By Richard Urban

William Tines was executed at the Tennessee State Peni-tentiary in Nashville at 5 a.m. on Nov. 7, 1960. It was the day before John F. Kennedy was elected president.

Tines, described in local news accounts as a 37-year-old “Negro” from Knox County, was strapped into Tennessee’s electric chair as punishment for raping a white woman in Roane County three years earlier. As his wrists and ankles were being secured, he asked his prison guards, a minister, and the attending doctor, “Pray for me.” Twelve minutes later, Tines was pronounced dead.

“Old Smokey,” Tennessee’s electric chair, has not been fired up since Tines’ execution. However, the results of the Aug. 1 Supreme Court election, combined with the death-penalty litmus test Gov. Don Sundquist is using in his search for Penny White’s replacement, suggests that many Tennesseans think it’s time to open up the furniture polish and check Old Smokey’s wiring.

On the day of Tines’ execution, most of the state’s leading newspapers devoted their pages to the next day’s close presidential election. It’s small wonder that the execution almost went unnoticed. Tines was the 125th man executed in the state’s electric chair since 1916, the year electrocution replaced hanging as the method of choice. In the intervening decades, 85 blacks and 40 whites had been executed:36 for rape, 88 for murder, and one for both. In 1960, state-sanctioned execution was not the highly charged issue it would become later, when much of the nation’s social and political agendas began to take a decidedly more liberal bent. The War on Crime would not replace the War on Poverty until Richard M. Nixon’s second term in 1972.

It was also in 1972 that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Furman Decision halted executions altogether, deeming them cruel and unusual punishment. Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia, the court reconsidered and allowed states to impose the death penalty under very specific circumstances. Tennessee rewrote its death-penalty law in 1976, but the state Supreme Court struck it down in 1977. The Legislature rewrote the law again that year, and the new law first passed U.S. Supreme Court muster in 1979. It has been upheld at various levels in subsequent cases, including the state Supreme Court’s controversial Odom decision in June.

Three days before William Tines was tried for rape in July 1957, another trial got under way just one county away in Knoxville. That trial would test the federal courts’ power to enforce public school desegregation. The U.S. Senate was debating President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s civil rights bill, and Southern senators were trying to block it through endless filibustering. The country was just beginning to deal with the idea of integrating blacks into the political and social structure.

Today, the public’s opinions about crime and punishment have taken a more conservative turn. There are calls for criminals to be more swiftly and surely punished, and the death penalty has again become a highly charged issue. There are now 97 men and two women on Tennessee’s death row. Twenty-seven of them are black; 67 are white; the others are Hispanic, Asian, or Native American. Richard Austin has been on death row the longest; he has been there since January 1978.

Nationwide, 28 states have executed a collective total of nearly 450 people since 1977; Texas leads the way with 106 executions. Ten states, including Tennessee, have not exercised their current death-penalty laws. Twelve states have no death-penalty laws at all.

Part I: The Horror on Highway 61

Summer came a month early in 1957. By late April, a Gulf high had crept into East Tennessee and parked there, pumping tropical moisture into the air and sending temperatures into the high 80s, near 90.

On the morning of Tuesday, April 23, William Tines and four other men were cutting timber near Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. For about a year, Tines had been a trusty at Brushy, a fortress-like structure in the foothills of the Smokies, about 50 miles west of Knoxville. The timber Tines was cutting that day would be used to support the shafts of the coal mines in the surrounding hills. The coal from the mines would be used to warm the prison in winter. The surplus would be hauled by train to the valley, where it would be sold.

Cutting timber was hard work. Tines, 5 feet, 8 inches and 147 pounds, was not a big man. His uniform, a heavy black-and-white-striped cotton prison shirt and bib overalls, only made him hotter. To make matters worse, Tines’ feet hurt too. His prison-issue shoes just didn’t fit right.

Tines, who was serving two concurrent 99-year-sentences, had spent over 12 years at Brushy Mountain. In January 1945, he had killed two other “colored” men, Marshall Kyle and John Johnson, during a gunfight near the corner of Schofield and Mississippi Avenues in Knoxville. Tines turned himself into the police on the night of the murders. His story was that Kyle and Johnson had pulled guns on him and that he had shot them in self-defense. His lawyer persuaded him to plead guilty. Now 33, he hadn’t had much of a life, and he certainly had nothing to look forward to.

