Paul Dennis Reid: three restaurants, seven death sentences and a fight over his mind

• BornNovember 1957, Texas, according to his trial record
• Known asThe ‘Fast Food Killer’, in later true-crime accounts
• Convicted ofSeven murders at three restaurants in Nashville and Clarksville, Tennessee, February–April 1997
• ArrestedJune 1997, in Cheatham County, Tennessee, after an alleged attempt to kidnap a former manager
• TrialsThree: Captain D’s (Nashville, April 1999), Baskin-Robbins (Clarksville, September 1999), McDonald’s (Nashville, 2000)
• SentenceSeven death sentences, all upheld by the Tennessee Supreme Court
• Died1 November 2013, in a Nashville hospital, aged 55; never executed

Paul Dennis Reid killed seven people during robberies of three fast-food restaurants in Middle Tennessee between February and April 1997: two workers at a Captain D’s in Donelson, Nashville, three at a McDonald’s in nearby Hermitage, and two at a Baskin-Robbins in Clarksville, who were taken from the shop and stabbed. A fourth McDonald’s employee survived. Reid, a Texas parolee who had come to Nashville hoping to sing country music, was arrested in June 1997 after an alleged attempt to kidnap a former manager. Three juries convicted him in 1999 and 2000 and gave him seven death sentences. He was never executed. After a decade of litigation over whether he was competent to give up his appeals, he died in a Nashville hospital on 1 November 2013, aged 55.

The killings frightened restaurant workers across the region; the Associated Press reported in 1999 that some parents had forbidden their children to take fast-food jobs. But the case is remembered as much for what came after. Reid came within hours of execution in 2003 and within a day in 2006, and each time a court stopped it over the same question: could a man with documented brain damage and long-held beliefs that the government was controlling him rationally choose to die? The Tennessee Supreme Court called him “a human conundrum”, and in 2013 used his case to set a single competency test for post-conviction cases in the state.

This account rests on opinions of the Tennessee Supreme Court and the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, a Tennessee courts press release, Associated Press reports from 1997 to 2013, a 2006 Amnesty International appeal, reporting by WPLN and WKRN in Nashville and a later account in The Lineup, all listed at the end. Where they disagree, it says so. In line with this site’s rules, the people Reid killed, their families, the man who survived and Reid’s own family are not named.

A Texas record

Reid was born in Texas in November 1957, according to evidence given at his first trial. His parents divorced when he was three, and he was raised largely by his father and a grandmother before moving to his mother’s home, which he was told to leave at sixteen. He suffered several head injuries as a child and young man, and brain scans taken in 1998 showed damage to the left side of his brain, which defence experts later linked to his delusions.

His juvenile record included car theft and assault. As an adult he was charged in Texas with armed robberies, found incompetent to stand trial and sent to a psychiatric hospital; the court records give two different dates for this (see below). In 1984 he was convicted of aggravated robbery in Harris County, which includes Houston, and sentenced to twenty years. The prosecutor in that case later told a Tennessee jury that Reid had clowned in front of the jury at his competency trial and stopped as soon as the jurors left. According to the AP, he was paroled in 1990.

Nashville, 1995–1997

Reid moved to Nashville to pursue a career in country music, according to the court records and the AP; a co-worker testified that he arrived in 1995, went back to Texas and returned in 1996. He worked as a cook at a Shoney’s about two miles from the Captain D’s in Donelson and, by early 1997, was taking developmental courses at Volunteer State Community College.

Money was short. Two co-workers testified at all three of his trials that in January 1997 Reid talked about robbing a fast-food restaurant late at night, when there would be no witnesses, and asked them to help him get a gun. In February 1997 he left Shoney’s; whether he quit or was fired, and when, is one of the points on which the accounts differ.

Captain D’s, Donelson: 16 February 1997

On the morning of Sunday 16 February 1997 the manager of the Captain D’s on Lebanon Road, aged 25, and a 16-year-old high school student who worked there part-time were preparing to open when they were forced to the floor of the walk-in cooler and shot from behind. About $7,000 was taken, along with the manager’s wallet.

