The CSI Detective Who Smelled Trouble in Her Own Police Department

Horry County Police Department detective Alan Jones had briefed Tamasi by phone while they were both en route. It was a road-rage killing, he said. Spivey, a 33-year-old insurance adjuster, was menacing other drivers on Highway 9. He waved a gun out the window of his truck and pointed it at people he passed, including Boyd and Williams. With Boyd behind the wheel, he and Williams followed Spivey until he turned off on Camp Swamp Road. Jones, the lead detective in the homicide case, said Spivey got out of his truck holding a pistol and started shooting. Boyd and Williams, both armed, said they returned fire through the front windshield and killed Spivey in self-defense. Prosecutors believed the shooters' account -- that they killed only to save their lives. The case was closed as a legal homicide under South Carolina's stand-your-ground law. The Wall Street Journal revealed in a series of articles last year that police overlooked or ignored evidence that raised questions about the self-defense claim and the integrity of the investigation. More than seven hours of Boyd's phone recordings were in the police file -- conversations before and after the killing that went unreported until aired by the Journal. The recordings showed that rather than acting out of fear, Boyd was angry. Spivey had just left a bar where he had been drinking beer and whiskey that afternoon when he crossed paths with Boyd and the chase began. Spivey later pulled in front and braked hard, running Boyd off the road. Boyd, a local restaurant owner, got back on the highway. All told, Boyd tailed Spivey for about 9 miles, much of it at high speed. Boyd was already anticipating a shootout well before Spivey stopped and got out of his truck, according to 911 recordings. Minutes after the shooting, Boyd called the deputy police chief, a close friend, and begged for his help. "You're taken care of," the deputy chief later told Boyd, in one of 90 recorded conversations reviewed by the Journal. The homicide investigation by Horry County police is now under scrutiny by a special prosecutor, and a state grand jury is reviewing evidence of alleged police misconduct. Spivey's family believes the investigation was tainted from the start. Tamasi's sworn account of what happened on the night of the Spivey killing, Sept. 9, 2023, raises further questions about the deputy chief's behind-the-scenes influence. Tamasi said she found a zippered range bag, typically used for firearms and ammunition, on the floor of Boyd's truck. Jones said it belonged to one of the shooters, who needed it back. Tamasi gave Jones the bag, she said, but his request was baffling. A suspect isn't supposed to take belongings from a crime scene before the items are inspected and inventoried. There were more unusual decisions, Tamasi said in her deposition. Higher-ups waved off the coroner's van and decided instead to tow Spivey's truck to the police impound lot with Spivey's body still inside. Tamasi asked why. A forecast of rain, she was told. It was the first time Tamasi had heard such an order. It made no sense, she said. "We have access to tents." After Spivey's truck arrived at the police impound lot, Jones pointed out a compartment concealed in the back seat and asked Tamasi to open it. She said later she wouldn't have noticed it otherwise. Inside, Tamasi found a plastic bag with 26 blue pills. She also found two bottles of prescription pills and three vape pens in the center console. Jones said he wanted only the blue pills taken as evidence. Tamasi swabbed for DNA samples in Spivey's truck -- door handles and such. The search warrant called for any DNA related to the victim or suspects. Yet Jones didn't instruct her to swab the plastic pill bag. The detective later told Tamasi not to send any of the DNA swabs for testing, she said in her deposition. While inspecting Boyd's truck, Tamasi noted a Samsung tablet mounted on the dashboard, a device that could have recorded the gunfight. Since no witness saw who shot first, the tablet might help determine whether Boyd and Williams were telling the truth. Tamasi recalled asking Jones to make sure the tablet was included in the search warrant. "He told you not to worry about it, right?" Mark Tinsley, the lawyer representing the Spivey family in a civil lawsuit, asked Tamasi during her deposition in February. "He said he didn't want it," Tamasi replied. The failure to take Boyd's phones and dash-mounted tablet as evidence, the towing of Spivey's body, the handling of the pills -- seemingly inexplicable decisions from Tamasi's view -- are among the clues left to the 18 men and women of the grand jury charged with assessing what went wrong on Camp Swamp Road. 