SAVANNAH, Tenn. (Court TV) — Zachary Adams’ former lead defense attorney told a Hardin County judge Friday she does not believe she was a competent, effective capital defender at his 2017 trial for the murder of Holly Bobo. She told the court she was depressed, overwhelmed, buried in an electronic discovery dump and facing a hostile judge she believes was determined to secure a conviction.
Zach Adams testifies in his hearing for a new trial on Nov. 20, 2025. (Court TV)
Adams was convicted in 2017 of kidnapping, raping and murdering 20-year-old nursing student Holly Bobo and is serving life without parole plus 50 years. Bobo disappeared from her family’s rural Decatur County home on April 13, 2011, after her brother saw a man in camouflage leading her toward the woods. Ginseng hunters found her remains in 2014 in a wooded area of northern Decatur County just off Interstate 40.
Investigators found no DNA, fingerprints or other forensic evidence linking Autry, the Adams brothers or Shayne Austin to Bobo or the site where her remains were found. Prosecutors instead relied largely on Autry’s testimony, along with statements attributed to John “Dylan” Adams, who did not testify, and several jailhouse witnesses who claimed Zachary Adams made incriminating comments. Austin, whose immunity deal was later revoked, died by suicide in Florida in 2015 before the case went to trial.
MORE | Zach Adams denies killing Holly Bobo in bid for new trial
The importance of Autry’s narrative to the state’s case became clear at his formal sentencing hearing in September 2020, where he was sentenced to time served and promptly released from custody. Assistant District Attorney Paul Hagerman told the court that Autry’s testimony “answered many questions that were left open, factually, in the investigation,” as well as “many questions that Karen and Dana [Bobo] had about what happened to their daughter,” calling it “a very important piece in getting justice for Holly.” Autry’s reintegration into society was relatively brief. In December 2020, months after his release, he was arrested on gun charges in Benton County, Tennessee, federally prosecuted, and later sentenced to 19 years in federal prison, a term upheld by a federal appeals court in August 2025.
Defense attorney describes crippling pressure and hostile conditions
Zach’s former attorney, Jennifer Thompson, alleged in court Friday that Autry “crafted” his account after reviewing the discovery and said she believed other witnesses fell in line with it.
After listening to recordings of May 2025 conversations between TBI special agent Brent Booth and trial witness Victor Dinsmore — a clip she never played for the jury — Thompson said Booth was “absolutely telling Victor Dinsmore how to testify,” suggesting that Booth was guiding Dinsmore’s story until it aligned with Autry’s version of events.
The strain of trial preparation spiked in 2017 when Judge C. Creed McGinley blocked her request to have Austin’s former attorney join her trial team, Thompson recalled. “The judge said, ‘I talked with Jennifer Nichols, and I’m not going to let Luke Evans come on; there’s a conflict,’” Thompson said. “At that point, we had a big hearing about it. The Board of Professional Responsibility, which is the body that decides whether there’s a conflict, said there was no conflict, and the judge still refused.”
With Evans out, Thompson told Judge Brent Bradberry she was effectively on her own against a mountain of digital discovery and a hostile courtroom. “I was the only one doing the trial,” Thompson testified. “I wasn’t able to pull things in trial and show them. I was barely able to cross-examine witnesses. And it’s not because I wasn’t trying or wasn’t a good attorney. It was because of the situation that I was plopped down into, and with the judge being so rough on me and the state being so ugly to me, it just made it impossible for me to be my normal zealous self.”
Thompson said Assistant District Attorney Jennifer S. Nichols was “so ugly when I would make objections, and so ugly in front of the jury,” that she feared prosecutors were “poisoning the jury against me.” She said McGinley “absolutely was biased in this case” and added, “I think the judge was going to do what he needed to do in order to see that there was a conviction in that case.” McGinley, who presided as a senior judge at Adams’ 2017 trial, retired in 2021 after more than three decades on the bench. Bradberry began presiding over the case after his appointment later that year.
Thompson said co-counsel Jim Simmons “was not working on guilt-innocence,” focusing instead on preparing mitigation evidence for the penalty phase of the capital trial. According to Thompson, “Jim Simmons had tried very hard to get Zach Adams to plead guilty,” even alleging that Simmons tried to line up a plea without her involvement. When Adams objected and asked for Simmons to be replaced, McGinley declined to remove him, Thompson testified.
