PAUL REID: THE FAST FOOD KILLER

Article BY LORI BELL

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A wanna-be country singer terrorized Nashville, Tennessee, robbing local restaurants and executing fast food workers. This violent ex-con got away with murder for weeks until he pressed his luck one time too many and fell right into law enforcement’s trap.

In Nashville, Tennessee, on February 16, 1997, Steve Hampton and Sarah Jackson prepped for the morning rush at Captain D’s restaurant. Hampton, a 25 year old father of three, had been working for the franchise since he was 15. He worked his way up from a part-time employee till finally he was named manager .

Sixteen year old Sarah Jackson had been working at Captain D’s for nearly nine months. Jackson was involved in a lot of different things at school, and got good grades. Her mother had to think twice about letting her work there along with her other activities. She was working part-time right down the street from where she lived.

At 8:15 a.m., Hampton took a call from his regional director. At 8:54 a.m., a woman drove past Captain D’s and saw two men talking in the entryway. She recognized Steve Hampton standing in the doorway talking to a white male holding a piece of paper.

The white male had dark hair and was approximately five inches taller than Hampton. The restaurant wasn’t supposed to be open for business until 10 a.m., but Hampton let the man in. Once inside the restaurant the man pulled a gun that he had hidden on him.

The man asked for Steve to open the store safe. He went in and emptied the safe of its contents. He took both Steve and Sarah into the cooler and had them lay face down on the floor. He put the muzzle to the back of Steve’s head and pulled the trigger. He shot him a second and third time as well.

The perpetrator turned to Sarah and fired two shots at close range into her head. The gunman then entered the office and removed the surveillance tapes. Suddenly there was a noise coming from the cooler. The killer returned and found Sarah struggling to pull herself up. He shot her two more times then fled the scene with the restaurant security tapes in hand. He didn’t want any clues left there at all.

At 9:30 a.m., a motorist drove past Captain D’s and saw a tall, muscular, white male walking hurriedly away from the restaurant. The man averted his eyes from the driver and got into a parked car. Moments later employee Michael Butterworth showed up for work.

Michael went to open the door but it was locked. He looked through the windows and saw that the chairs were still up and on top of the tables, which is not the norm, so he became alarmed. Michael walked around to the rear door and pounded on it.

There was no answer, so he drove to a nearby business and borrowed their phone. He started calling into the restaurant and there was no answer so he called one of the other employees of the restaurant, whose father was a police officer, to see if they could circumvent the problem, or find out what was actually going on.

Between 11 a.m. 2:12 p.m. the Nashville police entered the restaurant and they discovered the two bodies, deceased in the freezer. Investigators from robbery-homicide arrived to process the scene. There wasn’t all that much in the way of evidence left behind.

There were shoe prints on the floor, but no fingerprints themselves. This criminal, this killer was a bit more sophisticated than your average armed robber. More than $7,000 had been stolen, including $250 in coins. Steve Hampton’s wallet, which contained $600 in rent money, was also missing.

The next day on the highway, about 12 miles away, and individual picked up trash on the side of the roadway and came across Hampton’s wallet with his identification in it. There was also a plasticized movie card that had a very distinctive thumbprint on it. The print did not generate any immediate matches so it was stored away as evidence.

In the meantime, cops interviewed the Captain D’s employees who worked the night shift prior to the shooting. The police learned that at least some of them met somebody the night before, right around closing time.

Approximately 10 p.m. an individual did in fact go into the restaurant and asked for a job application. He wore a Shoney’s restaurant apron, claimed he was cook, and was looking for a change of workplace environment. The night time manager, at that point, said “ Why don’t you come back first thing tomorrow and talk to the full-time manager.”

At National Police Headquarters, February 22nd, 1997, detectives administered photo lineups to 3 Captain D’s employees to see if they could identify the suspicious night visitor. They were unable to locate anybody who resembled the person they were describing.

The police sketch artist came up with a composite drawing. Law enforcement showed the sketch to workers at the nearby Shoney’s. They asked them if they knew anyone who matched the sketch. They said yeah a guy by the name of Paul Reid, who works here.

