JUST IN: Tennessee Executes Anthony Hines After 40 Years on Death Row | Last Words & Meal

The state of Tennessee has carried out another execution despite serious concerns about the state’s lethal injection protocol due to a botched execution last May.  The state of Tennessee has executed Anthony Darrell Hines by lethal injection. Happened this morning.  August 13th, 2026. Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, Nashville, Tennessee.

 A man is strapped to a gurney. Needles, witnesses, silence. The room is still, and somewhere in that stillness sits 41 years of unanswered questions. His name is Anthony Darrell Dugard Hines. He is here because of what happened inside a motel room in Kingston Springs, Tennessee on the morning of March 1st, 1985.

 What was done to the woman in that room, what investigators found when they walked through that door, is something that even now [music] is almost impossible to put into words. Multiple stab wounds, evidence of a violent sexual assault, a body wrapped in a blood-stained bedsheet, a bag of cash gone, a car gone, a life taken. For 40 years, Hines told anyone who would listen that he did not do it.

 His lawyers pointed to a flawed investigation. They argued that a key witness lied to police. They claimed his own defense attorney made one quiet, deliberate decision. A decision that may have cost Hines everything. The Supreme Court of the United States heard every word of it, and they said the evidence was too overwhelming to look past.

 So, the question that has followed this case for four decades still stands. Did the right man spend 40 years waiting to die? Stay with us because by the end of this story, you will have to answer that for yourself. Welcome to Red Mark Files, and if you are new here, this is the place for real stories told straight.

 Hit subscribe and tap the bell so you never miss a case. Now, let’s go back to where this all began. To understand what was lost on March 1st, 1985, you first have to understand who Katherine Jean Jenkins was. Jean, as her family called her, was from the Fairview, Tennessee area, a small, close-knit community about 20 minutes south of Kingston Springs.

 She was a wife, a mother, a woman who held her family together with both hands and never once complained about the weight. Her husband had suffered a massive stroke early in their marriage. It forced him to retire on disability from his job as a mechanic with the Nashville Gas Company.

 After that stroke, he was left with crippling headaches. He could no longer work, and just like that, everything fell on Jean. She rose to meet it. People in her community knew her as someone who could make a disability check last an entire month. That was not luck. That was discipline. That was love in its most practical form. By 1985, all four of her children were grown.

 Her daughter Melissa was 22 years old, and when Melissa looks back, the memories that stay with her are not the big ones. They are the quiet ones. Jean once spent a morning at the hospital having a benign lump removed from her breast. That same afternoon, she showed up at Melissa’s softball game. She never missed those games, not once.

 Her faith was just as steady. Those who knew her said she was so devoted to her church in Fairview that she would walk there through the snow if she had to. Her church was not just a place she visited. It was the center of her world. When her children grew up and the house got quiet, Jean decided she wanted something to do.

 She took a job as a maid at the Saban Motel in Kingston Springs, just off Interstate 40. Her sister worked there, too, so every shift was time spent with family. She had been there about a year, maybe two. On the morning of March 1st, 1985, Katherine Jean Jenkins went to work. She would never come home again. Now, let’s talk about the man on the other side of this story.

 Anthony Darrell Dugard Hines was born around 1958. He had ties to the Bowling Green, Kentucky area. In March of 1985, he was 27 years old. On the surface, he was just a man passing through Tennessee. Nobody in Kingston Springs knew him. Nobody at the C-Bond Motel had ever seen his face. He had no history in that town, no connections, no reason to be remembered.

But, court records and post-conviction proceedings would later paint a very different picture of who Anthony Hines really was. His father left early. His mother raised him in a home that was anything but stable. Expert testimony presented during his appeals described a childhood shaped by family violence, abandonment, and substance abuse.

 As a teenager, Hines was documented to have sniffed gasoline and glue. He drank. He used drugs. The foundation of his early life was fractured in almost every direction. Years later, psychological evaluations gave that damage a name. Hines was diagnosed with personality disorder, depression, and trauma-related conditions.

 But, none of that came out at his original trial. It only surfaced during post-conviction proceedings, long after a jury had already decided his fate. There was one detail, however, that did not wait for a courtroom to be revealed. Court records established that Hines carried a hunting knife concealed beneath his shirt wherever he went.

 When his mother once asked him why he was always armed, he did not hesitate. He told her, “I never go anywhere naked. I always have my blade.” That quote would later appear in filings before the United States Supreme Court. What this man carried into that motel, both physically and psychologically, would change everything for one woman who was just trying to do her job.

 In the days before March 1st, 1985, Anthony Hines was in Raleigh, North Carolina. He had no money, not enough for a bus ticket, not enough to get himself where he was going. So, his girlfriend and her mother stepped in. They bought him a bus ticket and handed him $20 for the road. His destination was Bowling Green, Kentucky, where his sister lived.

