By Judith A. Yates
This is an excerpt from the author’s book When Nashville Bled, published here as she submitted it to the magazine.
Josephine Reid was sleeping soundly in her bed. She deserved a rest, given her age and all her responsibilities. Josephine was in her seventies, did not have much money, and she was expected to feed and clothe two grandchildren with no help from their father, Paul, her son. She also cared for her bedridden mother. The widow did not drive or own a car; she kept her small house tidy. So, when the exhausted Josephine jerked awake to the smell of smoke, it took a moment to realize what was happening. The corner of her bedsheets had been set afire. As she beat down the flames with her hands, there stood one of her grandchildren, holding a used match and smiling at his handiwork. His name was Paul Dennis Reid, Jr. He was five years old. He would grow up to be a serial killer.
It would not be the last time Paul, Jr. would attempt to seriously harm his grandmother. He tried to shred her mouth and throat when he slipped tacks into her soup. Paul Jr. had barricaded her in rooms, beaten her little dog to death with a ball bat, scooped fish out of their tank to fillet them, and spray her in the face with the water hose until she was gurgling.
While trying to survive Paul’s attacks, Josephine knew he was also a menace in the neighborhood. He destroyed other children’s things as well as his own. He stole mail from mailboxes as soon as he could reach. His grandmother could not take him to the store because his penchant for taking and pocketing whatever he wanted, including a woman’s purse.
In a fit of helplessness, she caught him and tied him to a chair in a desperate attempt to keep others safe. But she rarely caught him. Paul would scramble up a tree or to a roof and taunt her.
Paul was the only boy with two sisters, Janet and Linda. He was born to Joni and Paul Reid on November 12, 1957. Little Paul had thick, dark hair and dark eyes and a malformation of his left ear at birth. Later, some doctors would guess this indicated brain damage to the left temporal lobe. Paul Jr. would always have poor hearing in his left ear. Paul was developmentally delayed, according to a psychiatrist, by five to nine months. He walked at 18 months of age. His first words did not pass his lips until he was two. He was not combining words until 36 months.
Paul was three years old when his parents divorced. Joni took Linda. Paul, Sr. took Paul and Janet. An alcoholic, Paul Sr. dumped his two children on their paternal grandmother, Josephine Marie Reid, when she was already overwhelmed. Paul Sr. would marry several times. But mostly, he was married to the bottle. When he became school aged, Little Paul Reid did not go to school because no one seemed concerned over his enrolling. He was seven years old when a relative finally enrolled him in first grade. The schoolyard provided a new place for his theft and bullying behavior. Only a few months into the school year he was sent to a psychologist, who determined the boy suffered from “minimal cerebral dysfunction.” In later years it would be called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
According to one scholar: Minimal Brain Dysfunction (MBD) or ADHD refers to an impairment of brain functions that affects the area of the brain associated with perception, behavior, and academic ability... one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using spoken or written language (it is) characterized by dyslexia, difficulty in writing, hyperactivity, or mental retardation. (Rosa, D. 2015)
Rosa also explains “minimal” is “reference to the degree of lesion or damage to the brain causing the dysfunction.” In layman’s terms, Paul had a slight learning problem.
At some point in his childhood, Paul Reid was prescribed Equinol, a psychoactive medicine. After a few months he showed improvement in his behavior and his dosage was increased. The extra milligrams slurred his speech, so the dosage was lowered again.
Josephine was at her wit’s end the day she was nursing a bleeding ear. Paul had hurled a saltshaker at her, aiming to seriously injure her. A pious woman, she called on her priest to help. Her priest sat her down to discuss her options, but ended with, “You’re going to have to get this boy out of your house.” Josephine contacted Paul Sr. and explained eight-year-old Paul should be sent to a Catholic school for boys in the hopes of straightening him out. Not knowing what to do with this out-of-control boy, Paul Sr. turned his son over to the Burnett Baylor Boy’s Home in Houston. This was not an orphanage, but a home for incorrigible children who were a potential menace to society.
And there were the accidents. At five years old, Paul Jr. was hit in the back of his head with a brick that another child threw at him. “He would get dizzy sometimes, or have these temper outbursts,” family will say. At the age of 12 he received a mini-bike for Christmas and was showing off when he wrecked; it fractured his skull. Later, he was in a car accident and his head hit the windshield. Paul Jr. seemed to be a magnet for accidents. His cranium caught much of the damage.