'Good old boy' Boyd sounded rattled in his first call to Brandon Strickland, the deputy police chief. "I had to shoot somebody," said Boyd. He had an app on his phone recording all the conversations that ended up in the Horry County police file. In subsequent calls, Strickland told Boyd he had contacted the captain of criminal investigations to make sure "the right people" got to the crime scene. Jones was on duty that weekend, and Strickland assured Boyd that the detective was a "good old boy." "I'll tell you what happened after you called me," Strickland said to Boyd later, "never to be spoke of again. I called my people." Strickland's lawyer, Bert von Herrmann, has said his client's words were "all bluster." Strickland was a department veteran who had recently been promoted to deputy chief. In his new job, he controlled criminal investigations, crime-scene investigations, internal affairs, the narcotics team and drug-analysis units. The morning after Spivey was killed, Strickland told Boyd in a call that he had heard Spivey was on steroids "real bad." A couple of hours later, the deputy chief texted Jones to ask, "You get any info that he was on steroids?" Strickland insisted on a toxicology report to go along with the autopsy, he told Boyd, "just to cover you." Hours later, Boyd called his mother and said Strickland hoped that toxicology tests detected steroids so police could say Spivey "was on a steroidal rage." Boyd's lawyer, Kenneth Moss, agreed, Boyd told his parents: "Ken said, in this kind of situation, alcohol is not going to help our argument," according to the recorded call. "He said we need narcotics, or we need steroids." Moss declined to comment on Boyd's recounting of that conversation. Two weeks after the shooting, Jones met with the Spivey family and said the blue pills from Spivey's truck "bubbled the hottest pink" in a laboratory test, an indication of pure anabolic steroids, family members recalled. The lab findings Jones referenced weren't in the police file, which contained only a photo of blue pills in a clear plastic bag. A forensic toxicologist said later he received an unusual request from the coroner's office -- to test Spivey's blood for 27 types of steroids. The toxicologist said in a Feb. 12 deposition that he had been asked for that type of test only five times in his 17-year career. The tests revealed no trace of steroids. The autopsy, however, determined that Spivey was killed by a bullet in the back. Crime-scene blackout Police turned off their bodycams for about two hours during the crime-scene investigation. Tamasi, in her deposition, said that was unusual. Police department policy at the time allowed the ranking officer to order the devices disabled. Mick Kathman, captain of criminal investigations under Strickland, was the highest-ranking officer on Camp Swamp Road that night, though his name doesn't appear on the official crime-scene log. The log went missing until last fall, when an officer in a deposition said it had been misplaced in the trunk of his squad car and he returned it. Kathman texted Strickland that night to say that Spivey's truck would be towed with his body inside, according to Kathman's phone records. Strickland later told Boyd in a recorded call that the decision was made to "clear you." The police bodycams were turned back on as Spivey's truck was towed away. Two elected South Carolina coroners said in interviews that Spivey's body appeared to have been illegally handled. The jostling of the body during the 25-mile trip would have ruined its value as evidence, they said. Sgt. Damon Vescovi followed the tow truck ferrying Spivey's body to the impound lot. The escort job required him to keep his dashcam on Spivey's black Silverado to make sure no one tampered with evidence -- either the truck or the body. At the impound lot, Vescovi pulled into a spot where his dashcam pointed away from Spivey's truck. He later mislabeled the dashcam footage, which kept it out of the homicide file. The video was found nearly two years later during an internal police investigation. Vescovi, a 23-year veteran of the department, had been one of the first officers to arrive at Camp Swamp Road. In the minutes after the shooting, while Boyd was on his phone with Moss, his lawyer, Vescovi asked Boyd if he could speak with Moss. Boyd handed over the phone. Vescovi told Moss the killing looked like self-defense. He listened to Moss for a minute or two and handed the phone back to Boyd. Vescovi went to his squad car and returned minutes later. He held up a handwritten note for Boyd to read. The officer's own bodycam recorded the message: "Act Like a Victim. Camera." Vescovi was eventually fired for his performance that night. His lawyer has said Vescovi had no criminal