Latest / Gone Cold - Texas True Crime / The Murder of Sharon McLane Part Two: The Fast Food Killer

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The Murder of Sharon McLane Part Two: The Fast Food Killer · Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Gone Call podcasts may contain violent or graphic subject matter.
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Listener discretion is advised. In December of nineteen ninety six,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: thirty two year old Sharon Maclin was stabbed and slashed
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: more than fifty times inside her Bedford, Texas apartment. Investigators
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: quickly zeroed in on her friend, John Earl Knowley, who
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: had been by Sharon's home the evening. Police believed she
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: was killed to sell her pot. In a city where
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: homicide was rare and violent crime still felt like something
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: that happened somewhere else, the murder shook Bedford to its core.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: For a while, the case seemed straightforward, albeit slow moving.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: Months into the investigation, Noley was arrested and charged with
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: killing Sharon, but at the same time detectives were chasing
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: down evidence to use against Knowley, something else was unfolding
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: several hundred miles away in Tennessee, a series of murders,
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: murders that at first glance had nothing to do with Bedford, Texas.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: Word of the violence made its way there, and police
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: working the case of Sharon Maclan were at least interested
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: in taking a quick look at the cases in Tennessee. Ultimately,
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: though their attention couldn't be pulled away from the man
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: they believed was responsible. Eventually, Noley was found guilty in
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: a court of law and sentenced to life in prison.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: At trial, however, his defense attorney had argued that the
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: man responsible for the multiple killings a couple states over
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: was a strong alternate suspect, and the evidence he collected
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: to support that theory should have cast a large, looming
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: shadow of a doubt. In February of nineteen ninety seven,
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: Middle Tennessee was on edge. The killings had started relatively
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: quietly and without much fanfare in the press, but by
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: spring it was becoming impossible to ignore what was happening
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: across Nashville and beyond. It all started on the morning
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: of February sixteenth, nineteen ninety seven, when employees arriving at
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: a Captain D's restaurant on Lebanon Road in Donelson discovered
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: something horrifying. A worker reported for duty at around ten
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: thirty that morning, but couldn't get inside the lockdown building.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: He called his father, a Metropolitan Nashville policeman who routinely
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: patrolled that part of the city. The officer arrived alongside
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: another employee who had a key to the restaurant. Together,
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: they entered the building in the rear of Captain D's.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: Inside the walk in cooler, they found the bodies of
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: twenty five year old manager Steve Hampton and sixteen year
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: old Sarah Jackson. Both had arrived at around six thirty
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: am to prepare for the day's opening. They had both
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: been shot to death, execution style. There was no sign
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: of forced entry. Detectives spent hours processing the restaurant and
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: examining the parking lot behind the building, where Steve Hampton's
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: navy blue Mitsubishi pickup sat seemingly untouched. Steve had worked
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: for Captain d'es for nearly a decade. He was married
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: and the father of three children, ages three, six, and eight.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Sarah Jackson was a junior at mcgavic High School and
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: had worked at the restaurant since the previous summer. School
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: officials described her as unusually kind, the sort of teenager
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: who intentionally greeted students and faculty members in the hallways.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: The killings shocked Nashville. The Metro police were flooded with calls.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: Hundreds of tips poured in during the first forty eight hours,
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: while Shoney's Incorporated, Captain D's parent company, offered reward money
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: that quickly climbed from five thousand dollars to ten thousand.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: Investigators looked into current employees, former employees, angry customers, and drifters.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: Most were eliminated quickly, and weeks passed without much of
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: an update in the press. Then another restaurant became a
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: crime scene. Just after midnight on March twenty fourth, nineteen
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  Speaker 1: ninety seven, a gravely wounded employee at a McDonald's on
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  Speaker 1: Lebanon Road in Hermitage managed to dial nine to one
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: point one. He spoke in Spanish, and before dispatchers could
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: secure an interpreter, the call disconnected. Still, Officer Tracy Holmes
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: arrived within minutes. Looking in the drive through window, she
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: saw blood across the floor. Using her baton, she smashed
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: through a locked restaurant door and entered. Inside were four victims,
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  Speaker 1: manager Ronald Santiago twenty seven years old, Robert Sewell Junior
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  Speaker 1: twenty three, and Andrea Brown seventeen. All three of them
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  Speaker 1: were dead from gunshot wounds. Nearby was Jose Gonzales, thirty
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  Speaker 1: years old, still alive despite having suffered multiple stab wounds.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: He had crawled to the telephone after the attack and
