JOE EDWARDS,Associated Press Writer

NASHVILLE — It was nearly closing time at Bob Bell's Nashville convenience store on July 5, 1980. In walked Cecil C. Johnson Jr., who lived in the neighborhood and had patronized the market.

Within a few horrifying minutes, three people were dead, including a 12-year-old boy who was the son of the market owner and apparently was helping his dad run the register.

Johnson, 23 at the time and now 53, is to be executed early Wednesday for three counts of murder resulting from a robbery that warm summer evening that netted the holdup man about $200.

He'll be the sixth person put to death in Tennessee since 2000.

Johnson, his relatives and survivors of the victims have declined requests for interviews about the slayings.

But Jim Sledge, a retired homicide detective for the Metro Nashville Police Department who worked the crime at the time, still has the case file.

Shot to death were Bobby Bell, son of market owner Bob Bell, and two men who were sitting in a Supreme Taxi outside the market, Charles House, 35, and James Moore, 41, the driver. The elder Bell and another man in the market were wounded.

"He had six shots and he accounted for them all," Sledge said. "He didn't want to leave any witnesses."

The two men in the taxi were innocent bystanders.

"They were in the wrong place at the wrong time," Sledge said.

Johnson, who was a kitchen worker at Vanderbilt Hospital, was arrested two days later after his father turned him in.

"Word was out on the street about him," Sledge said, consulting the case file. "It was pretty stupid to rob the place he shopped at."

Johnson was convicted six months later, with the elder Bell identifying Johnson during the trial.

"It was very vicious in the fact that a 12-year-old boy was killed, and Bob Sr. watched his only child executed in front of him," Sledge said.

"I talked to him three months ago, and he said he had no grandchildren and he's still very bitter."

In 1987, Johnson was one of two Death Row inmates convicted of the 1985 beating death of Laron Williams, a fellow prisoner at the old Tennessee Penitentiary. Williams was on Death Row for the slayings of a Memphis policeman and a Roman Catholic priest.

Sledge visited the market site some time ago, looking for the elder Bell, and discovered he's sold the building. It's now a taproom south of downtown, across the street from Dolly Parton's walled office complex and a half block from the Hope Center place of worship with the word "Believe" in big blue letters on the side.

"I said to myself, 'You people here don't have a clue what happened here years ago,' " Sledge said.

On the bar's front window, printed in gold, is this warning declaring that the business bans guns inside: "Don't take your guns to town, son. Leave your guns at home." Johnny Cash