Just In:Tennessee to Execute Anthony Hines in 90 Days.He Stabbed Motel Maid to Death and Stole Her..

Just In:Tennessee to Execute Anthony Hines in 90 Days.He Stabbed Motel Maid to Death and Stole Her..

On August 13th, 2026, the state of Tennessee will execute Anthony Daryl Dugard Hines by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. He will die for the murder of Catherine Jenkins. Catherine was a 54-year-old motel maid working alone at the Seabon Motel in Kingston Springs, Tennessee, on the morning of March 3rd, 1985.

The manager left her in charge at 9:30 AM with a bank bag containing $100 in small bills. A man named Anthony Hines was in Room 9. He had a hunting knife beneath his shirt that he carried every single day of his life. He had $20 in his pocket and a non-refundable bus ticket someone else had paid for. By 12:40 in the afternoon, Catherine’s silver Volvo was seen leaving the driveway at a speed she would never have driven. A part-time worker tried to follow it, but it was already gone.

Catherine Jenkins was found in Room 21, wrapped in a sheet with a $20 bill placed deliberately under the band of her watch. The bank bag was empty and bloody on the floor beside her. Her keys, her wallet, and her car were gone.

Anthony Hines was found on the side of Interstate 65 with her keys in his hand and her blood on his shirt. He told his sister he had stabbed someone at a motel. He told a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent that he would confess everything if the state could guarantee him the death penalty. Two juries gave him exactly that in 1986, and again in 1989.

The case spent 41 years in courtrooms across Tennessee and the federal system. A plea agreement was negotiated before resentencing, but was rejected by the trial judge as too lenient. DNA found on the victim did not belong to Anthony Hines. A federal appeals court briefly granted him a new trial in 2020, but the United States Supreme Court reversed that ruling 8-to-1 in 2021 and called the evidence against him overwhelming.

Every avenue of relief has been exhausted. The warrant is signed. The drug is tested. Four people were executed in Tennessee in 2025 under the same protocol without a single legal interruption. The clock is running.

This is the complete story of Anthony Daryl Dugard Hines and the murder of Catherine Jenkins. Every person, every detail, every layer of what happened and why—from the moment he boarded a bus in Raleigh, North Carolina, all the way to the execution chamber. If this is the kind of documentary you come to this channel for, subscribe right now and turn on your notifications. You do not want to miss a single chapter of this one.

A Childhood of Neglect and Abuse

Anthony Daryl Dugard Hines was born on April 20th, 1960. His mother was a woman named Barbara, and his biological father was a man named Dugard. They had three young ones together, and Anthony was among them. The name Dugard stayed in the middle of his full name, Anthony Daryl Dugard Hines, long after the man himself was gone. Dugard left when Anthony was around 10 or 11 years old. He walked away from the family without a recorded explanation and did not come back.

Barbara was left with three young ones and a household to run on a single income. The practical solution she arrived at was to send the young ones to live with her parents while she worked. Her parents were John and Nancy Croft, and they lived in Cave City, Kentucky. John Croft was an attentive man. When his grandchildren arrived, he took his responsibility toward them seriously and paid close attention to each of them.

What he noticed about Anthony in those early years was straightforward: the boy was respectful. Anthony listened when spoken to, followed instructions without pushback, and carried himself with a quiet seriousness that Croft found easy to work with. Croft said later that Anthony gave him more respect than his own sons did. He said Anthony always minded him, and he always minded his grandmother too.

But beneath the good behavior, Croft noticed something else. He called it loneliness. Not a mood that came and went with the seasons, but a deep and settled feeling that had moved into Anthony the day his father left and had not moved out. Croft was clear about what he thought had produced it. He said it was not a discipline problem; he said it was the separation. There was a loneliness in the boy that the Croft household, as warm and stable as it was, could not undo.

Barbara eventually remarried. Her new husband was a man named Bill Hines, and when the family reorganized around him, Anthony and his siblings took his last name. The family moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky. Bill Hines had a biological son of his own named Bobby Joe. And the difference in how he treated Bobby Joe versus the others was not subtle. He bought food for Bobby Joe. For the others, including Anthony and his sister Victoria, the household ran differently. On difficult days—and there were many—the young ones ate cereal made with water for all three meals. The money in the household went toward beer and cigarettes, not groceries.

A family associate named Miles spent significant time in and around the household. He saw the food shortage firsthand. He saw how Bill Hines fed Bobby Joe while the other young ones ate cereal made with water. Miles was a teenager when Bill Hines sexually assaulted him and attempted to pull another young person into the situation. Miles fought back, and the attempt went no further. The household ran on its patterns, and those patterns stayed inside its walls.

Descent into Substance Abuse and Green River

Anthony moved between the Bowling Green household and his grandparents in Cave City. John Croft watched him closely and saw the same respectful, attentive boy he had always known. Then, one day, Croft went into Anthony’s room and searched it. He found glue. Anthony had been inhaling it. Solvent-based glues carried chemical compounds that, when breathed in directly from a container or a soaked cloth, produced a brief intoxicating effect. It was cheap, accessible, and it worked fast for a teenager with nothing stable beneath him and no money for anything else. It was available in any hardware store or household cabinet. Anthony had found it and was using it regularly enough that Croft discovered the evidence in his room.

From that day forward, Croft saw a different person in front of him. The boy he had known shifted into someone he no longer fully recognized. Croft harbored real doubts about keeping Anthony in the home permanently. The glue did not stop. Gasoline came next. The method was the same—inhaling the fumes directly—but gasoline was even easier to access than glue, and the effect was similarly disorienting and brief. Together, the two substances were doing damage to Anthony’s developing brain at a stage when that damage would not reverse itself.

The Bowling Green household had beer where food should have been, and Anthony drank the way his mother drank. His sister Victoria drank alongside him. Marijuana followed. Anthony was eventually sent to a juvenile facility in Kentucky. It was called Green River Boys Camp.