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: somehow managed to call for help before collapsing. The similarities
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: to the Captain D's murders were obvious another fast food restaurant,
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: victims herded toward the rear of the building and little
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  Speaker 1: evidence left behind. Investigators publicly cautioned that it was too
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: early to declare the crimes connected, but privately fear was
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: spreading through Nashville's restaurant industry. Police released a composite sketch
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: of a man reportedly seen near the Captain D's around
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  Speaker 1: the time Steve Hampton and Sarah Jackson were killed. The
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: witness described a large white man around thirty years old,
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  Speaker 1: standing six foot three and weighing roughly two hundred and
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  Speaker 1: forty five pounds. He had dar care tied back in
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  Speaker 1: a ponytail, facial stubble, olive skin, and war what appeared
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: to be a Shone's apron. Shoney's was Captain D's parent company.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: The implication was unsettling. Detectives were beginning to suspect that
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: whoever committed the murders may have been connected to the
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: restaurants themselves, an employee or former employee someone familiar with procedures,
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: schedules and closing routines, but that didn't necessarily explain why
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: McDonald's was hit if the crimes were connected. The investigation
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: anyway stalled. Then in late April, another pair of workers vanished.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: This time, the violence unfolded about fifty miles northwest of
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  Speaker 1: Nashville in Clarksville, Tennessee. Twenty one year old Angela Holmes
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: and sixteen year old Michelle Mace worked at a Baskin
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  Speaker 1: Robin's ice cream shop on Wilma Rudolph Boulevard on the
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  Speaker 1: night of April twenty third, nineteen ninety seven. Investigators believed
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: the women were cleaning the store before closing at around
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: ten o'clock when someone entered to rob them. When Michelle's
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: brother arrived to pick her up, the store was empty,
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  Speaker 1: no employees, no blood, no obvious signs of a struggle.
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  Speaker 1: He called nine to one one At ten twenty five pm.
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  Speaker 1: In the store, the register and safe had been emptied
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  Speaker 1: and surveillance tapes were missing. A bee on the lookout
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  Speaker 1: was issued and officers patrolled the nearby areas, but they
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: had no way of knowing which direction the employees and
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: their abductor went. The next morning, around ten point fifty,
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  Speaker 1: a man walking near Swan Lake inside Dunbar Cave State
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  Speaker 1: Natural Area, within a few miles of the Baskin Robbins
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  Speaker 1: discovered their bodies. Angela Holmes lay face down with her
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: wrists bound behind her back. Michelle Mays's body was found
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: roughly one hundred eighty feet away in the woods. Their
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: throats had been slashed and they were stabbed repeatedly. At
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: that point, Tennessee investigators were openly comparing cases. Nashville detectives
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: traveled to Clarksville immediately to examine possible links between the
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: Baskin Robbins murders and the unsolved restaurant killings in Donaldson
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: and Hermitage. The similarities kept stacking up. Restaurant workers were
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: targeted during closing or opening. No witnesses left alive, or
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: at least that was the theorized plan. There were thefts
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: of relatively small amounts of money, and victims were controlled
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: before being executed. The public pressure on police intensified. Within
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: twenty four hours of the Baskin Robbins murders, Clarksville investigators
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: identified two local men as possible suspects. They were known thieves,
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: known methanthetamine users, and witnesses connected them to a green
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: Corvette seen near Dunbar Cave. Detectives leaned in hard on
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: the pair. Witnesses set a composite sketch based on descriptions
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: from the McDonald's survivor, resembled one of them, though the
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: comparison was admittedly questionable. Jose Gonzales, the sole survivor of
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: the McDonald's murders, himself, could not identify either man as
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: his attacker. Still, detectives concentrated on those suspects while hundreds
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: of other tips waited in the background, and while they
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: chased leads that would eventually crumble, another man was quietly
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: moving through through Nashville, a Texas parolee, a failed country singer,
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: a former fast food cook named Paul Dennis reed. In
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: early May of nineteen ninety seven, events surrounding the Nashville,
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: Tennessee area cases that became known as the Fast Food
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: murders finally began to shift. At around ten pm on
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: the first, Cheatham County Sheriff's Deputy Bruce Pendleton responded to
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: a report of a possible break in in progress at
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: the home of Mitch Roberts, a Shawnees restaurant manager just
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: outside Nashville. Roberts told deputies that a former employee named
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: Paul Reid had shown up asking for his job back.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: At first, Reid had been polite, but after Roberts led
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  Speaker 1: him back outside the home, he said, Reid suddenly became hostile,
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  Speaker 1: produced a pistol and handcuffs, and ordered him into a car.
