Six of East Tennessee’s most infamous executions
On Thursday, Billy Ray Irick became the sixth man in Tennessee to die by lethal injection.
A total of 132 men have died like Irick — either by poison cocktail or electrocution — since Tennessee began carrying out executions at the main state prison in Nashville in 1916.
Before that, sheriffs hanged the condemned in the counties of their crimes. An estimate by the Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks capital punishment in the U.S., places Tennessee’s hangings through those years at 210.
Here’s a half-dozen of East Tennessee’s most infamous executions, from the gallows to the electric chair to the gurney.
FROM HOODS TO HANGING
The spectacle offered everything but a big top July 7, 1899, when men, women and children gathered on the courthouse lawn in Sevierville to see Pleas Wynn and Catlett Tipton hanged side by side.
The two Sevier County farmers had become the face of the masked vigilantes that terrorized rural communities for years in a kind of gangland war.
Farmers in the rural Emert’s Cove community initially banded together for masked nighttime raids to drive out local prostitutes. A counter-vigilante group, the Bluebills, formed, and the rivalry spiraled into a series of fatal shootouts and ambushes.
The violence climaxed when whitecaps killed a tenant-farming couple, William and Laura Whaley. Their landlord had hired the men for $200 to force the couple out.
The killing sparked a crackdown by the state Legislature that led to the arrests of Wynn and Tipton, identified by Laura Whaley’s sister, who’d watched the murders as she hid under a bed. Her testimony earned them a death sentence.
Wynn was led to the river to be baptized before the noose graced his neck. Each found the time to address the crowd before the trapdoor swung open.
“Let my evil deeds be forgotten,” Tipton begged the spectators. “If I ever did any good, I hope it will be remembered.”
LAST MAN HANGING
The crowd that gathered outside the Knox County Courthouse on Main Street went home disappointed March 23, 1908, when Sheriff Lum Reeder decided to close the night’s hanging to the public.
John McPherson, 24, became the last man hanged in the county. He fidgeted on the gallows inside the jail and asked the sheriff to loosen the rope as the clock ticked to the appointed hour.
McPherson had killed a deputy, William Walker, two years earlier as he made his getaway from killing another man, Grant Smith, in a drunken rage. He’d hidden in the coal mines of West Virginia for a year before authorities tracked him down.
“He drew a number of long breaths and inflated his lungs and held his breath when the trap was dropped,” a reporter for the Knoxville Sentinel wrote. “He was a perfect specimen of humanity, and very strong.”
FOUR IN A DAY
The lights at the Tennessee State Prison dimmed four times the morning of March 1, 1922 — once for each of the men strapped into the electric chair inside an hour.
Tom Christmas, Charles Petree, John McClure and Otto Stephens sat down one after the other to pay with their lives for the robbery that killed George Andrew Lewis in Anderson County. It’s the only recorded quadruple execution in Tennessee history.
The four kidnapped Lewis and taxi driver Andrew Crumley the night of May 30, 1921, and left them to die — bound and gagged with their throats slashed — near a gravel quarry in the Robertsville community. Lewis died. Crumley survived, worked himself free and found help at a nearby farmhouse.
The four used the taxi the next day as a getaway car in a failed robbery of the Oakdale Bank and Trust in nearby Roane County. They didn’t count on being caught by an armed posse and identified by Crumley.
An Anderson County jury sentenced all four to die. Guards at the death house threw the switch first for Petree at 6:15 a.m. The lights blinked for the last time just before 6:50.
‘INNOCENT AS THE SUN THAT SHINES’
Maurice Mays never gave up proclaiming his innocence — not until the executioner’s current cut his life short.
Mays died at age 35 in the electric chair March 15, 1922 — nominally for killing Bertie Lindsey, a white woman shot by an intruder in the bedroom of her North Knoxville home. But supporters suspected Mays’ only true crime to be defiance of a segregated society.
Mays, a black man rumored to be the illegitimate son of Knoxville’s white mayor, paid no mind to the written and unwritten laws of his day. He dated white women, ran back-alley bootleg and gambling operations, and helped organize black voters for the city political machine.
