Prosecutors said Lawrence Goodine changed Kara Akins’ surroundings before police arrived, while his defense highlighted toxicology results and flaws in the investigation.
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — Before investigators had an autopsy or a final explanation for Kara Akins’ death, Lawrence Goodine repeatedly told officers that she had taken something. Nearly three years later, prosecutors used those statements to argue that the former police officer had been constructing an overdose explanation for a homicide.
The prosecution’s theory went beyond what Goodine said. During his August murder trial, prosecutors accused him of changing the appearance of the living room before making a 911 call early Nov. 29, 2023. They said he moved Akins, repositioned her arms, washed blood from her face and took photographs. A Hamilton County jury ultimately convicted Goodine of tampering with evidence as well as first-degree felony murder, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated criminal trespass and violation of a no-contact order. Jurors also convicted him of second-degree murder on two other homicide counts.
Prosecutor Roger Layne told jurors that Goodine’s repeated comments to responding police had to be considered in the context of what the state said he had already done inside the home. According to Layne, Goodine said versions of “she took something” numerous times as officers began examining the scene. Prosecutors argued that the repetition was significant because the medical evidence had not yet been developed and officers had not reached an independent conclusion about why Akins, 48, was unresponsive in her Carr Street residence.
The defense challenged the suggestion that an overdose was merely a fabricated story. Defense attorney Neal Pinkston pointed to toxicology evidence showing alcohol in Akins’ system and argued that testing also indicated cocaine. Prosecutor Paul Moyle countered that the cocaine result came from an overly sensitive presumptive screening and was not confirmed during later testing. The dispute placed a technical question before the jury: how much weight to give an initial drug-screen result when the medical examiner identified traumatic injuries as the cause of death.
The autopsy became the state’s primary answer. The Hamilton County medical examiner classified Akins’ death as a homicide caused by manual strangulation and blunt-force injury to the head. Trial reporting described bruising and fractures in her neck along with a head injury involving bleeding around the brain. Prosecutors argued those physical findings were fundamentally different from the drug-related scenario Goodine had offered. They asked jurors to see the medical evidence not only as proof of how Akins died but as evidence that Goodine’s earlier statements were misleading.
Prosecutors also said Goodine’s photographs carried meaning beyond simply documenting what he found. Moyle argued that Goodine photographed the room so he could evaluate its appearance and decide what else to change before officers arrived. The state described the alleged conduct as an effort to curate the scene around a narrative. The jury was not asked to infer guilt from photographs alone; prosecutors connected them to Akins’ injuries, the movement of her body, Goodine’s statements to officers and other evidence presented during the five-day trial.
Pinkston responded by focusing on how investigators themselves handled the room. He said police did not initially recognize the residence as an obvious homicide scene. Investigators left after the first response and later returned with a search warrant, collecting items that had not been taken initially. The defense argued that those decisions created uncertainty about the scene’s original condition. If authorities had not preserved everything from the outset, Pinkston contended, they could not confidently establish what changes had been made by Goodine rather than what might have occurred during the period surrounding the investigation.
A large rug became one of the clearest examples in the defense argument. Akins had been found on the rug, according to trial reporting, yet it was later discarded and was never tested. Pinkston argued that potentially useful evidence was therefore unavailable to both sides. He also pointed to DNA mixtures found in samples collected from Akins and said one or possibly two contributors were not identified. Those issues, he maintained, prevented prosecutors from presenting as complete a forensic picture as their theory of evidence tampering suggested.
The state’s case did not begin inside the living room. A neighbor’s motion-activated camera had recorded Goodine pursuing Akins outside several hours before the emergency call. Prosecutors said the footage showed him grabbing her and pulling her back toward her home while she protested and pleaded. Goodine called 911 about six hours after that encounter. For prosecutors, the video established a confrontation before the alleged scene manipulation. For the defense, the fact that the system did not record continuously meant that substantial portions of the night remained undocumented.
Pinkston said the surveillance evidence itself was incomplete and argued that testimony suggested additional footage once existed. He urged jurors not to assume that gaps in the recordings could be filled by the prosecution’s theory. The state answered by treating the camera as corroboration rather than a complete film of the homicide. Prosecutors linked the footage to the autopsy, witness evidence, Goodine’s presence, his later statements and the photographs. That broader approach allowed the state to ask jurors to draw conclusions from the combined record instead of requiring one piece of evidence to establish every event.
The legal restrictions between Goodine and Akins provided another layer of context. Both were under no-contact orders involving the other after arrests connected to an earlier domestic violence incident. Prosecutors said Goodine’s presence with Akins violated that restriction, and the jury convicted him on the no-contact count. The restriction did not itself establish murder, but it helped define the circumstances under which prosecutors said Goodine was at the residence and became one of several offenses considered separately by jurors.
Goodine’s case had reached the jury after years of investigation and pretrial proceedings. A grand jury indicted him in July 2024 on seven counts, including three first-degree murder theories, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated burglary, tampering with evidence and violation of a no-contact order. By the time the trial ended Aug. 21, 2026, the jury’s findings did not mirror every original charge. It convicted Goodine of first-degree felony murder during an aggravated kidnapping, but returned second-degree murder verdicts on the other two homicide counts and convicted him of aggravated criminal trespass rather than the burglary charge described in the earlier indictment.
Hamilton County Criminal Court Judge Barry Steelman sentenced Goodine, 46, to life in prison on the felony-murder conviction. He set an Oct. 22 status hearing to address sentencing on the other convictions. Pinkston said the defense believed questions raised at trial remained unresolved and that a possible appeal would be discussed. The verdict nevertheless established criminal responsibility after jurors spent roughly six to seven hours evaluating a case in which both sides urged them to interpret the same incomplete record in sharply different ways.
The trial also drew renewed attention to Goodine’s earlier career as a Chattanooga police officer. He had worked for the department for about two years before being fired in 2007 following an internal affairs investigation accusing him of stealing money on the job, filing false reports and violating procedures. He faced criminal charges connected to those allegations and was acquitted in 2008. That history was separate from the evidence used to determine responsibility for Akins’ death and did not substitute for proof of the later crimes.
Akins’ relatives have described her life in Chattanooga in terms unrelated to the evidence photographs, autopsy results and police recordings that later defined the criminal case. She had lived in the city since she was 15, was a mother of seven and founded WOW Kids, an outreach program for children in the Emma Wheeler Homes community. Her family attended the trial that ended with Goodine’s convictions and life sentence.
The next scheduled proceeding is the Oct. 22 status hearing concerning sentences on Goodine’s remaining convictions. His life sentence for felony murder has already been imposed. As of Sept. 29, no subsequent court ruling changing that sentence or overturning the jury’s verdict had been identified in the sources reviewed for this report.
Author note: Last updated September 29, 2026.