Every Town - The Depths of Darkness - Paul Dennis Reid Wanted to Be A Star, Instead He Became A Bad Guy

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

Life is often unfair, the roll of the dice in terms of who your parents are, where you grow up and your experiences. Some people get it good and others bad, and it all shapes who you become. There are also people who without any rhyme or reason grow up to be monsters just because and when someone commits an awful crime, it’s impossible to figure out the exact reason as to why they did it…you can only speculate. 💥 Watch On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/scarymysteries🎧 Our Other Podcast: https://scarymysteries.buzzsprout.com💥 Exclusive Podcasts: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1235579/subscribe 💀 Follow Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries 💀 Follow Our Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg👁 Follow Our TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald💥 Follow Our Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial🗣 Business Inquiries: [e-mail] Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Every town has a dark side. Life is often unfair in the roll of the dice in terms of who your parents are, where you grow up and your experiences. Some people get it good and others bad and in all shapes who you become. There are also people who, without any rhyme or reason, grow up to be monsters just because. When someone commits an awful crime, it's impossible to figure out the exact reason as to why they did it. You can only speculate. I'm Andrew, and welcome back to another episode of Everytown where today, together, we're going to speculate as to why Paul Dennis Reed between February and April of 1997 went on a killing spree down in Nashville, Tennessee, and received the moniker, the fast food killer. Born in Texas on November 12th of 1957, Paul Reed's life started out on a foundation riddled with cracks.

He was the youngest of three children. His parents divorced when he was very young, when he was sent off to live with his grandmother. There was just a kid. He was causing problems in his neighborhood. He liked to steal anything he could. He'd rifle through mailboxes and take clothes, hanging on clothes lines. So by the time he was eight years old,

his grandma had had enough and got rid of him, dumbing him back off with his dad. From there, he bounced back and forth between his mother and father, and they were abusive. towards him. Some believe it was these early experiences rife with trauma and pain that set the stage for the horrors that would later unfold. And we're not defending the man, but he never really seemed to have a fair shot at life. He would go on to spend time in juvie for a multitude of reasons, check fraud, auto theft, and petty burglary, to name a few. In 1983, in a bit of a glimpse

as to why he would eventually be labeled the fast food killer. He tried to rob a steakhouse in Houston, but instead of money, he received a 20-year sentence for aggravated robbery. Seven years later, though, he would be paroled, even though several psychologists thought it was a bad idea. There was something wrong with the way this man was. While many people saw this, the courts can get things wrong, and so it was let out and set free. A reed always thought of himself as a good-looking man. He worked out in prison and got in shape and felt like he could conquer of the world. The truth is he needed something to believe in, other than this bad life he had been living. And so each night in jail, he dreamt about becoming a famous musician. In 1997, he went for

it, decided to make that dream come true. He moved to Tennessee, as Nashville is rich in its musical history, so it seemed like the perfect place to turn aspirations into reality. But Reed wasn't a young Buck anymore. He was 40 years old at this point, so time was working against him. He performed at open mics and talent shows, thinking a music exec might see him and be blown away and sign him to a contract. The problem was, he just wasn't all that good. Struggling to make it in the music industry, Reed found work as a dishwasher at Shunny's restaurant. Things weren't really going as planned, and while it's unclear exactly what turned this aspiring singer towards the path of violence and murder, Chances are it was frustration mixed with a traumatic past.

On February 15th of 1997, not very long after moving to Nashville, Reed was fired from his job for losing his temper. He threw a plate that hit another employee, and so he had to go. Fet up with everything, the very next day, Reed headed to the restaurant, Captain Dees. This would be the first setting for his reign of terror. Captain Dees wasn't located too far from Shunnies. early that morning, 25-year-old Steve Hampton and 16-year-old Sarah Jackson were opening up shop when Reed knocked on the door. He was looking for a job, so they let him in to fill out an application, but before he actually got his pen to paper, he pulled out a gun.

He then ordered the two employees into the backroom cooler, where he had them lay face down on the ground. They thought if they complied, he'd just leave with the cash, but instead he shot them both, execution style, on the head. He grabbed all the surveillance footage, stole $7,000 from the safe and $600 from Hampton's wallet and fled. Authorities really had little to go on. They found some shoe prints at the scene, but no fingerprints. When they talked with other coworkers, a couple of them mentioned that the night before the murders, a man had come in looking to apply for a position as a cook, and they told him to come back the next morning. Off that info, the police mocked up a sketch.

of this man, brought it around to nearby businesses. Back at Shunnies, they said that it looked like Paul, and so he became a suspect and was contacted by police, but Reed told a string of lies and without any other evidence or actual witnesses to the crime. It wasn't a lot that cops could do. They were working on the case, Reed was feeling confident and liking the large amounts of money he could just grab, and so it was five weeks later, he headed out to a McDonald's. On the night of March 23rd, Reed sat in the parking lot of the fast food restaurant, watching patrons exit as closing time came. In the back, as the employees left, Reed approached armed with his pistol and forced them back inside. There were four employees who complied with everything he asked. He locked them in a storage

room while he emptied the cash registers. After that, he came back into the room where he began firing. He killed three of the workers, and when he got to the fourth, Jose Gonzalez, The gun jammed. Jose in a state of panic took the opportunity to fight back, but Reed was a big man, and during the struggle, he managed to grab a knife and ultimately stab Gonzalez 17 times, leaving him for dead before running off with $2,300 in cash. But Gonzalez wasn't dead. He managed to call the police, and luckily, he survived the attack. There were no fingerprints here once again, and the surveillance footage I've been taken, but Gonzalez was able to give them a detailed description.

