A 33-year wait
Exactly what happened next that morning of March 17, 1986, only two living people can say for certain. Martin, now 50, sits in a prison cell. West, now 56, waits to die by lethal injection today for the rape, torture and killing of Sheila and her mother, Wanda.
William Paul Phillips, former 8th Judicial District attorney general, helped send West to death row.
“This was by far the most brutal, most horrific case I ever prosecuted in 33½ years,” he said. “Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I believe in evil. I believe there are some crimes so shocking the only appropriate punishment is death, even if it takes 33 years.”
Going fishing
Campbell grew up with Sheila’s father, Jack, in this once-rural community on the Union-anderson county line near what’s now Big Ridge State Park. They went to school together, farmed together, started families together.
Wanda Romines was 51 that morning of March 17, 1986, a mother of five recovering from heart surgery; Sheila was 15, the youngest daughter and a star basketball player and clog-dancer at Anderson County High School.
The sun hadn’t yet risen when Jack Romines left for work that morning. As he stepped out the door of the house on Stooksbury Road around 5:20 a.m., two pairs of eyes watched and waited in the dark.
West and Martin had been drinking beer and roaming around the Big Ridge area for the past five hours, ever since they clocked out of work at the Mcdonald’s in what’s now Rocky Top. West told his pregnant wife he was going fishing. But as they drove around in Martin’s mother’s car, Martin suggested they go “get some sex.”