Interestingly enough Paul Reid call in to Shoney’s restaurant on the morning of the 16th, claiming he had car trouble and couldn’t make it to the restaurant. The detectives then took Paul Reid’s name and ran it through NCIC, National Crime identification check, and it came with negative hits, the investigation stalled .

In Hermitage, Tennessee on March 23rd ,1997, 27 year old manager Ronald Santiago and three other McDonald’s workers, 23 year old Robert Sewell , 30 year old Jose Gonzalez, and seventeen-year-old Andrea Brown, clocked out for the evening. Santiago unlocked a side door and everybody started to exit.

A man with a gun approached, herded them all up, and took them straight back into a small office in the rear of the location. The individual stole money from the safe and took the entire group and put them in a dry storage room. He executed the employees one by one.

Gonzalez was about to be executed, and all of a sudden the weapon misfired. Gonzalez stood up and started fighting with the gunman. The gunman was resourceful, he picked up a knife and he started stabbing Gonzalez 17 times. Gonzalez eventually went down and pretended he was dead.

The perpetrator fled the scene. Knowing the gunman was finally gone, Gonzalez managed to crawl his way to the phone and called 911. When First Responders arrived they found Ronald Santiago and Robert Sewell dead.

They found Gonzalez still breathing but not responsive. Paramedics rushed Gonzalez to the hospital. Surgeons work through the night to keep him alive. Andrea Brown had also been rushed to the ER, but doctors pronounced her brain dead. She was removed from life support the following morning.

Meanwhile homicide detectives processed McDonald’s for forensic evidence. They knew they had a relatively sophisticated criminal, because there were no fingerprints left behind. What they did find were six Remington 25 caliber automatic casings. $2,300, mostly in coins, was missing. What they were looking at was MO very similar to the Captain D’s robbery and subsequent execution.

By the spring of 1977, five Nashville, Tennessee, food workers had been gunned down in two separate armed robberies, exactly five weeks apart. At the most recent crime scene, there was an eyewitness Jose Gonzalez, who cops had under 24/7 surveillance at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

He was in pretty bad shape, he had knife wounds all over his body, he couldn’t even really talk to the police when they came in, but through signs, symbols, and nodding, and eventually some whispering, he gave the best description he could of the killer that night.

With Gonzalez’s assistance they were able to come up with a composite sketch of a white male with dark hair, mustache, and a baseball cap. The investigators compared Gonzalez rendering to the one generated by Captain D’s employees a month earlier.

Unfortunately the composite sketch from the McDonald’s location didn’t exactly match the composite sketch generated from the Captain D’s restaurant location. Despite the mismatch law enforcement went public just days later and thought that the two crimes shared some hard to ignore similarities.

In Clarksville, Tennessee, on April 23rd, 1997, Angela Holmes and Michelle Mace were finishing up the night shift serving ice cream to customers at a local Baskin-Robbins. Angela Holmes is 21 years old, the night manager at the restaurant, a wife, and a mother to a little girl. Michelle Mace was a 16 year old high school student, working part time.

Angela escorted the final Patron out of the restaurant then locked the front door. As the last customer left she noticed a red car that slowed down and turned into the parking lot of Baskin-Robbins. Michelle Mace’s brother, Craig, arrived to pick her up from work.

He waited for approximately 15 minutes, he doesn’t see her, and he doesn’t hear from her, so he started making phone calls and there was no answer on the calls either. Craig approached the ice cream parlor. He found the front door to be locked, and he went inside.

All the lights were off, he started calling out to people, but nobody responded. Michelle and Angela were nowhere to be found. He ran back out and called 911 immediately. Police arrived at the scene. They found the top to the floor safe on an office desk.

The only money in the store was inside Angela and Michelle’s purses, which seemed to have been left behind. Approximately $1,200 in cash was missing. The video tape from the surveillance system was also missing.

For the third time there was a robber taking money, and taking the video tape, but this time crime scene technicians caught a break. They found some viable shoe prints on the floor, as well as three identifiable latent fingerprints. Obviously there had been some foul play. Within an hour or two that night, police looked all over the metropolitan area for the two young women.

