Town note
Originally known as Liberty in the 1800s.
about 0:06:21The story
Maynardville, Tennessee is a small town in Union County, about 35 minutes from Knoxville, and in August 1986 Jack Romines lived there with his wife Wanda, 51, and their 15-year-old daughter Sheila. Jack, who was about 50, left for work at 5.20 a.m. on 17 August 1986. The two had known each other only about two weeks. He meant Sheila Romines, his classmate, who had once rebuffed him in front of a crowd and made him look foolish.
The pair reached the Romines house at about 5 a.m. and sat watching it. Jack left at 5.20. They ransacked the house and kept the two women in separate rooms. A pathologist said the wounds cut her right lung, colon, liver and gallbladder, and that the fatal wound severed her right common iliac artery; she would have died within five to ten minutes.
Fourteen of the wounds were described by the forensic pathologist as torture-type cuts, inflicted before three fatal wounds that went through the chest wall into her heart at a depth of five and a half inches. She also had defensive wounds on her left forearm and thumb. Two different knives were used, and the state pathologist concluded that two people had taken part in inflicting the wounds and in keeping the women apart.
The men left with the unloaded pistol and an envelope holding $200. Telephone wires at the house had been torn out. Jack came home that afternoon and found the scene.
The gun was recovered from a storm drain in Norris, Tennessee, after John Allen told police about the knife. He gave at least five statements.
A stay followed amid litigation over the state's lethal injection protocol.
On 29 March 2017 the US Supreme Court upheld the protocol. Jack, Wanda and Sheila are buried together in a cemetery in Maynardville.