After one of the childhood accidents, he was kept for observation at a hospital. Nurses would recall, over 20 years later, how Paul would purposely disrupt and act out. He would scream, sitting up in his hospital bed, for parents that never came.
The Burnett Baylor Boy’s Home contacted Jonie because they required her signature to release him to State custody; she was shocked to learn Paul was being set up for adoption. Jonie came to pick him up when she learned where Paul was living. “Do you know who this is, Paul?” he was asked. He lied and said he knew the strange woman who had come to take him away from the Home. He was nine years old. Jonie, not wanting anything to do with Paul’s father, including hearing his last name in her house, renamed the boy Paul Leon Morez. She gave him her current husband’s last name. There was never a legal name change.
Jonie’s daughters remember their mother as a kind, good woman who worked hard and did her finest for her children. She expected her children to do their best and arise from bad situations. An imprisoned adult Paul would recall a difficult childhood, citing physical abuse from a “puritanical, very austere, dominating” mother who beat him with her hand, a belt, coat hangers, and a belt buckle in their first year together. He then lamented he deserved the whippings.
As an adult, Paul created an idyllic childhood in his interviews with professionals. He claimed he was active in 4-H from ages nine to sixteen and that he raised various fowl, rabbits, and even a horse. He grew watermelons and carrots. He was enrolled in Little League baseball, was on a basketball team, and was a member of a swim team. He was spoiled, with lavish Christmas and birthday gifts, that included drum lessons and a complete drum set. He said he was an altar boy, involved in the Catholic Church. As a boy, Paul watched bodybuilder Jack LaLanne’s television show in the mid 1960s. Paul decided to emulate LaLanne, so he refrained from smoke or drink, preferring instead to lift weights and work out. Anywhere he went as an adult, he had a gym membership. Coworkers recall the “super” strength Paul Reid exhibited; he was always the person to call when heavy lifting was involved.
Paul attended Houston, Texas’ Boston Elementary. He was placed in the special education classes, riding the yellow bus every morning to school with six other students. The bus traveled across town; Boston Elementary was known as a “black school” until 1969, Paul’s first year. In a possible lie to create his own childhood, Paul wrote he was the football quarterback, and the only white player. He made friends with the other students, heedless of racial tensions then dividing America. Because he could not read, he had no idea of what was going on around him in politics and civil rights. In 1970 the special education curriculum was moved to Gregg Elementary, an “all-white” school. Paul was so embarrassed to be seen on the “yellow bus” he would duck and run to class once the bus arrived and swung its doors open. Eventually he made friends, including little girls. At a party given by one of the girls, Paul had his first kiss. He was 12.
Paul moved on to Jackson Junior High middle school. The student population here was racially mixed: white, black, Hispanic. His mother moved him into the Pasadena School District at South Houston Middle School. Here, for the first time in his educational career, Paul was not in special education classes.
One predominant theme in Paul Reid’s life is his claim of sexual prowess. Later, he would claim he was a hit with the young ladies in school, and the girls fought over who would be his “girlfriend.” Embarrassed to have been labeled “Special Ed,” he excelled in sports because he was fearful of name-calling by his peers.
Paul met a boy named Stewart in an eighth-grade science class. Both boys lived about a mile from the school, and saw one another on a social basis. Stewart would later figure into Paul’s adult criminal life. Paul lived with his extended family; he was 13 when Jonie divorced Paul’s stepfather, Mr. Morez. Paul lived with his mother until he turned 16.
By now, Jonie managed an exclusive Houston restaurant, and she allowed Paul to work there when he turned 12. Perhaps she was trying to teach him the value of work, and to keep him out of trouble. He cleaned tables at the Club Castile restaurant, located on the ninth floor of the thirty-story Houston House. Paul later explained he shuffled an ice bin from the Club Castile to the nightclub, called The Little Club. He also stole food and, when caught, claims Jonie would shrug it off. He would lock the doors of The Little Club and allow the Houston House teen residents to drink beer, play pool, and smoke marijuana on the balcony. In return, Paul was invited to the teen parties at their parents’ posh suites and apartments. Eventually Paul transferred to work in the kitchen, cleaning, washing dishes, and retrieving items for the chefs. The chefs taught him how to cook exquisite dishes. He then became a bar boy, dressed in a tuxedo complemented with a black bow tie and red vest. The seemingly dapper boy bantered with customers and cleaned and stocked glasses.