intent. With Vescovi's dashcam pointing away from Spivey's truck at the police impound lot, there is no video of the vehicle in the hour before Tamasi began examining it. The doors of the truck were sealed with red evidence tape. But the back window, shot out by Boyd and Williams, wasn't covered. "The compartment where you found the drugs is immediately inside that window that's open, right?" Tinsley, the Spivey family's attorney, asked Tamasi during a civil court hearing in February. "Yes, sir," Tamasi said. At 2:10 a.m., eight hours after the shooting, Jones filed a report concluding that Spivey's homicide appeared a clear case of self-defense. Neither Tamasi, Jones nor Kathman was available for comment, an Horry County spokesman said. No more questions Boyd, Williams and their lawyers appeared in a South Carolina courtroom for a civil hearing in February to determine whether their self-defense claim was sturdy enough to shield them from the wrongful death lawsuit filed by the Spivey family. If the judge sided with police and prosecutors -- that the two men killed out of fear for their lives -- the family's lawsuit would be over. If not, the lawsuit could move forward. The family's argument rests on the same logic that has drawn broad interest to the case: How can you chase a man 9 miles, shoot him in the back and call it self-defense? Tinsley, the lawyer representing the Spiveys, was particularly interested in the handling of Boyd's dash-mounted tablet and his phones. For several days after Spivey's killing, the tablet remained in Boyd's Ram TRX at the police impound lot. During that time, Boyd's mother tried to reassure him by saying that the video evidence would back up his account of the shooting. "But I haven't seen the video," Boyd told his mother in the recorded call. Boyd sent his ex-fiancee a text saying he had a video of Spivey aiming his gun at cars. Police released Boyd's truck to him a couple of days later, according to the evidence log. Moss said during the civil hearing that he stored Boyd's electronic devices in his safe until turning them over to investigators of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division nine weeks later. Investigators found the tablet had been set to record only with an external memory card, but it was turned over without one, the state agency said. Boyd frequently posted videos of erratic drivers on social media, but he testified at the hearing that he didn't record them with the tablet. He said he had deleted the only video on the tablet months before the shooting. It was sent to him by a woman, he said. "It would be fair to say it was maybe risqué?" Moss asked in court. "It was risqué," Boyd said. Boyd's phone with the recording app had 10 missing calls, including two with Moss from the crime scene. The Journal found the missing calls by comparing the call log with the recorded conversations. The Journal also found that 25 minutes of recordings were erased from nine calls made between Boyd and Strickland after the shooting. Boyd had testified under oath in a deposition a year ago that he didn't recall deleting anything on his phone. During the February civil hearing, Boyd said he had deleted, in Moss's presence, what he described as unrelated, sexually explicit photos from his phone. Police didn't take Boyd's second phone, which had been in his truck's console. Boyd said in his deposition last year that the phone was put in Moss's safe so it could be turned over to investigators at the state law enforcement agency known by its acronym, SLED. "You did not provide the second phone to SLED, did you?" Tinsley asked Boyd at the February court hearing. "We provided the phones that were operating, so that phone did not go because it was not being used," Boyd said. "We have to take your word for it, right?" Tinsley said. After the four-day civil hearing, Circuit Court Judge Eugene C. Griffith Jr. said Boyd's self-defense claim wasn't credible, and he ruled that Boyd wasn't entitled to civil and criminal immunity under the state's stand-your-ground law. Two weeks later, the judge issued the same ruling against Williams. In mid-March, Tamasi testified before the state grand jury, according to people familiar with the matter. Her testimony about the police handling of Boyd's dashcam tablet, his phones, Spivey's body and the blue pills echoed the account she gave in her deposition and in court, one of the people said. At the court hearing in February, Tinsley established that Tamasi's job was to collect and preserve all salient evidence for police investigations. "That didn't happen in this case, did it?" Tinsley asked Tamasi. "It would appear so," she said from the witness stand. "Thank you, Detective Tamasi. I don't have any more questions for you."