For a seasoned prosecutor like Tennessee Assistant Attorney General Beecher Witt, it looked like an open-and-shut case: William Tines was a loser. He had been in trouble most of his life; before he had reached his teens, he had done time for petty theft. At age 22, he had been convicted of murdering two men; he had escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary not once, but twice.
When Witt convened the grand jury on July 1, 1957, at the Roane County Court House in Kingston, Tenn., he could be confident that Tines didn’t have a chance. Tines, a 34-year-old black man and a prison escapee, was charged with raping Bertha Riggs, a widowed, middle-aged white woman who made her living as a housekeeper in Harriman, Tenn.
To seal the matter, Witt had a confession, signed by Tines, and he had two witnesses ready to testify that they had seen a black man in prison overalls approaching the Luther Nichols house, where Riggs worked, just before the attack took place. Shortly after the assault, a state highway patrolman had picked up Tines not far from the Nichols house; the officer was prepared to testify there had been blood on Tines’ clothes. A doctor was ready to confirm that Riggs had been raped. Witt could not imagine a jury that would do anything except put Tines exactly where he belonged—in the electric chair.
Paul Wilson, a Roane County citizen, served as foreman of the grand jury that would hear Tines’ case. Court documents list the other grand jury members: H.T. Luther, Dr. Van Hook, John Pennington, Luther Nichols, Margaret Nichols, Cecil Strader, Dr. T.L. Bowman, Ernest Randolph, Robert M. Delaney, and Clyde Carter and his wife, identified only as “Mrs. Clyde Carter.” Every member of the grand jury, except for Wilson, Luther, and Hook, would also be called to testify against Tines, and Luther was a constable who had arrived at the scene of the crime on the day of the assault. The day after Witt convened the grand jury, they all appeared in court before Judge Sue K. Hicks and returned an indictment against Tines. Trial was set for July 10.
Witt was well acquainted with Hicks. The two men were contemporaries and had begun their law careers at approximately the same time. An East Tennessee Republican, Witt had been a prosecutor for 31 years and previously served as a county judge in Madisonville. He had not spent much time away from the courtroom, except for a period in 1952, when he ran for governor and lost to Democrat Frank Clement.
Most days, Witt and Hicks rode the seven-county circuit together, traveling in the same automobile, one prosecuting, the other judging the cases. Their arrangement raised a few eyebrows among defense lawyers, but Hicks maintained a reputation for being fair, if tough, in his decisions.
Tines’ confession was a red flag for his court-appointed lawyers, Sterling Roberts, Kenneth Deatheridge, and Bronce Johnson. They had their doubts about the circumstances under which it had been obtained. In the confession, Tines admitted his guilt. But when the lawyers talked to Tines, he insisted he had never raped Bertha Riggs.
Tines insisted that no one had read him the confession before he signed it. Instead, he said, he thought the interrogators were trying to help him; he thought he was signing some kind of request for legal help. Tines’ version of the story—which accused a sheriff and an investigator of lying—wasn’t much to go on, but it was all his lawyers had. Tines was the only witness they would call.
On July 10, the first day of the trial, the morning was devoted to going through the 300 potential jurors. By 1:30, 12 men—all white, all “prominent citizens” as the Knoxville News Sentinel described them—had been empaneled. The jury included farmers, Union Carbide employees, construction workers, and salesmen.
A half-hour later, in the crowded courtroom on a sweltering summer day, the trial began. Nearly 200 people packed the small courtroom; every seat was filled, forcing spectators to stand in the rear of the room. The crowd spilled out into the hallway. There was no air-conditioning in the old courthouse, and all those bodies only heated up an already highly charged atmosphere.
Dr. T.L. Bowman, who had examined Riggs at Harriman Hospital, was the prosecution’s first witness. He described Riggs’ injuries, concluding, “Yes, she had been badly beaten up.”
“Was this lady able to talk coherently about this matter?” Witt asked.
“She didn’t remember, she told me, what happened.”
Bowman told the court he found “male sperm” during his gynecological examination of Riggs, but he was unable to say whether she had been penetrated recently.
Sterling Roberts, the veteran on the defense team, honed in on that point of uncertainty. Establishing that there were no bruises on Riggs’ legs or genitals, he asked Bowman, “Could you tell by your examination whether or not this woman had been raped?”
“No sir, I could not.”
Roberts persisted, suggesting that the semen could have been there as a result of an earlier encounter. The doctor replied, “I say no man could tell whether there had been a penetration.” Bertha Riggs had been a widow for 16 years.
