Anthony Hines, a 66-year-old convicted murderer who hadn't seen his own child since the boy was three, used his final breath to send a greeting to that son, while the son of the woman Hines stabbed to death stood watching and hoping the killer felt pain.
Tennessee carried out the lethal injection of Anthony Darrell Hines on Thursday at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, pronouncing him dead at 10:43 a.m. Hines had spent decades on death row for the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jenkins, a 54-year-old mother of four who was working as a motel maid in Kingston Springs, a small town west of Nashville, when he fatally stabbed her. The New York Post reported that witnesses described Hines groaning and breathing heavily before he died.
His last words were brief: "Tell my son 'hello.'" That son, whose name has not been publicly released, had reconnected with Hines just four days before the execution, visiting the prison where his father had been held for years. Hines had not seen the boy since he was three years old.
Outside the prison, Dennis Jenkins, the son of Catherine Jean Jenkins, addressed reporters. He did not hold back.
"I hope he felt severe pain because what he did to my mother is nothing compared to what he may have just gone through."
Jenkins told reporters his mother had nothing but a plastic spray bottle to defend herself when Hines attacked her at the motel in 1985. She was 54. She left behind four children.
The contrast between the two sons, one reconnecting with a killer father days before his death, the other standing witness to demand a measure of justice for a murdered mother, framed the execution in stark human terms. Hines had unsuccessfully appealed his death sentence, arguing at one point that the doctor overseeing the lethal injection was incompetent and likely to botch the procedure. The courts rejected that argument. Tennessee carried out the sentence anyway.
The Hines case is the latest in a string of executions that have drawn national attention to how states administer capital punishment and how long victims' families wait for closure.
Hines's execution was not the only one that day. Oklahoma and Alabama also carried out lethal injections on Thursday, making it the first time three U.S. inmates were executed on the same day since January 7, 2010. Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told USA Today that three executions in one day is "very unusual."
In Oklahoma, Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez was executed for killing his girlfriend, Olimpia Fisher. In Alabama, Jeremy Williams, 42, was put to death for the 2021 rape and murder of five-year-old Kamarie Holland. Prosecutors said Williams paid the child's mother $2,500 to perform a sex act on the girl, then raped and strangled her, and filmed the attack. The mother is now serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking.
Alabama Governor Kay Ivey issued a statement after Williams's execution. AP News reported her words:
"The unspeakable nature of this crime is exactly why we have the death penalty statute."
Russell County District Attorney Richard Chancey, who prosecuted Williams, was blunt about what investigators found on video. Fox News reported his remarks:
"To see on video what he did to this baby, what a grown man could do to a child, it's shocking, it's horrible, it's disgusting. It's just a level of evil."
Williams had pleaded guilty and waived his appeals. When he offered final words before the injection, Chancey responded publicly: "That baby didn't die in peace."
The Tennessee and Oklahoma executions occurred within 30 minutes of each other. Alabama's followed roughly six hours later. Taken together, 2025 has now seen 22 executions, with nearly a dozen more scheduled, the highest rate since 2009.
The triple execution day lands amid an ongoing national debate over the death penalty's administration. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court intervened to block Alabama from executing an inmate by nitrogen gas, raising fresh questions about which methods pass constitutional muster. And in a separate case, the high court split 5-4 to overturn a Mississippi death row conviction over a jury selection dispute.
Those procedural fights matter. But they can obscure what Thursday made plain: three states, acting independently, concluded that three convicted killers had exhausted their legal options and deserved the sentence a jury imposed.
Hines had 40 years on death row. Williams pleaded guilty and chose not to fight. Cuesta-Rodriguez's case moved through Oklahoma's system. Each path was different. Each ended the same way.
Florida carried out its own rare double execution earlier this year, putting to death its oldest death row inmate and a former police officer convicted of killing a child. That event, like Thursday's triple execution, signaled that states with capital punishment on the books are increasingly willing to carry out the sentences their courts impose.
The facts of the 1985 murder in Kingston Springs remain grim even four decades later. Catherine Jean Jenkins was working a shift as a motel maid. She was 54. She had four children depending on her. Anthony Hines stabbed her to death. Her son Dennis told reporters she had only a plastic spray bottle to defend herself.
No motive for the killing has been publicly reported. What is known is the outcome: a mother was murdered at work, her children grew up without her, and her killer lived another 40 years on the taxpayer's dime before the state finally carried out his sentence.
Hines spent the last days of that long wait reconnecting with a son he had abandoned as a toddler. He chose, in his final moment, to send a message to that child rather than address the family of the woman he killed. Dennis Jenkins stood in the witness gallery and watched.
The system gave Anthony Hines four decades of appeals, hearings, and due process. It gave Catherine Jean Jenkins nothing but a spray bottle and a shallow grave in the public memory. On Thursday, the ledger moved one entry closer to even.
Justice delayed 40 years is a hard thing to call justice. But for Dennis Jenkins, standing outside Riverbend in the Tennessee heat, it was the only kind left to give.