On the morning of April 13, 2011, a 20-year-old nursing student was taken from her home in rural Decatur County, Tennessee, and was never seen alive again. This is the geographic story of that morning — told through cell tower pings, phone records, and physical evidence introduced at the trial of Zachary Adams.
As of now, this is a living document being updated as I round up details.
Holly Bobo, 20, a nursing student at UT Martin — Parsons campus, is up at 4:00 AM. By 4:30 she is studying for a test. Her mother Karen makes strawberry muffins and packs her lunch.
The Bobos live on Swan Johnson Road in an unincorporated area south of Parsons — surrounded by woods, farms and quiet two-lane roads.
Holly's father Dana gets up at 5:30 AM and leaves around 6:15 to be at work by 6:30 at McKenzie Tree Service in Parsons — 2141 TN-69, about 4.9 miles and nine minutes from the Bobo home.
Karen leaves for Scotts Hill Middle School, where she teaches. As she walks to her car, she hears a loud truck engine somewhere nearby.
About fifteen miles northeast of the Bobos, John "Dick" Adams — Zach and Dylan's grandfather — leaves the house for work. Dylan is still in bed.
Zach lives next door with his girlfriend Rebecca Earp. Dick has worked the day shift with his neighbor Billy Bell for years.
Cell records will later show that Zach's phone is already active at 5:54 AM.
Jason Autry's phone sends a single text to his girlfriend in Camden — pinging the cell tower near her home. After that, his phone goes quiet for ninety minutes.
Two doors down from the Bobo residence, neighbor James Barnes gets a text from his friend Keith Clark. Clark is already at Barnes' house; the two are working on Barnes' pickup.
Over the next half hour, Holly and her boyfriend Drew Scott trade a flurry of missed calls — at least 15 attempts. Drew is turkey hunting in Bath Springs.
During the same window, Holly speaks briefly with Karen twice about the hunting trip.
A dog's barking pulls Clint Bobo in and out of sleep when his phone rings. He silences the call — thinking that's what woke him — and rolls over. Around 7:40, as the barking continues, Clint goes ahead and just gets up.
Clint walks into the den and looks through the sidelights — the windows next to the front door. He doesn't see anything. Then he turns to the carport window and hears voices. He raises the blinds: two figures kneeling beneath the window in the dark of the carport. A male voice on the left, a female voice on the right.
He recognizes Holly. The man sounds aggravated; Holly sounds upset and agreeing. It sounds, Clint will later say, like the man is giving orders. He listens for seconds. Clint is good friends with her boyfriend Drew — he assumes that's who she's with.
James Barnes, a neighbor about 750 feet from the Bobo home, is outside loading tools into his truck when he hears arguing from the Bobo house — then a younger female voice begins screaming. "Stop. I said stop." Then, louder: "Stop, goddamnit, stop it!" It lasts about a minute and cuts out mid-scream. Barnes later says it sounded like the person was arguing with someone she knew.
His dogs are barking. He tells his girlfriend to get in the truck and they pull into the Bobo driveway — engine off, watching the house. There are no cars in front. After a few minutes of silence, they leave for work. On the way, he calls his mother, Kathy Wise, who lives on the same property.
At 7:42 AM, Holly places her last outgoing call — to Drew Scott. He doesn't answer.
It is the last known voluntary act of her life.
Kathy Wise calls Scotts Hill Middle School first — to relay the message about the screams. Karen is in class; Kathy has to leave it with the school secretary. She does not drive over to the Bobo house yet.
The call itself is unusual: Kathy and Karen had a long-running animosity. That she picks up the phone at all signals how alarmed she is.
This is also when Holly normally leaves for nursing school to arrive by 7:55.
Clint calls Karen. No answer. He texts: "Call me ASAP." Within twenty seconds she's calling him back. He asks if Holly has school today — Holly's car is still in the carport. Karen says yes — and that her own school secretary just relayed a neighbor's call about screams from the Bobo house. Clint tells her Holly is out in the garage with Drew.
Karen cuts him off: "That's not Drew. Call all the neighbors."
Karen dials 911 from the school — and reaches the wrong county's emergency dispatcher. She drops to the floor as she works to get the call routed correctly.
Karen calls Clint back. He's still asking whether Holly has school today, or whether she's gone turkey hunting with Drew. Karen cuts him off: "That's not Drew. Get a gun and shoot him."