He couldn’t read and could barely scrawl his name. He had had his first run-in with the law, an arrest for petty theft, when he was 11. That charge had landed him at a State Training and Agricultural School. After his release, Tines had tried to go to school: He was put in the first grade at age 12, only to be kicked out because he was subject to epileptic seizures, which a started after a woman, apparently at school, had beat him unconscious with a shoe. By the time he was 13, he was back at the training school for stealing a horse.

A year later, Tines would be sent to the state training school yet a third time; the charge was robbery. By the time he was 17, he had earned his first stay at Brushy Mountain—five years for robbery. Within a year, he escaped, and two years were added to his sentence. Tines served 52 months. Eight months after his release, he was back in Brushy Mountain for the murder of Kyle and Johnson. Just 22, William Tines was a lifer.

His own father had died in 1937 while doing time at the very same state penitentiary. His mother had remarried two or three times, he’d lost track. He hadn’t seen his blood relatives in a long time.

So when the armed guard was looking the other way on that hot April morning, Tines saw his chance. He and two other men scrambled down the hillside toward the rail line to the valley. The threesome split up, and Tines found himself following the rails through Coalfield and Oliver Springs toward the outskirts of the small town of Harriman. The treeline hugged the rail, making it easy for him to hide whenever a coal-laden train passed. The prison guard was fired two days later.

As darkness fell, Tines found a place to rest and spent the night in the woods somewhere between the state prison at Petros, in Morgan County, and Harriman, in Roane County. A heavy afternoon rainstorm soaked him to the skin, but it also threw the prison’s tracking dogs off his scent. As the sun rose, he awoke to continue his journey east to more familiar territory in his hometown, Knoxville.

He was hungry. He needed money and clothes if he was going to make it home. Tines might have been illiterate, but he knew that a black man wouldn’t get far hoofing it through rural East Tennessee, especially with no money and with no clothes except his striped prison uniform.

Tines emerged from the woods along Highway 61, Oliver Springs Road. He stopped and looked at an isolated house across the road. Moving in closer, he hid behind some shrubbery, trying to decide whether anybody was home. The place seemed quiet, so he ascended the front steps to the porch, opened the screened door, and walked in.

Bertha Riggs had arrived at Luther and Margaret Nichols’ house between 7 and 7:30 a.m., just as she had for nearly 12 years. Riggs had been just 29 when her husband died, 16 years earlier. She really didn’t have a lot of skills, but she had an ailing father to look after. Her mother had died six years back. Like many women in the ’50s, Bertha Riggs had few options. She was lucky to find work as a housekeeper for the Nichols, who owned a grocery store a quarter-mile up the road.

Luther Nichols was already at his store, the Scandlyn Grocery, by the time Riggs arrived. When Margaret Nichols heard the clock chime 8:30, she realized she was running late for her Wednesday-morning hair appointment in town. She quickly got into her car and drove to Harriman, leaving Riggs in the dining room with a pile of clothes to iron.

A half-hour later, while Riggs was methodically running the electric iron over the Nichols’ laundry, she looked up at the clock. It chimed 9, and she started to take an armload of freshly ironed clothes toward the back of the house, intending to hang them in a closet. That’s when she heard a noise from the front of the house. Before she could look up, she felt the first blow.

Riggs made a frantic struggle to get to the telephone to call the police. She knocked the receiver from its cradle, and before she could make the call, Tines was on her, beating her with his fists. He was little, but he was strong, too strong for the 5-foot, 6-inch, 125-pound housekeeper; the blows kept coming at her head, breaking her nose and causing her eyes to swell up until they were nearly shut.

She felt herself losing consciousness, but still she could understand what was happening to her. As she slipped into the gray darkness of semiconsciousness, she knew the unthinkable was happening.

Still dazed in the wake of her attack, she managed to crawl down a small hallway toward the kitchen and the bathroom. She made her way out of the house and into the yard, collapsing near a fence. That’s where Harriman police officer Ernest Randolph found her. Amazingly enough, police officers had learned of the attack even while it was happening.

Bleeding heavily, Riggs called to her brother, John Gillmore, who had just arrived. Her clothes were torn and bloodied. Bruises were already discoloring her face, and the cuts on her forehead, scalp, and the bridge of her nose were gushing blood. She couldn’t see out of her left eye because it was so badly swollen, and she had a nasty bump behind her right ear.

