True Crime Chronicles: One of three killers of Rogers contractor led trio of executions in 1994

Hoyt Franklin Clines

Thirty-one and a half years ago on August 3, 1994, Hoyt Franklin Clines became the first of three men to die in Arkansas’s grim triple execution--the nation’s first in over three decades.

At 7:11 P.M., in a stark concrete-block chamber at the Cummins Unit prison, Clines, then 37, was pronounced dead by lethal injection, his final word a terse “Nope” when asked for a last statement. T

That night, Darryl V. Richley and James William Holmes followed him to the same gurney, but it was Clines who led the way into history, marking Arkansas’s seventh execution since the death penalty’s reinstatement in 1976.

Clines’s journey to that moment began 13 years earlier, on March 25, 1981, in Rogers Alongside Richley, Holmes, and Michael Ray Orndorff, he took part in a savage robbery that left contractor Donald Lehman dead. The four, masked in ski masks, rang Lehman’s doorbell and forced their way inside.

Lehman was shot three times and beaten with a motorcycle chain in front of his wife, Virginia, and daughter, Vicki, as the intruders looted over $1,000 and several guns. For Clines, the crime would prove a fatal misstep--one that Vicki Lehman sealed by identifying him after he removed his mask during the chaos.

Arrested just two days later, Clines and his co-defendants faced a joint trial that ended in capital murder convictions and death sentences. While Orndorff’s sentence was commuted to life without parole in 1990 due to legal discrepancies, Clines’s fate held firm through years of appeals, landing him at the forefront of that fateful night in 1994.

Born in 1957, Clines was no stranger to trouble. A 1979 electrocution accident at work left him with a scarred personality--excessive drinking and a robbery conviction followed, painting a picture of a man spiraling toward ruin.

At trial, his defense argued this trauma shaped his actions, but the jury saw only the cold brutality of Lehman’s murder. They found all three statutory aggravating factors—prior violent felonies, risk to others, and pecuniary gain—outweighed mitigating claims of his post-electrocution struggles.

On execution night, Clines’s silence spoke volumes. Strapped to the gurney at 7 P.M., he offered no plea, no remorse--just “Nope.” Fifty-eight minutes later, Richley took his place, and Holmes followed at 9:24 P.M., each echoing Clines’s refusal to speak.

The efficiency was chilling, a single gurney cycling through three lives in under three hours. Outside, protesters at the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock, 70 miles away, waved signs decrying the “slaughter,” but their voices couldn’t pierce the prison walls.

Clines’s execution wasn’t without controversy. Vicki Lehman’s testimony, enhanced by undisclosed hypnosis, became a legal flashpoint. Federal courts later ruled the prosecution’s failure to reveal this a constitutional error, but deemed it harmless for Clines, Richley, and Holmes--unlike Orndorff, who was spared.

Clines’s lawyers fought to the end, calling the triple execution a barbaric rush, a claim the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed hours before his death.