Anthony Hines was pronounced dead at 10:43 a. m. Central Time inside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, ending a 40-year journey through the American justice system that began with a bus ride he never finished and a motel clerk he never knew.
The 66-year-old man, paralyzed on one side of his body and blind in one eye, could not walk into the execution chamber on his own. He was carried. His death by lethal injection marked the culmination of a case that stretched from March 1985 through two death sentences, a unanimous Supreme Court reversal, and a final, complicated question about time itself.
Hines was 24 years old that spring, traveling from Raleigh, North Carolina toward Bowling Green, Kentucky on a ticket his girlfriend and her mother had paid for. He had $20 in his pocket and a hunting knife hidden under his shirt. His girlfriend’s mother noticed the knife before he left and asked him about it.
He brushed the question off. Somewhere along Interstate 40, he got off that bus in the small town of Kingston Springs and checked into a room at the Subban Motel.
Working the front desk that morning was a 54-year-old woman named Katherine Jean Jenkins. She was not usually stationed at the desk. She was a maid, but the manager had put her in charge that day along with a bank bag holding $100 for making change.
By the time investigators pieced together what happened, Jenkins had been stabbed multiple times in the chest deep enough to reach her heart and lungs. There were defensive wounds on her hands and arms. Her body was found wrapped in a sheet in one of the motel rooms.
Her car, her wallet, her keys, and the bank bag were gone. So was Hines. He was found later that day on the side of a road hitching a ride toward his sister’s house wearing a shirt soaked in blood.
Jenkins’ stolen car was found abandoned nearby. When police eventually questioned him, Hines said something that would follow him through every appeal for the next 40 years. He told them he had taken the woman’s car, but that he had not killed her before anyone had told him she was dead.
In the room he had rented, investigators found knife marks gouged into the wall. Hines would later identify those marks himself without being pushed as the marks of a knife. A Cheatham County jury did not take long to convict him.
In January 1986, they sentenced him to death for first-degree felony murder. That sentence did not hold, not because of any doubt about his guilt, but because of a legal technicality. Two years later, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but ruled that the jury had received flawed instructions during sentencing and sent the case back for a new penalty hearing.
In 1989, a second jury heard the case again. Prosecutors argued the murder had been especially brutal, committed during a robbery. The defense brought in a psychologist to testify about Hines’ troubled history.
The second jury reached the same conclusion as the first, death. For most cases, that is where the story would end. For this one, it was closer to the middle.
Over the next three decades, Hines’ legal team tried nearly everything. Ineffective counsel claims, constitutional challenges, arguments about how the juries were selected. Most were denied.
Then, in the mid-2000s, his lawyers pushed for something new, DNA testing on evidence from the crime scene, including Jenkins’ clothing. Tennessee courts said no more than once. It took a federal court stepping in before the testing finally happened.
The results were genuinely complicated. DNA from at least two other men turned up on a piece of Jenkins’ underwear, and Hines was not a match for it. For a case that had touched on allegations of sexual assault, that finding might sound significant.
But the courts that reviewed it reached a different conclusion.
Jenkins had not died from a sexual assault. She had bled to death from stab wounds to her chest. Whoever that other DNA belonged to, it did not undo the missing car, the bloody shirt, the knife marks in the wall, or the statement Hines gave police before he was told how she died.
The courts ruled the new evidence would not have changed the outcome. Then, in 2020, Hines came closer to a new trial than at any point since his conviction. His attorneys argued that his original defense lawyer should have more aggressively pointed the finger at another man, someone who had discovered Jenkins’ body and had a shakier account of his own movements that day.
A divided panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed and ordered Tennessee to give Hines a new trial and a new sentencing hearing. It did not last. The state of Tennessee appealed straight to the US Supreme Court and in 2021, the justices reversed the Sixth Circuit unanimously.
Their ruling was blunt. The appeals court, they said, had ignored overwhelming evidence of guilt to reach its decision. By then, more than three decades had passed since Katherine Jenkins was killed.
Her daughter, Melissa, was no longer a child. She was a grown woman who had spent most of her adult life watching this case wind through court after court.
She said publicly that the man who killed her mother has taken up space in her mind for as long as she can remember, and that no ruling was ever going to hand her back what she lost. An execution date was eventually set for August 13th, 2026. By this point, Hines was in far worse physical shape.
He had suffered a stroke in late 2025. By the time his execution date arrived, Hines could not walk. He had lost the use of his left arm, hand, and leg.
He was blind in his left eye. In the days before he died, something happened that had nothing to do with courtrooms or clemency petitions.
Hines reconnected in person with his son, a man he had not seen since the boy was 3 years old. It happened four days before the execution. His son would go on to witness what came next, sitting in the viewing room with the reporters and officials required by law to be present.
On the morning of August 13th, Hines was moved into the execution chamber accompanied by his spiritual adviser, a woman named Diana Gallagher. Witnesses were led into the room at 10:21 a. m.
When the curtains opened nine minutes later, they saw something unusual.
Hines was not sitting or positioned the way inmates typically are. He was lying flat stretched horizontally across the gurney. His paralyzed left side kept hidden beneath a blanket.
The day before, his attorneys had gone to court trying to stop staff from bending his affected arm during the procedure. Whether that order was granted or not, witnesses said they simply could not see that side of him at all. He chose a last meal that, on paper, reads like comfort food from anywhere in the American South.
Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, coleslaw, corn, fries, biscuits, a chicken sandwich, chocolate chip cake, and sweet tea.
When the moment came and he was asked whether he had any final words, Hines said, “Not right now. Thank you.” Gallagher began reciting the Lord’s Prayer, her hand resting on his shoulder.
Witnesses said he lay still, visibly emotional. Then he spoke again. What he said next depends on who you ask.
Tennessee’s Department of Correction Commissioner reported his words as, “Tell my son hello.” Other witnesses in the room heard something slightly different. “Tell my son I love him.”
Both accounts agree on one thing. His very last words, spoken as the drugs began, were a question.
He asked, “How long do I have?” Gallagher told him she did not know. His breathing slowed.
Witnesses said the color drained from his face. Gallagher kept praying, asking in her final words to him that they might all learn how to love one another, according to those in the room. Hines’ son quietly said “Amen” along with her.
He was pronounced dead at 10:43 a. m. Central Time.
Afterward, Melissa Jenkins released a statement on behalf of her family. She thanked the investigators, the prosecutors, and everyone who had worked to hold someone accountable for her mother’s murder.
A murder that happened when Melissa herself was young, and that has now outlived four decades of appeals, two death sentences, a trip to the US Supreme Court, and a national conversation about whether the machinery of execution itself is breaking down. Katherine Jenkins was 54 years old when she died. She was covering a shift she did not normally work, entrusted with a bag of cash for a motel that no longer exists in most people’s memory of Kingston Springs, Tennessee.
Anthony Hines was 24 when he killed her, and 66 when the state finally carried out the sentence a jury handed down almost 40 years earlier.
A sentence delayed by appeals, overturned once, reinstated by the country’s highest court, and finally complicated right at the end by a body that had started failing him before the state ever could. Two accounts of his last words, one certain time of death, and a question that outlived him by exactly the length of time it took the drugs to work. How long do you have when the answer was decided decades ago?
