Published: April 29, 2009 08:40 am      

Still searching

Officers find nothing after a two-day search behind Grubb’s trailer

By Samantha Swindler / Managing Editor

Acting on their latest tip Monday — this time from a suspect in jail — police were confident they had finally pinpointed the location of Jeremy Johnson’s remains.

Officers with the Kentucky State Police and Knox County Sheriff’s Department began searching the creek behind Daniel Grubb’s trailer at about 3 p.m. Monday and continued all night and all day Tuesday. A county backhoe was brought in to dredge a portion of the creek where Bobbie Ray Walters told officers they would find Johnson’s body.

Both Walters and Grubb were charged this month with tampering with physical evidence for allegedly moving Johnson’s body. Both have pleaded not guilty.

On Tuesday, Knox County Sheriff John Pickard brought Walters from jail to the site — between KY 6 and Smith Hollow Road in Knox County — and asked him to point out the location of the body.

The circumstances of Johnson’s presumed death are still unclear, but Walters told officers on Tuesday that he and two others had carried the body from Grubb’s trailer and buried him in the dry creek bed last summer.

Two days of searching revealed nothing and officers dug eight feet deep in some places along the creek. Walters continued to insist the body was in the area, but by Tuesday evening, the search was called off without any success.

Johnson, 25, of Woodbine, was last seen leaving the now defunct Angels & Wings Restaurant in Corbin last June. About a month after his disappearance his car was found on a rural path off of KY 459, about four miles from Johnson’s home, but there was no sign of Johnson.

Neither Grubb nor Walters has been charged with Johnson’s death.