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  Speaker 1: Roberts refused. He rushed back inside, yelling for his wife
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  Speaker 1: and children to get down, and called nine to one
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  Speaker 1: one while shouting for someone to grab a gun. Reid
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  Speaker 1: fled before police arrived. Then something extraordinary happened. While deputies
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: were still taking the report. Roberts's phone rang it was red.
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  Speaker 1: Deputy Pendleton managed to keep him talking long enough to
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  Speaker 1: convince him to return to the house by suggesting they
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: could help him get his job back. Reid arrived roughly
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  Speaker 1: an hour later and was arrested without incident. What happened
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: next altered multiple murder investigations across Tennessee. Authorities discovered that
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: thirty nine year old Paul Dennis Reid, Junior, was a
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: Texas parolee with a violent criminal history involving restaurant robberies.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: Even more importantly, perhaps he had worked for Shawnees. Suddenly,
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: detectives started connecting dots. By June fifth, nineteen ninety seven,
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: Metro police publicly charged Red with five counts of murder
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: connected to the Captain D's and McDonald's killings. At a
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: packed court appearance, Red denied everything. I didn't do it,
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  Speaker 1: he told the courtroom. Family members of the victims were
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: there to hear him say it don't lie. Deanna Hampton,
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: wife of victim Steve Hampton, shouted back. Police believed Reid
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: had entered the Captain D's by speaking with Steve about
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: a job application before executing him and Sarah Jackson inside.
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  Speaker 1: Investigators also said surviving McDonald's employee Jose Gonzalez identified Red
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: in a photo lineup as the man who killed three
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: there and brutally stabbed him. Additional evidence began surfacing quickly.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: Investigators said Reed's fingerprints were found on Steve Hampton's driver's
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: license after the contents of his wallet turned up near
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  Speaker 1: Ellington Parkway. Police also learned Reid had been fired from
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  Speaker 1: Miss Shoney's job after allegedly throwing a plate during an
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  Speaker 1: angry outburst. Details about the suspect's life in Texas quickly
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  Speaker 1: filled the local news cycle. Reid's passed read like a
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: warning nobody fully understood until bodies began piling up. In Tennessee,
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  Speaker 1: he had suffered two severe head injuries as a child.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy seven, he was charged in a Houston
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: supermarket robbery, though the case was dismissed after a psycho
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: diatrist declared him legally insane. IQ testing reportedly placed him
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: in the borderline intellectually disabled range. But the more revealing
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: information came from restaurant robbery investigations in Texas during the
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: early nineteen eighties. Victims from a nineteen eighty two taco
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: bell robbery in Pasadena, just outside Houston, described a scene
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  Speaker 1: that sounded disturbingly familiar to investigators in Nashville. Read and
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: an accomplice entered armed with handguns, jumped the counters, emptied registers,
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  Speaker 1: demanded access to safes, and forced terrified employees into a
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: walk in freezer before fleeing. They wore no masks and
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: offered no hesitation. Victims later identified both men. Pasadena, Texas
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: detective Ralph mcannich later suggested the Nashville murders may have
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Read presented an evolution and reads criminal thinking. Back in Texas,
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: witnesses had survived and helped convict him. Maybe Read eventually
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: decided to no longer leave witnesses behind. The portrait that
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: emerged from the suspects past was contradictory in almost every way.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: Former acquaintances described a man who was polite, clean cut,
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: soft spoken, and almost painfully eager for approval. Others described
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: someone paranoid, volatile, delusional, and obsessed with rejection. Reid's former
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  Speaker 1: landlady in Fort Worth, Dorothy Meadlin, remembered him helping around
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  Speaker 1: the house, eating meals with her family, and playing with
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: children at her daycare. She said he rarely cursed, kept
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: his clothes perfectly pressed, exercised obsessively, and became deeply focused
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: on improving his appearance. After receiving a worker's compensation settlement
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: in the early nineteen nineties. He underwent cosmetic procedures to
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: reduce acne scars, had braces put on his teeth, pinned
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: back his ears, and even had minor work done on
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: his nose. At the same time. In nineteen ninety three, specifically,
