The hills of Tennessee
hold a deadly secret.
A shotgun blast shattered the stillness of the
night,
sharp, sudden,
and final.
For four years its echo has haunted a
grieving family
unanswered and unresolved.
A murder case gone cold.
But now there's a $1,000,000
reward on the table.
Enough to loosen lips in backward bars, whispered
pillow talk and jailhouse chatter.
Now
someone might finally talk.
Because secrets don't stay buried forever,
not with a 7 figure reason to come
clean
and a widow determined to see who breaks
first.
He was
bigger than life, Such a
loving,
joyful,
caring
man.
Loved his family, loved God,
loved his community,
and
did everything he can
to make things better every
day. Dawn Grimes speaks from her late husband's
study,
seated beneath a portrait that still watches over
the room like he never left.
It is here, surrounded by the reminders of
63 year old Jim Grimes' presence,
that she recalls the night everything changed,
04/19/2021.
How do you think the killer or killers,
did this?
I think
that
they they know the area. I think that
they're familiar with the area.
I think that
they're not a stranger off the street. It's
probably somebody.
It's somebody that we know and somebody that
knows the area. That's the only thing that
makes any sense.
The Grimes live in rural Giles County, Tennessee,
about an hour's drive South of Nashville near
the Alabama state line.
It's a pastoral region defined by rolling hills,
dense hardwood forest,
and a quiet that feels untouched by time.
Long favored for its seclusion and natural beauty,
this corner of Tennessee has increasingly drawn affluent
buyers seeking weekend retreats
and escape from the noise and sprawl of
the city.
Some of the wealthiest people of the state
own farms here devoted to horse riding and
hunting.
But even in a place that seems built
for peace,
violence found its way in.
Don Grimes is determined
not to be driven out.
I think that if this had happened to
me here, my wife would have moved. I
think a lot of wise might have moved,
but you're still here. I'm here. This was
our home.
When we bought this house, it was for
our grandchildren.
At the time, we didn't have any.
Now we have three. And,
his blood is in this ground, and I
won't leave him.
I'm not going to run away from who
did this.
And he wanted to be here. It was
important to him,
and it's important to me.
The Grimes 2 story red brick home, framed
by white columns and a small covered front
porch,
sits in the 6,000 block of Buford Station
Road in Lynnville, Tennessee.
At the foot of a long gravel drive,
a wrought iron gate stands mounted between stone
pillars.
A large black ironwork letter g and the
Grimes name are fixed to the stone.
A split rail fence wraps the 22 acre
property of open pasture and thick woodland edges.
Set back a few hundred feet to the
left of the main house, a weathered wooden
barn leans into the tree line.
That barn,
unassuming,
sun bleached, and utilitarian,
is the crime scene of Jim Grimes' final
moments.
Inside it, the family kept a menagerie of
animals,
a routine of feeding and caretaking that brought
Jim out there
on the night he was killed.
So, we have a very specific routine when
we fed.
The first thing that you do is you
go over, you turn the water on so
that the trough is filling as you're feeding
for the for the animals.
And he followed that routine. So this person,
had to have watched him the entire time
that he fed.
The very last thing that you do after
you go up on the hill and we
were feeding the wild animals, because we like
to watch, we had,
trail cams
that we would watch the animals, you know,
the wildlife that would come in, the deer
and the and the raccoons. And so he
would go up on the hill, and then
that was the last thing that he did.
He'd come around the barn and he shut
the water off. So this person
sat there, watched this entire routine take place.
And when he
reached
to turn the water off,
they were standing in front of him in
the dark
and shot him.
Dawn Grimes arrived home around 08:30PM
suffering from a throbbing headache.
She handled business finances at the couple's pair
of Auto Body Advantage Collision Repair Shops and
a mechanical repair garage.
They were swamped by customers who had suffered
damage in a recent hailstorm.
Jim Grimes arrived home later from a board
meeting of the Well Outreach,
a Spring Hill food pantry that serves households
in need throughout Southern Middle Tennessee.
Because we typically fed between
six,
six thirty at the latest.
That night, I didn't get home until 08:30.
I didn't feel good. I had a bad
headache. I'd taken a bath.
He came home.
He said, you know, have you fed yet?
And I said, no. I'm getting ready to
go.
