On 1 October, 1989, Robirds was shot in the neck before being stabbed several times. Her eldest, Chad, was found having been shot in the left eye, as well as the chest and torso. Jason, her youngest son, had been stabbed in the neck and abdomen.

Oscar Franklin Smith, who was convicted of murdering his estranged wife and her two sons in 1989, was executed by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Tennessee, marking the state's first execution since 2020 and the first under a revised lethal injection protocol.

Tennessee death row inmate Oscar Smith died by lethal injection Thursday for the 1989 murders of his estranged wife Judith Smith and her teenage sons, Jason and Chad Burnett.