SEVIER COUNTY, Tenn. — It's been 15 years since an SUV went down a Sevier County embankment with a woman inside who was already dead.
That moment launched the murder mystery of Shannon Hercutt that still stretches on today.
"I never thought we would get this far, 15 years later and still unsolved, never thought that," Penny Lane Stephens, Hercutt's sister, said.
Stephens has been a vocal advocate for finding answers to her sister's death from the very beginning.
That beginning was Aug. 3, 2009. After Hercutt's Cadillac Escalade went down a 125-foot embankment off Walker Springs Trail, the vehicle's OnStar system alerted authorities, who responded and found Hercutt dead inside.
"They pulled her body out of the Escalade, they noticed she had a big hole in the back of her head," Stephens said. "Well, the way she was laying in her car, there was no way she had that done in the crash."
And there were other things that raised suspicion.
Despite the large drop off the embankment, the SUV's windshield never cracked. Hercutt was not wearing a seatbelt, something her family said she would always wear. And, the driver's side window was down, which Hercutt would never have done herself to protect her hairstyle, according to her family.
Investigators believe that the window was rolled down so that the killer could reach inside and steer that SUV off the cliff.
But it was the autopsy report, still sealed by court order to this day, that confirmed what so many already suspected - Hercutt had been murdered.
"I think about it all the time," Jeff McCarter, deputy chief of investigations for the Sevier County Sheriff's Office, said. "The case file sits in my office. It's not anywhere else. It's sitting right there. It's not been forgotten about."
McCarter has been on the case from the beginning and said he knew who killed Hercutt within the first week of the investigation. And he believes the killer still lives in the area.
So his goal, as it has always been, is to find the evidence to convict the killer. In this case, that means getting help from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which, just last fall, sent evidence to private lab Bode Technology to be re-tested.
"With cases such as this, we get one shot, right," TBI Special Agent Brandon Elkins said. "Once we find out what really happened, and we understand the evidence matches what we've learned in the investigation, we get one shot."
Elkins is determined not to miss that shot, despite the challenge of warming up a case that has sat cold for more than a decade.
"I think there was probably a time in my career where I believed that if a case was more than a year old then it wasn't going to be solved, and I think we've proven that's not true," he said. "It's getting harder and harder to get away with murder. Technology is catching up, and we're using today's technology to solve yesterday's crimes."
While investigators won't say which evidence is being re-tested, it could have come from Hercutt's own home, where they seized a baseball bat and found blood on the fridge, along with broken liquor bottles. They said the garage was the crime scene.
"Somebody tried to clean it up," McCarter said. "We found some items that indicated that some cleaning had been going on."
While McCarter said he feels confident he knows who did this and has interviewed the suspect before, he won't share the identity, only saying it is not a stranger, not a work associate and not a family member.
It's a sentiment Stephens does not share. She has long suspected her father, who died in 2017, was somehow involved in her sister's death. She even confronted him about it on the Dr. Phil show.
But McCarter will only say that the investigation did not reveal any evidence of his involvement.
"I'm confident that the evidence in this case, when we get there, that it may be no surprise to folks who have put in so much hard work on this case," Elkins said. "But we're just not there yet."
In the meantime, Stephens said there is still a $45,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in this case.
"I hope and pray that I'll still be living, that justice will be served," she said. "That's all I want."
Anyone with information can contact East Tennessee Valley Crime Stoppers or call 1-800-TBI-FIND.