The staff there ran the facility using a method called “grouping.” The grouping method at Green River worked on a single principle: when one person in a group misbehaved, the entire group paid the price. Privileges were stripped from everyone. It did not matter who had caused the problem or who had nothing to do with it. Every person in the group answered for the actions of every other person in it. The people who designed the method said it built responsibility. They said it built community. They said it taught young people with behavioral problems how to be accountable to one another.

What it built at Green River was something different. The groupings turned physical. They turned verbally abusive in ways that went past correction and into something that looked more like punishment for its own sake. The young people confined at Green River were held responsible for things they had not done and penalized in ways that had nothing to do with rehabilitation. The counselors who were supposed to be guiding the process were not guiding it. The method had run past its design and past anyone’s ability to control what it produced.

Anthony was inside that environment. He was a teenager sent there because behavior outside had created enough of a problem that someone with authority decided a facility was the answer. What the facility gave him in return was a daily experience of arbitrary punishment, verbal abuse, and an atmosphere where the adults in charge had given the system permission to do what it wanted with the people inside it.

One incident at Green River went further than the general pattern of humiliation and punishment. Anthony and another young person were pushed into sewage. Raw waste—the kind that soaks through clothing and reaches skin and stays in the body’s memory long after the body has been cleaned. It was not an accident. It was not the result of any rule violation or disciplinary process. It was something done to Anthony by people who held authority over him inside a facility that was supposed to be making him better. He could not leave. He had no power to remove himself from the situation. He was a teenager in a locked facility in Kentucky, and the people running it had just pushed him into sewage.

Miles visited Anthony during his time at Green River. What he found when he arrived was not a young person being rehabilitated. He found Anthony crying. Anthony begged his mother to come and take him home. He did not ask once. He begged. His mother did not come. Anthony stayed at Green River until the facility was done with him.

When he left, he carried with him everything he had brought in and everything the facility had added to it. The father who walked away when he was 10 years old. The household in Bowling Green where beer came before groceries and his stepfather fed only his biological son. The grandfather who had looked at him with unmistakable doubt after finding the glue in his room. The crying in a facility in Kentucky while his mother stayed home. The sewage. None of it had been addressed. None of it had been named by anyone with the authority, or the resources, or the time to do something about it. Green River had taken a damaged teenager, returned him more damaged, and sent him back into the same world that had produced him.

Drifting and the Move to Raleigh

Back in Bowling Green, the patterns resumed as if nothing had changed, because nothing had. Anthony and Victoria drank. Barbara drank. The household moved through its days on the same fuel it had always run on: alcohol, neglect, and the particular cruelty of watching one person in the family be cared for while everyone else made do. Bill Hines continued to provide for Bobby Joe and continued to withhold that provision from everyone else.

Anthony grew older inside this environment without anything interrupting it. By his late teens, he had begun to move out of Bowling Green, out of Kentucky, along the roads that connected one state to the next. He held jobs when he could find them and moved on when he could not. He told people he worked as a mechanic. He told his brother-in-law later that he had earned approximately $7,000 in Raleigh, North Carolina, through that kind of work. Whether that number was accurate or not, it did not matter much by the time he said it, because whatever money he had earned was gone.

Anthony’s years in Kentucky left a criminal record behind them. At some point during that period, he got into a confrontation that ended with serious physical harm to another person. He was charged with assault in the first degree. The charge was not reduced, and the conviction was not minor. He served time for it in Kentucky. When he was released, he was placed on parole, and the terms of that parole followed him wherever he went. He was still on that parole when he eventually packed what little he had and moved east. He landed in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Raleigh was where Anthony found something that resembled a life for a period of time. He worked as a mechanic—at least that was what he told people. What Raleigh gave him beyond the work was a connection to a woman named Melanie Chandler. Melanie was a friend of his sister Victoria. She and Anthony became involved with each other, and the relationship developed into something more serious than either of them may have anticipated. In January 1981, Melanie gave birth to a son. They named him Anthony Scott Hines.

The boy carried his father’s name, and for a time that felt like something. Like proof of a life taking shape. Like evidence that the drifting, the damage, and the years of moving between one unstable place and another had produced something real and worth holding onto. But it did not hold.

Melanie became involved with another man. Anthony found out. His grandfather, John Croft, who had never fully lost touch with Anthony despite everything that had happened between Cave City and Raleigh, described what followed in plain terms. There was an emotional conflict between Anthony and the mother of his son because she had been with another man. That conflict sat between them like something solid and immovable, and the relationship could not survive the weight of it.

The son, Anthony Scott Hines, was adopted by Barbara Hines—Anthony’s own mother—and taken to Bowling Green to be raised in the same household Anthony had grown up in. Barbara took the boy in and raised him as her own while Anthony stayed in Raleigh. He worked when work was available and moved when it was not. He had no stability to offer the boy, and no stability in his own life to build from.

The Knives and the Bus Ticket

Through all of this, Anthony kept the hunting knife. It was not a tool he carried occasionally or pulled out for specific tasks. It was a constant. Every morning when he dressed and left wherever he was staying, the knife went with him in its sheath, tucked beneath his shirt, pressed against his body where no one could see it unless they knew to look. The blade measured between 6.5 and 7 inches long. It was the kind of knife designed for fieldwork—heavy enough to cut through resistance, long enough to reach deep. A survival knife, the kind worn on a belt by people who spent time outdoors hunting or camping, where a blade that size had practical uses. Anthony did not wear it on his belt where it could be seen. He wore it hidden beneath his clothing, against his skin, every single day in the middle of a city in North Carolina.

Melanie had given him a smaller folding knife at some point during their time together, a compact blade that closed into its own handle and fit easily into a pocket. He kept that one, too. Two knives: one large and hidden beneath his shirt, one small and folded in his pocket. Both always with him, every day, everywhere he went.

By February 1985, Anthony made the decision to go back to Raleigh. He had not seen Melanie in some time. The relationship was over, and both of them knew it. But Anthony got on a bus and went back anyway. Whatever he was looking for when he showed up at her door—resolution, connection, one more attempt at something that had already collapsed—Melanie’s house in North Carolina did not have it waiting for him. The tension between them had not softened in his absence. It was still there, unchanged, pressing against every conversation and every moment they shared in the same room.

