Law enforcement officers with the Loudon County Sheriff’s Office arrested two people on Aug. 13 in the five-year-long murder investigation of Jacob Dean Bishop, a soldier with the Tennessee Army National Guard.
Detectives and deputies with the LCSO arrested Eric Austin Byrd, 39, of Lenoir City, and Amanda James Bishop, 39, of Kingston, for first-degree murder on a $1 million bond.
Two days later — on Thursday, Aug. 15 — Amanda Bishop, who is marked as "widowed" on the police report, posted bond and was released from custody.
“The court proceeding was going to be completed via video since both Amanda Bishop and Eric Byrd were in custody. However, Amanda Bishop posted bond earlier this afternoon and is no longer in custody,” LCSO Public Information Officer Corporal Cody Bengal stated in an email Thursday evening.
“There are no pre-trial bond conditions in place that would require an ankle monitor. We will update you regarding Eric Byrd if he posts bond.
“I want to clarify that the Loudon County Sheriff's Office has no control over setting bonds or any bond conditions,” Bengal said. “Additionally, we cannot stop or prevent someone, no matter the severity of their charges, from posting a bond. Pre-trial custody is not a form of punishment but detainment until court."
Jacob Bishop was found by his mother unconscious and unresponsive, zip-tied with multiple gunshot wounds on the morning of Oct. 1, 2019. Police and first responders were immediately contacted, and the case has been investigated every day since.
Jacob had recently returned from a year-long deployment to Poland at the time of his death.
Loudon County Sheriff Jimmy Davis said during a Tuesday press conference that at the time of Jacob’s murder, he was going through a heated custody battle with Amanda and, given the circumstances, that made her a top suspect throughout the investigation.
While many specifics won’t be released for a while, due to this being an ongoing investigation, Chief Deputy Zac Frye of the LCSO confirmed Amanda and Byrd refer to each other as "cousins," although he was unsure of the exact familial ties. Additional evidence reportedly has been found since the arrests with search warrants that will be used during prosecution.
“Something in law enforcement you try to go by in big cases like this is the assumption or the full process that your case will not get better after arrests,” Frye said. “Now, obviously we know in cases and by examples, the cases do get better after the arrest based on confessions or based on additional evidence that's found. But we try not to weigh too heavily on that because then if it doesn't, we want to be ready at the time of the arrest to take this to prosecution.
“That's kind of what our thought process was the whole time,” he said. “Let's build this case and make it really good before the arrests are made. But when it comes to additional stuff for the prosecution, there was more evidence … that was found … after the arrest based on our search warrants that we got, our physical search warrants of residences. That'll aid in our prosecution now more than what we thought we had at the time of the arrest.”
Since the beginning of this investigation, some technological advances have been made, like systems that can track phone history back to further dates. This was key in leading detectives to Byrd.
“As we would go down these trails of potential suspects, there wasn't a significant amount of forensic DNA at the scene,” Frye said. “So as you go down you're looking for things that can give you enough probable cause to execute electronic search warrants or subpoenas or preservation requests of social media data, Google data, Apple data, et cetera, stuff like that.
“And so as we were able to look through contacts that some of the suspects had made, some of the phone numbers they had reached out, we would try to then search those phone numbers through various types of law enforcement systems,” he said.
The systems, hypothetically, would give the name and information of the person who owned the phone number, but it didn’t have the capability to go back a certain extent of time.
“About eight months ago, we ran (suspects’ contacts) through a lot of systems again, ran some of those phone numbers back, and we were able to get a close match to one phone number that one of the suspects had been contacted. … And then from there, we were able to use some of our federal partners who then took it a little step further, which was able to identify a name and then that led to Eric Byrd.”
Over the last five years, constant communication was held between the Sheriff’s Office and Jacob’s family, specifically his mother, who thought it would end up as a cold case.
“I think somebody got a text or a phone call about every week telling her that we're waiting on search warrants, we're waiting on search warrants. It kind of sounded like a broken record. And she mentioned that today,” Sheriff Davis said. “She said, ‘I always thought you were just kind of telling me what I wanted to hear,’ but when it all came to fruition today, she saw the efforts.”
In an email to various news outlets, District Attorney Russell Johnson of the 9th Judicial District said, “Sheriff Jimmy Davis and his Criminal Investigation Division staff are to be commended for never giving up on this case (and) working the investigation intensively, especially over the last few months, then going the extra mile to get this case into a posture for us to present indictments for first-degree murder to the Loudon County grand jury.
“My office and trial team of ADA Bob Edwards and ADA Jed Bassett look forward to prosecuting the case in court based on their investigative efforts — which are still ongoing,” he said. “We appreciate the working relationship with Sheriff Davis, Chief Deputy Zac Frye, Assistant Chief Kevin Kirkland and the entire Loudon County Sheriff’s Office investigative team that has worked so hard as a cohesive unit with one goal: justice for the memory of Jacob Bishop and for his family.”
As this investigation continues, so does the coverage of the case and trial.
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