Thompson said she considered withdrawing but stayed because she feared Adams would be pressured into a plea if she left. “I thought if I withdrew, the judge was just going to put on some other attorney that would come in and plead Zach guilty, and I knew Zach was not guilty,” she said. “I thought Judge McGinley was not going to appoint a fiery attorney to represent Zach, and I believe that’s true.” She added, “I have never in my life had so much pressure put on me by other attorneys in the defense to have my client plead guilty. This was the worst case I’ve ever done, the most pressure I had ever been under, and it was horrible… but I knew that Zach Adams did not kill that woman, he did not kidnap her and he did not rape her, and I was going to stay in the case regardless of how they treated me, because I knew that justice needed to come forward.”
Missed evidence and witness issues
Much of Friday’s testimony focused on what Thompson says she failed to do at trial. She said one of her biggest mistakes was never getting a Parsons drive-through ATM video in front of jurors — footage Adams’ current lawyers now describe as partial alibi material. Thompson testified she believed at the time that key timestamp information had been lost when the bank changed ownership. After watching the footage in court, she called it “a partial alibi for the time that the state says he was committing the murders.”
She said she made similar mistakes with live witnesses. During Nichols’ direct examination of Dinsmore, Thompson said, Nichols was “leading terribly” and Dinsmore had already “said he didn’t remember,” yet she made no objection. Asked why she did not play for jurors a recorded conversation between Booth and Dinsmore, she answered, “I don’t know.” When attorney J. Houston Bates asked whether Dinsmore’s statement made sense and why it never went to the jury, she said, “No,” adding, “Gosh, I don’t know, Mr. Bates… I should have had this all prepared in the beginning. I didn’t realize how much everybody was going to lie. I thought I would be able to use the cross-examination of their prior inconsistent statements against them, and I thought they would just admit that they’d made these prior inconsistent statements, but everybody just lied about it and said they didn’t remember.”
Thompson said the Booth–Dinsmore recording also showed how she believes the state engineered testimony to match Autry’s late-breaking version of events. In that conversation, she testified, Booth was “absolutely telling Victor Dinsmore how to testify,” walking him through Autry’s “white truck” story and feeding him details until Dinsmore changed his account. Bates also pressed her on a shift in the murder-weapon theory. “Did you ever ask how Autry and Dinsmore both gave the .357 as the murder weapon, and then at trial they both said it was a .32 revolver? Did you ever connect that to the jury?” he asked. “No, I didn’t,” Thompson said. When he followed up, “Why not? You continually say you don’t know,” she answered, “Well, sitting here today, I do not know.” Asked whether “a competent, effective attorney” would have made these mistakes, she replied, “No,” conceding that even though she had “poured [her] life into this case,” she was not prepared for trial.
Prosecutors dispute her account
On cross-examination, prosecutors sought to turn Thompson’s own credentials and trial record back against her claim of being ineffective counsel. Special counsel Amy Weirich walked her through her résumé and the resources poured into the 2017 defense, pointing to more than $210,000 in fees for Thompson, more than $150,000 for investigators, and 14 consultants and experts retained at public expense. Prosecutors also played audio from a pretrial defense strategy session in which Thompson is heard confidently laying out her plan to point jurors toward alternate suspect Terry Britt so the panel would have “someone to hang their hat on.” “The jury’s not gonna have a trial and not convict somebody. Somebody’s going down for this,” Thompson said in the recording.
Zach Adams’ lead trial attorney, Jennifer Thompson, testified at his PCR hearing. (Court TV)
Former lead prosecutor Jennifer S. Nichols, who was appointed in 2022 by Gov. Bill Lee as a Sumner County Circuit Court judge, told Bradberry the previous day that Thompson “knew this case better than any person involved. And I’m embarrassed to say, she knew it better than me. She was effective. She had a strategy. She stuck to it.”
Late Friday afternoon, Bates returned to Adams’ claim of innocence. “You have maintained Zach is innocent?” he asked. “Yes,” she said. “You think if you had done a better job, the verdict would be different?” “I think so,” she answered, repeating her belief that “the way that we picked the jury and the way the judge was handling the case” left her convinced “the judge was going to do what he needed to do in order to see that there was a conviction in that case.”
What happens next
After Thompson’s testimony, Adams’ attorneys rested their case. The evidentiary hearing — which has unfolded in three sessions since May — is scheduled to reconvene Dec. 29 and 30 for the state’s remaining witnesses and closing arguments. Bradberry is expected to issue a written ruling within 60 days of the hearing’s conclusion. If he grants relief and that decision survives an expected state appeal, prosecutors would have to decide whether to retry Adams or walk away from a prosecution Nichols herself described in an April 2024 letter as “difficult at the least to re-try.”
This story was reported by John Cowley IV and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