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: Reid was writing bizarre letters to politicians and media outlets
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: claiming the government was electronically surveilling him. Some psychiatrists believed
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: he suffered from legitimate mental illness, others believed he exaggerated
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: symptoms whenever criminal charges threatened him. One evaluator described Reed
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: as divorced from reality, while another noted he would say
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: virtually anything to avoid prison. Reid adopted the stage name
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: Justin Parks while pursuing his fantasy of becoming a country singer.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: Friends said he handed out publicity photos despite barely being
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: able to hold a note. Reed was desperate, they said,
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: to become the next Garth Brooks. Through all of it,
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: one trait seemed to follow him consistently, anger, especially around rejection.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: Wayne Meadlin, whose mother was Reed's landlord and whose family
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: had helped the man repeatedly over the years, later described
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: him as someone who simply could not tolerate being turned down.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: According to Wayne, Reid became emotionally unstable whenever he felt abandoned, criticized,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: or dismissed. He believed running out of money in Nashville,
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: combined with losing his restaurant job and failing to find
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: success in country music may have pushed him over the edge.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: Detectives soon discovered another detail that immediately caught their attention.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: On February eighteenth, nineteen ninety seven, just two days after
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: the Captain D's murders, Reid returned to a Ford dealership
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: in Nashville with two thousand dollars in cash after previously
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: being denied financing because of poor credit. Police believed approximately
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: two to three thousand dollars had been stolen from the
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: Captain D's safe, along with cash from Steve Hampton's wallet. Meanwhile,
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: other law enforcement agencies across the country started looking at Reed.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: Authorities in Palatine, Illinois became interested because the Nashville restaurant
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: murders resembled the infamous nineteen ninety three Brown's Chicken and
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: Pasta massacre in which seven employees had been murdered after
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: being forced into the rear of the restaurant near closing time.
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: Investigators in Austin, Texas began examining whether Reed could somehow
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: be connected to the unsolved nineteen ninety one I can't
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: believe its yogurt murders or the yogurt shot murders, as
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: their known colloquially where four teenage employees were shot inside
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: a store before it was set on fire. But it
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: was in North Texas where a defense attorney saw parallels
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: that disturbed him enough to begin asking questions publicly about
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: a case he was working. As the summer of nineteen
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: ninety seven was nearing its end, Paul Denis Reid's name
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: had long since reached Bedford, Texas. Though there had already
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: been an arrest in the murder of Sharon Maclain, there,
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: detectives were at least passively interested in taking a look.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: It was the court appointed defense attorney Gary Medlin who
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: took a keen interest in the case. Sharon had been
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: stabbed more than fifty times inside her Bedford Road apartment
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: in December of nineteen ninety six. Authorities Roman publicly convinced
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: they had the correct suspect, but Medlin believed there were
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: troubling similarities between Sharon's killing and the crimes connected to Reed,
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: especially the Clarksville, Tennessee Baskin Robbins murders. One of the
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: victims had suffered even more stab wounds than Sharon Maclain,
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: and the injuries, particularly around the throat, were described as
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: strikingly similar. There were many other details of interest. Though
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: he'd moved to Nashville in nineteen ninety five, Red had
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: returned to North Texas in the last couple months of
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six, putting him in the area at the
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: time of Sharon's murder. According to witnesses, a loud, blood
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: curdling scream had been heard at Sharon's apartment complex the
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: afternoon after police believe she was killed. Around that same time,
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: witnesses described seeing man wearing a black cowboy hat in
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: the complex, a man who didn't belong Later, they identified
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: that man as Paul Dennis Reid by photograph. Other witnesses
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: told investigators Reed had been seen previously at the rental
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: car agency where Sharon worked. Then there were the cuts.
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: According to witnesses, Reid showed up at work a couple
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: days after Sharon was killed with injuries on his hands cuts.