He told them it was a man with dark hair and a mustache who was wearing a baseball cap. This sketch, though, didn't match the first one, which threw them off a bit, but authorities knew there had to be a connection due to the similarities and how everything played out. Exactly one month later, on April 23rd, Craig May sat outside in the parking lot of a Baskin-Robbins that a 16-year-old sister Michelle worked at. It was closing time. He was there to pick her up after work. Inside, she was with her co-worker,

21-year-old Angela Holmes. After about 20 minutes past the pickup time, he went inside to check what was going on. And to his concern, there was nobody in the place. He called Belize. When they checked out the scene, they could tell something it happened, but there wasn't blood.

They recovered shoe prints, and this time a lot of fingerprints. but once again, surveillance tapes were gone, and so authorities feared the worst. The following day, a man walking his dog in Dunbar Park, discovered a body in a lake when his canine started barking aggressively. And close to that, he saw another body, and it was the two workers from Basque and Robbins. They had been kidnapped, I read. Their hands were bound, and they had been stabbed multiple times, and their throats had been slashed before being dumped. At this point, there were seven days.

dead and people were freaking out. No one felt safe, especially the young workers at all the various restaurants around. Police beefed up their presence in various parking lots. It was unease in the air and everyone was just waiting for another tragedy to hit. The randomness and brutal efficiency of the killings made it challenging, though, for law enforcement to predict Reed's next move. Reed, meanwhile, evaded authorities. For the next few months, he laid low, started getting paranoid.

being caught. Now this time, police didn't link up the fingerprints to the Texas database because the technology wasn't there. He wanted to return to a more normal-looking life, and so in June, he went over to Mitchell Roberts' house, his old boss from Shunny's begging for his job back. Mitchell, though, wasn't budging. Reed started threatening him. Mitchell got scared and he told Reed that he had a gun in the house and managed to get back inside to safety. At that point, Reed drove off and Mitchell called the cops and told him the whole story. Police then devised a plan. They told him to call him back and get him over to the house under the false pretense of getting him his job back. A few days later, he came back. When Reed arrived, he was swarmed by police

and taken in. Gonzalez, the survivor from McDonald's, identified Reed as the one who attacked him and his co-workers. The fingerprints from the third scene match Reed's. And based on the M.O., they linked him to the first attack as well. Reed's trials were a major media event, a spectacle that drew attention from all corners. He was plastered all over the news, giving him a glimpse at the attention that a famous musician would experience, though, for all the wrong reasons. The evidence against him was completely overwhelming. His lawyers did the best they could, tried to argue what is called the broken brain defense, essentially stating that the abuse he suffered as a child, it caused brain damage and so he wasn't

fully responsible for his crimes. And as such, he should be spared from the death penalty. But the court showed no leniency. Given the very nature and number of his crimes, Reed was sentenced to death not once, but seven times in total, one for each victim, which was the harshest punishment, ever handed down in the state of Tennessee. The community is affected by his actions, breathed a collective side relief, hoping the sentence would bring some form of closure the trauma they had endured. For some time, Reed was considered a prime suspect in the 1993 Brown's Chicken Massacre in Platton, Illinois,

because it was so similar to the crimes he had done in Tennessee. The characteristics included shoe prints found at the scene and descriptions of the killer that match Reed's profile, but ultimately his alibi checked out. Reed was also considered a suspect in the Houston area killings of three people at a bowling alley, but eventually the perpetrator there was found to be Max Soper. Though sentenced to death, the Grim Reaper had other plans for Reed. In 2013, while still on death row, the 55-year-old was admitted to the hospital for pneumonia. It was not the executioner's needle, but complications related to the illness that brought his life to its conclusion. Paul Reed was a monster, no doubt.

What do you have acted this way if he had been raised differently? Well, chances are yes, but who really knows? Once caught up in a life of crime, it's hard to get out, no matter how big you dream. That's a hard pill for a lot of people to swallow. That sometimes you don't get to where you want to go. When you realize that, it can drive you to do crazy things. Reed wanted badly to become a famous musician, He wanted the attention and for people to know his name.

Perhaps in the end he knew it wasn't going to happen and that the only way the world would notice him was if he just stopped trying so hard to do good and just let the bad take over. Well, Paul, we all know you now, so way to go. So that's it for this week's episode of Everytown. Hope you enjoyed it. Go check out this episode in video form over on our YouTube channel

called Scary Mysteries. and for more podcasts from us, check out the Scary Mysteries podcast. Thank you for tuning in today. Remember to come back next week for another episode filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories. As you never know. Maybe your town will be next.