And he said, just you don't feel good,
go sit down. I'll go feed. Jim Grimes
put on a head mounted flashlight.
He headed into the dark, passing a large
pond that separated the house from the barn.
So I went back to the bathroom and
I was finishing up,
and I heard a very loud
ex it sounded like an explosion.
It was very loud,
and I had no idea what it was.
And so I picked the phone up. I
had my had my phone. I picked my
phone up, and I called him.
My first response or reaction was, what did
he get into? What's he done? What's he
got into now?
And he didn't answer.
And so I walked through and went out
where the it's enclosed now was just a
deck.
And I walked outside to the deck, and
he had a headlamp that he wore with
a flat it was like a flashlight.
And I could see that light up on
the hill,
and I'm still trying to call him. And
he's not answering, and he's not answering.
So when I got out there, I yelled
for him
because I could see his light, and I
yelled for him
And the
light never moved, and he never answered. And
I knew
that moment something was really something was wrong,
but I had no idea what had happened.
And so I took off running and got
back to the barn, and I got to
him. And I could see he was bleeding
on his chest.
But I I'm looking. You know, did something
fall off the barn? Did something hit the
fence and get him you know, I'm I'm
looking what's happened, and he's, you know, he's
looking at me, and he's struggling
to to breathe.
When lieutenant Shane Hunter, then an investigator with
the Giles County Sheriff's Department,
rolled up to the scene,
one detail stood out immediately.
The murder had occurred within clear view from
a well traveled rural road that ran past
the Grimes home.
You can visually see it, from the roadway,
especially this time of year, where there was
very limited foliage had started to grow yet.
So,
obviously, that's kinda what struck, you know, me
first is like, you know, wow.
You know,
somebody could actually have been seen, you know,
this close proximity to the main road. And
then just the layout of the land,
the fences,
I remember there being electric fences,
everywhere in the back,
around the pond,
around the property.
And that struck me,
very curious because
somebody would have to maneuver around through there,
in the pitch dark. You know?
So it would have been difficult to maneuver,
you know, around that area if if you
didn't have some kind of insight of this
area.
So you feel like the perpetrator would had
to have been there before?
I think they had to have at least
some knowledge of the property.
You know, I spent many nights there thereafter,
kinda traversing back into the property. And,
you know,
I got lost several times,
crossing the property. So I think that the
person would have had definitely had to have
some kind of knowledge of of the area.
You know, it's not just something you can
pull up on Google Maps and get a
three d image of and see all the
fences or whatnot.
When then Giles County Sheriff Kyle Helton stepped
onto the scene,
he felt it.
That quiet,
unshakable intuition seasoned law officers carry.
Something wasn't right.
The victim lay near the barn with a
massive wound in his chest,
the kind caused by a shotgun blast fired
at close range.
Before pulling the trigger, the killer had confronted
Jib Grimes
face to face.
When you said that something wasn't right, what
what was it that you had a feeling
about? Well, we had we had a person
laying there that had
deceased, then no weapon,
no,
no signs of any any weapons nearby,
and a gunshot wound.
And,
no sign of robbery or struggle?
It didn't appear to be. Didn't appear to
have any any struggles.
Sheriff's investigator
Luke Tyson,
the lead on the case,
arrived at the scene to find Grimes' animals
were running loose, unsettled, and scattered.
It appeared that Jim Grimes had been bending
over to shut off a water spigot near
the barn when he was ambushed.
Struck down in a moment of routine with
no chance to defend himself, is it your
sense from the investigation that there was somebody
laying in wait, there was somebody
gunning for him?
It it certainly looked like that. I mean,
the the darkest spot
on the the property was right on that
side of the barn.
They had lights on the front. There was
a there was a floodlight on the back
of the the barn that
kinda lit up towards the wood line.
And quite honestly, the darkest spot was right
there where those those lights didn't get to.
During my nighttime visit, I walked the woods
that back up and flanked the barn.
The darkness was absolute. No moonlight,
no ambient glow, just a wall of shadow
pressing in from all sides.
I stumbled through sinkholes, over limbs, never quite
sure what was underfoot.
Somewhere out there, a narrow path cut by
a tractor's mower wound through the brush,
but I never found it. Whoever killed Jim
Grimes did.
They navigated that rough terrain in the dark,
slipped through a maze of electrified fences,
and somehow stayed out of sight from the
trail cameras Jim had installed to monitor wildlife.
