Paul Dennis Reid

What the record shows

Paul Dennis Reid Jr., known in press coverage as the Fast Food Killer, was convicted of murdering seven restaurant workers during three robberies in Nashville and Clarksville, Tennessee, between February and April 1997. Across three separate trials he was found guilty of seven counts of first-degree murder and received seven death sentences, which the Wikipedia article describes as the most ever imposed on one person in Tennessee. He was never executed. After years of litigation over his mental competency, he died on November 1, 2013, aged 55, at Nashville General Hospital at Meharry, where he had been a patient for about two weeks, the Associated Press reported.

Reid was born in Texas in 1957 and, according to the Associated Press, was a drifter who had come to Nashville hoping to become a country singer. The Tennessee Supreme Court recorded that he had been convicted in Texas in 1984 of aggravated robbery and that he was 39 when the 1997 crimes were committed. AP reporting states that he had been fired from his job as a dishwasher at a Nashville Shoney's shortly before the first killings.

The first robbery took place on the morning of February 16, 1997, at a Captain D's restaurant on Lebanon Road in the Donelson area of Nashville. According to the Tennessee Supreme Court, Sarah Jackson, 16, and Steve Hampton, 25, were preparing to open the restaurant when they were shot on the floor, and about $7,140 and Hampton's wallet were taken. On March 23, 1997, four employees finishing the night shift at a McDonald's in the Hermitage area were forced into a storage room after the safe was emptied. Ronald Santiago, Robert Sewell and Andrea Brown were shot; Santiago and Sewell died at the scene and Brown died later in hospital. The fourth employee, Jose Ramirez Gonzales, was stabbed repeatedly after the gun jammed, pretended to be dead and then called 911. He survived and later identified Reid from photographs. On April 23, 1997, Angela Holmes, 21, and Michelle Mace, 16, were abducted during a robbery at a Baskin-Robbins in Clarksville; their bodies were found at Dunbar Cave State Natural Area, AP reported.

Reid became a suspect after an unrelated arrest. According to AP reporting, in June 1997 he tried to kidnap the Shoney's manager who had fired him, and he was linked to the restaurant killings after that. The Tennessee Supreme Court's 2002 opinion says police first considered him a suspect on June 12, 1997, after his arrest in Cheatham County, which supplied his fingerprints and photograph. His right thumbprint was found on a video rental card from Hampton's wallet, which had been discarded along Ellington Parkway, and shoe prints at the Captain D's matched the length of shoes taken from his home. Employees also identified him as a man who had asked about a job there the night before the killings. The exact date of his first arrest is given differently across sources.

Reid was tried separately for each robbery. A Davidson County jury convicted him in 1999 of two counts of first-degree murder and especially aggravated robbery in the Captain D's case and imposed death on both murders; the trial court added a consecutive 25-year robbery sentence. In Montgomery County he was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of especially aggravated kidnapping and especially aggravated robbery for the Clarksville killings. A second Davidson County jury convicted him on all counts in the McDonald's case, including three premeditated murders and attempted first-degree murder, and sentenced him to death on each murder. The Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed the Captain D's judgment in 2002, the Clarksville judgment in 2005 and the McDonald's judgment in December 2006.

The later years of the case turned on whether Reid was competent to make legal decisions. He dropped his appeals and came within hours of execution in April 2003; U.S. District Judge Todd Campbell found him mentally ill but competent to waive them, AP reported, before he agreed to resume. In 2006 AP described him as having been found brain-damaged and schizophrenic, and reported that he told lawyers and reporters a military government controlled and monitored him. Family members, including his sister, kept filing appeals on his behalf. A January 2008 execution date was stayed by Judge Campbell in December 2007 while Tennessee's lethal injection procedure was under review. In 2013 the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that relatives and advocates could not pursue appeals against his wishes, finding that they had not proven him incompetent.

Reid was held on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, according to WPLN. He died months after the 2013 ruling, with no execution date pending; the state medical examiner was to determine the cause of death. According to the Wikipedia article, he had at one time also been considered a suspect in the 1993 Brown's Chicken killings in Palatine, Illinois, for which two other men were later convicted.