One evening during the visit, a group of Melanie’s friends invited them to a party. Anthony went. The party passed without incident. The drive home did not. Something sparked between Anthony and the man behind the wheel. A disagreement that escalated fast. Anthony reached forward and grabbed the driver. Melanie moved immediately to stop it. She got between them, and in the movement and the scramble that followed, Anthony’s arms swung and connected with her face. The blow landed on her eye. It was not aimed at her, but the distinction did not matter to the bruising that formed around her eye in the hours that followed.

The visit ended after that. Anthony gathered the few things he had brought with him. He had the small folding knife Melanie had given him. He had the hunting knife in its sheath beneath his shirt. He had nothing else of substance—no savings, no plan, no destination beyond the bus ticket that Virginia Chandler, Melanie’s mother, purchased for him because he could not afford one himself. Virginia handed him the ticket and $20 in cash. The ticket was non-refundable. It went from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Bowling Green, Kentucky. The route passed through Tennessee.

Before Anthony boarded the bus, Virginia noticed the hunting knife. She saw the sheath beneath his shirt and told him he could not carry a knife like that onto a bus. Anthony looked at her and answered without hesitation. He said he never went anywhere naked. He said he always had his blade.

He boarded the bus on the morning of March 1st, 1985, with $20 in his pocket, a hunting knife beneath his shirt, a smaller folding knife in his pocket, a non-refundable ticket he had not paid for, and 17 hours of road between Raleigh and Bowling Green stretched out ahead of him.

The Seabon Motel

The bus moved west out of Raleigh, and the city disappeared behind it. The bus came through Nashville in the late hours of March 2nd or the early hours of March 3rd. At some point along that stretch, Anthony did not continue north toward Bowling Green. He stepped off the bus on the outskirts of Nashville and made his way to a small motel just off Interstate 40 in a community called Kingston Springs, about 25 miles west of the city.

The motel was called the Seabon Motel. He checked into the front office and was assigned Room 9. He was wearing a green army-type fatigue jacket, fatigue pants, and boots. He went to his room in the early morning hours and stayed there through what remained of the night.

Now, before the story moves further into that Sunday morning at the Seabon Motel, there is another person whose life is essential to understand. A woman who had been working at that motel for some time, a woman named Catherine Jenkins.

Catherine Jean Jenkins was 54 years old. She lived in the area around Kingston Springs and had built her life through steady, practical work. She was a maid at the Seabon Motel, and her role there was not a secondary one. She was the person the property relied on. She knew the regular visitors. She knew the rooms. She knew how the motel ran on a Sunday when the manager was elsewhere.

Catherine had habits that the people around her had observed and appreciated over time. She always locked her car when she was at work. She always kept her keys and her wallet on her person while she was on duty—never setting them down, never leaving them unattended. Her car was a 1980s silver-colored Volvo, and her key ring was distinctive. It read the words, “I love my Volvo,” with a heart symbol in place of the word love. Her husband later described her relationship with that car and that key ring as something close to a trademark. She locked it religiously and kept the keys on her at all times.

Regular visitors to the Seabon Motel knew Catherine as the woman who checked them in on Sunday mornings, who kept their usual rooms ready, who made the simple transactions of a roadside motel run smoothly. One regular visitor in particular, a man named Kenneth Jones, had been renting rooms at the Seabon Motel on Sunday mornings for approximately 2 years. He knew Catherine by sight, and she knew him. He usually rented from whoever was managing the front that day, and more often than not on a Sunday, that was Catherine.

Catherine arrived at the Seabon Motel on the morning of Sunday, March 3rd, 1985, and began her shift. The motel’s manager, Gay Doyle, was also present in the early part of the morning. Gay saw Anthony Hines walking from Room 9 toward the vending machine at approximately 9:25 or 9:30 AM. When she spoke with him, he told her he was not yet ready to check out. He also crossed the street at some point and went to the deli restaurant opposite the motel, where he bought a sandwich.

At approximately 9:30 in the morning, Gay Doyle left the motel and handed the property over to Catherine Jenkins for the rest of the day. When Gay Doyle handed Catherine Jenkins responsibility for the motel that Sunday morning, she also handed her the bank bag. It was a Cheatham County State Bank bag containing $100 in small bills, money to make change for guests as they paid and checked out. The three remaining occupied rooms were Rooms 9, 21, and 24.

Catherine took the bag, put it with her supplies, and went back to work. She had her maid’s cart with her, the wheeled trolley she used every working day to move linens and cleaning products between rooms. She knew this property the way a person knows any place they have worked for a long time. She knew which rooms needed what. She knew the layout. She knew the rhythms of a Sunday morning when guests were checking out, and the property needed to be turned around for the next set of arrivals. She moved through the motel the way she always moved through it—methodically, efficiently, keeping one eye on the rooms and one eye on the front office.

Anthony Hines was still on the property. He had told Gay Doyle at 9:30 that he was not ready to check out, which meant Room 9 was still active and he was still there. He watched the motel manager drive away at 9:30 and leave Catherine Jenkins alone on the property with a bank bag containing $100.

Between 11:00 and 11:30 in the morning, someone saw Anthony walking back toward the Seabon Motel from the direction of the interstate. He was on foot, moving along the road that ran beside I-40, coming from the east. He had been away from the motel for some period of time and was now returning to it. What he had been doing between 9:30 and 11:00, and where exactly he had gone, was not established. What was established was that he was walking back.

The Murder in Room 21

Catherine Jenkins was alone on the property when Anthony returned. At some point between 11:30 and 12:40, Anthony Hines entered Room 21. The distance between Room 9 and Room 21 at a small roadside motel was not significant. Catherine moved between rooms with her cart. The layout of the property placed the occupied rooms close to one another. Whether Anthony approached Catherine in the hallway, or followed the sound of her cart, or simply knocked on the door of the room she was working in, the record does not establish the precise moment of contact. What it establishes is what happened after contact was made.

