The Tanning Bed Murders: A Nashville Cold Case That Stayed Open

In 1996, two 18-year-olds were stabbed to death inside a Nashville tanning salon. The only man ever charged walked free in 2018. In 2025, he was convicted of a nearly identical assault two thousand miles away, and Nashville decided that still was not enough to reopen the case.

What Happened at Exotic Tan for Men

I was staying a few blocks off Church Street in Midtown on a recent trip to Nashville. Thirty years ago, one of those blocks held a tanning business called Exotic Tan for Men. I want to be direct about why I went looking into what happened there: a case that produces this much documented investigative movement and this little resolution is exactly the kind of record Clutch Justice exists to read.

On February 22, 1996, Melissa Chilton and Tiffany Campbell, both eighteen, were found stabbed nearly one hundred times inside the salon. The business’s manager discovered their bodies after he could not reach them by phone. Assistant District Attorney Pam Anderson later told a local news outlet there was “no forced entry,” and that the injuries reflected passion rather than robbery. The salon’s surveillance footage had been removed from the business and has never surfaced. Campbell was attending Middle Tennessee State University at the time of her death. Chilton’s mother, Gail, has said publicly that both young women were recruited into the business as teenagers by a man in his twenties, in an arrangement she now describes as trafficking, though it was never labeled that way in 1996.

The Seventeen-Year Gap

Investigators pursued several leads in the months after the murders, including Melissa’s boyfriend at the time, who was questioned and dismissed. For most of two decades, the case produced no arrest. By 2002, Nashville homicide detective Grady Eleam told reporters investigators had identified a suspect and had been concentrating on him for six months. No charge followed. It would be another eleven years before a name became public, and Metro Nashville’s cold case unit, later famous for closing dozens of decades-old homicides under detective Pat Postiglione, would not bring this one to an indictment until DNA technology caught up with the physical evidence sitting in evidence storage.

The DNA That Almost Was Enough

In 2013, advances in DNA testing led investigators back to Patrick Lamonte Streater, Campbell’s former boyfriend, then serving a prison sentence in California for a string of armed robberies, several involving a knife. Streater had worked as a football coach at a high school in Carmichael, California, before his arrest there. A partial DNA profile recovered from a knife sheath at the crime scene was said to link him to the killings, though prosecutors would later describe that link as a lower-probability partial match rather than a conclusive one. A witness told investigators Streater had appeared visibly upset when he came to the salon looking for Campbell the night before the murders. Streater was indicted on two counts of first-degree murder and extradited to Tennessee in 2015.

In March 2017, during a hearing on Streater’s motion to reduce his bond, an inmate named Quinton Hughes testified that his cousin, David Ewing, had confessed to killing Campbell years earlier. Hughes said the confession came while he witnessed Ewing commit an unrelated killing, a crime for which Ewing was later convicted. A woman previously involved with Ewing, Melissa Dickens, had told investigators years earlier that Ewing said he had killed the two women after a violent outburst; Dickens died in a car accident in 2014 and was never able to testify to it directly. Judge Monte Watkins denied the bond motion, describing the secondhand account as hearsay and declining to weigh it further. Ewing, who was never charged in the Chilton-Campbell case, was never independently tested against the case’s physical evidence before the state’s case against Streater was dropped on separate grounds the following year.

Why the Charges Were Dropped

In June 2018, five years after Streater’s indictment, the Davidson County District Attorney’s Office dropped the murder charges before trial. The office said additional DNA testing had weakened confidence in the original partial match to a point where prosecutors did not believe they could prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Streater was released. In a later interview, he acknowledged visiting the salon the night before the murders but denied owning a weapon matching the one a witness described, contradicting testimony from the original investigation. He has never been convicted of, or retried for, the Chilton and Campbell murders.

A Different Kind of Confirmation

In January 2024, Streater was arrested again, this time in Seattle. King County prosecutors charged him with attempted rape and unlawful imprisonment after a woman escaped from his car half-dressed, screaming that he was trying to rape her. She told police Streater threatened to break her face while restraining her in the back seat, then used pepper spray to free herself and ran to a nearby gym for help. More than a year later, Streater pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree assault and unlawful imprisonment with sexual motivation. He faced roughly ten years in prison and lifetime sex offender registration, with sentencing scheduled for September 2025. Clutch Justice found no additional public confirmation of the final sentence beyond those reported terms.

What “Nothing Substantial” Means

After Streater’s Seattle conviction became public, a spokesperson for the Nashville District Attorney’s Office told a local reporter that prosecutors had coordinated with Seattle police to look for overlap with the 1996 case, and concluded there was “nothing substantial enough to move forward on this end.” The office reiterated that the original DNA evidence was never strong enough to meet the state’s burden at trial. It also said that, by law, a suspect who has been tried and found not guilty cannot be tried again.

Jeopardy, under both the Fifth Amendment and Tennessee’s own double jeopardy protections, generally attaches when a jury is sworn, or when the first witness is sworn in a bench trial. It does not attach at indictment, and it does not attach when the state voluntarily dismisses a case before trial. Tennessee also places no statute of limitations on first-degree murder. Nothing in the public record suggests a legal bar prevents Nashville from presenting the Chilton and Campbell case to a grand jury again if it develops evidence prosecutors consider sufficient. What the DA’s office described, as reported, reads less like a legal impossibility and more like a resource-and-confidence decision: prosecutors do not believe the DNA evidence already in hand would win at trial, and a Washington guilty plea for an unrelated assault does not, on its own, change the strength of a 1996 partial DNA match. That is a defensible prosecutorial judgment. It is a different sentence than the one that made it into the coverage.

What the DNA Confidence Threshold Actually Protects

The distinction matters beyond this one case. Prosecutors are supposed to decline cases they do not believe they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt. That standard exists to protect people from being convicted on speculation, and it should not be softened casually. But when a declination gets described publicly as a legal impossibility rather than a professional judgment call, the public loses the ability to ask the obvious follow-up question, which is what it would actually take to reopen the file. A resource-and-confidence decision can be revisited if new evidence, improved lab technology, or renewed investigative attention changes the calculation. A constitutional bar cannot. Conflating the two, even without intending to mislead anyone, forecloses a conversation that two families have been trying to have for nearly thirty years.

Why This Case Matters Beyond Nashville

I have spent years reading records out of Michigan courthouses, and the pattern here will look familiar to anyone who has done the same kind of reading anywhere else. Systems rarely fail with a single dramatic decision. They fail through a sequence of individually defensible choices, each one a little quieter than the last, until a file is technically still open and functionally closed. Nothing here suggests Nashville officials lied. It suggests they stopped describing, in public, the actual difference between what the law requires and what a prosecutor’s office is choosing not to pursue. Melissa Chilton and Tiffany Campbell do not get the benefit of that distinction. Neither does anyone else still waiting on a phone call from a detective.