Teresa Chrismer Lynch said she has counted down the days for investigators to return the body of her 17-year-old son, questioning why it took so long after the trial for his killer ended.
“I was starting to get frantic,” she said.
Lynch’s son, Adam Chrismer, and his 16-year-old bride, Samantha Leming, were killed in 2002 and their bodies stuffed in a Johnson City, Tenn., storage facility.
In October 2002, Chrismer’s head and hands were found in Boone Lake, while the couple’s bodies was found a few days later in the storehouse. Leming’s body was intact.
In June, Howard Hawk Willis was convicted and sentenced to three death sentences, two for premeditated first-degree murder of each teen and a third for felony first-degree murder of Leming.
Leming’s body was returned in 2002 but investigators kept Chrismer’s all these years as evidence. On Wednesday, Lynch got the call that his body would be returned this week.
“Everybody met when we had Samantha funeral but Adam wasn’t there,” she said. “We need to have something just for Adam.”
Todd Hull, lead investigator on the case from the Washington County district attorney’s office, said Leming’s body was given to the family in 2002 because it was still intact. But Chrismer’s body needed to be kept since he was in pieces, all of which needed to be saved as evidence to convict Willis, and his family agreed to the arrangement.
“Because of Adam being dismembered, we had bone fragments that had to be tested,” he said.
Since Willis continually fired his court-appointed attorneys, delaying the trial, the prosecution needed to save Chrismer’s body in case the attorney requested more testing, Hull said.
While most of Chrismer’s remains were kept at the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center throughout the investigation, pieces were sent to FBI labs in different parts of the country for testing, Hull said.
After the trial ended in June, Chrismer’s body was scheduled to be returned to the center, but it took several months to finish the paperwork, he said.
Chrismer’s body will be returned this week to a Fort Oglethorpe funeral home for cremation.
Cases in which a body must be kept for the extent of the investigation and until a verdict is reached occasionally happen, said John Bankhead, spokesman for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Most the cases involve bodies that were dismembered, he said.
“It’s rare, but it does happen,” he said.
The GBI did not participate in the Chrismer investigation.
As Chrismer’s family prepares to hold services and a celebration of his life on Oct. 1-2, Washington County officials say they also plan to attend.
“We consider ourselves, to a certain extent, part of the family,” Hull said. “This will be the first case that will always come to mind. There won’t be another case like it.”
Contact Joy Lukachick at jlukachick@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6659. Follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/jlukachick.