 A straightforward trip. Nothing about it should have drawn attention, but the route passed through Tennessee. Hines made a stop in Kingston Springs, a small town on the outskirts of Nashville, right off Interstate 40. He checked into the Saban Motel. According to court records, he checked in alone.

 He had his concealed hunting knife beneath his shirt, the same way he always traveled. The motel was small. The staff was thin. There was nothing remarkable about the place from the outside. But, that afternoon, the motel manager made a routine decision. Before leaving, he handed Katherine Jenkins a bag of cash. She was to manage guest checkouts and make change for anyone who needed it.

 He put her in charge of the property. In one moment, Gene Jenkins became the authority figure in that building. She was also now the person holding the most valuable thing on the premises. She was alone. Hines was there. The knife was there. Court records show that in the hours before Katherine Jenkins died, every element fell into place, and none of it was accidental.

 What happened inside that motel on the afternoon of March 1st, 1985, is something this story cannot rush. Because Katherine Jenkins deserves more than a hurried account. And what was found in that room, what was done to her, demands that we take it one step at a time. This case did not involve a group of people sitting around a table making plans.

 There were no hired accomplices, no co-conspirators, no elaborate scheme mapped out in advance. But, court records tell a story of choices, deliberate ones. The sequence is documented. Hines had no money for a bus ticket, so others paid for it. His girlfriend and her mother covered the cost and handed him $20. He boarded that bus with almost nothing in his pocket.

 But, he did not board it empty-handed. The knife was already beneath his shirt before he ever left Raleigh. Court records make clear that this was not something Hines picked up along the way. He carried that knife everywhere. He traveled with it concealed. He spoke about it without being asked. It was not an afterthought. It was a habit.

 And habits like that do not disappear at a motel check-in desk. The $20 he was given did not last. By the time Hines arrived at his sister’s home in Bowling Green, that money was long gone. But, he was not broke. Far from it. Court records show he had enough cash to purchase a barbecue grill and still had money left over. Family members who saw him that day were puzzled.

 Days earlier, he had needed others to fund his bus ticket. Now, he was spending freely. Nobody could explain where the money came from. The murder weapon itself was never recovered. Melissa Jenkins believes it ended up somewhere in the well or cistern system beneath the Kentucky caves. If this story is gripping you the way it grips us, hit that like button, drop a comment below, and make sure you are subscribed.

 Now, let’s get into what happened inside that motel room. In the early afternoon, a local man named Kenneth Jones pulled into the Sabon parking lot. He would later tell investigators that when he walked to the front desk, nobody was there. He picked up a room key. He walked to one of the rooms and opened the door. What he found inside stopped him cold.

 Katherine Jean Jenkins was there. She was wrapped in a blood-stained bed sheet. She was not moving. She would never move again. The autopsy confirmed what no family should ever have to hear. Jean had suffered multiple deep knife wounds to her chest, her abdominal cavity, and her genitalia. She had been raped. Her wallet was gone.

Her car keys were gone. The bag of cash the manager had left with her was gone. And so was her car. Another employee at the Sabon had seen a man leaving the parking lot in Jenkins’ vehicle shortly before Jones made his discovery. That employee tried to follow. The car sped away. Later that same afternoon, a group of travelers came across a man standing by the side of the road.

 A car had broken down nearby. The man was Anthony Hines. His shirt was stained with dried blood. He was carrying a folded jacket. The travelers later described him as nervous. He kept contradicting himself. He talked constantly. He told them he had bought the car from an old lady for a few hundred dollars. They gave him a ride toward Bowling Green.

 When Hines arrived at his sister’s home, the blood on his shirt was plain to see. He told her he had stabbed someone at the motel, but he said the person was a male employee who had attacked him first. He did not just tell her. He stood up and physically demonstrated exactly how he had done it. He also had Jenkins’ distinctive car keys.

 And despite needing his girlfriend’s mother to pay for his bus ticket just days earlier, he now had enough money to go out and buy a barbecue grill. When law enforcement eventually caught up with him and he surrendered, his very first unprompted words to the sheriff were that he had taken the automobile but had not murdered the woman.

 Then his story shifted again. He told the sheriff he would confess to the murder if the sheriff could guarantee him the death penalty. What investigators found next back at that motel room would seal his fate in a way that no jury could ignore. The evidence did not stay hidden for long. Katherine Jenkins’ wallet was found near the roadside where Hines had abandoned her car after it broke down.

 It was sitting there in the open. Just off the road, not far from where the travelers had picked him up. Back at the Sabon Motel, investigators searched Hines’ room. What they found on the walls stopped them. There were stab marks, multiple ones. When an investigator pointed directly at them and asked Hines about the damage, he did not hesitate.

He did not claim ignorance. Without being prompted to describe them, he called them knife marks. Jenkins’ distinctive car key chain, the one that had been on her person the day she died, was found in Hines’ possession. Family members in Bowling Green confirmed it on site. They recognized it immediately. Those same family members had already seen enough to know something was deeply wrong.

 The blood on his shirt, the unexplained cash, the car keys, the physical demonstration of how he had stabbed someone. Every one of them would later be called as witnesses. Every one of them had seen the same thing with their own eyes. Back in Fairview, Tennessee, the Jenkins family did not yet know what had happened.

 Melissa Jenkins had just come home from a day of work at Vanderbilt. Less than an hour later, there was a knock at the door. It was Marvin Crouch, a well-known figure in the community, whose grandson would later become district attorney. He stepped inside. He and Melissa’s father moved to the living room. Melissa had started walking toward her bedroom when she heard Crouch speak.

 “I’ve got some bad news for you. Gene has been stabbed.” Her father’s voice broke when he asked, “Is she dead?” “Yes,” Crouch said. “She is.” The community came. Friends, church members, neighbors, they filled that house. Katherine Jenkins was laid to rest at Harpeth Hills Memory Gardens. An estimated 200 people showed up to say goodbye to a woman who had lived quietly and humbly her entire life.

 Melissa tried to carry on. She enrolled in college. It did not last. She moved through jobs, security, retail, dishwashing. Nothing held. She eventually packed up and moved 800 miles away from Tennessee, partly to escape the weight of what had happened. Even now, every time she visits family, she has to drive past the place where her mother died.

 From the very beginning, this investigation had problems. Court filings would later describe the See Bon Motel crime scene as mismanaged. Evidence handling fell short of what a case this serious demanded. And the lead medical examiner who worked the scene, the doctor whose findings would help shape the prosecution’s case, later lost his medical license for professional misconduct, including the falsification of evidence.

 That fact did not surface until decades later, buried inside Hines’ clemency petition. Then there was Kenneth Jones. Jones told police a straightforward story. He said he had stopped by the Saybon to visit the motel owners. He found no one at the front desk. He took a room key to use the bathroom. He opened a door and found the body. He called the authorities.

But his timeline did not line up cleanly with the account given by first responders. Hines’ original trial attorney noticed the discrepancies and pointed them out to the jury. What that attorney did not tell the jury, what he chose to leave out entirely, was the full truth about why Jones was really at that motel.

 According to post-conviction proceedings, Hines’ own state-appointed defense lawyer already knew that Jones had not been there alone. Jones had come to meet a woman who was not his wife. The attorney was aware of the affair, but he made a deliberate decision not to pursue it, reportedly to spare Jones the embarrassment of having it exposed in open court.

 Jones also had a long-standing personal connection to the local sheriff. Hines’ legal team would later argue that relationship affected how thoroughly Jones was ever investigated. Despite all of that, the physical evidence against Hines remained substantial. The bloody shirt. The stolen car. Jenkins’ money. Her keychain. The stab marks.

 The family members who heard him describe the stabbing himself. His own shifting statements to law enforcement. The case went to trial in 1986. It did not take long. Years passed before the full truth came out. And when it did, it did not come from a new suspect. It did not come from fresh forensic evidence or a surprise confession.

 It came from Kenneth Jones himself during post-conviction review, long after the trial was over. Jones finally admitted what he had never told police on the day Katherine Jenkins died. He had not been at the Sabon Motel by coincidence. He had not simply stopped by to visit the owners. Court records reveal that Jones had been coming to that motel nearly every Sunday for at least 2 years to meet a woman who was not his wife.

 The motel staff knew him. He had a routine. He was a familiar face. On March 1st, 1985, he arrived with his companion and found the front desk empty. They waited, first at the motel, then at a nearby restaurant. When Jones grew impatient, he returned alone, helped himself to a room key, and walked to the door of one of the rooms.

He opened it and found Jenkins’ body. His companion had stayed outside. She watched through the open curtains as Jones entered the room and walked back out quickly. Jones then called the authorities, drove his companion home, and returned to the motel to meet the sheriff. Hines’ legal team seized on this.

 They argued that the full truth about Jones should have been presented to the original jury. But the Tennessee courts looked at the same information and reached a different conclusion entirely. Jones now had a witness who confirmed his account. He had an established routine at that motel, and he had been the one to report the crime himself.

 The courts found that the new information made Jones less suspicious, not more. Hines had already surrendered to law enforcement. He had already admitted to taking Jenkins’ car. The arrest was never in question. The only fight that remained was whether the conviction itself would hold. In 1986, a Cheatham County jury delivered its verdict.

 Anthony Darrell Dugard Hines was found guilty of first-degree felony murder. The sentence was death. He had barely left the courtroom before the legal fight began. Hines’ post-conviction argument rested on one central claim, that his original attorney had failed him. Specifically, that the decision not to aggressively investigate Kenneth Jones, not to put the full truth of Jones’ presence at the Saban Motel before the jury, was a constitutional violation.

