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Greeley Wells looks back on career | TriCities.com

BHC file photo by Earl Neikirk - Elsa Garcia talks about her life as an abuse victim Tuesday, July 25, 2000, at a park in Bristol, Tenn.  Garcia, 22, was repeatedly tortured, beaten and raped by a former Bristol minister and his wife who took her as a baby from an Indiana orphanage and raised her.  The Rev. Joseph and Evangeline Combs were convicted in March of kidnapping and abuse and were sentenced in April to a combined 179 years in prison.

Greeley Wells took a job with the Sullivan County District Attorney’s office because he wanted to live in the mountains and near Knoxville and its surrounding area where he and his wife grew up and their families still lived.

On Wednesday, the county’s chief prosecutor confirmed that he will retire June 30 – bringing an end to a 35-year career in which he successfully prosecuted five death penalty cases, mentored a staff he’s confident will be able to take his place, and ran across a pair of child abusers who still haunt him today.

“I plan to spend a good deal more time with my family and my grandchildren,” Wells, 66, said as he talked about his career and his retirement plans during an interview with the Bristol Herald Courier and WJHL-TV Channel 11. “I plan to do a little fishing and play a little golf.”

Getting started

Immediately after graduating from the University of Tennessee’s law school in 1969, Wells was appointed to serve as a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and worked out of the bureau’s field offices in Cleveland, Minneapolis and Washington D.C.

Wanting to move to Northeast Tennessee – where he gained a limited amount of fame in high school by tackling Steve Spurrier when the University of South Carolina football coach played for Johnson City’s Science Hill High School – Wells got a job as an assistant district attorney for the county in 1976.

Two years later, Wells was assigned a case against Donald Strouth, a 19-year-old Kingsport resident who murdered James Keegan while robbing the elderly Kingsport shopkeeper’s used clothing store in February 1978.

Strouth and his accomplice, Jeff Dicks, were both convicted on capital felony murder charges in September 1978, marking the first and second of five people Wells would send to Tennessee’s Death Row in his 35-year career.

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