On August 13th, 2026 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, 7475 Cockrill Bend Boulevard, Nashville, Tennessee, the state of Tennessee is scheduled to carry out the execution of a man named Anthony Darrell Duguard Hines. He will be offered a final meal. He will be permitted final words. And then the state intends to carry out a sentence that was first handed down nearly 40 years ago.
But here’s the thing about this case that stops you cold. When law enforcement finally caught up with Anthony Hines, when they sat him down and laid out what they had, he didn’t ask for a lawyer. He didn’t deny everything. He made an offer. He told investigators that if they could guarantee him the death penalty, he would confess.
He would tell them everything they wanted to know. Think about that for a moment. A man so certain of what he’d done or so indifferent to what came next that he bargained with his own execution as the currency. That was 1985. 40 years later, on August 13th, 2026, the state of Tennessee plans to make good on exactly that outcome.
But getting here was not simple. There were two trials, two death sentences, a federal court that granted him a new trial, a Supreme Court that took it away, a claim of innocence that never went away, a man who reportedly suffered a massive stroke while waiting on death row, and a botched execution just weeks before his scheduled date that has thrown the entire state’s execution program into chaos.
This is the full story of Anthony Darrell Hines. March 3rd, 1985, a Sunday. The Sub Bon Motel sits just off Interstate 40 near Kingston Springs, Tennessee. A small town about 20 miles west of Nashville. It’s a roadside property. The kind of place travelers pass through and don’t remember. That morning, 54-year-old Katherine Jean Jenkins showed up for work.
Kathy, as she was known, was a motel maid. She had worked there long enough to be trusted. On that particular Sunday, the manager left her in charge of the property, handed her a bank bag of small bills to make change for departing guests, and stepped away. She was alone. At some point that morning, Kathy wheeled her cleaning cart to room 21.
She never came back out. Sometime between 1:00 and 1:30 that afternoon, a visitor picked up a key from the front office and unlocked the door to room 21. Inside, Katherine Jenkins lay on the floor wrapped in a sheet. She had been sexually assaulted. She had been stabbed multiple deep wounds to her chest, cuts to her neck and collarbone.
The medical examiner documented a penetrating wound that traveled from her lower body into her abdominal cavity. Her clothing had been pulled up to her chest. Her underwear had been torn away and left in pieces elsewhere in the room. And there was one more detail. A $20 bill had been tucked under the band of her wristwatch. Prosecutors would later argue that wasn’t random. That it was deliberate.
A gesture of humiliation or staging or both. Missing from the scene, the motel’s bank bag of money, Kathy’s wallet and keys, and her car, a Volvo. Katherine Jenkins was 54 years old. She had come to work that morning on a routine Sunday shift. She did not go home. Now, let’s go back two days. March 1st, 1985. In Raleigh, North Carolina, a 27-year-old man named Anthony Darrell Hines boards a bus.
The ticket was paid for by his girlfriend’s mother. He had $20 in his pocket. He was headed to Bowling Green, Kentucky. Before he left, someone noticed he was carrying a hunting knife concealed beneath his shirt. When asked about it, Hines had an answer ready. “I never go anywhere naked. I always have my blade.” His route took him through Nashville.
He stepped off, or rather, he stopped short instead of continuing on to Kentucky. Hines checked into the Super 8 Motel near Kingston Springs. The same motel where Kathy Jenkins was working that Sunday. Not long after noon on March 3rd, just after the body was discovered, another motel employee saw something.
A man driving Kathy Jenkins’s Volvo pulling out of the Super 8 Motel’s driveway, accelerating hard toward Nashville. Later that day, the same car was spotted again. This time on I-65 heading north, heading toward Kentucky. The man behind the wheel was Anthony Darrell Hines. By the time Hines reached Kentucky and showed up at a family member’s home, his shirt was soaked in blood.
He was carrying keys on a distinctive keychain. Those keys, it would later turn out, belonged to Katherine Jenkins. And Hines was talking. He told different versions of what had happened. That he had stabbed a male employee at a motel. That he had fought someone off. That he had defended himself. At one point, he demonstrated to a relative exactly how he had used the knife.
Then investigators found Jenkins’ wallet, discarded near where the Volvo had been abandoned. Then they found knife marks in the walls of the motel room Hines had been staying in. Marks consistent in size with the wounds on Katherine Jenkins’ body. Then they sat him down. Hines admitted he had taken the car, but he denied killing the woman at first.
And then came the offer that has defined this case ever since. If investigators could guarantee him the death penalty, he said he would confess. He would tell them everything. He did not get that guarantee, but the state of Tennessee did not need it. In 1986, Anthony Darrell Hines stood trial in Cheatham County Circuit Court.