John Gillmore, gently picked his sister up in his arms. He put her in his car, and they headed for Harriman Hospital.

When Margaret Nichols arrived at the beauty shop that morning, her beautician was waiting. After her hair was washed and dried, but before it had been combed out, she decided to call her housekeeper. She wanted to let Riggs know that she planned to visit a friend; that meant she would not be home for lunch.

In Harriman, like much of the rest of rural East Tennessee in the late 1950s, the telephone system still consisted of party lines, each of them shared by several customers. A live operator still ran the local switchboard. The phone line that served the Nichols’ house was also the line that served the Scandlyn Grocery, as well as the lumberyard Margaret’s brother owned, just across from the grocery store on Highway 61.

When the operator connected Nichols to her home phone, she could tell that it was already off the hook. On the small-town phone system, Nichols could actually hear what was going on in the room. What she heard stunned her.

“I’m bleeding to death!” a woman was crying. “Somebody help me!”

At first Margaret Nichols didn’t recognize Bertha Riggs’ voice. She tried to ask what was wrong. Riggs screamed, “Something’s happened to me! Somebody come help me!”

Margaret Nichols broke off the connection and tried to call her brother, Ben Scandlyn, at his lumberyard. When that line turned out to be busy, she frantically tried to call the Harriman police. As it turned out, the Sheriff’s Department had already been called. Other parties on the phone line, including Ben Scandlyn, also heard the screams.

Her hair still uncombed, Margaret Nichols ran to her car and raced the four miles home. By the time she pulled into her own yard, Riggs had already been taken to the hospital. Luther Nichols and the neighbors wouldn’t let Margaret in the house. They decided it would be best for them to clean the place up before they allowed her back in.

It was the small-town grapevine—and the small-town phone system—that had drawn the townspeople to the Nichols’ front yard. Clyde Carter and his wife had been driving along Highway 61 from Morgan County that morning when they noticed a black man wearing what appeared to be prison garb. He was holding something in his hands, and he was standing by a shrub at the corner of the Nichols’ house about 70 feet from the road. They drove about 75 feet farther down the road, where they turned into a gas station and doubled back to take another look.

This time, Clyde Carter saw the black man approach the screened-in front porch and head toward the door. Mrs. Carter couldn’t be quite sure what the man was carrying in his hands. She thought it was his shoes.

Carter and his wife stopped at a little store, a short way down the road, to ask if any convicts were working in the area. It was not unusual to see inmates working in the area around Brushy Mountain; sometimes they were used to paint houses and perform other tasks. It also was fairly common for prisoners to escape. Twenty years later, Brushy Mountain would become famous as the prison from which Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin, James Earl Ray, escaped.

At the store, the Carters were told that there weren’t supposed to be any convicts working in the area that day. Mrs. Carter replied, “Well, we just saw one. I wonder if he’s the one escaped from prison.”

“Let’s just call the law,” a bystander suggested, so Carter called the police and the prison. When somebody explained that the house in question belonged to Luther Nichols, Carter and his wife headed back down the road to the Scandlyn Grocery.

“There’s a convict going in your house down there, going in on the porch,” Carter announced as he entered Nichols’ store. Because he was busy with customers, Nichols couldn’t leave right away. Instead, he called his brother-in-law at the lumberyard across the street. He asked Ben Scandlyn to drive out and check on things for him.

Apparently, when Nichols broke off the phone connection to the lumberyard, the line remained open to the Nichols house. When Luther Nichols hung up, Scandlyn could hear Bertha Riggs’ screams.

Scandlyn grabbed John Gillmore, who worked at the lumberyard. In separate vehicles, the two of them set out for the Nichols house. On his way, Scandlyn stopped at his own house to pick up a pistol and a shotgun, but Gillmore headed straight to the Nichols place. By the time he got there, a crowd of about 20 to 25 armed men had gathered. Word had traveled fast in the small town.

Meanwhile, Nichols hastily closed his store and hurried home. What he saw horrified him.

Gillmore was carrying his sister’s limp and bloodied body out to his car. Nichols went into the house. As he walked toward the dining room, he saw blood everywhere, on the dining room walls and on a closet. There was blood on the floors in the hall, on the floor by the refrigerator in the kitchen, and on the bathroom floor too. Blood-soaked towels and cloths were strewn on the kitchen floor. The electric iron was still plugged in, and it had burned through the linoleum into the wood floor beneath. It was hard to believe anyone could bleed so much and still be alive.