At Dunbar Cave State Park, April 24th, 1997, a man walking his dog made a grisly discovery. The dog alerted him to the fact that there was a body in a nearby lake. Investigators arrived and examined the body.

It was a woman, her hands had been bound behind her back with a Baskin-Robbins apron. They searched the woods nearby for clues. Approximately 100 feet away was a second victim. The woman in the woods was Michelle Mace, the one in the water was Angela Holmes. Both victims suffered long and slow deaths. They were stabbed multiple times and their throats were sliced, and they were left like trash.

The police continued their investigation, of course, into who was this killer, but at the same time they were also increasing their surveillances and patrols around individual restaurants. They had officers working undercover in the role of fast-food employees, who were obviously going to be armed should this individual attempt this again.

They basically were going to set up and see if they could possibly catch him. The killer didn’t take the bait. Weeks passed with no action.

In Joelton, Tennessee, on June 1st, 1997, 45 year old Mitchell Roberts who managed a Shoney restaurant in Nashville, was home with his family. His son was recording a home video when an unexpected visitor showed up at the front door. It was his former employee Paul Reid.

Mitchell had fired Reid back on February 27th, which was 11 days after the Captain D’s murders. Now Reid was on his doorstep begging for his old job back. Mitchell informs him he can’t hire him back and walks Reid to his car.

Reid pulled a gun on him, pulled handcuffs out of his pocket, instructed Mitchell to put them on, and said “You are coming with me.” Mitchell ran back to his front door. Reid followed, only now he was armed with a knife.

At the porch, Mitchell fought back. He pushed Reid and slammed the door in his face yelling to his wife to get a gun, despite the fact he didn’t own a gun, he was trying to intimidate Reid. The tactic worked. Reid ran back to his car and sped off.

Minutes later, Mitchell was in his living room recanting the crazy events to law enforcement, when something even crazier happened. The phone rang, and who was it? Paul Reid. He wanted to apologize. Mitchell, at the officer’s request, coaxed Reid to return to the house.

When Reid arrived at the location, he was taken down and into custody immediately. Sheriff’s deputies escorted Reid back to the station. They booked him and interviewed him, and he gave them a false birthdate. Due to the fact he gave an erroneous birthdate, there was no solid pings on him in NCIC.

Reid was booked into Cheatham County jail for assault, but could be released on bail in no time. Mitchell was determined not to let that happen. Believing his former employee was the Fast-Food Killer, Mitchell pressed the authorities to file more severe charges.

The police decided, that they would, in fact, charge Reid with attempted kidnapping and aggravated assault. That made sure he wouldn’t get out that night. Now they had him in custody and they could do the rest of the investigation, which was just about to kick into high gear.

Officers quickly reached out to Jose Gonzalez, the lone survivor from the murder spree. Gonzalez went through over 300 photos and he picked out Paul Reid as the individual that perpetrated the attack.

Investigators Revisited the fingerprint they found on Hamptons movie card. When it was tested it was the fingerprint of Paul Reed. Now there was no question, that put him at the scene of Captain D’s. The knot was tightening on Paul Reed. Investigators searched Reeds apartment.

They found four 1 gallon jugs that contained more than $1,000 in coins. They also found a pair of white sneakers containing traces of human blood. On the bottom of Reid’s shoes forensics found DNA exemplars which were related to both of the employees at the Baskin Robbins restaurant.

Investigators searched reads car, a red Ford Escort. Fibers taken from the back seat and floor mats matched fibers found on the clothing of Michelle Mayes and Angela Holmes. CSI was building a case against this person and really putting the noose even tighter around Reed’s neck.

Detectives interrogated Reid for 8 hours, believing the ex-cons was responsible for the murders of seven fast-food workers during a two-month killing spree. Reid emphatically denied he had anything to do with any of the murders. There was overwhelming evidence against him so they were going to, in fact, charge him with all those murders and take him to trial.

