Bio

Anthony Darrell Hines was born on April 20, 1960. In early 1985, at the age of 24, he traveled by bus from Raleigh, North Carolina, departing on March 1 with a non-refundable ticket to Bowling Green, Kentucky and twenty dollars in spending money. A witness who saw him before he left recalled that he was carrying a hunting knife in a sheath concealed beneath his shirt. The bus route took him through the Nashville, Tennessee area, and rather than continuing directly on to Kentucky, Hines stopped along Interstate 40 near Kingston Springs and checked into a room at the CeBon Motel.

Murder Story

On March 3, 1985, the manager of the CeBon Motel left the property in the care of Katherine Jean Jenkins, a 54-year-old maid, at approximately 9:30 a.m. She was given a bank bag containing 100 dollars in small bills to make change for departing guests. At that point, guests were still occupying Rooms 9, 21, and 24. At some point that morning, Jenkins wheeled her cleaning cart to Room 21. Sometime between 1:00 and 1:30 p.m., a visitor to the motel obtained a key from the office and opened the door to Room 21, where he found Jenkins's body wrapped in a sheet on the floor.

An autopsy determined that Jenkins had been killed by multiple stab wounds to the chest, with four deep wounds ranging from 2.5 to 6.4 inches in depth, inflicted with a knife consistent with a butcher knife or hunting knife. She also had superficial cuts near her neck and collarbone, and a wound that penetrated through the upper vagina into her abdominal cavity. Her outer clothing had been pulled up, and her underwear had been cut or torn and left in another part of the room. A twenty-dollar bill had been tucked under her watch band. The bank bag she had been given that morning was found in the room, empty and bloodied. Her car keys, wallet, and her silver 1980 Volvo were missing.

Investigators later found marks on the wall of Room 9 — the room Hines had checked into — that appeared to have been made by a knife being stabbed repeatedly into the wall; when shown photographs of the marks, Hines acknowledged they were knife marks, though ballistics-style comparison indicated they had been made by a different, smaller knife than others associated with him. Jenkins's wallet was later found wrapped inside a thermal underwear shirt not far from where her car was discovered abandoned. A key to Room 9 of the CeBon Motel was recovered at a site near Cave City, Kentucky, where Hines had reportedly been camping.

Travelers who encountered Hines on the road near Jenkins's broken-down car recalled that he had dried blood on his shirt, seemed nervous, contradicted himself, and talked at length, at one point claiming he had bought the car from an elderly woman for three or four hundred dollars. When Hines later arrived at a family member's home, his sister noticed the blood on his shirt, and Hines admitted to her that he had stabbed someone at the motel — though he described the victim to her as a male motel employee who had allegedly assaulted him, and he physically demonstrated the stabbing motion. Around the same time, despite having been unable to afford a bus ticket days earlier, Hines purchased a barbecue grill and told his sister he had come into a substantial amount of money.

When law enforcement took Hines into custody, he volunteered, without having been told a woman had been killed, that he had taken "the woman's" car but had not killed her. When a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent later pressed him to tell the truth about Jenkins's death, Hines said that if the officer could guarantee him the death penalty, he would confess and tell him everything.

Hines was tried in Cheatham County Circuit Court in 1986. A key prosecution witness was Kenneth Jones, the man who discovered Jenkins's body; Jones testified that he had stopped by the motel that afternoon, found no one in the office, and let himself into a room to use the bathroom, during which he came across the body. The jury convicted Hines of first-degree felony murder and imposed a sentence of death.

On direct appeal, the Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed Hines's conviction but found that the trial court had given erroneous sentencing-phase jury instructions, and it remanded the case for a new sentencing hearing. At a resentencing hearing held in 1989, at which a psychologist testified regarding Hines's mental state and history of self-destructive behavior, the jury again returned a sentence of death. The Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed this second death sentence in 1995, and the United States Supreme Court declined to review the case in 1996.

Hines subsequently pursued post-conviction relief in state court, filing a petition in March 1997 that was twice amended; following evidentiary hearings, the post-conviction court denied the petition in 2002, and the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed that denial in 2004. Hines later sought DNA testing of several pieces of evidence, including the victim's underwear, dress, and slip, a bloody bank bag, a cigarette butt, a twenty-dollar bill, and a spray bottle recovered from the room; the trial court denied the request, a decision the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in 2008.

In May 2020, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that Hines was entitled to a new trial and sentencing hearing, finding that his trial attorney had provided ineffective assistance by failing to more aggressively pursue the possibility that Kenneth Jones — the man who found the body — was an alternative suspect, based on information that emerged after trial that Jones had been at the motel that day for a recurring meeting with a woman who was not his wife. The State of Tennessee appealed, and on March 29, 2021, the United States Supreme Court summarily reversed the Sixth Circuit's decision in an 8–1 per curiam ruling, with Justice Sotomayor dissenting. The Court held that the Sixth Circuit had improperly disregarded the substantial evidence of Hines's guilt — including his flight in the victim's car, his bloodied shirt, his possession of her keys, and his own admissions to family members — in concluding that the alleged deficiencies in his defense had caused him prejudice. The ruling reinstated Hines's conviction and death sentence.

On October 1, 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court set an execution date of August 13, 2026 for Hines, as part of an order scheduling several executions during the final months of Governor Bill Lee's second term. In the months that followed, Hines's attorneys reported that he had suffered a series of strokes that left him with significant physical and cognitive impairments, including the inability to move his left arm, hand, or leg, loss of vision in his left eye, and dependence on a wheelchair. Following a botched lethal injection attempt on a different Tennessee death row prisoner, Tony Carruthers, in May 2026, Hines's legal team sent a letter to Governor Lee on June 22, 2026, requesting a reprieve until the state's execution protocol could be reviewed and its reliability confirmed. As of the most recent available reporting, Governor Lee had not yet issued a decision on that request, and Hines's execution remained scheduled for August 13, 2026.