Quote: The park ranger here reviewed the case not too long ago,” he said. “They determined there was a possibility that the suspect may have held the map upside down.”
Monday’s search was based on a new interpretation of the map, which Johnson hopes will finally unearth Sellers’s remains and allow his parents the relief for which they’ve waited most of their lives. Unquote.
The quote is from the article about a recent search of the Kincaid park area (linked below).
I was part of the initial search referred to, and can say that the "map" was actually a rough sketch drawn from memory by Donald Leroy Evans - not a published map that he may have held upside down.
Evans claimed to have picked Randy Sellers up and drove him in his car to Kincaid park, where he said that he drank a beer with him, then shot him in the head with a .45 automatic pistol. He claimed to have buried Randy's body near the murder site in a shallow grave, using a piece of sheet metal he found in the area to dig the grave.
Evans, at this point already convicted of two other murders and on Florida's death row, had been in contact with Kentucky state police regarding Randy's disappearance. Evans did not look at some map (upside down or otherwise) to describe the area, but rather described it entirely from memory and wrote it all down in a rough pencil and paper sketch. That was the "map" that current investigators refer to.
That sketch did correspond in many ways with features of the park, such as location of the road with its curves, the lake, boat dock, woods, fields, etc. I do not recall whether or not he had included a compass arrow as part of his sketch to indicate which way was North.
In searching the area back in the early 1990's, we did find several areas of probability which were excavated. At one site, we did find the buried skeleton of a fox, but no human remains or any clothing, shoes, etc. As I recall, we dug down to at least 3 feet in places.
During our search, Evans called the Trooper in charge and wanted to know if we had found the grave. He clearly wanted us to find it and tried to give more information over the phone to assist in its location.
Unfortunately, we did not find Randy's body, but we felt that we were looking in the place that Evans described. Some thought that Evans might have buried him at that location, and then returned to move the body elsewhere.
Others thought that the body may have only been covered with leaves and limbs, and that heavy duty mowers may have scattered any remaining bones over the surface over the intervening years.
Regarding Evans' desire to prove that he had killed Randy, one has to look at his previous Florida conviction which resulted in the death sentence.
Evans had abducted and murdered a little 10 year-old girl in Mississippi and had been captured, tried and convicted. While in prison in Mississippi, he contacted Florida LE to offer his unsolicited confession to the unsolved murder of a woman in a Florida hotel room.
When Florida investigators questioned him and expressed some doubts, Evans told them to go into the crime scene hotel room, enter the closet and turn to face the room, then to check for a full set of fingerprints in the upper right hand corner of that closet.
All proved to be correct. Evans' carefully placed handprint was found and he was brought to Florida, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the woman's murder.
LINK:
Did upside-down map keep '94 murder victim from being found?