Anthony had $100 in his sights. He had a hunting knife beneath his shirt. He had been broke for long enough that Virginia Chandler had to buy his bus ticket and hand him $20 to travel on. He was on parole from a Kentucky assault conviction. He was 24 years old and had nothing. Catherine Jenkins had her keys in her pocket and the bank bag with her, and no one else on the property.

What happened in Room 21 was brutal, and it was not quick. Catherine fought. She raised her hands against the blade coming toward her. She put them between herself and the knife. The cuts on her hands and arms were the physical record of that resistance. She fought with everything she had in that room, alone, with no one on the property to hear her and no one coming to help. It did not save her.

Anthony drove the hunting knife into her chest four times. The wounds ranged from 2.5 inches to 6.4 inches in depth—deep enough on the longer strikes to reach the vital structures inside the chest cavity. There were additional cuts to her neck and collarbone. The blade moved across her body before and after the chest wounds were delivered. Catherine remained conscious for most of the time it took her to die, four to six minutes. She was alive and aware for the majority of those minutes in a motel room in Kingston Springs, Tennessee, on a Sunday morning in March while the interstate ran past the window and no one came.

Anthony took the bank bag. He emptied it. He took Catherine’s car keys—the ones on the ring that said “I love my Volvo” with a heart in place of the word love. The keys she always kept in her pocket because she always locked her car. He took her billfold. He pulled her outer clothing up to her chest. He cut her underwear apart and left the pieces in a different part of the room. He wrapped her body in the sheet from the bed. Then, he placed a $20 bill deliberately underneath the wristband of Catherine Jenkins’s watch. He left it there.

He walked back to Room 9. He took the large hunting knife, the blade between 6.5 and 7 inches long that had just been inside Catherine Jenkins’s chest, and he drove it into the walls of the room. Not once, multiple times. He stabbed the walls of his own motel room with the same knife he had just used to kill a woman. The marks it left were deep and deliberate, the kind that come from force applied with intention, not from accident or agitation. He was in his own room alone, driving a blade into the walls after killing the only other person on the property.

Then he took the knife with him. The large hunting knife, the one he had carried from Raleigh, the one he had told Virginia Chandler he never went anywhere without, left that motel room in his hand and was never seen again. Whatever he did with it between Kingston Springs and Cave City, Kentucky, it was not recovered. It was not found on him when he was arrested. It was not found along the road. It was gone.

He walked out of Room 9 and got into Catherine Jenkins’s silver Volvo. He started the engine. He pulled out of the Seabon Motel driveway at 12:40 in the afternoon and turned east onto Interstate 40 toward Nashville. Penny Rust saw the car leave. She saw it cross the interstate and accelerate hard, faster than Catherine Jenkins ever drove, faster than the road around the motel warranted. Penny got into her own vehicle and followed. The Volvo was already beyond reach by the time she reached the interstate. She watched it disappear toward Nashville and turned around and went back.

Catherine Jenkins was still in Room 21. She was wrapped in a sheet from the bed. The bank bag that had held $100 in small bills lay empty and bloody on the floor beside her. The keys and the billfold were gone. The money was gone. The man from Room 9 was gone. The large hunting knife was gone. The $20 bill was still under the band of her watch.

The Discovery and Kenneth Jones

At approximately 1:00 in the afternoon, a man named Kenneth Jones arrived at the Seabon Motel. Kenneth Jones drove to the Seabon Motel on the afternoon of Sunday, March 3rd, 1985, with a woman named Vernedith White. The two of them had been coming to the Seabon Motel together almost every Sunday for approximately 2 years. They were not there for any innocent reason. Jones was married to another woman, a woman named Marion, and Vernedith White was his girlfriend. The Seabon Motel was where they met each Sunday morning. They usually arrived around 9:00 in the morning, rented a room from whoever was working the front—often Catherine Jenkins—and stayed until around noon. They had done this on at least 100 occasions.

That Sunday, March 3rd, Jones and White arrived at the motel sometime between 10:00 in the morning and 11:00. There was no one in the front office to greet them. They waited in Jones’s van in the parking lot. Vernedith White suggested after a while that they leave and go somewhere else, but Jones said no. He wanted to wait. They waited in the parking lot long enough that White was certain no one had entered or left Room 21 or Room 9 during the time they sat there. She said the van doors were open, and the day was warm, and she could see the motel clearly from where they sat. She saw nothing unusual. She heard nothing.

After a period of waiting, Jones decided to act on his own. He knew from his regular visits that room keys were kept in a dish in the front office. He went inside the empty office, took a key from the dish, and let himself and White know which room they would use. The key he took was to Room 21. He drove the van to park in front of that room. He told White to wait in the van while he went in to check the room.

The curtains in Room 21 were open. White sat in the van and watched through the window as Jones walked into the room. She could see him clearly. He walked in past the beds. He saw Catherine Jenkins’s body. He turned around and ran back out of the room. White could see him the entire time he was inside. He was not in there for even a full minute. When he came back out, he was scared. He had no blood on him.

Jones got back in the van. He drove to the restaurant across the street and had someone call the authorities. He drove Vernedith White home to Dickson, a drive of approximately 45 minutes. Then he drove back to the Seabon Motel to wait for the sheriff, who was a friend of his.

The Cheatham County Sheriff’s Office received the call at 2:37 in the afternoon. When Sheriff Weekley arrived at the Seabon Motel, the blood in Room 21 had already begun to dry. Catherine Jenkins’s body was beginning to stiffen. The time of death had passed several hours earlier.

Jones spoke with Sheriff Weekley that evening. He told the sheriff he was concerned not about the murder, but about his wife finding out why he had been at the motel with Vernedith White. Weekley was a regular customer at the sporting goods store that Jones and White co-owned together. The two men knew each other well, and the relationship between them went beyond the counter of a sporting goods store. Jones understood from the conversation that Weekley would not press him on why he had been at the motel. He understood that the question would not be asked. That same evening, Weekley called Jones and told him not to discuss the matter with anyone.