In 1971, Jonie rented an apartment at the Houston House. They resided on the 21st floor while a realtor searched for their permanent home. Jonie married for a third time in 1971. Paul said he fought often with this man, and would leave the house for days at a time.
It was during this time Paul claimed he became sexually active with several of the residents. He always described the women as beautiful and wealthy. He bounced from high school to high school, working where he could, until dropping out. He would eventually obtain his GED in 1977 at San Jacinto Junior College in Pasadena, Texas. Later, his sisters would say a stepfather sexually abused them. They do not reveal the perpetrator’s name.
To read his own account of his childhood, it sounded idyllic. In truth, Paul Leon Morez, aka Paul Dennis Reid Jr., was stacking up paper in the Juvenile Courts of Texas. There are juvenile records of auto theft and simple assault. At 16 he was picked up for auto theft but received three years’ probation. Several simple assault charges were added to his rap sheet. Paul remained an incurable thief with a quick, evil temper. He was not a bad-looking kid, with those dark eyes, long lashes, and thick brown hair. But behind the looks lay a mind that constantly, illegally schemed.
Court records report he attempted to sexually assault his sisters and his mother, and for this his family showed him the door. He would later deny their outcries. Paul turned up at his father’s front door soon afterward, looking for shelter. Paul Sr. continued to be a stranger in his own home, and this left Paul Jr. with plenty of time on his hands to do whatever he pleased. Though he claimed to hate drugs, he occasionally skipped school and used drugs with his sister who became addicted to heroin.
Paul Reid claimed he dated a rich, older married woman from 1975 to 1977. She lived in one of Houston’s elite neighborhoods and they had a daughter together in a planned pregnancy. In return, Paul received handsome clothing, free vacations, expensive meals, and more. Paul continued to describe his lovers as wealthy, attractive, and powerful women.
Paul Reid would enroll in a nine-month program in a vocational school, graduated, and was hired at a petroleum equipment company in 1980 as an industrial machinist. He also listed employment as a bank guard. Paul was still a thief, breaking into closed businesses to steal everything from jewelry to televisions. Stewart was his accomplice. In later memoirs, Paul would write Stewart “is the daredevil and I was the thrillseeker” [sic]. His crimes became more serious. Sometimes with Stewart, he began robbing restaurants in 1982, brandishing weapons at people and removing the cash from the registers and the safe. Paul also robbed a hardware store. The pair were identified by witnesses who were all too eager to see these terrorizing robbers behind bars.
In 1982, Paul was caught and charged with robbing four restaurants and the hardware store. A Pasadena rap sheet shows he was quite familiar with robbery. He underwent psychiatric evaluation at Rusk State Hospital and was found competent to stand trial. Paul and Stewart pled guilty to one aggravated robbery and six other counts were dismissed. In February 1985 Paul Reid plopped a blanket, sheets, and a plastic-covered pillow onto a bunk in Huntsville’s Ellis II Unit in the Texas State prison system, preparing for a 20-year sentence.
“Next time,” he would tell fellow inmates, “I’ll do it right. I won’t leave witnesses.”
He kept his word. Reid is suspected of a 1980 robbery of a Texas bowling alley where three young people were murdered and one barely escaped with his life. In Tennessee, he would be convicted of killing seven young people in 1997 during robberies. There are similar murders where Reid is a suspect. Sentenced to seven death sentences, Paul Dennis Reid, Jr. died of natural causes in 2013.
The five-year-old boy who set his grandmother on fire had become a serial killer. And when he died, many people hoped he was burning in hell.
Barkley, R. (1998). Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: A handbook for diagnosis and treatment. New York: Guilford Press.
Rosa D. (2010) Minimal Brain Dysfunction. In: Clauss-Ehlers C.S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural School Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-71799-9_256
This is an excerpt from Judith A. Yates’s book When Nashville Bled, which she submitted to the magazine, and it is reproduced as submitted; only the closing purchase link, photo credits and author biography are omitted. The archive already carries PAUL REID THE FAST FOOD KILLER on the murders themselves, and Reid’s roster entry records the seven Tennessee convictions, the seven death sentences, and his death at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on November 1, 2013. Two details are the author’s and are left as she gave them: the mother’s name appears as both Joni and Jonie, and the Rosa citation is dated 2015 in the text and 2010 in the reference list.