Clint replies: "You want me to shoot Drew?"
Clint looks through the carport window again. The voices are gone. Through the glass he sees Holly walking toward the trail behind the house with a man in turkey-hunting camouflage — what looks like a deer grunt call in his right hand.
Clint was thinking it the man was Drew at first, but when his eye register the size: the man is wider and heavier than Drew. He decides it must be his cousin Richie. Clint later said that he didn't see them disappear into the trees (as the man likely forced her toward the logging road behind the house).
Clint opens the back door — the cold air hits him, and he's confused. He runs to his room to pull on pants, socks, shoes, a jacket. He grabs his cell phone and a loaded pistol and walks out through the open garage. Near Holly's car, where the silhouettes had been kneeling, he finds a pool of blood. He thinks maybe Drew or Richie shot a turkey.
The blood was not in the carport when Dana or Karen left.
Fifteen minutes after her phone call to the school, Kathy Wise pulls into the Bobo driveway in person to check on things. She tells Clint the screams she heard were 15 to 20 minutes earlier.
Clint calls 911 from the yard, gun in hand, scanning the tree line.
The search for Holly Bobo begins.
The first Decatur County deputy arrives at the Bobo home. Investigators will later conclude that Holly was taken as she stepped out to her car for nursing school — she is never seen again.
Holly's phone hits a new tower on CR 1253. It is already moving — away from the house, headed northeast.
The phone hits the Shiloh Road tower near Natchez Trace State Park, still tracking northeast.
After ninety silent minutes, Jason Autry's phone wakes up — a text to Zach Adams. Both phones are on the same tower: Holiday/Yellow Springs, near Zach's residence.
Holly's phone hits on the same tower but different sector. Her phone is still in the Shiloh Road area.
Zach texts Jason back at 8:30. Then, between 8:53 and 8:55, the two of them call each other twice. Same tower the whole time.
For fifteen minutes, the prosecution's cell expert says all three phones — Holly's, Zach's, and Jason's — are on the same tower. The defense's expert says they were on different sectors.
This is the forensic question at the heart of the case.
Between 9:00 and 9:10 AM, Holly's phone moves through multiple sectors of the CR 3152 tower, drifting further from the abduction site.
Four pings in rapid succession — the kind of pattern a phone leaves behind when it's in a moving vehicle.
At 9:15 AM, TBI Special Agent Brent Booth arrives at the Bobo home. By then, 100–200 people are already on the property. Terry Dicus is securing the scene; a K-9 unit is dispatched into the woods.
Around the same time, Dick Adams later says he saw Zach, Dylan, and Shayne driving south on Highway 641, in Dylan's pickup.
At 9:25 AM, Holly's phone pings the CR 1257 tower, Sector 3 — placing it in the rural wooded area off W Natchez Trace Road, near where her lunchbox and notebook would later be recovered. It is the final recorded signal her phone will ever produce.
After this, the line goes dead — permanently. The phone is either powered down or has its battery removed.
Seventeen minutes after Holly's phone goes silent, Zach and Jason resurface — this time at Birdsong, a tower near the Tennessee River about twenty miles east of where they were all morning. They've moved.
Both phones stay on the Birdsong East sector for the next fifty minutes.
Both phones flip briefly to Birdsong West. Then Autry's drops off the data entirely.
Adams' phone pings the tower closest to his home in Holladay. He has left the Birdsong area.
A parking-lot camera near the abduction area captures three vehicles passing within minutes:
11:04 — a black SUV.
11:05 — two more black SUVs.
11:07 — an extended-cab pickup truck like Zach Adams' dark Chevy Silverado with Georgia plates.
Investigators later note that a TBI special agent was throwing a retirement party that morning — many of the SUVs are likely officers heading to the Bobo home. The pickup truck is something else.
Adams' phone pings a tower near the CB&S Bank ATM. Surveillance footage from that ATM is later introduced at trial.
Shayne Austin is at his trailer when satellite installer Randy McGee arrives around noon. The install was scheduled in advance — not a same-day call. Shayne is alone.
Cell-tower data lines up with this: Shayne's phone is on his home tower from 9:23 AM through 10:55 AM, with no earlier activity that morning.
At 12:17 PM — more than four hours after the abduction — Terry Britt, a confidential informant in Parsons, gets a phone call from his ex-wife Brenda Seagraves, who tells him about Holly's disappearance. Per his later trial testimony, this is how he first hears of it.