When Riggs took the stand, she seemed to remember little about the incident. Witt asked her, “Do you actually know, of your own knowledge, whether or not you were penetrated and raped on that occasion?”
“Yes, I felt like I was.”
“How did you feel? What makes you feel like you were?”
“Well, when I come to myself, I know what I was doing and what I was going to do, and it felt like there was just blood....The doctor said I would have to be operated on, and I thought it was blood coming from where I had to be operated on, and it wasn’t. It was just a discharge.”
Witt pointed to the 33-year-old Tines and asked Riggs, “To the best of your knowledge, did you ever see this boy over here?”
Riggs said she was uncertain, so Witt hammered away at the question: “I take it, to the best of your knowledge, you don’t know whether he was the one who raped you or not?”
“No, I don’t.”
Margaret and Luther Nichols testified about their relationship with Riggs, who was their housekeeper, and they gave their version of the events that had led them to rush home on that April morning. Then the Carters told about sighting a man outside the Nichols’ house. All the while, nobody could make a positive identification of Tines.
Witt asked Clyde Carter, “This man that you saw, was he a colored man?”
“Yes, that is right.”
“How would he compare in size to the defendant over there—and looks?”
“Well, the size would be about right. His looks, at this distance away, I couldn’t say.”
During his grilling from Witt, and then from Roberts, Carter seemed to be certain of only a few details. He knew that he had seen a man wearing “convict clothes.” But he wasn’t sure whether the man was black. Mrs. Carter could draw no direct comparisons between the man and Tines. All she remembered was that he was carrying his shoes in his hand as he headed up the Nichols’ front steps. She did not see him enter the house.
The Carters, as it turned out, had only seen the man from the highway, 75 feet away from the Nichols’ screened porch.
Highway Patrol Lt. Cecil Strader described how he arrested Tines and how he noticed the blood on Tines’ clothes. After handing Tines over to prison officials, he recalled, he had gone to visit Riggs at the hospital.
The most important legal skirmish of the day came late in the afternoon, with the jury out of the courtroom. Deatheridge, one of the defense attorneys, told Hicks that he had questions about the circumstances under which Tines’ confession had been obtained and about whether it should be admitted. Deatheridge, a 34-year-old World War II veteran just a few years out of Cumberland Law School, lost the battle. Hicks said he was satisfied that the confession should be admitted.
The jury returned to the courtroom, and the confession was read into the record.
On the second day of the trial, Tines took the stand as the only witness for the defense. Johnson, the third defense attorney, guided him through the events of April 24:
Tines recalled entering the Nichols house, and he remembered hitting Riggs, but “...I don’t know what happened after then. I lost my senses. I can’t give account of it—what I did after that.”
“Did you knock her down? On the floor?”
“Yes, sir, I remember knocking her down once.”
“Then what happened? What followed that up? Where did you go and what did you do?”
“Well, I went out the house. I remember that.”
“Do you remember seeing any towels on the floor or any blood?”
“Yes, I remember wiping the lady’s face with a towel or something.”
“How come you did that? Did she ask you to or what?”
“No sir, she didn’t exactly ask me. I just felt sorry for the lady. I wanted to help.”
Johnson asked Tines if he knew anything about Riggs being raped. Tines’ reply was direct:
“No sir, I do not.”
When the questioning turned to Tines’ confession, Johnson asked him, “William, did you know what you were signing? Can you read...? Do you know what you signed?”
Tines said he could not read. He explained that he signed the paper because it would encourage his interrogators—Roane County Sheriff Robert M. Delaney and attorney general investigator John Pennington—to “get me a lawyer to help me or something.”
When it was Beecher Witt’s turn to question Tines, he hammered relentlessly away about the rape of Bertha Riggs:
“You say you were a little nervous when Sheriff Delaney and Mr. Pennington talked to you?”
“Yes, I was upset, yes sir.”
“Were you upset about raping this woman?”
“I did not rape this woman.”
“You told them you raped her.”
“Those two upset me.”
Repeatedly, Witt accused Tines of beating and raping Riggs. Repeatedly, Tines replied, “I did not rape her.”
He recounted the details of statements Tines had made to law-enforcement officials. “You said, ‘She started yelling and I grabbed her and started beating her with my fists, I knocked her down twice with my fists, I knocked her out and tore her pants....’ What did you tear her pants off for?”
“I did not tear the lady’s pants off.”
“You told them that, didn’t you?”
“No sir, I did not.”