The next day police searching beside Ellington Parkway in East Nashville, alerted by a passer-by, found the manager’s driving licence and a video rental card. Reid’s right thumbprint was later found on the card. In the days after the killings, according to the evidence at trial, he paid more than $5,000 in cash to lease a new red Ford Escort.

McDonald’s, Hermitage: 23 March 1997

On 23 March 1997 four employees of the McDonald’s on Donelson Pike in Hermitage had just finished the night shift when a man with a small handgun forced them back inside, made the manager empty the safe, ordered them to lie on the floor of a storage area and shot three of them: the 27-year-old manager and two co-workers aged 23 and 17. All three died. When he turned the gun on the fourth worker it failed to fire. The attacker stabbed him repeatedly, 17 times according to the AP and WKRN; the worker pretended to be dead and, once the gunman had gone, telephoned 911.

According to police testimony at trial, no fingerprints or other physical evidence linked Reid to the restaurant. The survivor looked through hundreds of police photographs and identified Reid about four months after the attack. He later testified against him.

Baskin-Robbins, Clarksville: 23–24 April 1997

On the night of 23 April 1997 two young women aged 21 and 16 were closing the Baskin-Robbins on Wilma Rudolph Boulevard in Clarksville, north-west of Nashville. Shortly after ten o’clock a relative arrived to collect the younger woman and found the shop lit, unlocked and empty, the till emptied and the safe opened. Their bodies were found the next morning at the Dunbar Cave State Natural Area, a few miles away. Both had been stabbed.

According to the Tennessee Supreme Court’s summary of the trial evidence, a credit card receipt put Reid at a petrol station less than a mile from the shop at 9.45 that evening, blood on one of his shoes matched the DNA profile of the older woman, and fibres on both women’s clothing were consistent with his car.

The arrest

In June 1997 Reid went to the home of the Shoney’s manager who had employed him, armed, the manager later testified, with a handgun and a knife, and, according to police and the court records, tried to kidnap him. The attempt failed. The Tennessee Supreme Court records Reid’s arrest in Cheatham County, west of Nashville, on 12 June 1997, and says it was this arrest, which gave police his fingerprints and photograph, that first made him a suspect in the Captain D’s case. Soon afterwards, the AP reported, he was charged with the five Nashville murders. At his arraignment he said he was innocent, and he maintained that for the rest of his life.

Three trials, seven death sentences

Each robbery was tried separately. In the Captain D’s case, before Judge Cheryl Blackburn of the Davidson County Criminal Court, Reid was convicted on 14 April 1999 of two counts of first-degree murder and of especially aggravated robbery, and the jury sentenced him to death on both murder counts; the judge added 25 years for the robbery. No question was raised about his competence, the state Supreme Court later noted, though his lawyers presented evidence of his brain injuries and mental illness at sentencing.

The Baskin-Robbins trial followed in Montgomery County in September 1999. Eight days before it began, his lawyers asked for a ruling on his competence; after a three-day hearing, at which defence experts said he was psychotic and a state psychiatrist that he tended to malinger, the judge found him competent. The jury, brought from Memphis because of local publicity according to the AP, convicted him of both murders, kidnapping and robbery, and on 22 September 1999 sentenced him to death twice more.

The McDonald’s case was tried in Nashville in 2000, again before Judge Blackburn. According to the state Supreme Court’s opinion, a court-appointed psychiatrist told a pre-trial hearing that Reid was not competent, while the state’s psychologist said his delusions were in remission; the judge found him competent. He was convicted of three murders, of attempting to murder the survivor and of robbery, and sentenced to death three more times. That made seven.

The Tennessee Supreme Court upheld all three sets of convictions and sentences: the Captain D’s case on 26 November 2002, the Baskin-Robbins case on 24 May 2005 and the McDonald’s case in December 2006, each time rejecting the argument that he should not have been tried. In the last, according to the court’s press release, Justice Adolpho A. Birch Jr., concurring in part, called on the governor to suspend lethal injections pending further study.