That kind of movement wasn't luck. The killer
knew the terrain.
Investigator Luke Tyson agrees.
Well, it sounds like somebody would have to
know this existed and know how to get
through the maze of electric fences and everything
else. What do you think?
Definitely somebody that would have studied the property,
known
what
where everything was, and and also their
a general idea
of their schedules.
Any sense of,
from the evidence you've seen of a a
motive of revenge or,
just a joy killing?
There's really that's that's part of what's so
frustrating is there's at this point,
there's really
no no idea as to why they would
have done this.
Lieutenant Shane Hunter says investigators have questioned more
than 200
people in their search for leads,
chasing down every tip, rumor, and whisper
that might crack the cold case.
When I say 200, that's that's really on
the low end side. We've we've probably spoken
to
just that many people that hadn't associated
with mister Grimes.
He was a prominent leader,
in Spring Hill. He was a civic, you
know,
part of the multiple groups up there. So,
obviously, he touched many lives, was a big
part of the, boys and girls club,
just a very genuinely good person. So,
he had a lot of contact. So, ultimately,
you know, when we would go interview somebody,
you know, they would say, well, you need
to go talk to this person and whatever.
So,
like I said, easily 200 people that we've
talked to that just had personal contact or
knowledge about him, throughout, you know, the last
four years.
Not a person that had
a a problem to grind
with mister Grimes. I did did people that
even he'd been dismissed from work still speak
highly of him?
Absolutely. And that's what makes this case so
difficult is that
not that you dismiss any victim,
but I've been doing this for twenty seven
years,
and this is probably one of the most
difficult cases I've worked,
when it's relating to a victim
because you can't could not find anybody that
had a bad word to say about him.
You know, genuinely, you you'll find somebody that's
had some kinda tiff with a person that,
you know,
throughout the years and would say something negative
about a victim. But
but that was what was unusual about mister
Grimes was that,
people that had he had employed
and had terminated
still had nothing but very good things to
say about him.
You know, they would genuinely say, you know,
yeah. You know, I messed up. He had
to fire me, but, you know, I still
loved him. You know? He was a good
man.
He was concerned about everybody's family,
would try to introduce you to God and
and religion. And,
you know,
there was one individual that
that
obviously, they own a body shop, and mister
Grimes is seen where somebody had spray painted
something,
inappropriate,
political purposes on this person's car, and and
he found a way to get in contact
with him and said, you know,
I'll I'll take care of your your vehicle
and and actually, you know, painted their vehicle
for him, you know, just out of his
own pocket. So that kinda goes to the
fortitude that, you know,
mister Grimes stood for.
The small sheriff's department has poured thousands of
hours into the case,
following leads that have stretched far beyond Tennessee,
some spanning the country.
It's the kind of sustained commitment that most
big city departments, burdened by budgets and bureaucracy,
could rarely afford to make.
For example,
Lieutenant Jeff Perkins focused on a digital trail.
He wanted to know, did the killer have
a cell phone on him that night?
In the digital age, it's a routine yet
powerful investigative tool,
triangulating
signals between cell towers to determine whether a
phone had been present at the crime scene.
If the killer left his phone on even
for a moment,
it could betray his location.
Because of the area that this particular homicide
occurred at,
it just so happens that the towers actually
are in line. You have three towers that
are literally
a linear alignment.
That's no good if we're trying to do
data extraction from cell dumps that we could
maybe time
frame
where a phone would be. So g lock
or that would be
geographical location.
If you try and extrapolate that from numbers,
well, usually you have
a cell tower and it's got three sides
to it, right? So you've
got your ranges, your azimuth, and then you
got your sectors, three sixty degrees. That's the
way it's all broken down.
And from that point, if you have a
tower here and maybe a tower eastward or
westward,
well you could then
get through time manipulation.
Looking through the data, you could see yeah,
the phone was here at one
point, it pinged off that other tower, and
then it pinged back to this particular tower,
the the primary tower, and then you can
do time variances and it's what we call
time difference. And at that point, you could
actually track somebody's location.
Well, we couldn't do that because of the
cell towers that we have in this particular
area.
Trust me, we've gone to every extent you
could possibly imagine.
Lieutenant Perkins turned to another investigative tactic,
one that blended old fashioned detective work with
modern computer coding.