Jones did not discuss it. Nobody who arrived at the Seabon Motel that afternoon knew why Kenneth Jones had actually been there. Not the officers processing the scene. Not the medical examiner working over Catherine Jenkins’s body in Room 21. The story Jones told—that he stopped by to use the restroom, that he found no one in the office, that he helped himself to a key and walked into the room—was the story that went into the record. The woman he had driven to Dickson and dropped at her house before returning to the motel was not mentioned. The two years of Sunday visits were not mentioned. The room they rented each week, usually from Catherine Jenkins herself, was not mentioned.

The Flight and Arrest

The investigation moved forward on what it had. The money was gone. The car was gone. Catherine Jenkins was dead on the floor of Room 21, wrapped in a sheet with an empty bank bag beside her and a $20 bill under the band of her watch. Someone had driven her Volvo out of the driveway at 12:40 in the afternoon and had not come back. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation came in alongside the Cheatham County Sheriff’s Department. The crime scene was worked. Room 21 was documented. Room 9 was searched, and the knife marks on the walls were found and recorded.

Investigators worked outward from the motel. The Volvo was last known to be moving east on I-40 toward Nashville, and then north on I-65 toward Kentucky. Calls went out along the route. State law enforcement began tracking the vehicle. The Volvo was found. It had broken down on Interstate 65 north of Nashville near Gallatin, heading in the direction of Bowling Green, Kentucky. The car had overheated and stalled on the side of the road.

By the time it was found, Anthony Hines was no longer with it. But a group of young travelers had stopped to help a man stranded beside a stalled silver car, and they had given that man a ride north toward Bowling Green. One of those travelers was a man named Daniel Blair. He and his friends were driving toward Bowling Green when they came across Anthony Hines standing beside the stalled Volvo on the shoulder of I-65. They stopped. They spent 30 to 45 minutes looking for water to try to cool the engine before giving up. Then they gave Anthony a ride.

Blair sat close enough to observe details. He noticed that Anthony had dried blood on the right shoulder area of his shirt. He noticed that Anthony was carrying a jacket, which he kept folded close to him. He noticed a key attached to a dark-colored key ring with the number 9 on it—the key to Room 9 at the Seabon Motel. During the drive, Blair and the others noticed that Anthony was nervous. He kept contradicting himself. He talked constantly, as if he needed to fill every moment with words. At one point, he told Blair that he had purchased the Volvo from an old woman for $300 or $400.

The drive to Bowling Green took about an hour. Blair and his friends dropped Anthony off at the home of his sister, Victoria, between 3:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon. Victoria Daniel, Anthony’s sister, arrived home that afternoon to find her brother already there. She looked at him and noticed something red on his shirt. She described it as looking like blood.

Anthony told her what had happened, or his version of it. He said he had tried to pay another day’s rent at a motel when the motel operator attacked him. He said he had fought back. He got the attacker in the side and in the chest with a knife. He demonstrated the motion to her physically, showed her how he had used the knife on another person’s body. He told her he had a large sum of money. Victoria could not remember later whether the number he said was $3,500 or $35,000. What she remembered clearly was that he had money—substantially more than someone who 4 days earlier could not afford his own bus ticket.

Anthony also had a set of keys. Victoria saw them. They were on a key ring that said “I love my Volvo” on it with a heart symbol in place of the word love. Her husband Robert saw them too. Anthony told Robert that a man who had given him a ride had tried to rob him, and he had grabbed the steering wheel and caused the car to run off the road, and in the confusion he had taken the keys and run. He also purchased a barbecue grill that evening with stolen money in his sister’s neighborhood. He went out and bought a barbecue grill. He was wearing an army fatigue jacket that had something large, heavy, and bulky in the pocket.

However, word moved faster than Anthony had anticipated. The murder warrant out of Tennessee had his name on it, and law enforcement in Kentucky was already coordinating with Tennessee investigators. The Volvo had been found on I-65. The registration at the Seabon Motel had his name on it. The travelers who gave him a ride had been located and interviewed. The trail from Kingston Springs to Bowling Green had been reconstructed piece by piece, and every piece pointed to the same address.

Anthony’s family knew what was coming. The people around him in Bowling Green—his sister, her husband, the family members who had seen him arrive with blood on his shirt and more money than he should have had—were not going to be able to protect him from what was already in motion. The warrant was active. Tennessee wanted him back. Kentucky law enforcement was involved. There was nowhere left to go that the name Anthony Daryl Dugard Hines had not already reached.

He turned himself in. He walked into custody in the Bowling Green area and surrendered. And before a single question was put to him, before any officer told him what he was being charged with or described what had happened at the Seabon Motel, Anthony spoke first. He said he had taken the woman’s car, but that he had not killed her. The arresting officer had not yet told him a woman was dead. Anthony named the gender himself. He said “the woman’s car,” not “a car,” not “someone’s car,” the woman’s car. He said he took it, and he said he did not kill her. And he said both of those things before anyone in that room told him there was a woman involved in what had happened in Kingston Springs, Tennessee.

Officers searched him. They found the small folding knife Melanie Chandler had given him. They found a second small knife. Two knives, both small, both recovered from his person. Neither was large enough to have made the knife marks on the walls of Room 9. Neither was consistent with the wounds on Catherine Jenkins’s body. The large hunting knife, the one with the blade between 6.5 and 7 inches long, the one he carried beneath his shirt from Raleigh, the one he told Virginia Chandler he never went anywhere without, was not on him. It was not in his belongings. It was not found anywhere in Bowling Green. It was gone, and it stayed gone.