“ ‘I tore her pants off and raped her.’ You know what ‘raped’ means, don’t you?”
“I know.”
“You know exactly what it means, don’t you?”
“I know what it means, yes sir.”
Witt forged ahead, but Tines stuck steadfastly to his story, insisting that he had signed the confession before it was read to him and all but accusing Pennington and Delaney of lying.
Witt cynically noted that Tines was accusing two law officers of lying. He pointed out that, when Tines was picked up on Highway 61, there had been blood on his clothes. He reminded his listeners that, on the day of the attack, Tines had been on the lam from Brushy Mountain. He made sure the jury understood that it was not the first time Tines had run away from prison.
Johnson interrupted with a feeble objection, but he got nowhere. The damage clearly had been done. The defense and the state rested their cases and began final arguments.
Sterling Roberts, the most experienced member of the defense team, blamed the state for allowing Tines to escape and laid the blame on prison officials. He also argued that the evidence against Tines was circumstantial, since no one could identify him as the man who entered the Nichols house.
His final plea was halfhearted: “Even if you see fit to convict Mr. Tines, you should send him back to prison, where he will stay for the rest of his life. Under the circumstances, he will not be able to escape again. He has learned his lesson.”
Beecher Witt, summarizing for the prosecution, did not mince words. He described Tines as “nothing but a brute. He entered this house and beat this little woman, broke her nose, then satisfied his animal passion by rape.” In words that sound eerily familiar in the current debate over the death penalty, he proclaimed, “The time has come when we must quit coddling the murderer, the sex fiend, and these people who rape and kill our women and children. We must act now. Gentlemen, there is no compromise. Either you give him death or let him go free or back to the penitentiary for life.”
It was 11 a.m. Over the course of two days, the trial had lasted just five hours.
The jurors filed out and crammed themselves into a long, narrow nook adjacent to the courtroom. It was approaching midday, and the thermometer was heading past 90. The open windows let in the sounds of the traffic below, but they let in little fresh air.
The night before, the 12 men of the jury had been sequestered across the river, just outside town at Parker’s Hotel. Now they were ready to get down to work. The job didn’t take them long, just 25 minutes.
As the jury foreman announced the verdict—guilty—and the sentence—death—Riggs wept. Tines’ face revealed nothing.
Recalling the trial, one juror recently suggested that Witt’s closing statement probably did the most to seal Tines’ fate. Another of the surviving jurors, LaRue Cook, remembers that it took more than one vote for the jury to reach a unanimous decision. Apparently, one man had had some questions.
But “the fact that he was an escapee had a great bearing on the outcome of the verdict and the decision to send him to the electric chair,” said Cook, who went on to buy the Roane County News. “Things are a lot different now.”
Former juror R.W. Branson, now retired from the construction business, said Tines’ fate was sealed because “he had done so many violent things, rape, murder, escape. Everybody on the jury agreed he should be executed.”
Another juror, who asked to remain anonymous, suggests that Tines was his own worst enemy: “The man should never have been put on the stand. He was not capable of defending himself. Beecher Witt just ate him up on cross- examination.”
Still, the evidence against Tines seems purely circumstantial. Nobody, not even the victim, could identify him in court. When he was picked up, three-quarters of a mile from the Nichols place, there was blood on his clothes, and the gynecological exam of Riggs had discovered semen. Still, the state had no crime lab at the time. Forensic evidence was sent to the FBI for analysis, but only when it was deemed necessary. Records of the case do not indicate whether an attempt was made to match the blood on Tines’ clothes with Riggs’ blood. It does not appear that tests were run to determine whether the semen in question even matched Tines’ blood type. DNA analysis was still in the future, and only recently has it been allowed as evidence in cases other than paternity suits.
In his final statement, Roberts had argued that the state bore some responsibility for the crime because it had let Tines escape. Yet no one from Brushy Mountain was called to testify. Tines testified that he was groggy from epilepsy medication when Delaney and Pennington questioned him. But no one from the prison medical staff was called to support or contradict his assertion. In fact, a review of Department of Corrections records shows no indication that Tines suffered from epilepsy or ever received medication. Only one medical document was found, a general physical report dated April 11, 1945, around the time Tines began his life sentence at Brushy Mountain. According to that report, Tines was in good health.
What’s more, some of the testimony in the trial contradicted statements in Tines’ confession. For example, Tines said he knocked Riggs out before raping her, but, if she had been unconscious, how was she able to bite him? At least two witnesses had seen Tines carrying his shoes in his hands before he entered the Nichols house; yet, his statement says he took his shoes off as he fled the house. On appeal, Tines’ lawyers were limited to arguing only the admissibility of the confession.
