Thirty-eight days: Inside the hunt for Elizabeth Thomas

Under the cover of night, the SWAT team closed in on a silver Nissan Rogue next to a boat dock at a remote waterfront campground not far from the Tennessee-Alabama state line.

"I see them," an anonymous caller had told Maury County dispatcher Janette Sanchez, describing the vehicle. The SUV matched the description of a Rogue at the center of the increasingly frantic hunt for 15-year-old Elizabeth Thomas and her former ninth-grade teacher, and alleged captor, Tad Cummins.

The team moved quickly to detain the man and the girl who Sanchez said had been "pinned up" at the campground, only to discover they were not the pair authorities were looking for.

That episode took place less than 24 hours into a national manhunt that lasted 38 days and led detectives nearly 2,500 miles from tight-knit Columbia, Tenn., to another remote campground in Northern California where they ultimately rescued the girl and captured 50-year-old Cummins.

"That one, I thought it was them. I thought we had them," said Sanchez, one of seven dispatchers who over the course of the investigation worked around the clock, sifting through some of the roughly 1,500 tips in the case.

"The first night when it went public, dispatch was overwhelmed with a couple hundred right out of the gate," Sheriff Bucky Rowland said, recalling the elation and frustration his department of 146 deputies, dispatchers and other staff experienced that evening in Maury County, roughly 40 miles south of Nashville. "And you name it that’s what we dealt with for 38 days and 38 nights."

From reported sightings of Cummins and Elizabeth walking on a beach or eating popcorn at the movies, to chartering a helicopter in Las Vegas, detectives with the Maury County Sheriff's Office spent countless hours chasing down false tip after false tip.

All the while, Cummins eluded police, changing his appearance, using only cash, switching out his license plates more than once and keeping to the backroads, according to court findings.

'Gone in 15 minutes'

It was 10:22 p.m. on March 13 when Maury County dispatcher April Toombs answered the 911 call.

The male caller said his daughter did not return home when she was supposed to.

"At first we thought she was just a runaway, but things took a turn," recalled Rowland, a stocky man in his early 40s with an easy smile and firm handshake.

Early the next morning, Elizabeth was entered as a runaway into the National Crime Information Center, an electronic database that can be tapped into by law enforcement agencies nationwide.

That same morning, Capt. Nathan Johns, one of eight men on the sheriff's office's Criminal Investigation Unit, got a call from Jill Cummins, who said her husband also was missing. Johns knew the couple personally. Elizabeth had known the couple outside of school and had attended church with them, according to court documents. But Tad Cummins, who worked as a Culleoka Unit School teacher, was suspended from his job in February after a student reported seeing him kiss Elizabeth in a classroom. Throughout the investigation, Detective Sgt. Marcus Albright, a 19-year department veteran with the sheriff's office and one of the lead investigators on the case, worked closely with the Cummins family.

Later that evening, an Amber Alert was issued for Elizabeth by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation on behalf of the sheriff's office. And soon after that, a warrant was issued for Cummins' arrest on suspicion of kidnapping.

As he sat at a desk in his office last week behind piles of paperwork from the case, the sheriff shook his head when asked how long he guessed it had taken the pair to disappear from Maury County.

​"They were gone in 15 minutes," he said.

The first 10 days 

Sleepless nights followed for Rowland and his team of dispatchers, investigators and his right-hand man, Chief Deputy Ray Jeter.

The first calls were possible sightings throughout the county, some in Columbia, a friendly Southern town with a bustling public square populated by cafes, boutiques and law offices.

"We’d gather as much info as possible and respond, whether it would be to retrieve surveillance video in the area, running a VIN number or interviewing witnesses," Rowland said.

Related stories:

►Tad Cummins' wife: He asked for forgiveness in jailhouse call

►Tad Cummins arrested, Elizabeth Thomas found safe in northern California

►Tad Cummins threatened teen with 'repercussions' before kidnapping, court papers say

Elizabeth was last spotted about 7:30 a.m. March 13 at the Shoney's off Carmack Boulevard, just south of the city's downtown limits. Surveillance video from that morning appears to show Cummins at a nearby gas station getting fuel.

Half a mile up the road is the Chick-fil-A where Elizabeth worked. It was there that Cummins often came looking for Elizabeth, who at times would hide from her former teacher and ask co-workers to lie about her whereabouts, court records show.

"Myself and several investigators in the unit have been by here several times to talk to the management and employees,"Albright said last week. "Mr. Cummins would visit this eatery a lot when she was working," Albright said, standing in the chicken chain's parking lot. "Mr. Cummins knows the owners of this Chick-fil-A and, from my understanding, was able to get her a job here."