Catherine Jenkins’s wallet was found near the location where her Volvo had been abandoned on Interstate 65. Someone had wrapped it in a thermal underwear shirt and pushed it into the brush on the side of the road a short distance from where the car had stalled. The wallet was empty. The key to Room 9 at the Seabon Motel was found at a campsite near Cave City, Kentucky. Anthony had stopped there at some point after leaving the Volvo on I-65. He had carried that key through every mile of the flight from Kingston Springs, through the breakdown, through the ride with Blair, through the time at Victoria’s house with the blood on his shirt and the barbecue grill. Then he had left it at a campsite in the same county where his grandparents lived, where John Croft had once searched his room and found glue and looked at him and seen something he no longer recognized.

A Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent sat down with Anthony and asked him to tell the truth about the death of Catherine Jenkins. Anthony looked at the agent and gave him a specific answer. He said that if the officer could guarantee him the death penalty, he would confess and tell him everything he wanted to know. He said he could tell the officer everything, all of it, every detail. If the guarantee came first. The guarantee did not come. Anthony said nothing further. The agent documented the exchange word for word. The conditional offer to confess in exchange for a guaranteed death sentence went into the record as evidence. It was not the response of a man who did not know what had happened in Room 21. It was not confusion or the statement of someone trying to understand why he had been arrested. It was a negotiation. Anthony Hines knew exactly what he had done and exactly what the charge was going to be. And the only thing he wanted to discuss was whether the state would commit to killing him before he said another word.

They would not commit. He would not confess. Anthony was transported back to Tennessee. He was charged in Cheatham County Circuit Court with first-degree felony murder and related offenses, including robbery and sexual assault. He was 24 years old. He had a prior violent felony conviction in Kentucky. He was on parole at the time he boarded the bus in Raleigh, at the time he checked into the Seabon Motel, and at the time Catherine Jenkins died in Room 21. The evidence assembled against him was already substantial. The motel registration placed him there. The eyewitness sightings tracked his movements through the morning. The Volvo connected him to the flight. The wallet placed him at the point of abandonment. The Room 9 key placed him at the campsite. The blood on his shirt placed the violence on his body. The statements he made to Victoria, to Robert, to Daniel Blair, and to the arresting officer placed the knowledge of a dead woman in his mouth before anyone told him she existed.

The Legal Battles: Trials and Resentencing

The Cheatham County Court appointed him an attorney. The attorney’s name was Steve Stack. Stack had been practicing law for 20 months. He had taken two cases to a jury. He did not believe he was qualified to serve as lead counsel on a capital murder case and said so later under oath. He was appointed anyway. He was paid $20 an hour for work done outside the courtroom and $30 an hour for work done inside it. In his private practice, he charged between $60 and $75 an hour. He had no office investigator and no support staff. He and his co-counsel, a man named William Wilkinson, conducted all of the investigation themselves.

A second attorney had originally been appointed to represent Anthony, a man named Robert Wilson. Wilson was allowed to withdraw approximately 2 months after his appointment because he had been hired by the district attorney general’s office. He recommended Steve Stack as his replacement before he left.

Stack and Wilkinson began building the defense. They traveled to Kentucky and interviewed some witnesses. Stack interviewed Gay Doyle, the motel manager. He interviewed Bill Hines, Anthony’s stepfather. He may have interviewed Bobby Joe Hines and Barbara Hines. He drove to Victoria Daniel’s house but could not later remember whether he actually met with her. He knew that Victoria had seen blood on Anthony’s clothing. He knew she would testify to it. He did not obtain any evidence or any expert witness that could challenge or reframe her testimony. He did not interview Melanie Chandler. He did not interview Melanie’s mother, Virginia Chandler, who had given Anthony the bus ticket and $20, and who had observed him with the hunting knife. Neither of them were ever contacted by the defense. He did not run a criminal background check on Daniel Blair, the man who had given Anthony a ride from the stalled Volvo. If he had, he would have found that Blair had a prior conviction for theft of livestock, a fact that could have been used at trial to raise questions about Blair’s credibility as a witness. He never found out.

The most significant omission of the pre-trial investigation was this: Steve Stack never interviewed Kenneth Jones. Stack knew who Kenneth Jones was. He knew Jones had testified to being at the motel in unusual circumstances. He knew that some of Jones’s account had struck him as false or inaccurate. He knew there were discrepancies between the timing Jones described and the account provided by the first responders who arrived at the motel. He knew something about the account was off. He also knew that Sheriff Weekley held a specific view of Kenneth Jones. Weekley told Stack that Jones had not been at the motel for long and had nothing to do with the murder. Weekley told Stack, in essence, not to embarrass the man. Stack’s later testimony about his decision not to interview Jones was candid about what drove it. He said he held Weekley in high regard. He said he would take Weekley’s word for anything in the world. He said Weekley told him Jones hadn’t got a dog in the hunt, and Stack was not going to embarrass the man.

The trial was set for 1986 in the Cheatham County Circuit Court. The judge was Robert E. Burch. The prosecutors were District Attorney J. Kenneth Atkins and Assistant District Attorney James Kirby. The case against Anthony Hines was built on the motel registration, the eyewitness sightings, the Volvo, the wallet, the Room 9 key, the knife marks on the walls, the blood on his shirt, the distinctive key ring, the statements he made to his sister, to his brother-in-law, to Daniel Blair and the travelers, and to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent who asked him to tell the truth.

Jury selection took place in Cheatham County. The jury that was seated to hear the case against Anthony Hines would determine not only whether he was guilty, but if found guilty, whether he would die.

The trial began. The trial opened in Cheatham County Circuit Court in 1986. The prosecution called its witnesses one by one, and each of them added another layer to the picture the jury was building. Gay Doyle described leaving Catherine in charge at 9:30 with the bank bag. Catherine’s husband described the key ring, the “I love my Volvo” tag with the heart in place of the word love, and confirmed it was hers and no one else’s. Penny Rust described watching the Volvo leave the driveway at 12:40 and trying to follow it and losing it on the interstate. Daniel Blair described picking up a nervous man beside a stalled silver car on I-65, the dried blood on his shirt, the key with the number nine on it, the story about buying the car from an old woman. Victoria Daniel described her brother arriving at her house with something reddish on his shirt and the key ring in his hand, and a large sum of money, and a story about a motel operator who attacked him. Robert Daniel described the same key ring and a different version of the same story: a man in a car tried to rob him and he grabbed the wheel and took the keys. The TBI agent described the statement Anthony made before being formally questioned, that he had taken the woman’s car but had not killed her, and described what happened when he asked Anthony to tell the truth. He told the jury what Anthony said: “If you can guarantee me the death penalty, I will confess and tell you everything you want to know.” Dr. Charles Harlan testified about the autopsy: four deep wounds to the chest, defensive injuries on the hands and arms, death within 4 to 6 minutes, consciousness for most of that time.