By noon on July 11, Judge Hicks had ordered Tines to be sent to the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville. Judge Hicks set Tines’ date with the electric chair for Sept. 26, 1957, less than three months away.
For three years, Tines’ lawyers’ attempted to get his conviction overturned or to have his sentence commuted. Roberts and Johnson asked Hicks for a new trial, arguing that the confession was improperly admitted because Tines had not been arraigned in a timely manner and because he had not been informed of the charges against him before he confessed.
The defense attorneys also contended that the rape charge was based on a statute that had been repealed. They argued that Hicks’ instructions to the jury did not address the law regarding confessions. And, seizing upon a notion that may have been ahead of its time, they argued that the jury should only have considered the evidence in the trial, implying that pretrial publicity might have tainted their deliberations.
Hicks turned the lawyers down. He handed down a stay of execution and instructed the defense team to appeal to the state Supreme Court. At the time there was no intermediate appeals court.
In May 1958, the Supreme Court ruled against every argument offered by Tines’ attorneys, and a new execution date was set for Aug. 8, 1958. After the U.S. Supreme Court denied Tines’ request for a new trial, yet another new execution date was set: Feb. 3, 1959.
Sometime after the high court’s decision, Tines’ family hired Knoxville lawyers Earl M. Leming and James P. Brown to examine the case and handle any further appeals.
Leming and Brown’s first move was to make a direct appeal for executive clemency to Gov. Frank Clement, who was preparing to leave office. Clement declined, deferring to his successor, the newly elected Buford Ellington. Shortly after Ellington took office, he issued a respite until May 12, 1959.
Meanwhile, James M. Hayes had taken over a new seat as a civil judge in the Knox County Circuit Court. On May 11 Leming and Brown filed with Hayes a writ of habeas corpus, demanding an inquiry as to whether Tines’ death sentence was, in fact, legal.
Hayes granted the lawyers a hearing. Because the writ had been filed, Ellington had no option except to grant Tines a last-minute reprieve. The governor rescheduled the execution for June 11.
Leming argued that Tines’ indictment inaccurately stated that the crime was committed on April 25, 1957. On that day, Tines was back in solitary confinement at Brushy Mountain. The assault had actually occurred April 24.
Eight days after the hearing, Leming amended his writ, contending that the grand jury in the Tines case was illegal because it did not consist of 12 members plus a foreman. He argued that the grand jury was further tainted because it included nine state’s witnesses in the trial. Hayes dismissed both petitions and sent Tines back to the State Penitentiary in Nashville. Hayes gave Leming 45 days to appeal to the state Supreme Court.
In July Leming filed a writ with the state Supreme Court; three months later, his writ was once again denied. Tines’ execution was rescheduled for Dec. 3, 1959. Leming managed to make one more appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Once again, his appeal failed.
Finally, on Sept. 9, 1960, the state Supreme Court lifted its stay order and reset Tines’ execution date for Nov. 7.
The entire process of Tines’ appeals—including seven stays of execution, two appeals to the state Supreme Court, and two appeals to the U.S Supreme Court—took just three years.
While lawyers filed briefs and argued in various courts, Tines was locked away on death row at the State Penitentiary in Nashville. His cell was stark; its only furnishings were a bed and a toilet. He was not allowed any personal items except a Bible. His only clothing was what he wore: a lightweight, white prison-issue T-shirt and white trousers that were designed to rip apart if he tried using them to hang himself.
He had spent the early part of his stay on the row in the prison’s old maximum-security area. There, his cell was little more than a cage, separated from other cells only by its bars. In 1958, the penitentiary opened a new maximum-security area, where cells—equipped with heating for the winter and cooling for the summer—were separated by walls. A few times each week, Tines was led to a small open-air exercise area. He also was permitted to shower by himself several times a week, and he was allowed fresh changes of clothing.
During his time on death row, Tines had learned to read a little. His only available book was his Bible.
He also received medical care. A few weeks before his execution, Tines confounded the prison doctor with tales of hallucinations in which bugs were crawling all over him. The doctor could find no cause for the hallucinations.
The Sunday before Tines’ execution, Gov. Ellington came to see him. Tines, accompanied by eight guards and shackled nearly head to toe, could barely walk as he was led into Warden Lynn Bomar’s office for his meeting with the governor.
