He allegedly suffered extensive abuse from his family from a young age, including one incident where a neighbor witnessed Irick's father clubbing him with a piece of lumber.

During an arranged visit to his parents' home in 1972, Irick (then aged 13) reportedly hit the household's TV set with an axe of some description, destroyed flower beds, and cut up the pajamas his sister was wearing with a razor blade.

[2][4] In 1983, while working as a dishwasher at a truck stop in Knoxville, Irick met and befriended Kenny Jeffers, an auto mechanic who lived in nearby Clinton.

Nobody was severely injured or killed during the fire; however, the family had to live in separate abodes as a result of difficulty in finding a house big enough for all eight of them.

Upon arriving at the Exeter Avenue address, