JUST IN: Anthony Hines EXECUTED After 40 Years on Death Row for SHOCKING Murder

JUST IN: Anthony Hines EXECUTED After 40 Years on Death Row for SHOCKING Murder

On August 13th, 2026, after spending 40 years on death row, Anthony Darrell Hines was executed in Tennessee. But, the reason he ended up there started at a bus station. A woman noticed the knife hidden under his shirt and told him he couldn’t bring it. Anthony told her, “I never go anywhere naked. I always have my blade.

” Two days later, a motel maid was stabbed to death. This is what happened. On March 1st, 1985, Anthony boarded a bus in Raleigh, North Carolina, heading to Bowling Green, Kentucky. He was 24 years old and had been in and out of jail since the age of 15. He already had a felony conviction for assault in the first-degree, in which he had caused serious physical harm to another person.

A few weeks earlier, Anthony had shown up at his girlfriend, Melanie Chandler’s house in North Carolina, >> [music] >> with almost nothing. They went to a party where he got into an altercation and accidentally struck Melanie in the eye. Her mother, Virginia, called the police and forced him to leave. That same night, he appeared at Melanie’s window and she let [music] him in.

He spent a week hiding in her closet before Virginia found him and put him on a bus herself. >> [snorts] >> She handed him $20 in spending money. That was all the money he had. The knife he carried was a 6-in fixed-blade survival knife with one end serrated. Sometime in the early morning hours of March 3rd, Anthony checked into the Seaborn Motel off Interstate 40 in Kingston Springs, Tennessee.

He was wearing an army fatigue jacket, fatigue pants, and boots. And he was assigned room nine. Working at the motel that day was a maid named Katherine Jean Jenkins, but everyone called her Kathy. She was 54 years old. Around 9:30 that morning, the motel manager left Kathy in charge of the front desk and handed her a Cheatham County State Bank bag containing $100 in small bills to make change for departing guests.

Three rooms still hadn’t checked out, and room nine was one of them. Around the same time, a witness saw Anthony walking from his room toward a drink machine. He told the manager he wasn’t ready to check out yet and went back to room nine. And then sometime between 1:00 and 1:30 that afternoon, Kathy’s body was found.

She was wrapped in a bloody bed sheet inside room 21, one of the rooms she had been cleaning. Her outer clothing had been pulled up to her chest. Her underwear had been cut or torn into two pieces and left in a separate part of the room. And under the band of her watch, someone had tucked a $20 bill. The autopsy revealed the full extent of what had been done to her.

Four deep stab wounds to the chest ranging from two and a half to more than six inches deep inflicted with something like a butcher knife or a hunting [music] knife. There were additional cuts to the neck and collarbone. And one wound that the medical examiner described in clinical detail. A knife had been driven through the upper portion of her vagina penetrating into the abdominal cavity.

That wound occurred at or around the time of death. No male DNA or any evidence of violation was found. A forensic expert who later reviewed the case testified that this type of wound was a very specific expression of power of a female victim and an indicator of hatred toward women. The pathologist testified that after the lethal wounds were inflicted, Catherine would have remained conscious for four to six minutes.

 And she had defensive wounds on her hands and arms. She fought. The bank bag she had been given that morning was found in the room with her, empty and covered in blood. Her car keys, her wallet, and her silver 1980 Volvo were all gone. It was Kathy’s habit to always lock her car and keep her keys and wallet on her while she worked.

But none of that mattered. Whoever did this had taken everything. Around 12:40 that afternoon, a motel employee saw Kathy’s Volvo pulling out of the driveway driven by a man. The employee tried to follow, but the car sped away toward Nashville. The car didn’t make it far. It broke down a few miles past Gallatin on Interstate 65 heading toward Bowling Green.

Anthony was standing beside it when a group of young travelers pulled over to help. They couldn’t get it running, so they offered him a ride the rest of the way to Bowling Green. During the drive, they noticed dried blood on the shoulder of his shirt. He was also carrying a folded up jacket and seemed nervous.

 He kept contradicting himself. >> [music] >> He talked a lot, and at one point he told them he had bought the car from an old lady for 300 or 400 dollars. When Anthony reached his sister’s house in Bowling Green, the story changed again. He told her he had tried to pay for another night at a motel and the motel operator attacked him.

 He demonstrated for her physically how he had stabbed the man. He told her he had a large sum of money. He told her husband he had earned about 7,000 dollars working as a mechanic in North Carolina. And despite not being able to afford his own bus ticket just a few days earlier, Anthony went out and bought a barbecue grill. It was a belated birthday present for his sister.

Her birthday had been February 4th, just a few weeks earlier. His family also noticed he had a set of car keys on a distinctive keychain. Anthony explained that a man who had given him a ride had tried to rob him. So, he had grabbed the steering wheel, run the car off the road, and taken the keys. A different story for every person who asked.

And when law enforcement caught up with him, Anthony volunteered something before anyone even started asking questions. He said he had taken the woman’s car, but he hadn’t killed the woman. The arresting officer testified that nobody had told Anthony a woman had been killed, which meant he already knew. Later, when a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent pressed him to tell the truth, Anthony made an offer.

He said if the officer could guarantee him the death penalty, he would confess to the whole thing and tell them everything they wanted to know. And the physical evidence backed up what investigators already suspected. Kathy’s wallet was found wrapped in a thermal shirt near her abandoned car. The key to room nine turned up at a campsite near Cave City, Kentucky, where Anthony had been staying.

 And inside room nine itself, investigators found stab marks gouged into the wall, the kind made by someone driving a knife into the surface over and over. When shown photographs of those marks, Anthony identified them himself. He called them knife marks. In 1986, a Cheatham County jury heard all of it.

