Search Team in Tennessee Has a Great Track Record

If you were lost in the woods, Bob Swabe and J. R. Buchanan are two men you’d want to have looking for you.

If you were a fugitive from the law, however, the Tennessee trackers are the last people you’d want to see.

Swabe, an FBI agent, and Buchanan, a park ranger in the Great Smoky Mountains, have spent half a lifetime tracking missing persons and fugitives in the hills of East Tennessee and elsewhere.

Buchanan cannot recall just how many lost hikers he has found in one of America’s most popular national parks, a 520,000-acre natural area straddling the Tennessee-North Carolina border.

Swabe counts among his biggest searches the manhunt for James Earl Ray, the assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., after his escaped from Brushy Mountain Prison, and the search for clues in the Atlanta child murders.

The pair assisted FBI and local authorities in the manhunt this fall for Michael Wayne Jackson, an escaped mental patient wanted in three killings. They tracked Jackson to an isolated barn near Wright City, Mo.

Tracked to Barn

“Bob and I were on either side of a fence, tracking toward one old barn, when he called me over and said he’d found something,” Buchanan said. “It was an old track, maybe two days old. We kept going and Bob found some grass mashed down and called me over again. I moved the grass back and there was a good, fresh track, probably about one hour old.”

The pair kept working either side of the fence until they came upon the barn where Jackson had been hiding. Buchanan found another fresh print in mud on a plank at the barn’s entrance. He found no exit print at the other end, and the call went out for strong flashlights.

During the search of the barn, a muffled shotgun blast sent the agents scrambling. Buchanan dove into a stall, then fled as tear gas was thrown in. The searchers found Jackson dead from a shotgun blast to his right temple.

Buchanan learned tracking from his father and uncle, “a couple of old mountain men who loved to hunt and trap,” he said.

Swabe praises Buchanan as “the best visual tracker in the country,” but says he prefers to rely on a bloodhound’s keen nose.

Relies on Hounds

“The reason I got into this kind of work goes back to the ‘50s, when there was a little girl lost in Campbell County,” a rural, mountainous area about 75 miles north of Knoxville, Swabe said. “She’d fallen off a cliff and died hours before we found her. I can’t help but believe if I’d had a bloodhound with me she’d be alive today.

“If you lose a visual track a bloodhound can get it back for you. You can bring in a dog and you’re right back on the trail.”