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Tramel featured on Discovery Channel
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Former Smithvillian and DCHS graduate Jim Tramel was featured on a recent episode of Investigation Discovery’s “Stolen Voices, Buried Secrets.”The episode, entitled “Hunting Season” premiered last week and will re-run several times in the near future on the Investigation Discovery Channel.The show tells the story of the 1982 murder of Lynn Orrand of Murfreesboro, which Tramel, now a detective with the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Department, helped solve in 2007.Orrand was shot while hunting on his in-laws’ property in Rutherford County on Jan. 16, 1982.The killer left little evidence apart from a few footprints in the snow, and the murder remained unsolved for 25 years.Tramel and fellow Rutherford County Sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Mark Di Nardo reopened the case in 2007 after recieving information that Orrand’s brother-in-law Kevin Patterson, a high-school classmate of the informant, had told him years ago that he committed the act.Upon further investigation, Patterson, as well as Orrand’s widow and Patterson’s sister, Candance Bush, along with her second husband Gary Bush were all charged with first-degree murder in December 2007.Patterson, a 17-year-old high-school senior who had just fathered a premature baby at the time of the killing, testified that his sister and Gary Bush, then her boyfriend, hired him to kill Orrand in exchange for $5,000 and a place for him, his new wife and infant daughter to live.He said that he never received the money and only lived with his sister for a few weeks before she kicked him out.The Bushes were convicted of first-degree murder in 2008 and are serving life sentences.In exchange for his testimony, Patterson was given a 25-year sentence.Assistant District Attorney Paul Newman said it was his position if people helped in a murder, they are “just as guilty of murder as the person who pulled the trigger. Candance and Gary Bush’s weapon was Kevin Patterson.”