Tips from the public during the first 10 days were "somewhat low" for an Amber Alert case of such magnitude, Rowland said. Then the calls began to flood in.

'This could be them'

Sanchez, who has spent 10 years as a dispatcher, recalled sending officers to the same spot near Decatur, Ala., on several occasions after 911 callers reported seeing the Nissan.

The tips continually came up cold.

For Albright, the first big tip that stood out was a sighting from a trucker at the first rest area across the Georgia state line.

"He said he was at a rest stop and saw a silver Nissan Rogue with a Tennessee tag," Albright recalled.

The plate didn't match.

"A handful of them maybe got you thinking, taking you down that trail," Albright said. "This could be them."

Many others seemed too far-fetched, though detectives ran each to the ground.

"I saw them at Disney World.”

"We saw them at the movies."

"I've got pictures of them walking on a beach."

Albright said he spent two hours on the phone with Las Vegas authorities after police there detained two people on a tourist helicopter ride who matched a description of the missing pair.

"They wanted me to send them fingerprints," he recalled. "But I asked them to send us the pictures. When I saw them, there was no doubt in my mind it wasn’t them. This was not the profile we felt they were doing. That just didn’t fit the equation. Although they were on an excursion through the country I don’t think they were taking in the sights. They were staying off the grid.”

Frustration began to settle in

More than 100 photos of Nissan Rogues and people who matched Elizabeth and Cummins' descriptions filled the sheriff's and Albright's inbox, so many the sheriff's office IT department asked Albright to clear some out.

Some of the photos looked so convincing that the individuals in them could be identical twins with Elizabeth or Cummins. Others looked nothing like them.

“Now how frustrating is that?” the sheriff said, pointing to a fuzzy photo of a small silver SUV, with half the top of the picture cropped out.

"You can’t even tell what make or model it is," added Albright, as he sat in the sheriff's office.

Rowland said his team was continually slowed by people failing to snap a photo to accompany their tip, or waiting too long to report a possible sighting.

Some businesses, whose video surveillance did capture photos, were less than helpful with investigators, he said.

"The biggest issue is it would take a manager to come in and pull the video, wasting time," Rowland said.

"But for the most part the businesses were more accommodating because a child was involved," Rowland said. "You’d be amazed, whether it would be a citizen, business or law enforcement, most people went above and beyond to help."

The big break

For all the dead ends, it just takes one good tip to break a case. It came in the early morning hours of April 20, when Siskiyou County, Calif., Sheriff's Office SWAT team members, working off a tip, had verified the VIN on a Nissan Rogue parked outside a cabin.

Back in Tennessee, Albright was in bed and heard the ping of a new email on his phone.

"I received an email just like many I had received over the last 30-something days during the night. I wondered exactly where was Siskiyou County, California?"

By the side of his bed, Albright punched the location into his phone. He said he immediately had a feeling that the lead was promising, in part because the place was so far off the beaten path that it took even the local authorities hours to get there.

He called Siskiyou County Sheriff’s dispatch and chatted with a dispatcher who brought him up to speed.

"It was still dark on that side of the country and they had the structure they believed the couple to be in under surveillance," said Albright, who began to pack for California.

Before he got out the door, Albright got a call from Chief Deputy Jeter, who gave him the news.

"I was told Mary Catherine (Elizabeth goes by her middle name) was fine and Mr. Cummins had been detained," Albright said. "I felt like a huge weight was just taken off my back and an overwhelming amount of relief — this part of the investigation was finally over, and most of all that both were safe."

Comparing it to the nationally watched cases of Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Lee Dugard, Rowland said investigations like this one usually come along only once in a great while. He said the emotions and exhaustion his team experienced for more than five weeks were a small price to pay for the result.

"Thirty-eight days, just every day you hammer, those are few and far between," he said. "But this one, for her, was worth it all in the end."

Natalie Neysa Alund at nalund@tennessean.com and on Twitter @nataliealund.

Dispatchers

Darci Morris

April Toombs

Dawn Owens

Pam Cole

Rebecca Renfro

Rebecca Prince

Janette Sanchez

Investigators

Sheriff Bucky Rowland

Capt. Nathan Jones

Lt. Roscoe Voss

Detective Sgt. Marcus Albright

Detective Sgt. Marc Craig

Detective Sgt. Terry Dail

Detective Sgt. Steve Kindler

Detective Sgt. Rob Wagonschults

Detective Sgt. Ray McCluagge

Records custodian

Terri Coppes