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: He left town not long after the murder. The man
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: in custody for the crime, John Earl Noley, did not
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: have cuts on his hands. There was also the physical
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: evidence hair recovered from Sharon McLean's clothing and the bathroom
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: of her apartment didn't belong to her. John Noley or
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: John Noley's girlfriend, also a friend of Sharon's. The Hare
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: was Caucasian, but Noley their suspect is black. Paul Dennis
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: Reed was white. To the defense, the implications were enormous
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: to Bedford police detectives, Apparently, they were not. They remained
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: focused on Noley, and while his attorneys quietly explored Reed
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: as an alternate suspect, Tennessee authorities continued building murder cases
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: against him. Months after the fast food murders. In June
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety seven, evidence against the suspect was growing.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: Detectives discovered what they believed were blood stained latex gloves
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: connected to Paul Dennis Reed after his roommate contacted police.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: Red had called the roommate from jail and struck at
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: him to remove toiletry items from his apartment. When the
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: man checked Reed's bathroom cabinet, he reportedly found the box
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: of latex gloves spotted with blood. Clarksville investigators also intensified
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: efforts to connect Reed to the Baskin Robbins murders, in
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: which he wasn't yet charged. There was blood in Reed's
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: red Ford escort, not a massive amount, according to police,
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: but enough to matter. Witnesses had already reported seeing a
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: small red car near Dunbar Cave the night Michelle Mace
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: and Angela Holmes disappeared from Baskin Robbins. Reed had purchased
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: that red escort barely a month before the murders. Investigators
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: also learned Reid knew a woman living near the Baskin
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: Robbins and near Dunbar Cave State Park itself, a girlfriend
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: he'd seen just two days prior. Gas receipts placed Reed
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: at a Texico station on Warfield Boulevard around nine to
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: fifty three pm on April twenty third, only minutes before
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: the Baskin Robins store closed, and only a short distance
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: from both the restaurant and the eventual dump site at
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: Swan Lake. As detectives compared timelines, travel routes, and witness statements,
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: the earlier Clarksville suspects began fading from focus. Police eventually
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: admitted that forensic testing ruled them out, and by late
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: June nineteen ninety seven, especially convened Montgomery County Grand jury
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: formally indicted Paul Dennis Reed, Junior, for the murders of
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: Michelle Mace and Angela Holmes. The charges were extensive premeditated murder,
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: felony murder, aggravated kidnapping, and aggravated robbery. Authorities believed the
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: robbery itself yielded less than sixteen hundred dollars, were extraordinarily violent. Financially,
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: they made almost no sense restaurant workers in the Nashville
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: area were being slaughtered over relatively small amounts of cash. Increasingly,
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: investigators started wondering whether robbery was truly the primary motive
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: at all. Back in Nashville, Jose Gonzales, the loan surviving
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: McDonald's victim, publicly identified Red during a court hearing. Through
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: an interpreter. Gonzales pointed directly at the defendant wearing an
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: orange jail uniform and identified him as the attacker who
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: murdered his coworkers and stabbed him repeatedly. Detectives also testified
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: they believed Reed gained access to Captain des by approaching
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: Steve Hampton about employment opportunities before killing him and Sarah Jackson.
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: Circumstantial evidence, it seemed, was constantly surfacing fingerprints on Steve
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: Hampton's ID card. The sudden cash Reid came upon, and
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: the similarities to early Texas robberies he had been convicted of.
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: There was the red car and the blood in it,
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: the gloves and the gas receipts. And yet even while
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: prosecutors built their cases, controversy followed Red almost daily. A
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: judge imposed gag orders after Reid repeatedly spoke publicly about
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: the charges against him. The court was worried about a
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: tainted jury pool. Jail officials eventually restricted his phone privileges
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: because of those violations. A local television news reporter even
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: wrote Read in jail, attempting to arrange an on camera interview,
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: while criticizing the public defender's office in the process. The
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: defense team exploded over the contact, which they believed might
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: compromise their client's case. Next came shortz. Reed had been
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: caught engaging in a consensual sexual act with another inmate,
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: and later jailer's discovered a sharpened chicken bone hidden in
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: a light fixture inside his cell, a makeshift shive. Read
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: immediately claimed had been planted there to frame him. The
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: media attention surrounding the case became relentless. By that point,
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: Paul Dennis Reed was no longer being discussed merely as
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: a suspect in restaurant robberies gone wrong. He was also
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: being discussed as a possible serial killer, not just a
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: spree killer, and in Bedford, Texas, attorneys defending John Earl
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: Noley were watching every development carefully because the more information
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: emerged from Tennessee, the more questions surrounding Sharon McLean's murder.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: Questions about the fact that he was back in Texas
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: when she was killed, Questions about the stab patterns in
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: her case and the similarities they bore to the Baskin
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: Robbins murders, questions about witnesses who reportedly saw Reed near
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: Sharon's apartment complex shortly after her death, and perhaps most importantly,
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: questions about whether detectives in Texas had become so convinced
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: they already had their killer that they stopped looking anywhere else.