Hours from execution, 2003

After the Captain D’s appeal failed, the state Supreme Court set an execution date of 29 April 2003. That spring Reid told the courts and the governor that he would not appeal further and accepted his sentence. One of his sisters and his lawyers then went to federal court, arguing as his “next friend” that he was too ill to make that decision. District Judge Todd J. Campbell questioned Reid and refused to let the petition proceed, but on 28 April the Sixth Circuit stayed the execution and ordered a full competency hearing.

Less than three hours before the lethal injection was due, the AP reported, Reid signed a petition for post-conviction relief in the state courts, and the execution, which would have been only Tennessee’s second since 1960, was postponed indefinitely. Within months, according to the Tennessee Supreme Court, he asked to withdraw that petition.

The competency fight, 2004–2013

For the next decade the litigation turned on one question: was Reid competent to abandon his appeals? He said he was; the state Office of the Post-Conviction Defender and later his sisters said he was not. In June 2006 the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that anyone seeking to have him declared incompetent had to prove it by clear and convincing evidence.

By then a date had been set in the Baskin-Robbins case, 28 June 2006, and Reid had again given up his appeals. His other sister filed a next-friend petition in federal court backed by expert evidence, and on 27 June Judge Campbell found enough doubt about Reid’s competence to stay the execution. On 7 July 2006 the Sixth Circuit refused the state’s request to lift the stay; one judge, dissenting in part, criticised the state for having been unable or unwilling to hold a full competency hearing in three years. According to the Tennessee Supreme Court, the state told the federal court that August that its own expert had found Reid incompetent to waive his appeals, and the hearing was never held. An execution date of 3 January 2008 in the McDonald’s case, set in December 2006 according to the court’s press release, also passed.

In May 2008 courts in Nashville and Clarksville held separate hearings on the petitions filed on his behalf. Experts disagreed about whether his delusions were genuine, and in December 2008 both courts ruled that incompetence had not been proved. The Court of Criminal Appeals agreed in August 2011.

On 24 January 2013 the Tennessee Supreme Court unanimously affirmed. Writing for the court, Justice William C. Koch Jr. described Reid as undeniably brain-damaged, a man who claimed his trials had been mock trials and his lawyers actors, yet who had told mental health professionals that his delusions were a hoax he had used before to escape prosecution. “Is Paul Reid a mentally ill man who tries to appear sane or a sane man who tries to appear mentally ill?” the court asked. It held that incompetence had not been proved by clear and convincing evidence, so his family and lawyers could not pursue appeals against his wishes, and it set one competency standard for all future post-conviction cases.

Death, 2013

Reid was held on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. He had been in hospital for about two weeks, a Department of Correction spokeswoman told the AP, when he was pronounced dead at Nashville General Hospital at Meharry at 5.55 pm on 1 November 2013, aged 55. The state said the medical examiner would determine the cause; WKRN reported three days later, citing unnamed sources, that he died of complications from pneumonia, heart failure and respiratory problems. Relatives of some of those he killed spoke of finality; one said he had wanted Reid to admit the killings and never got the chance.

