‘Evil’ act leads to death penalty
West was 23, a shift supervisor at the Mcdonald’s who’d spent three years in the Army. Martin was 17, short and curly-headed with a face that made him look even younger. They’d known each other barely two weeks.
“Ronnie had asked her out, and Sheila told him no,” Campbell recalled. “Jack and Wanda didn’t let her date. They thought she was too young.”
The pair met a friend of Martin’s around 3 a.m. who loaned Martin a butcher knife. As Jack Romines’ taillights faded out of sight two hours later, Martin walked up to the front door with West.
“They both told the police she called out, ‘Mama, it’s Ronnie,’ ” Campbell said. “And she let them on into the house.”
What a father found
No one outside the house heard the screams that followed. No one suspected a thing until Jack Romines came home from work 10 hours later.
“He found Wanda’s car sitting outside and the front door locked,” Campbell said. “He went around behind the house and saw the back door standing open. They never used that door, so he knew something was wrong.
“When he went inside, the first thing he could see from the hallway was Wanda’s feet on top of the bed in the bedroom. Sheila was lying on the floor. It
was a slaughterhouse.”
Campbell remembers the phone ringing, the rush to the house, the sight of Jack Romines weeping outside.
“He just kept saying, ‘Oh, my baby,’ over and over, ‘Oh, my baby.’ He never got over it,” Campbell said.
‘He thought he could get away’
While Jack Romines wept, Steve West worked his shift at the Mcdonald’s. Coworkers noticed he looked distracted, disoriented, “like he was having a heart attack,” by one woman’s account.
“To me, that’s a crime almost as great as the murders,” said Phillips, the prosecutor. “He’s a husband and a father himself, and he let Jack come home to find his wife’s and daughter’s bodies. All he had to do was tell someone. But my speculation has always been that he’s trying to put up the appearance that everything’s normal and avoid detection. He thought he could get away with it.”
Union County deputies collected 58 bags of evidence from the Romines house. An autopsy by Dr. Cleland Blake, one of East Tennessee’s pioneers of forensic medicine, determined mother and daughter had been bound and stabbed dozens of times each — Wanda Romines more than 40 times alone. Most of the wounds were shallow, apparently meant to inflict pain and terror rather than death. Sheila Romines had been raped, although early attempts at DNA collection proved inconclusive.
“We could never determine exactly how long it all lasted,” Phillips said. “We know from the evidence that these crimes were committed on the daughter in front of her mother, on the mother in front of her daughter. It would have had to take a substantial amount of time. Eventually they bled out.”
The killers got away with little of value — an unloaded pistol, some cash, a few family possessions worth at most $200 by investigators’ estimates.
Officers tracked down Martin first, then West. By day’s end March 18, one day after the killings, both were in custody, each charged with double first-degree murder.
Shifting stories
With the arrests over, the fingerpointing began. Each suspect told a series of stories, with each somehow an unwilling witness to the horror inside the house.
West made five separate statements to investigators. Each time investigators confronted West with a new piece of evidence, the story changed — from watching Martin disappear inside the Romines’ house alone to standing by helpless as the teenager tormented mother and daughter to death before his eyes.
A ‘brazen’ defense
West told a similar story of helplessness at his trial, held on the third floor of a packed Union County courthouse almost a year to the day after the killings. Campbell remembers watching West “shake like a leaf ” as he took the witness stand, a desperate move for a man on trial for his life.
Phillips, the prosecutor, didn’t hesitate to pounce on cross-examination.
“The whole crime was brazen from start to finish,” Phillips said. “I think he and Ronnie Martin both thought they could just talk their way out of this. At one point he tried to claim that Sheila Romines had willingly had sex with him and Ronnie Martin. We had her diary. This was a girl who was deeply religious and had never even started dating, and he expected the jury to believe this. What else can you call that but arrogance?”
West couldn’t explain why he never called out or made any effort to escape from the Romines’ house in a community where the nearest neighbor lived barely 300 feet away. He couldn’t explain the medical examiner’s findings that Wanda and Sheila Romines each suffered wounds from not one, but two knives of separate sizes, most likely wielded by two people. And he couldn’t explain why he helped wrestle Martin’s car out of the mud during the getaway rather than run.
Martin, he pleaded, had threatened his wife — the same pregnant wife West left alone to go drinking and carousing with a 17-year-old in the first place.
West’s lawyers since have argued his family interfered with defense efforts to build a case for insanity, whether out of denial or shame.
Jurors found West guilty after less than two hours of deliberation. They took even less time to settle on the death sentence — about 90 minutes.
Martin’s age — 2½ months shy of 18 at the time of the killings — spared him a death sentence. He pleaded guilty after being charged as an adult. He’s now serving two life sentences at the Morgan County Correctional Complex, eligible for parole in June 2030.
Martin told a fellow inmate at one point as he waited for trial that he’d killed mother and daughter himself. When the inmate, wearing a wire for West’s defense, pressed for details, Martin shrugged and said he didn’t know.
West’s lawyers brought up that recording in last week’s bid for clemency. He initially passed on the right to choose how he’ll die, but has since requested electrocution.
Jack Romines died in 2008.
Father, mother and daughter lie together side-by-side in a small family cemetery off state Highway 61, not far from where the house still stands. Campbell tends the graves, passes by the house and remembers the promise he made to his friend.
“He asked me to promise him I’d see it through,” Campbell said. “And I will.”
He’ll be at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville today for West’s execution, not in the witness chamber but in a room just next door. Because he’s not an immediate blood relative, he won’t get to see West’s last moments, but he hopes he’ll be able to hear the last words.
“That’ll satisfy me,” Campbell said. “I’d like to know if there’s any remorse for what he’s done.”
“He’s a husband and a father himself, and he let Jack come home to find his wife’s and daughter’s bodies. All he had to do was tell someone.” William Paul Phillips, Prosecutor