Ellington spent about five minutes with Tines, and then the prisoner was returned to his cell. In his papers in the Tennessee State Archives, Ellington gives no indication of what the two talked about. According to contemporary newspaper accounts, the governor said that he had studied Tines’ case and that there was “nothing legal” he could do to save the man’s life.
On the day of his meeting with the governor, Tines was also visited by his mother, Lucille Neal; his stepbrother James Neal; his stepsister Ruth Neal; and his aunt Willie Mae Keith. The highway patrol had brought them in from Knoxville.
They spent the afternoon with Tines and stayed through the night until an hour before he was executed, when they were moved to the administrative offices. The prison chaplain and another minister also visited with the family.
The next day, James Neal would tell then-Nashville Banner reporter Larry Brinton, the only journalist to cover the execution, “He acted as if he was ready.”
Up to the end, his mother insisted her son had not received justice, that he was coerced into signing a confession he couldn’t read, and that he had been given “crazy pills” before he was questioned by Delaney and Pennington. But prison officials, including Warden Bomar, insisted that weeks before the execution, in an attempt to make peace with his Maker, Tines had confessed to the rape.
The night before he went to the chair, Tines was served a last meal of pork chops, french fries, eggs, and orange drink. He didn’t eat much. He was also permitted to watch television, a privilege usually denied those on death row. According to news reports, Tines’ lawyer, Earl Leming, made one last effort to stop the execution. On Sunday night he sent Ellington a telegram asking the governor to “give Tines the benefit of the doubt by commutation of his death sentence.” Leming’s appeal went unheard. Ellington’s papers contain no copy of the telegram nor any response he might have made.
On execution mornings, prison hospital superintendent Billey Smith usually arrived at the State Penitentiary about an hour ahead of time. He and his wife had lived on the prison grounds since 1956, and it was his job to make sure the death certificate was properly filled out and ready for the prison doctor’s signature.
Before 4:30 on the morning of Nov. 7, Smith was inside the death chamber, where the maintenance engineer was making a routine check to ensure that the electric chair would work. This would be Smith’s fourth—and last—execution.
Just after 4:30 a.m., four guards arrived at Tines’ cell. They led him from his cell and down a corridor past the other death-row inmates to a metal door leading to the death chamber. One guard led the way, two others flanked Tines, a fourth followed him.
In accordance with standard prison procedure, Tines wasn’t shackled. This time, he had no chance of running away.
Still wearing the white, death-row T-shirt and trousers that made his dark complexion appear even darker, he silently entered the room. Inside, he saw the wooden chair sitting off to one side.
Nearby was a panel resembling the sort of partition behind which X-ray technicians stand in a hospital or a dentist’s office. A small glass window provided a view of the chair. Behind the window was a guard who had drawn the duty of pulling the switch. It wasn’t the best duty in the prison, but it earned extra pay and extra time off.
Tines walked the 13 steps from the door to the chair. Before he knew it, he was being strapped in.
First came the leather straps that gripped his wrists to the chair’s wooden arms. Then came the straps around his ankles. Once his limbs were secure, a third leather strap was attached. It ran diagonally across Tines’ chest, from just above his hip to just below his armpit.
As the prison guards finished strapping him in, Tines made his last request. In a strong voice, he pled, “Pray for me.”
Rubber straps attached the electrodes, soaked in acid to ensure proper connections, to the side of each of Tines’ knees. A rubber headband, encircling his head, attached an electrode to his temple. Wires led off to the control room behind the panel.
Finally, a ring was lowered over his head and a black cloth was positioned over his face. At 5:05 a.m., the switch was pulled. At 5:12, prison doctor Vernon Hutton put a stethoscope to Tines’ chest and, hearing no heartbeat, pronounced him dead.
An ambulance waited outside to take the body away. Tines’ mother would later claim the remains and bury her son at Good Samaritan Cemetery, back in his native Knox County.
The execution of William Tines got little attention in the state’s major newspapers, which devoted the majority of their news space to John F. Kennedy’s election to the presidency. Larry Brinton, now of WTVF-Channel 5, wrote a short story, less than 100 words long, which was buried deep inside the Nashville Banner on the day of the execution. The Tennessean published nothing.
In Tines’ hometown of Knoxville, the daily papers paid a little more attention: The afternoon News Sentinel published eight paragraphs of a United Press International story at the bottom of Page 1, while the morning Journal ran an Associated Press story on Page 13 the following day.
In Roane County, however, Tines’ death was bigger news. The weekly Harriman Record published a front-page story under the headline “3-Year Bid for Life Fails,” with a second story inside tracing the history of state executions. The Roane County News, also a weekly, ran a story on Page 3, opposite the society page.