William Tines was back on Highway 61. Winded from running, he had found a spot, away from the road, where he could rest before he continued on to Knoxville. He was frightened, and his adrenaline was pumping. He wasn’t quite sure what had happened.

He remembered going in the house to look for clothes and food, and he remembered that a woman had started screaming. He had panicked—he knew that. He remembered hitting the woman and knocking her to the floor, then he remembered feeling sorry for her and trying to wipe the blood from her face. He tried to remember more, but it wouldn’t come.

As Tines crouched at the bottom of the embankment, he saw cars filled with armed white folks patrolling the highway. He could also hear the prison’s tracking dogs, less than a mile away. He was scared, and he knew now there was no place to hide. Just then, he saw the highway patrol car and flagged it down.

Sgt. Cecil Strader was in his patrol car when he got the call on his radio, reporting that a woman had been badly beaten in a house along Highway 61. Strader knew the area well. A trooper for 20 years, he had spent the last decade at the Roane County station. By the time he headed out that morning, he already knew there were three escaped convicts on the prowl. The prison still had dogs out looking for them, and police agencies throughout the area were on the lookout.

About 11 a.m., alerted by the radioed report, he started for the Nichols’ house. Before he got there, however, he spotted Tines, about three-quarters of a mile east of the Nichols’ house, off the shoulder of the road opposite him, up an embankment.

Strader cut his car across the road, jumped out, and drew his service revolver. Tines immediately lifted his arms skyward; he was still carrying his shoes. Strader arrested him, took him to the patrol car, and radioed ahead to Brushy Mountain. Warden Frank Llewellyn, who was in his car directing the search for the escapees, told Strader to take the prisoner to the Harriman police station, where he would be picked up.

As Strader drove Tines to the station, he stopped near the Scandlyn Grocery. He asked the gathered crowd a few questions, but it didn’t take long for him to figure out that the angry crowd was about to turn ugly. If he didn’t take his prisoner and get out of there soon, Strader knew there’d be a lynching.

As he drove away toward town, Strader noticed the blood on Tines’ sleeve and shirt. He asked Tines about it, but Tines didn’t reply. “Why’d you beat her?” Strader asked. At first, Tines said he didn’t know what Strader was talking about. Later, Tines told the trooper, “I didn’t mean to beat her that hard.”

When Bertha Riggs arrived at Harriman Hospital around 10:30 a.m., she was still dazed, and she was beginning to get hysterical. It would be another half-hour before Dr. T.L. Bowman examined her.

Her face was badly discolored and bloody, and her blood-soaked clothes were partially torn off. Bowman also found cuts on Riggs’ scalp and a friction burn in the middle of her back.

The doctor tried to find out what had happened, but Riggs, barely coherent, couldn’t tell him. Bowman decided to perform a gynecological exam. He found seminal fluids in Riggs’ vaginal canal. Curiously, he found no cuts or bruises on her legs.

Bowman treated Riggs and admitted her to the hospital. Later that afternoon, the Nicholses, Sgt. Strader, and Roane County Sheriff Robert M. Delaney visited her. Strader would later recall, “You couldn’t even tell whether she was a man or woman, she was beat up so bad.” Riggs would stay in the hospital until she was released eight days later on May 3.

Tines spent an hour or so in the jail at Harriman City Hall on the afternoon following the attack. During that time, he never appeared before a squire, one of the local justices of the peace who would have informed him that he was accused of a crime. A squire would also have advised Tines of his rights and would have determined whether he should be held. Because Tines was already serving a sentence in a state prison, however, no one thought such formalities were necessary. Instead, Warden Llewellyn and two of his men packed Tines into the warden’s car and drove him back to Brushy Mountain.

“Feeling was running pretty high over there in the neighborhood where the attack occurred, so we decided it would be better to send the Negro back to prison rather than bring him here to the county jail,” Sheriff Delaney explained in press accounts.

As they drove back to Brushy Mountain, Llewellyn tried talking to Tines, asking why he had attacked Bertha Riggs. One of Llewellyn’s men threatened Tines, warning him, “I’m going to get you a trip to Nashville.” Tines knew what the prison guard meant: The electric chair was located at the state penitentiary in Nashville. Tines held his tongue.