Then Kenneth Jones took the stand. Jones told the jury he had stopped by the Seabon Motel on the afternoon of March 3rd because he knew the owners and needed to use the restroom. He said he found no one in the office. He lingered outside. He eventually helped himself to a room key and walked in and found the body and called for help. His timeline did not match the timeline the first responders gave when they testified about the emergency call. The discrepancies were visible to anyone paying attention.

Steve Stack paid attention. He stood before the jury and pointed out the strangeness of Jones’s account. A man who just happened to arrive at a motel on the same afternoon a woman was killed, who lingered outside for no clear reason, who helped himself to a key, who walked into the one room where the body was. Stack told the jury that Jones was fooling around at that motel that Sunday afternoon. He said Jones seemed nervous. He said Jones just happened to be there when there was a lot of something going on. The jury heard the discrepancies. The jury heard Stack’s argument about Jones.

The jury found Anthony Hines guilty of first-degree felony murder on January 10th, 1986. The penalty phase followed. The prosecution presented Anthony’s prior assault conviction in Kentucky. The jury found three aggravating circumstances: the prior violent felony conviction, the especially heinous nature of the killing, and the murder being committed during robbery and sexual assault. The jury sentenced Anthony Daryl Dugard Hines to death. Judge Robert E. Burch imposed the sentence. The method of execution in Tennessee at that time was electrocution. Anthony was taken to death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. He was 25 years old.

The Tennessee Supreme Court reviewed the case on automatic appeal. The conviction stood without question, but the jury instructions given during the penalty phase were found to be constitutionally flawed. The aggravating circumstances had not been defined and explained to the jury in the way the law required. The death sentence was vacated. In September 1988, the court sent the case back to Cheatham County for a new sentencing hearing. Anthony Hines had been on death row for 2 years. Now he was going back to court.

The resentencing hearing was set for 1989 in the Cheatham County Circuit Court. The same judge, Robert Burch, would preside. The question before the jury was simple: given the crime and the circumstances of the man who committed it, should Anthony Hines live or die?

Steve Stack was appointed again to represent Anthony at the resentencing. By 1989, Stack had moved from private practice into the Cheatham County Public Defender’s Office. He brought two other attorneys with him: Chip Williams, the public defender, and a younger attorney named Philip Maxey. The three of them formed the defense team for the resentencing.

The public defender’s office was not equipped for what this case required. Williams later testified about the conditions under which the office operated at the time. Three attorneys handled approximately 800 cases each. The position that should have been held by an investigator was filled by a third attorney because the office was budgeted for only two. The resources that a capital resentencing hearing demanded did not exist. In Williams’s own words, the attorneys in that office didn’t have the luxury to properly prepare a misdemeanor case, let alone a capital one.

The defense team made a series of decisions that would be examined intensely in the years to come. They gave the opening statement at resentencing to Philip Maxey, who was the least experienced of the three attorneys. Stack and Williams later acknowledged that the opening they had anticipated was different from what Maxey delivered. Maxey’s opening did not outline the proof the defense planned to present. It simply asked the jury to listen.

At the close of the hearing, the defense made a deliberate decision not to give a closing argument. The reasoning behind this decision was tactical. District Attorney Atkins was known for delivering powerful closing arguments. Stack described him as exceptional in his ability to bring emotions out in a jury. Atkins had given an impassioned close at the original 1986 trial, and the defense team decided that their best move was to prevent him from giving a rebuttal. By waiving their closing argument, they took away his opportunity to respond.

Before the resentencing, something else happened that did not become widely known at the time. A plea agreement had been negotiated, the terms of which would have spared Anthony’s life. Judge Robert E. Burch rejected it. He had the authority to do so, and he exercised it. His view was that the proposed sentence was too lenient given the nature of the crime. The plea deal died in his chambers, and the resentencing went forward.

The defense presented mitigation evidence—testimony about Anthony’s background, his childhood, his mental state. Dr. Pamela Able, a clinical psychologist, took the stand. She had been working with Anthony since May 1989, barely more than a month before the resentencing hearing. She had reviewed his school records, his prison records, and records from the Middle Tennessee Mental Health Institute. She had met with him and assessed him. Her diagnosis was paranoid personality disorder and dysthymia. Dysthymia is a form of chronic depression, persistent and low-grade, but present every day.

Dr. Able testified about what the paranoid personality disorder meant in Anthony’s case. He suppressed his emotions. He held things inside. Under stress, those emotions did not gradually release. They accumulated until they boiled up. Dr. Able testified that Anthony had returned from turbulent visits with his parents and with his girlfriend Melanie Chandler shortly before the murder, and that he was under significant emotional stress at the time he killed Catherine Jenkins.

Dr. Anne Marie Charvat, a sociologist who worked in mitigation, also testified. She spoke about the circumstances of Anthony’s childhood. The father who left, the stepfather who withheld food from the young ones who were not his biological son, the Green River Boys Camp, the sewage incident, the begging to go home. What neither expert was given enough time to fully develop was the family history of addiction, the possible neurological effects of long-term substance abuse, and the full scope of the abuse within the household. Dr. Able said later that she had been given just over a month to prepare, and there were aspects of Anthony’s background she would have explored more deeply if she’d had more time.

The jury at resentencing found the same three aggravating factors it had found in 1986. Anthony Hines was sentenced to death a second time.