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: In the months that followed, then years, the case against
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: Paul Dennis Reed solidified in Tennessee courtrooms. Prosecutors eventually tied
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: him to all seven so called fast food murders across
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: the Nashville and Clarksville areas. To investigators and prosecutors, the
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: crimes reflected at least some planning familiarity with restaurant operations
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: and a willingness to eliminate witnesses entirely. To the public,
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: the cases felt almost impossible to comprehend, especially the more
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: details about Reed himself surfaced. He wasn't the type of
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: suspect many people expected. Witnesses repeatedly described him as articulate
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: and polite. Even metro investigators admitted he appeared normal on
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: the surface. Sergeant Robert Moore remarked that Red seemed like
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: someone who could easily live next door without drawing attention.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: Gina Jackson, Sarah Jackson's mother, echoed the sentiment after seeing
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: him in court. Often, serial or spree killer's look and
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: act ordinary enough to disappear into crowds, and Reed had
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: spent years doing exactly that, working restaurants, taking classes, talking
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: about a career in country music, and sharing meals with neighbors.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: He appeared as someone trying to reinvent himself repeatedly after
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: prison and psychiatric evaluations, after failed relationships and bankruptcy filings.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: Yet beneath all of it was a pattern investigators could
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: trace backward through decades. Restaurant robberies, explosive anger, humiliation over rejection, attempts,
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: to control people through fear and a seeming obsession with
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: eliminating witnesses. After earlier crimes resulted in prison time for
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: the families of the Tennessee victims. Reed's arrest brought some
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: measure of relief, but not closure. Pre trial hearings and
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: defense motions stretched on for a couple years. Arguments over competency,
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: mental illness, and appeals would continue long afterward. In Bedford, Texas,
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: nothing detectives or defense attorneys found proved Paul Dennis Reed
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: murdered Sharon Maclain, not any more so or less so
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: than the evidence against John Earl Noley. Together, the facts
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: formed the kind of alternate suspect theory defense attorney's dream of,
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: especially because Reed was not some hypothetical unknown offender floating
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: at the edges of the investigation. Instead, he was someone
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: whose proclivity toward violence was just becoming known, as was
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: the fact that he was actually in the area and
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: seen near or with Sharon around the time she was killed. Still,
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: Bedford investigators remained committed to the case against John Noley.
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: The pressure to hold on to the original theory was enormous.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: The murder had horrified Bedford. Sharon was only thirty two
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: years old, a young mother found savagely stabbed inside her
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: apartment in the middle of the suburban mid Cities area
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: between Dallas and Fort Worth. The sheer violence of the
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: crime generated immediate public outrage and fear. By the time
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: Reid emerged in Tennessee, investigators in Texas had already spent
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: months publicly insisting they had solved Sharon's murder, insisting they
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: had their man. Backing away from that would not have
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: been easy, neither professionally nor politically, and certainly not emotionally
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: where the victim's family is concerned. So while Tennessee authorities
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: expanded their investigations around Reed, Texas officials largely stayed their course.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: In DFW, suspicion of Reed never stuck in the news cycle.
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: In Tennessee. The media attention surrounding him was relentless. Reporters
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: dissected every aspect of his history, from childhood injuries and
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: psychiatric evaluations to failed music ambitions and cosmetic surgeries. Some
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: coverage bordered on sensationalism, stories about Reed wearing headbands to
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: ward off demons, and families shattered over amounts of money
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: that often totaled less than a down payment on a
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: used car. The trials of John Earl Knowley and Paul
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: Dennis Reed both eventually had similar outcomes, but after many
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: more years of appeals and claims of innocence, one of
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: them turned out much differently in the long run. That's
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: next time on Gone Cold, Texas True Crime. If you
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: have any information about the murder of Sharon Lucretia McLain, police,
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: call the Bedford Police Department at eight one seven nine
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: five two two one two seven. If you'd like to
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: join Con Cold's mission to shine a light on unsolved
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: homicides and missing persons cases, get the show at free
• 34:58
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• 35:02
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• 35:07
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• 35:09
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• 35:14
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• 35:18
  Speaker 1: for listening, y'all.