An Epilogue
After she recovered from her attack, Bertha Riggs went back to work for the Nichols. Luther Nichols died in 1964; his wife, Margaret, died a few months later in 1965. Riggs died sometime later. All the witnesses who testified in Tines’ trial are also dead.
After serving on Tines’ defense team, Kenneth Deatheridge went on to serve as a district attorney and retired from practicing law in 1982. Now 73, he still lives in Roane County and was recently honored as a 50-year Mason.
His co-counsel, Sterling Roberts, would later serve as a judge, an FHA administrator, and a state senator. Bronce Johnson worked briefly as an assistant attorney general before he set aside his law practice to become a land developer in Kingston. He died in the mid-’80s.
R. Beecher Witt retired as a prosecutor the year after Tines’ conviction. He had put in 32 years as an attorney general and went on to succeed Sue Hicks on the bench. He died in 1969. His son, James, is a circuit court judge in Madisonville, and his grandson, Curwood, is a nominee for a new seat on the East Tennessee appeals court.
Sue K. Hicks retired from the bench the same year Witt left the prosecutor’s office. He died in the mid-1960s. Locals say his name was the inspiration for the Johnny Cash song “ A Boy Named Sue.”
Sheriff Robert Delaney later represented Roane County in the state Legislature. He too is dead.
At least four of the jurors in the Tines trial are still alive, but even those four are reluctant to talk about the experience, their memories having faded over 39 years. One, R.W. Branson, now retired, said he would rather not talk about the trial because “it happened a very long time ago.” For Branson, however, one point remains clear: “I would do it again,” he said.
James Brown, who with Earl Leming handled Tines’ later appeals, was elected to the state Legislature in 1959. He later served as a judge for six years, retiring in 1972. He died in 1979. There are few details available about Leming’s career.
Hospital superintendent Billy Smith, who witnessed Tines’ execution, left the Tennessee State Penitentiary in 1966. He and his wife still live in Nashville, where Smith works three days a week at a discount membership sales club.
Smith remains philosophical about having watched four men die. “I’m for the death penalty,” he says. “I didn’t put those people there. I was just doing my job. I might feel a little differently if any of them had proclaimed their innocence, but none of the ones I knew did. As far as the humane side of this thing is concerned, I would say this: Electrocution is the most humane way to execute someone if you have to have a death penalty.”
In the late ’80s, when the old state prison west of downtown was being phased out, Death Row was moved to the nearby Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. In the intervening years, the old prison has been used for several movies, including Against the Wall, The Expert, and Last Dance.
The rape statute under which Tines was convicted and sentenced remained on the books until 1974.
After a series of federal court decisions declaring death to be cruel and unusual punishment for the crime of rape, the state Legislature rewrote the Tennessee law, providing for a life sentence if the victim was older than 12. It retained the death penalty for raping a child 12 or younger, but the U.S. Supreme Court also overturned that provision.
Ironically, the afternoon after Tines died, Gov. Ellington spent an hour interviewing another man, Franklin D. Smith, a 22-year-old white man from Campbell County who was scheduled to die three days later for murder. The night before, Ellington had stayed Smith’s execution until the following February so he could study the case further. On May 1, 1961, Ellington commuted Smith’s sentence to 99 years.
William Tines was the 125th, and the last, man to be executed by the state of Tennessee. His story was reconstructed from trial transcripts and court documents, from records on file in the Tennessee State Archives, 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.
Editor’s Note: On April 23, 1957, William Tines, serving two life terms for killing two other black men, escaped from Brushy Mountain Penitentiary in East Tennessee. The next morning, he found himself in the front yard of the home of Luther and Margaret Nichols on Highway 61 in rural Roane County.
Inside the house, Bertha Riggs, the Nichols’ housekeeper, was ironing clothes. When she discovered Tines, she began screaming, and he panicked. Tines beat her brutally and fled, leaving a trail of blood through the house. A later medical examination indicated that the 45-year-old white woman had been raped. Within an hour of the attack, a highway patrol trooper picked up Tines, less than a mile from the site of the attack. The escaped convict was returned to Brushy Mountain.
The next day, Tines was interrogated for approximately two hours. He admitted he beat Riggs, but he stubbornly denied raping her. An investigator from the attorney general’s office wrote out a statement, and Tines signed it, even though he could not read. The statement said Tines beat and raped Riggs.
This is the second of two installments.