The case against him was built almost entirely on circumstantial evidence, but it was layered and substantial. His presence at the motel, his departure in Jenkins’ car, the blood-stained shirt, the distinctive keychain, the discarded wallet, the knife marks, the stories he told family members about stabbing someone at a motel, and the offer to confess if the price was right.
The jury convicted him of first-degree felony murder. At sentencing, the state presented three aggravating factors. Hines had a prior violent felony conviction. The murder was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, involving torture or depravity of mind, and it was committed during the commission of other felonies, robbery and rape.
The jury imposed the death penalty, but the case didn’t end there. In 1988, the Tennessee Supreme Court reviewed the conviction on direct appeal. They affirmed his guilt. The evidence, they said, was more than sufficient, but they found a problem with the penalty phase. The jury instructions on the aggravating circumstances had not met the constitutional standard.
The death sentence was vacated. The case was sent back for resentencing. In 1989, a new jury heard the penalty phase again. They sentenced him to death again. In 1995, the Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed the second death sentence. The US Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Anthony Darrell Hines was going to die.
The question was only when. Here is where the story gets complicated. And this is the part that kept Anthony Hines alive for decades more. Post-conviction proceedings, the legal review that comes after all direct appeals are exhausted, unearthed something that had not been fully examined at trial. The man who discovered Kathy Jenkins’ body was a local named Ken Jones.
At trial, Jones had presented himself as someone who simply happened to come by the motel that afternoon, found the office unattended, let himself into room 21 with a key, and discovered the body. He called authorities, left briefly, and returned to meet the sheriff. That was his story, but post-conviction investigation revealed something different.
Jones was at the Suburban Motel that Sunday for a reason he hadn’t disclosed. He was there for a regular secret meeting with a woman who was not his wife. The two of them were apparently regulars at the property. His companion that day had watched through the curtains as Jones entered the room and quickly left after finding the body.
That was not the story the jury heard. Hines’ post-conviction attorneys argued that this mattered enormously, that his trial lawyers had failed him by not fully investigating Jones, not exposing his real reason for being at the motel, and not developing him as a credible alternate suspect.
They argued that if the jury had known the full truth about Ken Jones, the outcome might have been different. There was also the matter of DNA. Hines’ legal team petitioned for the right to test seven pieces of physical evidence from the crime scene. If DNA from an unknown male were found, it could open the door to reasonable doubt.
The trial court denied the petition. The court of appeals affirmed the denial in 2008. In 2004, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals reviewed the post-conviction claim about Jones in detail. They acknowledged the incomplete picture, but they concluded that given the strength of the evidence against Hines, the car, the keys, the wallet, the bloody shirt, the admissions to family, the knife marks, there was no reasonable probability that a more aggressive cross-examination of Ken Jones would have changed the verdict.
The death sentence stood, but the legal fight was not over. After exhausting state remedies, Hines’ attorneys took the case into the federal court system. They filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. That court denied the petition.
They appealed to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. And in May 2020, nearly 35 years after the murder of Katherine Jenkins, something remarkable happened. A divided panel of the Sixth Circuit ruled in Hines’ favor. Two of the three judges concluded that the Tennessee courts had been unreasonable in rejecting the ineffective assistance claim by failing to fully investigate and confront Ken Jones’ real reason for being at the motel.
Hines’ trial attorneys had denied him a fair trial. The Sixth Circuit granted habeas relief effectively ordering that Hines receive new proceedings. For a brief period, Anthony Hines had something he had not had in decades, a legal lifeline. It did not last. The state of Tennessee appealed directly to the United States Supreme Court.
On March 29th, 2021, the US Supreme Court unanimously reversed a lower court ruling in Mays versus Hines Supreme Court decision. The court held that the Sixth Circuit had improperly overturned the Tennessee court’s decision despite strong evidence of Hines’ guilt. The justices emphasized that federal courts may not overturn state court judgments unless the error is so clear that no reasonable judge could disagree.
They also noted that Hines’ trial lawyer had already presented evidence suggesting another man, Jones, might have been suspicious, but the jury still found Hines guilty. As a result, the Supreme Court reinstated the conviction and reversed the grant of habeas relief. The death sentence was reinstated. Only one justice dissented, Sonia Sotomayor.
For Hines, the Supreme Court decision closed the last major door. He had maintained his innocence throughout. His attorneys had argued for DNA testing for a fuller picture of Ken Jones, for a new trial. Every avenue had been denied. And the man who had once told investigators he would confess if they guaranteed him the death penalty was now in fact facing exactly that outcome.
By 2025, the standard three-tier appeals process for Anthony Darrell Hines was complete. The state of Tennessee moved the Tennessee Supreme Court to set an execution date. Hines’ lawyers urged the court to reject the state’s motion or at minimum recommend that the governor commute his death sentence. They argued that important mitigating factors remained, including exhausted legal options, unresolved claims of innocence, and reports that Hines had suffered a major stroke while on death row.
