Autumn comes early in the high hills that straddle the rugged border between Tennessee and Georgia. Up in these mountains, the air is as crisp as the fallen leaves and the first searing touch of cold is as sharp as a buck hunter’s knife.

Lookout Mountain, ridge and arial view

Sometimes, when the wind blows up on Lookout Mountain, it almost burns, torching the hickory, the ash, the maples and setting a blaze of red and gold under the pale blue haze of late October in the southern end of the Smokies.

“Fire on the mountain.” That’s how the locals describe it when the hills that rise to Lookout Mountain begin their autumn transformation.

The locals are not much given to flowery words, but the hunters all know that if you step quietly and listen close enough you can hear the red-tailed hawks shouting curses against the coming winter. You can hear fugitive mountain streams trying to outrun the first freeze. They won’t make it. They never do. Sooner or later they’ll be frozen and buried under a white shroud.

Adam Chrismer and Sandra Leming (WJHL- TV with permission)

These were Adam Chrismer’s hills. At 17, the boy knew every deer path and every antler scrape on every butternut tree on Lookout Mountain. The mountain was his home. He had grown up there, gone to school there and met Samantha Leming not far from there. He had spent long hours up on that mountain last summer considering the plan that Howard Hawks Willis had concocted so that Samantha and he could get around their parents’ objections and get married even though she was just 16. There were a thousand reasons why he shouldn’t do it. His mom and his stepfather had laid them all out for him over and over again, all summer long.

They never liked Howard much. They didn’t trust him

Howard Hawk Willis (WJHL- TV with permission)

But they didn’t really know him. Not like Adam did. Howard Hawk Willis was the boy’s hero. There was something mysterious and even a little dangerous about the older man. Some folks even suggested that Willis might have had a hand in the disappearance of his first wife. But no one had ever been able to prove anything. This much was clear, though. Howard Hawks Willis had secrets. And he knew other people’s secrets. He knew Adam’s secrets.

He knew, for example, that as beautiful as it was, the mountain was also a prison to Adam. Home is always prison when you’re on the cusp of manhood. Howard Hawk Willis understood this because he was about to become a fugitive himself. After that business with the feds up in New York – 700 grams of top-quality cocaine found stashed in his truck – Howard Hawk Willis was planning his own disappearance.

Maybe, Adam thought, Howard Hawk Willis would take him with him. Maybe he’d take Samantha.

“I just have one more thing to do for Howard,” Adam had told his mother a few days after he left home.

Lookout Moutain with Tennessee River

No one really knows whether Chrismer was on the mountain that day with Willis. Investigators have their suspicions. But in the end it no longer matters whether Chrismer led the older man through the underbrush and the still-green rhododendron to a remote spot under the hickory trees where the mutilated remains of old Sam Thomas were dumped, says Capt. Chip Bradley of the Bradley County, Tenn., sheriff’s department.

It doesn’t really matter whether Adam and Samantha knew of the plan that Willis had formulated to kill Thomas and use the old man’s credit cards to pay for his flight from justice. It doesn’t even matter whether Adam and Samantha were present when Thomas was killed or even whether they helped Willis kill him, Brant says. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t.

It doesn’t matter, the cops say, because Chrismer is dead too.

So is Samantha Chrismer.

They’re beyond the reach of the law.

But Howard Hawk Willis -- the man who in a jailhouse confession to his wife admitted to killing them in a failed attempt to escape from the law before the mountain streams turned to ice – is not.