 The legal standard he pointed to was established in Strickland v. Washington, a landmark 1984 ruling that holds defense attorneys to a minimum standard of competence and thoroughness. Tennessee state courts were unmoved. They looked at the physical evidence, the bloody shirt, the stolen car, the stolen money, the keychain, the stab marks, the family members who heard Hines describe the killing himself, his own shifting statements.

 The courts called the idea of Kenneth Jones as the real killer far-fetched. They pointed out that Jones had reported the crime himself in a public place where the staff already knew his face, with a witness who could account for his movements. The state court said no, and they said it clearly. Then, in 2020, a divided panel of the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said something different.

 The panel ruled in Hines’ favor. It found that a more thorough investigation of Jones could have helped the defense credibly cast him as an alternative suspect. The Sixth Circuit said Hines was entitled to a new trial. Tennessee appealed directly to the United States Supreme Court. In 2021, the Supreme Court reversed the Sixth Circuit in an 8-1 decision.

 Justice Sonia Sotomayor stood alone in dissent, offering no written comment. The majority’s opinion was direct and unsparing. The Sixth Circuit had, it said, disregarded the overwhelming evidence of guilt and had no legal basis to overturn Tennessee’s conclusion. The court pointed specifically to Hines’ flight in a blood-stained shirt, the stolen vehicle, the stolen money, and what it called his ever-changing stories about stabbing and robbing various people on the day of the crime.

 Federal habeas relief was gone. Every legal door had been tried. Every argument had been heard. His legal team turned their attention to the only thing left, the execution itself. Anthony Darrell Dugard Hines arrived on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee in 1986.

 He would stay there for nearly four decades. While he filed appeal after appeal, Katherine Jenkins’ children grew older. They built lives. They had grandchildren of their own. They attended funerals and birthdays and everything in between, all while waiting for a system to deliver what a jury had promised them in 1986. Then, in December 2025, Hines suffered multiple strokes.

 By the time his execution date approached, court filings told a grim picture. He was blind in his left eye. He could not walk without assistance. He was largely confined to a bed. His attorneys argued that his deteriorated physical condition made executing him a constitutional violation, that the state of Tennessee could not lawfully put a man to death in that condition.

 The argument carried extra weight because of what had happened just months earlier. In May 2026, Tennessee had attempted to execute Tony Carruthers. The execution failed. The physician involved, Dr. Mark Walton Fowler, could not establish a vein for a backup intravenous line. An attempt to insert a central line also failed. Carruthers was granted a reprieve.

Hines’ attorneys, including Kit Thomas, who compiled a 158-page document questioning Execution Commissioner Frank Strada’s qualifications, argued that Hines faced an identical or greater risk because his strokes had left his veins in far worse condition than Carruthers. The Tennessee Supreme Court rejected the motion to pause the execution.

 Governor Bill Lee defended the protocol and declined to intervene. The execution was confirmed for 10:00 in the morning on August 13th, 2026. On the morning of August 13th, 2026, Anthony Darrell Dugard Hines was served his final meal. He requested fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, chocolate chip cake, and sweet tea.

 By 10:00, he was in the execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. The witnesses were in place. The room was quiet. When he was asked if he had any final words, Hines did not speak about the case. He did not speak about Katherine Jenkins. He did not speak about 40 years of appeals or innocence claims or the Supreme Court.

He said five words. “Tell my son hello.” At 10:43 in the morning, Anthony Darrell Dugard Hines was pronounced dead. The lethal injection proceeded without the complications that had derailed the Carruthers execution 3 months earlier. There were no reported delays, no failed lines.

 The process the Jenkins family had waited 41 years to see reach its end. Outside the walls of Riverbend, the family of Katherine Jean Jenkins had their answer. The answer they had been waiting for since 1985. Not with celebration, not with relief that erases grief, but with the quiet, exhausted knowledge that the legal chapter of their mother’s story was finally closed.

41 years, one final meal, five words, and then silence. Melissa Jenkins said she asked herself every single day how the execution would affect her. She had no answer. What she knew was simpler than any court ruling. She knew the smell of her mother’s blueberry cream pie coming out of the oven. She knew what it felt like to look up from a softball field and see Jean there.

 She knew a woman who could make a disability check last an entire month. A woman who walked to church in the snow because nothing was going to keep her from her faith. That woman is gone. She has been gone since 1985. A man spent 40 years denying what a jury and the Supreme Court of the United States said he did.

 A family spent 40 years waiting. Both of those things are true at the same time, and the people left behind are the ones who carry the weight of both. What moment in this story hit you hardest? And do you think 40 years on death row is justice, or something else entirely? Tell us in the comments below.

 If this story moved you, hit the like button, subscribe, and tap the bell so you never miss the next case. We will see you there.