Once he was back at Brushy Mountain, Tines was put in solitary, where he was given medication for his epilepsy.

The next day, Delaney took John Pennington, an investigator from the attorney general’s office, with him to question Tines. By that time, Delaney and Pennington had heard from the doctor who examined Riggs. They knew she hadn’t just been beaten; she had also been raped. Tines was brought to the warden’s inner office.

Tines asked the two men who they were. Pennington explained that he was from the attorney general’s office and that he was there to take a statement from Tines.

Pennington and Delaney had discussed their plan of action beforehand. They had decided not to tell Tines what he was charged with. They did tell him he did not have to say anything and that, if he did make a statement, it would be used against him.

They did not ask Tines if he wanted a lawyer, although he asked for one later. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Miranda Decision—which ruled that the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination requires a lawyer’s presence during questioning—was still nine years off.

As Pennington and Delaney talked to Tines, the prisoner kept yawning. “You sleepy?” Pennington asked.

“I didn’t get no sleep last night,” Tines replied.

Despite his seemingly drowsy demeanor, Tines was nervous and upset. He had had a seizure before the two arrived and he was still groggy from the medication. He told Pennington and Delaney that he was sick and that he needed help. Their response was that he would get no help until he signed a confession. Pennington noticed that Tines’ right index finger was cut and swollen.

The two investigators spent about two hours going over the events with Tines, who admitted that he had beaten Riggs but insisted he had not raped her. Finally, a statement was produced, written in Pennington’s elaborate, calligraphy-like hand. Tines couldn’t read what Pennington had written, but he thought that, by signing the papers, he would get a lawyer who would help him.

He scrawled his name at the bottom of the confession:

I William Tines age 33 Prison No. 38533 do make this statement of my own free will and accord, although I have been advised that what ever statement I may make can be used for or against me, also that I have not been threatened or promised anything.

I left the prison about 10:30 A.M. tuesday april 23 1957, I had started to Knoxville, but when I came to this house(the Nichols house) which is on highway 61 I went up on the front porch and opened the door went into the front room and then into a little room, then I saw this woman (Mrs. Bertha Riggs) she told me to get out that I didn’t have any business there.

Then she started yelling and I grabbed her and started beating her with my fist. I knocked her down twice with my fist. I knocked her out and tore her pants off and raped her, I only had one intercourse with her I held my hand over her mouth she bit me on the finger which is still sore and swollen. It didn’t take me but a minute or two.

I didn’t intend to rape her but I had been in the pen so long that when I saw her I just lost my head.

After I got through I took a towel and wiped the blood off of her face and looked to see if there was any blood on her private but there was not any there.

I went out the back door and pulled my shoes off so I could run faster I went through the woods and over to highway 61 where the officer picked me up.

I told Capt Waldroup yesterday 22nd that I did not rape her but I was lieing to him I should not have.

I want to tell the truth about it and beg for mercy.

After signing the statement, Tines was returned to solitary. In mid-May, he was taken the 35 miles from the prison to the courthouse in Kingston to be arraigned before Squire Tom Ward. At that time he was formally informed of the charges against him; then he was sent back to Brushy Mountain to await trial.

Less than a month and a half later, Tines’ legal proceedings got under way. By today’s standards, the series of events was amazingly swift. By July 11, 1957, Tines would be convicted and sentenced to death in a trial lasting just five hours. There would be only nine witness, including Tines himself. The jury would take just 25 minutes to hand down a verdict.

Thirty-nine months after his trial, Tines would be executed. In just over three years, his case would go through two unsuccessful appeals to the state Supreme Court and two unsuccessful appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court. There would be seven stays of execution. The entire court record of Tines’ case takes up about 200 pages of documents and transcripts. Today it would be front-page news, and the trial records would fill boxes.

Editor’s Note: The story of William Tines was reconstructed from trial transcripts; court documents; records on file in the Tennessee State Archives and Library, the Brushy Mountain Penitentiary Museum, and the state Department of Corrections; and from contemporary newspaper reports. Additional information came from interviews with surviving family members, with several of the jurors and principals in the case, and with a witness to the execution.

This is the first of two installments.

Next week: The trial, the appeals, and the execution.

This is the first of two installments.

Next week: The trial, the appeals, and the execution.