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If you blink while traveling on Highway 64 in northeast Lauderdale County, you may miss the Grassy community. It consists of a Baptist Church, cemetery, park, and a retail farm supply. Houses dot the farmland surrounding this hamlet that's relegated to a Lexington postal route. The community hasn't changed more than a micron since a murder that rocked the area almost 40 years ago.
James Russell Thames Jr. moved to Grassy in 1970 to work just across the Tennessee River as a control room supervisor at Champion International Corp. in Lawrence County. With him, Thames brought his wife Trudy Holley Lavender Thames. After their arrival in the Shoals, Holley gave birth to four sons. By 1984, Jim had joined the Lexington Rescue Squad and was coaching his older sons in Dixie Youth League baseball.
This should have been a happy time for the family, but unfortunately it wasn't for the 35 year-old Holley. Was she bored? Having delivered her last child only months before, did she have a form of postpartum depression? Or had she simply allowed herself to become caught up in gossip of something that she never intended and didn't know how to squelch?
It was Monday, May 21, 1984, and Jim's youth league team was playing at Lexington City Park. As the former Army sergeant from Montgomery looked casually up into the stands, he saw Holley with the married man local gossips said was her lover. The exact give and take between the husband and wife was not memorialized that night, but witnesses who were called to testify at Jim Thames' murder trial stated he called his attractive young wife to the dugout where he told her to leave the man, leave the game, and go home.
Holley laughed at Jim.
According to trial testimony, Holley returned to the stands and appeared shaken. Friends, including her alleged paramour, encouraged her to spend the night anywhere but with her husband, but Holley stated she was resigned to the inevitable confrontation. Once home in Grassy, Jim and Holley Thames became involved in a verbal argument that lasted at least 20 minutes. Their three oldest sons heard their father say he would blow his wife's brains out, to which Holley responded "I don't care." It was then that the sons heard three gunshots; however, an autopsy indicated Holley Thames had been shot four times in the back, falling across the couple's bed where rescue squad members found her.
The boys testified that their father left the bedroom and relocked the door. He told one son that he had shot Holley in the arm and they needed to drive to a friend's to secure medical help. It's unclear from court records why no phone communication to the small Lexington Rescue Squad was available at the Thames home, but precious time was wasted in finding help for the mortally injured Holley.
Once rescue squad personnel arrived, they immediately began to perform CPR until an ambulance arrived to take the dying young wife to Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital. Jim Thames was ultimately left alone in the house with his sons and one Lexington police officer. The officer later testified that Thames stripped the bed, placed the linen in the washer, and inverted the mattress, stating he didn't want his sons to see the copious amount of their mother's blood. Thames repeatedly alternated between saying he didn't mean to do it and that his wife made him do it.
The Lexington officer then drove James Thames to the Lauderdale County Sheriff's office where he was formally charged. The trial was held five months later, and a jury of nine men and three women convicted Thames not of Felony Murder as the district attorney asked, but of Manslaughter. While Judge Ned Suttle could have given the young father a 20 year sentence due to a firearm being involved, he instead decreed that Thames would spend ten years in the Alabama State Prison System.
After an incarceration of ten months, Thames asked for a transfer to work release. Both the Lauderdale District Attorney's Office and a group of Lexington citizens opposed Thames' transfer, forcing him to serve his sentence in a literal prison setting.
After he completed his sentence, James Russell Thames Jr. moved to Missouri where he passed away ten days after his 63rd birthday, survived by his four sons who had been raised by their maternal grandparents in Montgomery. He was interred in the veterans' cemetery in Springfield.
Holley Lavender Thames lies buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Montgomery where she grew up.