The Tennessee Supreme Court ruled against Anthony Hines on every issue in 1995. The plea agreement rejection was upheld. The aggravating circumstances were upheld. The United States Supreme Court declined the case in 1996.

Anthony filed for postconviction relief in March 1997. Evidentiary hearings were held, and for the first time in any proceeding connected to this case, the real reason Kenneth Jones had been at the Seabon Motel on March 3rd, 1985, came out. Jones testified by deposition from a nursing home where he had been confined after a stroke. He admitted he had been at the motel that Sunday to rent a room with Vernedith White, a woman he had been having an affair with for 11 years. The two of them had been coming to the Seabon Motel nearly every Sunday for approximately 2 years, usually renting a room from Catherine Jenkins herself. Vernedith White testified and confirmed it. She had watched from the van as Jones walked into the room and came back out in under a minute with no blood on him. She said there was no possibility Jones had anything to do with the murder.

Marion Jones, Ken’s wife, confirmed the affair and added that after his stroke, Jones had transferred approximately $30,000 to Vernedith White and given her his power of attorney. Steve Stack admitted under oath that not interviewing Jones before trial was ridiculous. He said he had known Jones’s account was inaccurate, but had trusted Sheriff Weekley and did not want to embarrass the man. The court denied the petition. The evidence against Anthony Hines was too strong. The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in January 2004.

Anthony filed a second petition seeking DNA testing of seven items from the crime scene. Every court denied it. In January 2005, he filed a federal habeas petition growing to 31 claims of constitutional error. In October 2010, the district court granted DNA testing. The results showed that Catherine Jenkins’s underwear contained DNA from at least two males. Anthony Hines was excluded as a contributor. A former FBI fingerprint examiner declared his prints did not match anything found at the scene. The district court denied relief anyway. The prosecution had never argued a sexual motive. Fingerprints had never been part of their case. The DNA and fingerprint findings did not touch any evidence the prosecution had actually used to convict him.

The Sixth Circuit reversed the district court in May 2020 on one claim: that trial counsel were ineffective for failing to interview Jones and use the truth about his presence at the motel to create doubt. Judge Kethledge dissented, saying the majority had ignored the overwhelming evidence of guilt and given no proper deference to the state courts. The case went to the United States Supreme Court.

On March 29th, 2021, the Supreme Court ruled 8-to-1 in favor of the state. Justice Sotomayor dissented without writing a separate opinion. The court reversed the Sixth Circuit. It said the standard for overturning a state court judgment required showing the ruling was so lacking in justification that no fair-minded jurist could agree with it. The Sixth Circuit had not come close to meeting that standard.

The court went through what the Sixth Circuit had ignored: the bloodstained shirt, the victim’s keys, wallet, and car in Anthony’s possession. The shifting stories. The voluntary statement about the woman’s car before being told a woman was dead. The conditional offer to confess in exchange for a death sentence. On Kenneth Jones, the court was direct: Jones had not offered any testimony that pointed to Anthony’s guilt. He found a body and called it in. Everything that incriminated Anthony came from other witnesses and physical evidence. Undermining Jones would have changed nothing because Jones’s testimony was not what built the case against him.

The Final Countdown

The death sentence was reinstated. Every avenue of relief had been exhausted. Anthony Daryl Dugard Hines remained on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. In February 2025, the state of Tennessee filed a motion asking the Tennessee Supreme Court to set an execution date. The motion stated plainly that Anthony Daryl Dugard Hines had completed the standard three-tier appeals process and that the sentence of death imposed by a jury in 1986 and again in 1989 should be carried out.

Anthony responded through counsel. He asked the court to deny the motion. He cited a Tennessee statute and asked alternatively for the court to issue a certificate of commutation to the governor. He asked in the language of the law for mercy.

On October 1st, 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued its order. Four execution dates are set for death row inmates who have exhausted the appeals process. Tony Carruthers is first, May 21st, 2026. Anthony Daryl Dugard Hines is second, August 13th, 2026. Christa Pike is third, September 30th, 2026. Gary Wayne Sutton is fourth. The order is direct: The warden of Riverbend Maximum Security Institution is ordered to execute the sentence of death on the 13th day of August 2026 unless otherwise ordered by the court or another appropriate authority.

Tennessee had resumed executions in 2025 after a pause triggered by a lethal injection scandal. Officials had admitted to providing false testimony under oath about the purity and potency of the execution drugs. The state developed a new protocol using a single drug, Pentobarbital, and in 2025 executed four people under it. Oscar Smith, Byron Black, Donald Middlebrooks, and Harold Nichols were all executed without legal interruption. The protocol held. The courts found no constitutional deficiency in it. The executions proceeded on their scheduled dates and were carried out as ordered.

Anthony Hines is the second name on the 2026 calendar. He has been at Riverbend since 1986. Listed as offender number 109293. 39 years on death row. 31 federal habeas claims filed and rejected. A brief window of hope opened when the Sixth Circuit granted relief in 2020 and closed permanently when the Supreme Court reversed it in 2021. No active proceedings remain. No court orders stand between him and the date on the calendar.

The pattern established by the 2025 executions is clear. Tennessee rebuilt its protocol, tested it, and carried out four consecutive executions without interruption. The courts reviewed the method and found it adequate. The political and legal environment in Tennessee is not one in which a last-minute intervention appears likely. The state has demonstrated both its intention and its capability.

August 13th, 2026, carries the full weight of 41 years behind it. 41 years since Catherine Jenkins went to work at a small motel off Interstate 40 in Kingston Springs on a Sunday morning with a bank bag and her keys in her pocket and did not make it home. Tennessee intends to carry out the sentence its juries imposed twice, based on everything that has come before: the completed appeals, the reinstated death sentence, the functioning protocol, and the four executions carried out without disruption in 2025.

August 13th, 2026, is not a date that is likely to pass without consequence. Anthony Daryl Dugard Hines once told a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent that he would confess everything if the state could guarantee him the death penalty. The state is about to make good on exactly that.