The night Lindsey died, police headed straight to Mays’ home, led by Andy White, an officer who’d cursed and threatened Mays for years. The only witness to the shooting, Lindsey’s cousin Ora Smyth, who’d been sharing a bed with her that night, took just one look at Mays under the dim glow of a streetlamp and pronounced him “the man.”
A white mob blasted into the county jail with dynamite in a vain search for Mays the next day. He’d been spirited to Chattanooga by the sheriff. He stood trial less than a month later in front of an all-white jury that took 18 minutes to find him guilty.
A second trial ordered by the state Supreme Court ended with the same verdict and sentence — death. Despite pleas from prominent Tennesseans white and black, Gov. Alf Taylor refused to intervene.
Mays, his health ruined by the years of confinement, walked his last steps to the electric chair on crutches.
“I am as innocent as the sun that shines,” he said from the death seat. “I hope the politicians are satisfied.”
He was still speaking when the current silenced him forever. Efforts to clear his name over the decades, including entreaties to Gov. Bill Haslam, have failed.
SHOOTOUT WITH THE SHERIFF
Gus McCoig had two main skills: he could pick the guitar, and he could point a gun.
The guitar got him girls. The gun got him a seat in the electric chair.
McCoig made a name for himself as a young man hot-rodding the highways of Appalachia through the early 1930s with outlaws such as Clarence Bunch, East Tennessee’s counterpart to John Dillinger. Their exploits ended in 1934 with Bunch dead from a hail of bullets and McCoig behind bars in the Tennessee State Penitentiary. But McCoig wasn’t ready to bow out.
He and fellow inmate Pete Dean kidnapped a deputy warden and escaped the prison, then made their way to New Tazewell, Tennessee, where they and a third bandit, Frank Hopson, robbed the Citizens Bank on Dec. 6, 1935, and headed south on state Highway 33.
Union County Sheriff L.B. Hutchison was ready. He and a deputy staked out the highway at the bridge over the Clinch River and gave chase.
The sheriff wasn’t ready when the getaway car stopped and McCoig shot him dead — just as a Greyhound bus full of passengers drove up.
The gang split up, and McCoig stayed on the run until February 1936. Officers finally caught up with him in a Cumberland County tourist camp, where they found him strumming his guitar and singing a prison work song.
“Here I go to ride that long trail, not to come back,” he sang as deputies led him away.
He was right. McCoig died in the chair April 3, 1937.
LAST OF A GENERATION
William L. “Willie” Tines was less than two years from parole when he broke out of Brushy Mountain Prison. His escape route led him to the electric chair.
Tines was serving a 99-year sentence for killing two men in Knoxville when he and a couple of other inmates split from a wood-chopping detail April 23,1957, outside the prison near Petros. The next day, a black man wearing striped convict pants broke into a home on state Highway 61 near Harriman and walked in on a white housekeeper as she ironed clothes. A struggle knocked the phone off the hook, and neighbors on the party line heard her scream.
Officers found the woman beaten and bloody, with her eyes swollen shut and her nose broken. She said she’d been raped. As an armed posse fanned out along the highway, Tines flagged down a passing state trooper to give himself up.
He admitted he’d broken into the house. But he denied he raped the woman.
He signed a confession to rape. But he couldn’t read or write.
The woman testified she couldn’t swear what her attacker looked like. A Roane County jury deliberated 25 minutes before finding Tines guilty.
Three years of appeals and bids for clemency followed. On Nov. 7, 1960, Tines took his seat where 124 men had sat before.
“Pray for me,” he asked as the guards fastened electrodes to his body.
Seven minutes later, a doctor pronounced him dead.
“He stood up well at the end,” the warden remarked later.
No one knew it then, but Tines’s death marked the last inmate executed in Tennessee for a generation. Forty years would pass before the next inmate, Robert Glen Coe, died on the lethal-injection gurney on April 19, 2000.