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Flaming death no accident, FBI says Gasoline found on clothes of license examiner By Bill Dries dries@gomemphis.com The fiery death of a driver's license examiner at the center of a federal fraud investigation was not an accident, an FBI agent said here Wednesday in federal court. "Katherine Smith obviously lived two lives, maybe more. She may have had other things going on in her life that may have led to her death." - Karen Cicala Federal and state investigators found gasoline on the clothes Katherine Smith was wearing when she died Sunday in a car crash on a stretch of ...

The fiery death of a driver's license examiner at the center of a federal fraud investigation was not an accident, an FBI agent said here Wednesday in federal court. Federal and state investigators found gasoline on the clothes Katherine Smith was wearing when she died Sunday in a car crash on a stretch of U.S. 72 in Fayette County, FBI agent J. Suzanne Nash told U.S. Magistrate Judge J. Daniel Breen. Nash also testified that investigators found evidence of some kind of accelerant in the burned-out interior of Smith's car. "Katherine Smith obviously lived two lives, maybe more. She may ...

By Bill Dries, dries@gomemphis.com A Memphis woman allegedly at the center of a scheme to sell fraudulent Tennessee driver's licenses was identified Tuesday as the person whose burned body was found early Sunday in the wreckage of a car in Fayette County. L icense examiner Katherine Smith was probably alive when her car hit a utility pole on U.S. 72 near the Mississippi state line, said Tennessee Highway Patrol Lt. Col. Mark Fagan. Smith, 49, died the day before she was due to appear before a federal magistrate judge for a detention hearing on a charge of conspiracy to obtain ...

Like Canadian figure skaters, Sevier County sheriff's deputies thought they had seized Olympic gold with the arrest of a man they immediately suspected as an al-Qaida operative carrying cash and drugs. But federal authorities say they will be the judge -- and they are scoring the extraordinary catch as a routine drug bust. But officials in the rural central Utah county are not so sure. On Tuesday, the Sheriff's Department issued a press release praising the deputies' arrest of a motorist from the Middle East country of Jordan on Interstate 70 who had $300,000 cash in his trunk. The announcement ...