Jacob Allen Morley stuffed Cody Birchfield's body into a box and shoved it beneath his house in Elizabethton, Tennessee. It stayed there for nearly a month before investigators found it on March 2, 2022. On Sunday night, Morley — now serving life for first-degree murder — cut through the perimeter fence of the Northwest Correctional Complex in Tiptonville, Tennessee, wearing his prison uniform, and disappeared.
He was two miles down the road before anyone at the prison noticed he was gone.
Staff at the facility didn't confirm Morley was missing until approximately 11:30 p.m. Sunday during an emergency count. Security footage later showed the 28-year-old breaching the fence while still in his Tennessee Department of Correction clothing. By around 1 a.m. Monday, Morley had made it to the 400 block of Keystone Drive in Lake County — roughly two miles south of the prison — where he stole a white 2008 Ford F-350 work truck bearing the name "Lindamood Planting Company" on the cab and an air compressor in the bed. The truck carried Tennessee license plate 138BBQV.
Firehouse surveillance cameras later captured Morley driving past the Hornbeak Fire Department, about 15 miles from the prison. Then the trail went cold.
Morley's crimes weren't ambiguous. He was convicted in 2025 of first-degree murder, aggravated burglary, tampering with evidence, evading arrest, and vandalism in connection with Birchfield's killing. Birchfield had been reported missing from Elizabethton in early February 2022. His former girlfriend, Landree Sheperd, testified at trial that Morley told her "he f---ing killed him." The jury gave him life.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation added Morley to its Most Wanted list and is offering up to $2,500 for information leading to his arrest. Federal and state law enforcement agencies have joined the search. The TDOC has publicly warned that Morley should be considered dangerous — the kind of detail that might have been more useful before he was on the other side of a perimeter fence.
Here's the part that should bother every taxpayer in Tennessee. This is a man convicted of killing someone and hiding the evidence under his own house. A man sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars. And the state correctional system's fence — the single physical barrier between a life-sentence murderer and the general public — failed to keep him contained. No alarm tripped before the emergency count. No officers spotted a man in prison clothing walking two miles to a parked truck. The security camera footage was reviewed after the fact, not in real time.
Morley stands 5 feet 11 inches, weighs 240 pounds, has brown hair, green eyes, and a beard. He was last seen in TDOC-issued clothing. Morley is dangerous, armed with a stolen truck, and has a documented history of evading arrest.