He wrote a custom computer program to analyze
the phone numbers of more than 6,000
of Jim Grimes' customers
just in case one of them had a
grudge.
His goal, to determine whether any of them
had been near the Grimes' property on the
night of the murder using location data as
a silent witness.
It was a long shot,
and it came up empty.
It sounds like it was the perfect scene
for a crime.
Yeah. No question about it. If you think
about
who would know that the towers or something
like that couldn't track someone there at that
particular
night, right, or that particular area. I don't
think anybody would think about that stuff, right?
But it just so happens that was one
huge negative for us, right?
Like you said, also no cameras in the
back. The two cameras that were back
for,
you know, the trail cams, they weren't exactly
pointing in the direction
that
James was found at.
So somebody either would have known they were
there or just by pure luck, they never
came across those cameras because that would have
been coming across behind the barn
and that would be east to west and
it would have picked that stuff up.
Yeah, it's pretty unusual though. And to think
that no one would hear anything, but again,
this look secluded area. Right? This is,
rural
typical Giles County. You've got people that live
in spots and you never hear anything.
The Giles County Sheriff brought in one of
the nation's foremost experts on unsolved homicides,
legendary cold case investigator,
Joe Kennedy, from the Carolinas
Cold Case Coalition.
Now retired,
Kennedy made his mark as a special agent
with NCIS,
where he founded the federal government's first cold
case unit.
He didn't just work the toughest cases, he
helped write the playbook for investigators.
I interviewed him in 2023
for a two part series,
and I've included the links in the show
notes.
Kennedy encouraged me to report on the Grimes
case, hoping that renewed attention and the $1,000,000
reward
might flush out new leads or shake loose
a long held secret.
As we left the crime scene together, we
discussed the case's complexity.
It was clear.
This wasn't just a random killing. It was
calculated,
and someone out there knows why.
In my mind, there's probably no more than
three or four suspects in this case.
It's just getting to that right suspect, and
that's the hard part about cold cases
is how do we narrow down that pool
of suspects? And that's the
that's the the million dollar question, right, in
this one. And, you know, this case is
is very difficult.
You know, it's a single,
shotgun blast in the chest.
You know, the ammunition is
is not extremely
rare.
So, you know, that's a that's a hard
path to travel to try to identify,
you know, or link a particular suspect to
the ammunition.
There is no shotgun shell that's left behind.
You know, essentially,
this is a crime scene devoid
of physical evidence.
There's no physical evidence to speak of,
other than that, you know, the remnants of
that,
shotgun blast. And it's you know, it does
give us some clues, but but they're not
real viable clues that we can follow to
to lead us to a particular person.
Your experience has shown that most murders
occur outdoors. Break that down for me. And
are they more difficult to solve outdoors?
Yeah. So you'll you'll you'll see that about
two thirds of murders are committed outdoors.
About one third of murders are committed indoors.
Of course, just nature itself,
sunlight,
right,
exposure to the weather,
destroys
or degrades DNA
at a outdoor crime scene.
And you'll find that we have a higher
closure rate on indoor crime scenes,
somewhere sometimes upwards in excess of 10% higher
closure rate for indoor murders.
And,
indoor murders are easier to work. The the
the evidence the physical evidence is preserved better.
Typically, that requires people to enter and exit
locations
where maybe there's an ability to track that
movement of an individual. Whereas outdoor scenes,
like the one we have here in Giles
County, it's much more difficult,
you know, to to trace the whereabouts and
the travels of a particular suspect
both before and after the murder.
I am impressed
by
a small department and a few detectives.
How much time and resources they put into
this, I I don't know that you would
see that kind of dedication
in a big city police department. Well, I
will say this,
I was extremely impressed with the effort of
the Giles County Sheriff's Department.
We initially came out here in March of
last year.
Myself, Craig Ackley, retired FBI agent, just a
a brilliant investigator.
Ed Collins, retired New York State Police, another
brilliant investigator.
And we all commented in our way back
after we had been out here last year
that, wow, for such a small department,
these guys put an impressive
investigative product together.
And they have, you know, uncovered
all the stones
that they possibly could have. They've done some
very nontraditional
investigative techniques.
And and like you said, Robert, it you
you wouldn't see this in a lot of
major metropolitan homicide units.
