The Murder of Sharon McLane Part Two: The Fast Food Killer

Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

Vincent Strange

True Crime

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2026

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In December of 1996, 32-year-old Sharon McLane was found brutally murdered inside her Bedford, Texas apartment, stabbed and slashed more than fifty times in a crime that shocked the Mid-Cities area between Dallas and Fort Worth. Police quickly focused on Sharon’s acquaintance, John Earl Nolley, and within months he was arrested, charged, and eventually convicted of her murder. But while investigators in Texas built their case against Nolley, another terrifying series of murders was unfolding hundreds of miles away in Tennessee.

As Nashville-area detectives investigated what became known as the “Fast Food Murders,” authorities began connecting multiple brutal restaurant killings tied to a violent drifter and former fast-food employee named Paul Dennis Reid Jr. The murders stretched from Captain D’s in Donelson to a McDonald’s in Hermitage and eventually to the abduction and murder of two Baskin-Robbins employees in Clarksville. The crimes shared disturbing similarities: restaurant workers targeted during opening or closing shifts, robbery mixed with extreme violence, and victims executed by firearm or repeatedly stabbed.

As Reid’s history and alleged crimes came to light, Sharon McLane’s defense attorneys began noticing troubling overlaps between the Tennessee murders and Sharon’s killing in Bedford. Witnesses reportedly placed Reid at Sharon’s apartment complex around the time investigators believed she was murdered. Others claimed Reid had previously been seen at Sharon’s workplace. Hair recovered from Sharon’s clothing reportedly did not belong to either Sharon or John Nolley, and witnesses later described Reid appearing with cuts on his hands shortly after the murder.

The rise and fall of Paul Dennis Reid was at the expense of several lives, the horrifying Tennessee fast-food murders. And his arrest cast a shadow over the prosecution of John Earl Nolley. As investigators in Tennessee connected Reid to one of the region’s most infamous murder sprees, questions continued to linger in Texas about whether Sharon McLane’s killer had truly been identified, or whether another violent predator had passed through the Metroplex before the violence escalated elsewhere.

Part two of three.

If you have any information about the murder of Sharon Lucretia McLane, please call the Bedford police at (817) 952-2127.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Gone Cold Podcasts may contain violent or graphic subject matter. Listener discretion is advised.
0:08.8	In December of 1996, 32-year-old Sharon McLean was stabbed and slashed more than 50 times inside her Bedford, Texas apartment.
0:19.9	Investigators quickly zeroed in on her friend,
0:23.2	John Earl Knowley, who had been by Sharon's home the evening police believed she was killed
0:28.9	to sell her pot. In a city where homicide was rare and violent crime still felt like
0:35.5	something that happened somewhere else.
0:38.1	The murder shook Bedford to its core.
0:41.1	For a while, the case seemed straightforward, albeit slow moving.
0:46.9	Months into the investigation, Noly was arrested and charged with killing Sharon.
0:53.0	But at the same time, detectives were chasing down
0:55.7	evidence to use against Noly. Something else was unfolding several hundred miles away in Tennessee,
1:02.9	a series of murders. Murders that, at first glance, had nothing to do with Bedford, Texas.
1:13.6	Word of the violence made its way there, and police working the case of Sharon McLean were at least interested in taking a quick look at
1:20.2	the cases in Tennessee. Ultimately, though, their attention couldn't be pulled away from the man
1:26.7	they believed was responsible.
1:29.5	Eventually, Noly was found guilty in a court of law and sentenced to life in prison.
1:35.9	At trial, however, his defense attorney had argued that the man responsible for the multiple
1:41.6	killings a couple states over was a strong alternate suspect, and the evidence he collected to support that theory should have cast a large, looming shadow of a doubt. Two. In February of 1997, Middle Tennessee was on edge.
2:26.1	The killings had started relatively quietly and without much fanfare in the press.
2:32.4	But by spring, it was becoming impossible to ignore what was happening
2:37.0	across Nashville and beyond. It all started on the morning of February 16, 1997, when employees
2:46.1	arriving at a Captain D's restaurant on Lebanon Road in Donaldson discovered something horrifying.
	...

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