Thirty-five years ago, the execution-style killings of two young mothers shook Gibson and Carroll counties to their core.
Today, the murders remain unsolved, and the questions investigators could not answer in 1991 are still waiting for fresh eyes.
Twenty-year-old Kathy Stoots of Trenton and 23-year-old Tammy Tidwell of Atwood had a lot in common.
Both were married, both were mothers, and each had a toddler at home.
Both had ties to Milan, and they were even distantly related by marriage, according to reports at the time.
On the night of October 12, 1991, both were working behind a store counter because their families needed the money.
Stoots had asked for more hours, and Tidwell had been on the job just two weeks.
A birthday cake in the refrigerator
Stoots had two sons: Blake, who was about to turn 3, and Tyler, 16 months.
Her sister-in-law told The Jackson Sun that the boys went with their mother wherever she went.
On Saturday, October 12, she left Blake’s birthday cake in the refrigerator and went to work at J&W Video, at 72 Medina Highway in the Graball community just south of Milan.
Around 9 p.m., someone robbed the store, made her lie on the floor and shot her once in the back of the head.
A customer found her behind the counter minutes later.
The killer, or killers, took about $600 from the register.
The store had a video monitoring camera, installed after an earlier robbery, but Gibson County Sheriff Joe Shepard told The Mirror-Exchange it was out of film.
Blake turned 3 the next morning.
Christmas toys on layaway
About 30 minutes later and less than 10 miles away, Tidwell was behind the counter of the Country Oasis near Atwood.
She and her husband, Doug, had just bought a house in Atwood, and she was working weekends to help pay for it.
It was only October, but a relative told The Mirror-Exchange she had already put $100 down on layaway Christmas toys.
Doug Tidwell stopped in to see her that evening.
According to The Commercial Appeal, he called the store a few minutes after leaving because he had forgotten to pick up candy for their 3-year-old daughter, Melanie.
A police officer answered the phone.
A customer, John Callis, told The Mirror-Exchange that he and a friend walked into the store after 9:30 p.m. and looked around for about five minutes before finding Tidwell face down behind the counter, still breathing.
The Carroll County NEWS reported that the customer who found her noticed a maroon, medium-sized car pulling away from the store.
Tidwell had been shot once in the head. She was airlifted to the Regional Medical Center in Memphis and died there on the morning of October 15 without regaining consciousness.
Carroll County Sheriff Douglas Brandon told the Carroll County NEWS it was one of the most brutal killings of his seven years in office.
Suspects, but no charges
Almost immediately, authorities named two prime suspects: Michael Dale St. Clair and Dennis Gene Reese, who had escaped from the Bryan County jail in Durant, Oklahoma, three weeks earlier and were wanted in killings in New Mexico and Kentucky.
The FBI joined the search, and that December the case aired on “Unsolved Mysteries.”
Even then, officials were cautious. Shepard told The Associated Press that investigators had no concrete evidence tying the two men to the shootings.
District Attorney General Clayburn Peeples, who was at the Graball scene that night, told The Mirror-Exchange there were no witnesses and no proof the escapees were involved at all.
Fingerprints from both stores, along with a 9 mm shell casing found in Atwood, were sent to the FBI laboratory in Washington.
By the end of October, it was reported that Reese’s fingerprints did not match any found at the Atwood scene.
St. Clair had not been ruled out, and investigators were waiting on a ballistics report to learn whether the same gun was used in both shootings.
In early November, the Carroll County NEWS reported that the two fugitives had been identified from mug shots at a video store in Maryville. The FBI considered this significant because it tied them to video stores.
No prime suspects
By December, the picture was no clearer.
The Mirror-Exchange reported that two Milan men who had admitted robbing the same Country Oasis two months before the murders were questioned, and that investigators disagreed about whether they could be responsible.
An Oklahoma investigator who had tracked the fugitives told the paper he was convinced they were the killers.
Shepard called them the best suspects so far, but said he had a feeling the killer was local.
The results of the FBI testing do not appear in news coverage reviewed for this story.
St. Clair was captured in Oklahoma in December 1991, and Reese in Las Vegas the following month.
Both were convicted of murdering Frank Brady of Bardstown, Kentucky.
St. Clair was sentenced to death and Reese to life in prison.
Both were later convicted in the killing of Denver paramedic Timothy Keeling.
Neither man was ever charged in Tennessee.
No one has been.
Families still waiting
In 2013, Stoots’s mother, Martha Mays, told WBBJ-TV that time had not eased the loss, and that she still looked at her daughter’s pictures every day.
The children Stoots and Tidwell left behind grew up without their mothers, and without an answer to who killed them.
Thirty-five years on, both cases remain open questions.
Current Carroll County Sheriff, Eric Sawyers, said TBI investigators would visit the office and look at the file here and there over the years, but he’s not aware of any significant breakthroughs.
Anyone with information about the death of Kathy Stoots is asked to call the Gibson County Sheriff’s Office at (731) 855-1121. Information about Tammy Tidwell’s death can be reported to the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office at (731)986-8947.