However the stroke allegation came from death penalty opponents at a press conference rather than court records and had not been independently verified by Tennessee authorities. On October 1st, 2025 the Tennessee Supreme Court granted the state’s motion. August 13th, 2026 that is the date the court set for the execution of Anthony Darrell Dugar Hines at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
The court’s order also specified that no later than July 13th, 2026 the warden must notify Hines of the method Tennessee will use to carry out the execution. And then just weeks before Anthony Hines’ scheduled execution date something happened that changed the temperature of the entire conversation. May 21st, 2026 Tennessee attempted to execute another death row inmate Tony Carruthers.
Media witnesses had been escorted into Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. They were seated in a room adjoining the death chamber. They waited for the blinds over the window to rise. They never did. Inside the chamber, the execution team was struggling. Medical personnel established a primary intravenous line, but could not establish the required backup line.
They attempted to insert a central line. That failed, too. They tried again and again. According to Caruthers’ attorneys, the team punctured him more than a dozen times in his arms, his hands, his feet, and his chest over the course of more than an hour. The execution was called off.
Governor Bill Lee granted Tony Caruthers a 1-year reprieve. In the days that followed, attorneys and advocates held press conferences demanding the governor pause all executions in the state. Questions emerged about the qualifications of the execution physician, Dr. Mark Fowler. Defense attorneys alleged that Dr. Fowler had not placed a central line in 13 years, and that he holds no hospital privileges to perform that procedure at any medical facility in the country.
Tennessee’s 2025 lethal injection protocol, a one-drug method relying on pentobarbital, had already been challenged in Davidson County Chancery Court by nine death row inmates who argued it created an unacceptable risk of a torturous death. That lawsuit was still pending. Advocates pointed out the next scheduled execution was in August, Anthony Darrell Hines.
As of June 2026, the state had not said whether the protocol would be reviewed, revised, or paused before the August 13th date. The same team, the same doctor, the same institutional machinery that had failed to execute Tony Caruthers was potentially being lined up to proceed with Daryl Hines. Hines’ advocates were not quiet about it.
They noted his stroke. They noted his innocence claims. They noted that his DNA testing request had been denied. They noted that the full story of Ken Jones, the man who found the body, had never been placed completely before jury. None of that changed the legal posture of the case. Every court that reviewed those arguments denied them.
But the questions remain. Before we talk about what comes next, we should stop here for a moment. Because in cases like this one, cases that stretch across 40 years of appeals and federal courts and Supreme Court decisions, it becomes easy for the victim to become a footnote. Katherine Jean Jenkins was not a footnote.
She was 54 years old. She was a working woman who showed up for a Sunday shift. She was trusted enough to be put in charge of the property that day, given a bank bag of money, and left to manage things on her own. She was doing her job. She was stabbed repeatedly. She was sexually assaulted.
She was left on the floor of room 21, wrapped in a sheet with a $20 bill tucked under her watch band. A detail that speaks to a cruelty that goes beyond murder. Her wallet was taken. Her car was taken. Her keys were taken. And her life was taken. As of this recording, August 13th, 2026, remains the scheduled execution date for Anthony Darrell Hines.
He has been on Tennessee’s death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution for nearly four decades. His TDOC inmate number is 109293. He is 68 years old. His last meal request, if made, has not been reported. His final words, if he chooses to speak them, have not been recorded. Those details will only exist after the date has passed. What we know is this.
The Tennessee Supreme Court set his execution date on October 1st, 2025, after the state certified that Hines had completed the standard three-tier appeals process. Every court that reviewed his case at every level ultimately returned the same verdict. The evidence against him was overwhelming.
The claims of ineffective assistance, the alternate suspect theory, the request for DNA testing, all denied. The US Supreme Court in 2021 called the evidence against him voluminous. They said it pointed to guilt in a way that left no room for the federal courts to intervene. And yet, his attorneys say he has maintained his innocence.
DNA from the crime scene was never tested. The man who found Kathy Jenkins’s body had a secret he didn’t tell the jury. And now, just weeks before Hines’s scheduled execution, the state of Tennessee nearly carried out a botched lethal injection on another inmate, raising serious questions about whether the execution protocol is safe, constitutional, or even operational.
The state has not answered those questions publicly. Governor Bill Lee has not indicated he will pause executions. The August 13th date has not been moved. So, here is the question I want to leave you with. When the evidence is overwhelming, but not complete, when every court has ruled the same way, but one, when the DNA was never tested and the story was never fully told, at what point does beyond a reasonable doubt become something we have to examine more carefully? Is the system working the way it was designed to, or is the machinery moving forward simply because it has always moved forward? I don’t have the answer to that, but I think it’s worth asking.
