Tennessee police responding to a 911 call expected to find a bear attack victim. What they found instead has now launched a massive manhunt and murder investigation. It’s the second bear-related murder investigation in recent weeks.
The incident happened on Oct. 18, near Tellico Plains, TN, a small town of just 1,000 residents about 80 miles west of Chattanooga. According to a Monroe County Tennessee Sheriff’s office press release, 911 dispatch received a call from someone who said they were a hiker who had been chased by a bear off a cliff and that he had fallen in the water and was injured.
Pinging the rural area where the call came from, police and emergency first responders arrived and found a dead body with an ID saying his name was Brandon Andrade. Only one problem: Upon further investigation, authorities discovered the body wasn’t him.
Who is Nicholas Wayne Hamlett?
According to Tennessee police, Nicholas Wayne Hamlett, 45, is wanted in Alabama for parole violation and had stolen Andrade’s ID and used it on several occasions before the bear-attack call. Hamlett allegedly called himself Andrade when he called 911 to report the bear. The dead body discovered on Oct. 18 is neither Hamlett nor Andrade. Authorities are currently trying to identify the remains and now suspect it was Hamlett, not Andrade or the unidentified deceased man, who made the call, and that Hamlett was somehow involved in his death.
In 2012, Hamlett pleaded guilty to felony assault when he held a man at gunpoint, tried to kill him with a bat, and then tried to bury him alive. According to AL.com, Hamlett has ties to Alabama, Montana, Tennessee, Alaska, Kentucky, and Florida. Authorities are now searching for Hamlett on first-degree murder charges in Tennessee, and say he is known to use aliases and should be considered armed and dangerous.
So, who did the police find near Tellico Plains?
Meanwhile, Tennessee authorities are developing a sketch to identify the supposed bear-attack-cliff-fall victim. The victim’s cause of death has not been reported. The real Andrade’s whereabouts are unclear, as is whether authorities have told him his ID was recovered.
The Hamlett situation is the second bizarre true crime story involving a bear in recent weeks. Earlier in October, a man in Montana reported finding his friend, Dustin Kjersem, 35, dead in his tent while camping in a remote area of the state, and because of Kjersem’s condition, he suspected he died in a bear attack.
When authorities arrived, however, they determined that Kjersem, 35, was brutally murdered, and the suspect remained at large. Hamlett reportedly has ties to Montana, but no known connections exist between the cases. Kjersem was discovered on Oct. 12. The unidentified Tennessee body was found a week later.
Not long after Andrade’s ID was recovered, Montana police provided a social media update on Kjersem’s death. In it, authorities said items were taken from Kjersem’s campsite, including an axe, a shotgun, a revolver, and a Yeti cooler, and asked the public to be on the lookout for the items. The Montana sheriff’s office said they were investigating leads, but there were no other updates.
“I think that after all this the world just got so dark to me, and it really needed more people like him that were good people, so it’s been hard,” Kjersem’s sister, Jillian Price told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, referring to her brother’s death. “I just really want to get to the bottom of what happened to him. He was a good person and didn’t deserve anything like this.”
