After talking with Wayne and his son John , it was what he had believed happened.
It had been seven years since her husband Doyle was found in the Tennessee woods shot dead. The son of bitch deserved it for what he’d done to their children and her. It was six years since she packed her Uhaul and moved to Texas—to be with Texas inmate Steve Groves when he got out of prison.
In the days after Doyle was found dead, the neighbors wondered about the intense blue lights glowing out from her trailer windows at night. She’d taken the money she borrowed for her husband’s funeral and bought a tanning bed, a polaroid and a bikini. Sharron lay there under the glow thinking about the man in Texas she had met on prisonpenpals.com. The photographs of him she had put around the house in place of Doyles. The pictures she sent of her tanned body she desperately needed to work to snag a new man and get her out of here before they charged her with the murder.
When she got to Texas, she told Steve Groves her husband had been killed in a hunting accident. But when her children arrived, their damaged souls revealed a truth that started coming out. Steve Groves was catching on that she had killed her husband, it even frightened the ex con, so much so he distanced himself. This is when Sharon caught on she had to leave her son and daughter behind if she was going to find a new man.
Sharon moved to another part of Texas and found a job. She met her new husband, and she became a Lynch. Meanwhile, Steve Groves violated parole and was sent back to prison. Looking for a deal, he contacted authorities in Tennessee and told them Sharon Pressly killed her husband. But they already knew that.
Meanwhile Sharon’s life was renewed. She walked into a new family, with new children and everything was great. That is until prosecutors contacted her from Tennessee and told her they would charge her for the murder of her husband unless she made a deal. They wanted her to testify against a man named Wayne Grimes. A former County Commissioner now Alderman who was causing them problems. He’d been calling out the Sheriff for protecting the drug dealers. Voting to keep a police force who shutdown 67 meth labs.
As the trial began, her children arrived, having not seen their mother in some time, they wondered what she was going to say about them and about Wayne as they never heard her say anything about him killing daddy.
As Sharon prepared to take the stand and testify, she went over the story she was about to tell about Wayne, a family friend who’d been good to them. Wayne was a successful builder, but kind of naive. He seemed to know little about Doyle and what he’d done. Sharon had tried telling his sister she was going to kill Doyle, when she told her she was not going to let him molest her grandchildren and the law wouldn’t do anything. But that didn’t do anything either. No one was going to help Sharon but Sharon.
Wayne had come by the trailer the night before the murder. The trailer they stayed while building their new house Doyle promised to build, but never seemed to materialize. Doyle had told Wayne he wasn’t going hunting the next day, because Doyle was taking Sharon up to Nashville to see Doyle’s foster mother Hiedi Williams for an early Christmas.They’d made plans to be there. Something Sharon was just not going to do. As Heidi would ask about the foster children they took in, the ones that had to be removed by the social workers after Doyle started screwing one of them too. She was damned sure not going to sit there while Doyle made up some crap to Heidi about how wonderful it was to be a foster father and pass on what she had done for him when she took Doyle in for Christmas when he was an orphan. Or whatever came from his own screwed up deviant mind, after God knows what happened to him when he was under the state’s care when he was a child.
She caught on why they never prosecuted her though. Because they’d all have to admit what they’d done after her daughter tried to kill herself. When they found out Doyle put a gun to her head and raped her, they let him off with a slap on the wrist. And then he wanted to come home and put it all behind them. She knew the law would do nothing to protect them if she went against him. They put their daughter back in the home with a monster, what did they expect? When their daughter had kids of her own, it was only a matter of time before he went after them.
That night, after Wayne left and Doyle said let’s get up early to go to Nashville, “Sharon took that rifle while he was sleeping, and put it to his side and pulled the trigger,” said Billie, who said he saw Sharon buy three gallons of Bleach that morning.
“She got Gene Caldwell to come help her with the body and put it out in the woods?,” said Wayne’s sister Carolyn. “Gene went missing for four hours that morning, his wife Juanita was furious. When she died, she told me her husband was involved.
Sharon heard her name called. She walked up to the stand, sat down and testified against Wayne Grimess. She said that Doyle told Wayne he was going hunting the next day, and Wayne left her a secret note to meet him after she dropped him off to go hunting. She said that after she dropped Doyle off to go hunting, she drove to the trailer but didn’t get out, then went to the motel where Wayne was staying.
“He was standing there in the driveway when I pulled up, he got in the car and said, ‘drive.’ That’s when he told me had just shot Doyle. That he went over the woods and found him standing in a tree and he shot him. I didn’t tell anyone because Wayne told me I had to take it to my grave. The time? It was 6:30 AM.”
The most ridiculous story really. For one thing, in December, it doesn’t start getting light until well after 7: AM. On top of the times she gave, Wayne would have less than 20 minutes to go over and find Wayne in the woods, in a tree, in the dark, among ten thousand trees. Then shoot him so perfectly and get back to the motel.
In a tree? There wasn’t any tree stand found, nor was Doyle wearing the hunting vest he always wore or a flashlight. His rifle was found, but it was muzzleloading season.
The court would not allow the jury to hear that Doyle had held a gun to the daughther and raped her. Or any of what went on at the Pressley home.
After she was done testifying, she walked out of the courtroom and flew back to Texas to her new husband. Not staying to see what happened to the man she said killed her husband.
The next day of the trial, her children came back and her daughter Christy went up to Wayne and asked if he knew where momma was.
Despite there being no evidence other than Sharon Pressleys coerced testimony, Wayne was convicted and sent to prison where he remains now.
In 2019, after Adam Braseel was released from prison, Wayne called me. He said he had no idea why Sharon said what she said other than to save her own skin. He said that Doyle told him the night before the murder that he was not going hunting the next day because they were going to Nashville to go Christmas shopping and see his foster mother Heidi Willams. Wayne said he had told this to everyone from the start. Sheriff Meeks, state investigator Larry Davis. And at the trial when he testified. It was the truth.
I think at first I thought if this was true, surely someone would have contacted Hiedi Williams. His lawyer would have brought her to testify. It would have shattered Sharon’s testimony. So why would he have not contacted her? When I came to realize that down on the mountain, there was a culture of honor.
After hearing his story I thought of doing something no one had done and was more then surprised no one had done it. I found Hiedi Williams in Nashville by a Covid news story of elderly people singing to each other from their apartment windows to stay sane. As if time had stood still since the day of the murder, without telling her why I was calling, I simply asked the question: “Were you waiting for Doyle and Sharon to arrive? Yes. “And they just didn’t show up? I called down and found out Doyle was missing. Then found out he was dead.
It was mind blowing, after speaking with Williams I realized if agent Davis had called her, he could have charged Sharon Pressley with the murder. She had concealed this from him, a pretty big piece to conceal, that Doyle’s plan for the morning of December 13th, was to be on the 90 mile drive to Nashville, not lying on the ground in the woods. The very fact she concealed it was enough for a jury to convict, though they probably wouldn’t, when they heard the reasons.
But putting an innocent man in prison? Who is to blame? Could it be more obvious why they did not charge Sharon?
Wayne Grimes case was as big a case of injustice I had ever seen to date.