 The hunting knife Anthony refused to travel without, the dried blood on his shirt, the stolen car and stolen money, the matching stab marks on the motel room wall, every version of the story he told along the way, and his offer to confess in exchange for a guaranteed death sentence. But there was one witness whose testimony stood out, a man named Kenneth Jones.

 He told the jury he had discovered Kathy’s body. And according to Kenneth, he had stopped by the motel because he knew the owners, found no one in the office, and eventually let himself into room 21 to use the [music] bathroom. That’s when he found her. Anthony’s defense attorney went after that story. He stressed how strange and convenient it sounded, told the jury that Kenneth was fooling around at that motel that Sunday afternoon, and pointed out that Kenneth seemed nervous.

The timeline didn’t match up neatly with what first responders reported, either. But none of it worked. The jury found Anthony guilty of first-degree felony murder and sentenced him to death. Years later, during post-conviction proceedings, the full truth about Kenneth Jones came out. He hadn’t been at the motel by chance, and he hadn’t been alone.

 He was having an affair, meeting a woman there nearly every Sunday for at least 2 years. The motel staff knew him well, and on the day of the murder, he and his companion arrived, found no one to greet them, waited at a nearby restaurant, grew impatient, and helped themselves to a room key. His companion confirmed she had watched through the curtains as Kenneth walked into the room and quickly came back out.

And then came the detail that Anthony’s appeals would center on for decades. His own trial attorney had known about the affair from the start. He knew Kenneth wasn’t there by accident, but he chose not to pursue it aggressively because he wanted to spare Kenneth the embarrassment. Anthony argued that amounted to ineffective counsel, but the Tennessee courts disagreed.

They called the theory that his lawyer should have accused Kenneth Jones of the murder far-fetched and pointed to the mountain of evidence against Anthony. The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court. Every appeal, every argument left his conviction standing. Anthony Darrell Hines spent more than four decades on Tennessee’s death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.

In December 2025, he suffered an ischemic stroke. Prison staff called for an ambulance, but it was turned away. The prison decided it could handle the CT scan internally. It took them 3 weeks to carry it out. The scan confirmed the stroke, but Anthony was denied prescribed follow-up medication. And in January 2026, he had a second stroke, collapsed, and hit his head.

After that, Anthony was confined to the prison infirmary. He could no longer walk. He couldn’t move his left arm, hand, or leg, and he was blind in his left eye. He struggled to speak, chew, or swallow, and was in constant pain. According to a Tennessee Department of Correction report, while on death row, Anthony had told prison security personnel that he hated women.

And yet his attorneys petitioned Governor Bill Lee for clemency, calling the execution a grotesque spectacle that would serve no meaningful penological purpose. They cited his medical condition and the state’s botched attempt to execute Tony Carruthers just months earlier, in which the physician struggled for over 90 minutes to establish intravenous access before the execution was abandoned entirely.

But the governor did not grant clemency. His execution was scheduled for August 13th, 2026. 14 days before the execution, prison staff wheeled Anthony’s hospital bed out of the infirmary and down the corridor to one of four cells directly adjacent to the execution chamber at Riverbend. He had been living in that bed for 8 months. He couldn’t walk.

 His left arm and hand were clenched in a permanent fist, the muscles locked from atrophy. He was blind in his left eye. And now the bed he couldn’t leave was parked 15 ft from the room where he was going to die. They call it death watch. 24 hours a day, a correctional officer sat outside his cell on a 12-hour shift watching everything.

 He was allowed legal and religious materials, a pencil, paper, and books. But nothing else. When he slept, someone watched. When he ate, someone watched. When he used the bathroom, someone watched for 14 days straight. Then, on the evening of August 12th, his last meal was delivered to his cell. Under Tennessee’s protocol, it had to be eaten by midnight.

 The state gives death row inmates a budget of $20 for their final meal. $20. The same amount Virginia Chandler handed him when she put him on a bus 41 years earlier. The same amount that was found tucked under Katherine Jenkins watchband the afternoon she was killed. And Anthony used every dollar of it. He ordered fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, coleslaw, corn, fries, biscuits, a chicken sandwich, chocolate chip cake, and a sweet tea.

On the morning of August 13th, Anthony was woken at 5:30 a.m. When the time came, he would be lifted from his hospital bed by prison staff and strapped to the execution gurney. When the curtain opened at 10:30, Anthony was already on the gurney. His son was sitting in the witness chamber. A female spiritual adviser stood beside him, leaning close, speaking softly.

She had been talking to him since before the curtains opened. Anthony’s speech was impaired from the strokes, and he struggled to form words. When he was asked if he had a final statement, Anthony said, “Not right now. Thank you.” But a moment later, before the injection began, he said, “Tell my son I love him.

The spiritual advisor began reciting the Lord’s Prayer. She kept her hand on him and did not stop speaking. At one point, Anthony got confused about what was happening and asked, “How much time do I have?” At 10:32, the drug began to take effect. Three loud, labored breaths, then more, then silence.

 By 10:35, there was no breathing and no movement. The spiritual advisor stayed beside him. She held the left side of his face, kissed him on his face, and held his hand. She said, “You’re a beautiful child of God.” She prayed for Anthony, and then she prayed for the Jenkins family. Meanwhile, his skin turned purple-gray. His mouth was slightly open.

At 10:42, the curtains closed, and at 10:43, he was pronounced dead. Anthony Darrell Hines was 66 years old. He had been on death row for more than 40 years. And Anthony Hines wasn’t the only man America put to death on August 13th. He was one of three. Three men, three different states, all executed in a single day.

 And that hadn’t happened in 16 years, not since 2010. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.