Three minutes later, at 12:20 PM, Britt calls his wife Janet. The call runs 2 minutes 56 seconds. Janet would later tell investigators the two had been "together all day."
You don't call someone standing next to you.
Adams' phone pings a tower in the Parsons area — more than four hours after the abduction. It is the last event in the phone timeline.
Decatur County deputies arrive at the Britt residence. No one is home. Three vehicles are gone.
Dottie's house sits between Zach Adams' home and Shayne Austin's. Inside, Victor Dinsmore is remodeling and Debbie Dorris is cleaning — both there most of the day.
Between 2:30 and 3:00 PM, three men pull up in a black pickup. Victor identifies the truck as Dylan Adams'. Debbie identifies one of the men as Jason Autry — she knew his mother. The third is Shayne Austin.
Zach asks Victor for a joint and the men smoke it together. Then Zach and Shayne start fighting. Jason breaks it up. They drive away.
The Britts roll back into their driveway and unload a bathtub. They say they bought it from Allgood's.
The receipt is handwritten. Allgood's has no matching store copy. No employee remembers the sale.
Judy Evans — aunt to both Shayne Austin and Jason Autry — drives out to the property she keeps for her horses. The barn there is really just a corn crib: a two-door building in poor shape. Feeding her horses is part of her daily routine; today is no different.
If anyone were screaming inside the corn crib, Judy will later testify, it would be audible from the street.
Searchers comb the road network around the Bobo home. Driving slowly along Gooch Road, a cattle farmer named Gerald Stephens spots a pink item on the right shoulder, stops, and identifies it as a pair of women's underwear. About 300–400 feet up the road, near the Yellow Springs community, he picks up a folded wad of paper that turns out to be one of Holly's school papers, with her name and address on it.
Stephens later testifies that the residence further down the road from the underwear find was Shayne Austin's mobile home. Booth, the investigator on scene, records the underwear's find spot using the nearest landmark: about 75 feet from Austin's driveway, on the road itself.
Lab analysis later confirms the underwear is not Holly's.
Eighteen hours after Clint's 911 call, TBI lab personnel finish processing the carport. They take the blood, the surrounding evidence, and leave.
Holly has been gone for one day.
By the early hours of April 14, the lab has cleared the carport and the searchers have gone home. No new evidence surfaces.
Holly Bobo's remains would not be found for another three years.
Over the next three years, pieces of evidence surfaced across the region — Holly's lunchbox, her cell phone, a SIM card, nursing papers, and, finally, her remains.
Items recovered between 2011 and 2014
A ginseng hunter named Larry Stone found Holly's skull beneath an upside-down bucket in the woods near a cell tower — roughly three miles from Shayne Austin's home, five from Zachary Adams'.
The proximity of the defendants' homes to the evidence sites and tower coverage areas became one of the central pillars of the case.
In the weeks surrounding Holly's disappearance, Britt makes a striking sequence of purchases:
March 11–12: new phones.
April 11 (two days before the abduction): 2,000 prepaid minutes.
April 29 (sixteen days after): a chainsaw.
When decomposition-trained cadaver dogs are walked across Britt's property, they alert on his tools — an axe, a shovel, and a hammer.
When investigators first approach Britt, his unprompted opening line is: "I didn't rape nobody." No one had mentioned rape.
Clint Bobo — the only person to hear the voice of his sister's abductor that morning — later says he is 80% sure it was Britt's.
Britt's vehicle matches surveillance footage from the Am Farm near the abduction site. He has a documented history of stalking blonde, blue-eyed women in the area. Before his devices are seized, his computer holds searches for "rape," "abduction," and "kidnapping."
At one point, Britt offers to plead guilty in exchange for a 20-year sentence. At trial, he denies it.
Terry Britt's home sits at the geographic center of the evidence. His phone went silent during the abduction. His alibi collapsed under scrutiny. Dogs alerted on his tools. Clint Bobo tentatively identified his voice. Britt offered to plead guilty.
He was never charged. Zachary Adams was convicted instead — largely on the testimony of Jason Autry, who took a deal for his cooperation.
Every layer at once — phone pings, recovery sites, and the residences of every person tied to the case — laid out together on a single map. Use the Tower Coverage button in the corner of the map to overlay the cellular sectors on top.
Witness testimony summaries throughout this scrolly are drawn from Innocent Brothers · Trial Witnesses →