Prosecutors spent the next year-and-a-half building their case against Reid. Who exactly is Paul Dennis Reid? Reid was born in Fort Worth, Texas, November, 1957. His parents divorced when he was approximately 3 years old. His father was a raging alcoholic.

Young Paul spent lots of time with his paternal grandmother, who he terrorized by putting tacks in her food, sprayed her with a water hose, and barricaded her in her room. At one point he attempted to set his grandmother on fire while she was sleeping in her bed.

By the age of eight Reid was completely out of control and he was ultimately turned over to a home for boys. By the time he was a teenager, neither of his parents wanted him around. When he was 16, he attempted to sexually assault both his mother and his sister, so his mother kicked him out of the house.

He went back to live with his father but there he attempted to sexually assault his other sister, he was kicked out of that house, and ended up being arrested for auto theft. Paul received three years probation, but he wasn’t scared straight, instead he delved deeper into a life of crime. He had quite an extensive record with robberies, check fraud, and auto theft.

In April 1984, Reid was sentenced to 20 years behind bars for robbing restaurants and a hardware store. Reid was released after only serving seven years. Several criminal justice professionals and experts told as many people as they could, he was a danger to society, he was going to hurt somebody else, but it didn’t matter.

Reid did his seven years, the prisons were too crowded, it was time to put Reid back on the streets. That was a big mistake. Less than a year out, Reid was working as a truck driver in Fort Worth, Texas, when he got into a horrific accident.

He received nearly two years of workman’s comp and a $25,000 settlement. What did he choose to spend it on? Plastic surgery. He had a skin peel, he had his ears pinned back, some dental work done to straighten out his teeth, because he had a new goal, to be a country western singer.

He took music lessons and where should he move to further that career? Nashville, Tennessee. In September 1995, he dressed the part with a cowboy hat, boots, and blue jeans. He told people his name was Justin Parks, the next Garth Brooks.

Within a month, Reid was working as a cook in a local restaurant. Before long, he turned back to what he knew, armed robbery. Only this time he vowed to never again leave any witnesses.

Fast forward to April, 1999, Paul Reid would spend the next 13 months in court facing three separate capital murder trials. First for the Captain D’s murders, second for the Baskin-Robbins slayings, and last, for the triple homicide at McDonalds. They were going to ask for the death penalty in each of these trials.

The prosecution presented their witnesses to illustrate Reid, was in fact, the killer. They also presented that Reid was in debt, but he had large amounts of cash in his possession, so why didn’t he pay off the debts, because obviously he recently acquired all this cash.

Prosecutors also had Jose Gonzalez, the lone surviving eyewitness to the murders. He was the final nail in the coffin of Paul Reid when the jury heard what he had to say. Reid did not take the witness stand in any of the three trials.

The heart of his defense was the head injuries suffered throughout his life, had rendered him with a broken brain. His lawyers provided the courts with brain scans and testimony from doctors who diagnose Reid with four conditions including chronic paranoid schizophrenia and Anosognosia - symptoms of psychosis in which a person cannot recognize that he or she is sick.

His defense was going to bring up that Reid had many mental deficits and trauma that led him to commit the crimes that he did, therefore he was not culpable. The only problem with that theory was the fact that if you were that mentally damaged then you were probably not going to be able to sit there and plan all these things out.

Read was convicted of a total of 7 counts of murder, one of attempted murder, and was assigned the death penalty. Reid spent several years appealing his convictions. In a strange series of events in March of 2003, Paul Reid wrote a letter. He wanted to drop all of his appeals of his death sentence.

Families of the victims actually showed up at the prison. The last minute, almost literally, Reid chickened out. In Nashville, Tennessee, on November 1, 2013, at 5:55 pm, Paul Dennis Reid died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pneumonia.

Paul Reid, from his earliest days, was trouble, he grew into a troubled man. He was selfish, he was narcissistic. Well robbery was his motive for committing those crimes, there was a sadistic side of him that he could not control awnd he actually enjoyed taking these people’s lives. His seven death sentences are the most ever handed down to a single person in the state of Tennessee.