Where the accounts differ

• Leaving Shoney’s: an AP report from 1997 said he was fired as a cook on 15 February 1997, the day before the Captain D’s killings; AP reports in 2003 and 2013 said he was fired as a dishwasher after throwing a plate at a co-worker; the Tennessee Supreme Court’s 2013 opinion says he quit in early February; its 2002 opinion says he quit ‘a short time after these murders’.
• The fingerprints: the AP reported in 1997 that fingerprints had been found at the Captain D’s and on the manager’s driving licence; the Tennessee Supreme Court’s 2002 opinion says none of his fingerprints were found at the restaurant and that the print that mattered was his thumbprint on a video rental card found by a roadside.
• Why the survivor lived: the 1997 AP report said the killer ‘ran out of bullets’; the Tennessee Supreme Court’s opinions say the gun malfunctioned, or jammed.
• The Texas incompetency finding: one passage of the 2002 opinion says two felony indictments were dismissed in 1978 on a finding of permanent incompetence and that he was committed to a psychiatric hospital but later found to be malingering; another passage of the same opinion, and the 2013 opinion, say he was charged with armed robberies in 1982 and hospitalised after being found incompetent.
• Time served in Texas: the AP reported in 1997 that he served about eight years of his 20-year sentence before parole in 1990; The Lineup says seven.
• The car: the 1997 AP report said he leased a red 1997 Ford Escort in March; the Tennessee Supreme Court’s 2002 opinion records cash payments for the lease on 18 and 20 February 1997, days after the Captain D’s robbery.
• The arrest: the 1997 AP report said he was arrested on a Sunday after the manager subdued him and called police; The Lineup says the manager barricaded his family inside the house; the Tennessee Supreme Court gives the date of his arrest in Cheatham County as 12 June 1997.
• Giving up his appeals in 2003: the AP reported on 29 April 2003 that he had dropped his appeals ‘last month’, in March; the Tennessee Supreme Court dates his letter renouncing them to 14 April 2003.
• The 2003 federal ruling: the AP reported that Judge Campbell found Reid mentally ill but able to understand the consequences of dropping his appeals; the Tennessee Supreme Court describes the ruling as a dismissal because his sister had not made a basic showing that he was incompetent.
• Cause of death: WKRN, citing unnamed sources, reported complications from pneumonia, heart failure and upper respiratory problems; The Lineup gives chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pneumonia; the AP and WPLN reported only that the medical examiner would decide.

The portrait

The portrait above is a detail of the coloring page drawn for Bloody America, which gives one killer to each state. The full page shows Reid with swept-back hair and a moustache, looking sideways, against towering stacks of coins. A large serrated knife stands on one side and a revolver on the other, beside medallions holding a pistol and a fixed-blade knife. In one corner is a map of the United States labelled Tennessee; in the other, a hooded reaper with a scythe beside the figure 7. The nameplate, framed by skulls and crossed bones, reads “Paul Dennis Reid”, “The Fast-Food Killer” and “Feb–Apr 1997”, with a judge’s gavel and a ticket marked “Death” beneath it. For other case files, see Richard Ramirez, Douglas Gretzler and Anthony Sowell.

If you find an error in this account, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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Questions people ask

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Sources

Every date and name on this page was checked against at least two of the following. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

1. State of Tennessee v. Paul Dennis Reid, Jr. (Captain D’s case), No. M1999-00803-SC-DDT-DDTennessee Supreme Court (via CourtListener), 26 November 2002
2. State v. Reid, 164 S.W.3d 286 (Baskin-Robbins case)Tennessee Supreme Court (via CourtListener), 24 May 2005
3. State v. Reid, 213 S.W.3d 792 (McDonald’s case)Tennessee Supreme Court (via CourtListener), 27 December 2006
4. Supreme Court Affirms Reid Convictions, Death Sentences for McDonald’s MurdersTennessee Administrative Office of the Courts, 26 December 2006
5. Paul Dennis Reid, Jr. v. State of Tennessee, 396 S.W.3d 478Tennessee Supreme Court (via CourtListener), 24 January 2013
6. Opinion denying the state’s motion to vacate a stay of execution, No. 06-5860US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, 7 July 2006
7. Is suspect in restaurant slayings a serial, workplace killer?Associated Press (reprinted by WorkplaceViolence911), 1997
8. Convicted killer gets death penalty for ice cream shop murdersAssociated Press (News On 6), 22 September 1999
9. Condemned inmate says government, military control his mindAssociated Press reports by Bobby Ross Jr. (author’s archive), 27–29 April 2003
10. UA 155/06: Death penalty / Legal concern – Paul Dennis ReidAmnesty International, 1 June 2006
11. Man convicted in 7 slayings dies in Tenn. hospitalAssociated Press (Jefferson City News Tribune), 2 November 2013
12. Paul Dennis Reid dead at 55WPLN News, 1 November 2013
13. Paul Dennis Reid’s cause of death revealedWKRN News 2, 4 November 2013 (Internet Archive copy)
14. Southern Inhospitality: Paul Dennis Reid and the Fast Food MurdersThe Lineup, 24 January 2025

The facts on this page come from public records and the published sources above. If you find an error, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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