Man Accused of Staging Fake Bear Attack To Cover Up a Murder Has Been Arrested

An accused murderer who allegedly killed a man, stole his identity, and staged a fake bear attack to cover up the crime has been arrested in South Carolina following a three-week manhunt.

Nicholas Wayne Hamlett, 45, is believed to have lured 34-year-old Steven Douglas Lloyd into the woods near Tellico Plains, a small town in eastern Tennessee, and killed him to assume his identity. Hamlett was wanted in Alabama on a parole violation.

The Monroe County, TN Sheriff’s Office received a 911 dispatch on October 24 from a man claiming to be a hiker named Brandon Andrade, who said he had been injured after a bear chased him off a cliff. Investigators later determined that the call had actually come from Hamlett and that the story had been made up. At the scene, rescuers found Lloyd’s body with Andrade’s ID.

“Once detectives laid eyes on the body, the injuries that the deceased had was not consistent with a bear attack, was not consistent with a fall,” said Monroe County Sherriff Tommy Jones in a press conference last month. Instead, investigators determined that Lloyd was killed by a blunt force trauma to the head.

Investigators quickly determined that the deceased was not actually Andrade and that Hamlett had stolen Andrade’s ID and been using it for weeks, likely to escape parole in Alabama. Police announced that the victim was Lloyd on November 4.

Hamlett has a violent history, including five prior felonies. He was charged with attempted murder in 2009 in a similarly bizarre case, in which he assumed an alias and lured a man to a remote area on the pretense of selling him insurance, only to pull a gun on him and attempt to march the victim to a shallow grave he had already dug. In that case, the victim fought back and knocked Hamlett unconscious, leading to his arrest.

The victim in this more recent case, Lloyd, has been described by those who knew him as a gentle and respectful man whose mental health issues led him to sometimes leave home to live on the streets of Knoxville. Police say Hamlett allegedly befriended Lloyd over the summer and lured him into the woods last month, intending to kill him and assume his identity.

The high-profile murder sparked a multistate manhunt that lasted three weeks, ending when a hospital worker in Columbia, South Carolina recognized Hamlett and alerted law enforcement. He is currently being without bail in South Carolina, awaiting extradition to Tennessee.

Featured image via Monroe County Tennessee Sheriff’s Office.