You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
Paul Dennis Reid.
He was Nashville’s most notorious killer.
He killed 7 restaurant workers in the course of 3 months. He is suspected in several more slayings.
It was 1997.
I had been in Nashville about a year.
The murders began in February. It starts with 2 restaurant workers killed over night at a Captain D’s.
A month later 4 people were shot at point-blank range in a McDonalds. 3 died. One man survived, who would later positively identify the killer.
And then in April, 2 young women were executed at a Baskin Robbins in Clarksville.
That was the straw that broke the community’s back.
One of the victims was a 16-year-old kid.
I remember that call in the night.
“get up to Clarksville. 2 women are murdered.”
I race up the interstate at 1 am. I get to the crime scene later.
The restaurant is roped off. Squad cars are everywhere, blue lights swirling in the darkness. Inside the restaurant, I see officers with evidence bags, and ID cops with cameras snapping pictures.
The scene is grisly, one officer will say on his way to his car.
The restaurant will quickly become a shrine to the victims. Because a High School girl is involved, car loads of kids approach the closed store and lay toys and candy and papers and notes.
The Baskin Robbins is a symbol of the barbarism that is tearing at the very fabric of our community.
7 people had been gunned down in 3 months. And all for a few dollars.
The community was on edge.
News rooms were like giant mixing bowls gyrating around. We were chasing leads, poking at the wind, knocking on doors.
I went back to Clarksville day after day after day.
I spoke with anyone who moved who had a thought about the senseless acts.
“We have to win this story,” my news director said fidgeting like a monkey hooked up to a car battery.
The pressure was immense. News cars passed each other, circling the store, driving aimlessly, like information sharks hoping to find a scrap of news meat.
It got so bad by the 2nd week, I was calling Britt the tow truck driver for tips.
A TOW TRUCK DRIVER? Like this meat hook was going to give me the tip that would crack the biggest case of the decade.
Nerves were raw. Tension was thick. Every newscast featured the serial killer. Where he was. Where he wasn’t. What police were doing and what they weren’t doing.
Parents didn’t let their children work late shift jobs in fast food restaurants out of fear.
The police knew it was the work of one evil man, but who?
Where was he?
When would he strike next?
I went to every crime scene. Each one more horrifying than the next. Yellow crime tape. Cop cars. People staring in disbelief, tears in their eyes.
There were sightings of cars that might be connected. There was an arrest of a man nicknamed Too Tall Jones.
“They got him” the news room screamed.
But it was a false alarm. They got the wrong guy.
He told me in a prison confessional that he didn’t do it.
He was right. He didn’t do it.
In late June, word spread that the killer, the real killer, had been arrested for the murders.
Camera crews scrambled down to Metro Night Court. Not one crew, but two and three crews.
It was a throng of media all jostling in the small room hoping to get the best angle of the most notorious killer in Nashville history.
Night Court was a throw back to another time of law.
It was one part wild west one part new millennium justice.
Felons would be brought to this court room inside the criminal justice center to stand before the judicial commissioner while being arrested.
Night court was a court room with wooden benches and cinder block walls.
It was part church, part theater, where both theatrics and histrionics were often on display.
The court was open to the public who could freely enter, sit and watch the spectacle of Nashville Justice unfold.
Drunks, whores, domestic violence perps, country music stars all passed through night court.
Night Court was reality tv before reality tv was in vogue.
On the other side of the thick plexi glass, the detectives and the perpetrators would enter the box.
They would be visible to all, naked in their accusation, as they approached the night court commissioner who would level the charges against them.
This is where I 1st viewed Paul Dennis Reid. He was tall, muscular, odd. He had a porn mustache. He had a brown beatles like hair cut. He was dull like rotting wood.
But there was something quietly evil about him.
I remember the Texas Felon standing in the box, blankly, no emotion, blinking ever so slightly.
The commissioner began to read off charges of horrifying proportion.
Almost on cue, the mass murderer turned to the cameras, slowly, methodically, so that everyone could see him.
He came to Nashville from Texas to be a country music star.
He wanted to be famous.
Now he was. Instead of a six string, he wielded a six-shooter.
He was convicted of 7 killings. He was sentenced to Tennessee death row and he died last November of natural causes.
Too bad. It would have been nice for the victim’s families to watch him fry.
I remember going to his home in East Nashville. Crime tape sealed off the house. Dozens of officers wearing hazmat suits were digging under the home. It was scary and surreal.
I hadn’t thought about this evil incarnate for years.
Then tonight I stared at his haunting face for hours.
I interviewed the lead detective in the case. He told me earnestly what it was like trying to delve inside the thoughts of a madman.
The former detective described the killer as being a sociopath, having no conscious, as he tried to get him to confess.
“At one point he said if I was a killer, would you hate me? He could kill someone then eat a hamburger without any problems,” the grizzled law man said.
I was interviewing the detective because Paul Dennis Reid’s name figures prominently in another murder from 1980 in Houston.
3 people were gunned down that night.
35 years ago and even from the grave, Paul Dennis Reid is a suspect.
A Houston man confessed to those slayings but many say he is mentally challenged and the evidence doesn’t add up.
Many say Paul Dennis Reid is the real killer and the man who confessed has been on death row needlessly for 30 years.
1st of all, on the day of the bowling alley murders, Reid lived in Houston, 11 miles from the business.
Reid was positively identified by witnesses as being an irate man who was thrown out of the alley days earlier pledging to return and kill everyone.
The detective will not say affirmatively that Paul Dennis Reid is the Houston killer, but he says there are many consistencies in the bowling alley murders and the 7 Nashville slayings.
The detective tells me that bowling alley killer said goodbye to each victim before shooting them. The lone witness at McDonalds in Nashville says that Paul Dennis Reid said good-bye to each victim before squeezing the trigger.
Reid often tricked his victims into opening the door of their locked stores so he could attack and rob them.
Witnesses at the bowling alley say the killer came to the door after-hours holding a jug claiming his car had over heated and he needed water.
Whether Reid is the killer is really a moot point.
He is dead.
The Texas man accused of the crime is dying of a terminal disease and will likely die soon in prison.
But looking at Paul Dennis Reid made me think about the families I interviewed, the mothers who cried, the senseless acts of barbarism.
I wondered how anyone could take a human life for some change and then eat a burger while life expires at his feet.
I can’t speak for the man in Texas, but I know that Paul Dennis Reid is burning in hell today.
He wasn’t executed by the state, but he was taken by a higher power that will judge him with final and ferocious vengeance for the rest of days.
Paul Dennis Reid deserves that.
Life’s Crazy™