Knoxville(TN)News-Sentinel

Nashville, Tennessee

A judge threw out theft charges against a collector and a janitor accused of stealing a notebook containing 17 songs that country legend Hank Williams wrote but never recorded.

The notebook was valued at as much as $250,000.

General Sessions Judge Michael F. _Mondelli said Thursday that there was not enough evidence to support the theft charges against Stephen M. Shutts and Francine Boykin.

Sony/ATV Music Publishing brought the charges in October after a Sept. 3 Chicago Sun-Times report detailed how Shutts and his business partner, Robert Reynolds, the former bassist for The Mavericks, obtained it.

Boykin had worked as a janitor on a cleaning crew at Sony when she said she found the notebook in a box of trash taken from the company's Music Row offices.

Boykin and her husband, Ronald, sold the box for $1,500 to Shutts last summer. The box contained Williams' notebook as well as other items from Roy Orbison, Buck Owens and Conway Twitty.

In court on Thursday, Ronald Boykin, who managed the Sony/ATV cleaning crew, testified that several boxes had been stored in a break room and that _he asked a Sony executive to mark which ones were trash. Instead of throwing the boxes away, he said he took some of them home.

Troy Tomlinson, president and CEO of the publishing company, testified that the company did not have an inventory record of what had been taken.

The case now shifts to a Sumner County court, where the notebook is being kept until a judge rules in a civil lawsuit over who owns the music treasure.

The notebook contained roughed-out lyrics to the unpublished songs and various musings written by Williams between May 2, 1947, and 1949.

Williams died in the back seat of a Cadillac traveling through West Virginia on New Year's Eve in 1952.

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