friends had come to a heart-wrenching conclusion. she had been in a violent relationship with shawn smoot. a relationship that ended with her murder. did it just seem so easy to you that, okay, they re they can go arrest him now, like, we know who did it? oh, absolutely. but that didn t happen. no. and you know, i kept thinking, well, surely, any day now. any day now. investigators had their suspicions as well and they were trying to build a case against smoot. he was the last to see her alive. they had an allegedly violent relationship. he had lied to investigators. but so far they had found no physical evidence tying him to the crime. you were able to search shawn smoot s apartment? we were. do you find anything? we find an empty box that
phone. they went to his house in the early morning hours after brooke s murder. you go over there. is he home? he is. shawn told investigators he had seen brooke the day before. she d called him from downtown knoxville asking for help. remember brooke s tailgating plans had gone awry and she d wanted to go home and change her clothes. she needed a ride to her car which had been left at a restaurant the night before. shawn said he agreed to give her a lift, but said they went to a bar to watch the game first. he had picked her up and they d went to, i think, wild wings and buffalo wild wings. it s two different restaurants within the same square mile of each other. shawn said he then dropped brooke off at her car in the parking lot where she d left it. did he say he didn t know where she went after that? he was at home. he said he didn t know where she went. so had brooke met her killer there in the parking lot, or sometime later? perhaps she left to meet up with that ot
mean, i would have hunted him myself, for hurting her in any way. and i think she knew that. brooke s friends who knew about the order of protection were surprised to find out she and shawn were talking on the day of the nobody knew that she even had contact with him. but to investigators, there was something different about this particular order of protection. brooke had asked the judge to allow her and shawn to have social contact. and sure enough they had continued to talk and spend time together. so they had to wonder if things were really that bad between brooke and shawn? the investigation dragged on for weeks. then months. it was almost too much for tina to bear. i got really frustrated. yeah, i did. you know, and i m sure they had to hear my wrath a few times. because you know, i m a mother. and i wanted to know who did it. and i wanted him put behind bars. but a major break in the
had the interview. we had lunch right before, and she was so excited, you know? it was a real job. and i said, there s gonna be so much potential for you to move up in this company. you know? i was really proud of her. did you feel like this was kind of the fresh start brooke needed? yeah, we did. we thought we we all thought it was gonna be a good thing for her. did she seem happy? oh yeah, she loved it. i think there was a couple other ladies in the office that she worked with. everybody got along, and she enjoyed it. she had formed a really, i guess, tight relationship with her boss. but brooke s family had no idea how close brooke s relationship with her boss shawn smoot actually was. some of her friends did. well, she had told me, in the beginning, that she had started working for this guy, shawn smoot. and a little bit down the road, i had, like, saw
protection, and all of the things that go wrong in those situations. you had no witnesses. you had no dna from your suspect. you had no murder weapon. that s a lot of things you didn t have. if we didn t feel like we could prosecute it, and be successful, we would ve never indicted it. we would have never proceeded with it. circumstantial cases are allow you to be creative. you can take a set of facts and and weave a story together for your theory of prosecution. shawn smoot insisted he was innocent. he cycled through five different defense attorneys and the trial was delayed again and again. it was surreal, really. you know cause it had been reset 22 times, 22 times. that s torture. it is. it is torture. the trial finally started in july 2016, nearly five years after brooke died. robert jolley, smoot s fifth attorney, believed the state s case was weak for one simple reason.