So, yeah, it's, I I'm most impressed with
also the quality of the people.
You know,
when you have a small sheriff's department,
the leadership starts at the top of the
sheriff.
And Kyle,
you know, he is just,
obviously, just a a a great human being,
a man of integrity, and all of his
officers,
you know, follow that model.
You know, whether it's Luke or it's Jeff
or it's Shane, you know, these are just
great respectable
police
officers out doing their job,
tireless workers.
The sacrifices they've made in this thing are
you know, if if the public knew all
the the personal sacrifices these investigators made,
they probably wouldn't believe it because they've missed
holidays, they've missed birthdays with their kids,
you know, all the things
that deaf investigators,
homicide detectives, you know, experienced in the course
of their career. So,
I would echo what you what you see
is that, this was,
this certainly was no stone left unturned in
this thing. And, I'm confident they're they're gonna
solve this case because
of the quality of the investigators that they
have working.
But even the most dogged investigation
can hit a wall when there's no forensic
evidence, no witnesses, and no clear motive.
That's where the $1,000,000
reward comes in,
designed to pry open locked lips.
The money is there to make silence expensive
and speaking up worth it.
Joe Kennedy says $1,000,000
is a big incentive to nudge someone on
the fringes of the murder
to step forward.
Well,
your experienced perpetrators don't keep secrets.
Yeah. They always tell someone, Robert,
in the vast majority
of successfully
closed
cold
cases, the suspect, for any number of reasons,
told someone they did it.
It's that first sign of their
attempts to cope with what they've done. It's
a coping mechanism. They gotta get it off
the chest. They gotta get it off their
minds. And so they tell someone that they
did it. And so that's my hope that
that reward could maybe,
encourage someone to come forward
that has been told something,
because we know that that is one of
the investigative steps that has to always be
followed with cold cases.
Find who they told
what they know about that. Find the person
that they told
that they were involved in the murder change
crimes.
For the team pursuing Jim Grimes' killer, the
calendar doesn't matter.
Four years in, their determination
hasn't wavered.
This case isn't just another file. It's a
promise,
and they're not letting go.
Lieutenant Shane Hunter says he goes to bed
thinking about the case, and he wakes up
asking himself,
what else can I do? What did I
miss? What can I do today to move
this case forward?
I would think for the killer knowing how
hard
the detectives on this case are working, and
then like a Joe Kennedy coming to the
table, they ought to be a little bit
worried. They know that that one day that
we'll knock on their door, door and, ultimately,
they'll be arrested for this.
I don't think this is just the perfect
crime that somebody's gonna walk scot free for.
We're not gonna let it happen like that.
There's too many people that are dedicated in
getting this solved, and and, ultimately,
justice will be served.
Dawn Grimes refuses to let her husband's murder
fade into memory.
She's keeping the case alive,
loud, visible,
and impossible to ignore.
In the latest show of her resolve, a
new billboard now towers above the long black
banner that runs the length of the fence
in front of her home.
The words on the banner remain unchanged.
We will never forget.
We will never give up.
But now, above that message,
a second one rises higher and louder.
A billboard featuring Jim Grimes' photo and a
direct plea for help in bold letters.
I was murdered here on 04/19/2021.
Help me get justice, it reads,
alongside the offer of a $1,000,000
reward for information leading to an arrest and
conviction.
The sign's message is unflinching.
So is the family behind it.
Every day,
you wake up and you live with this
every day not knowing
are they gonna come after me? Are they
gonna come after my children, my grandchildren?
Are they gonna come after
somebody else in the community? If they've done
this once, are they gonna do it again?
You know, that that's very
unnerving
to know that they're still out there every
day, and
it's the right thing to do. You just
you don't do something like this to another
human being.
So
please
help
us.
This is among the most puzzling cases that
I have ever covered.
But I can tell you this from my
reporting experience,
someone besides the killer
knows who murdered Jim Grimes.
The reward remains at $1,000,000
for information leading to the arrest and conviction
of the person or persons
responsible for killing Jim Grimes.
If you know something,
now is the time to come forward. Call
(931)
638-2358
or
800
to begin the process of claiming the reward.
And if fear is holding you back, know
this,
investigators have pledged to protect your identity and
your safety.
You'll find both numbers listed in the show
notes.
This is Robert Riggs reporting
for the True Crime Reporter podcast.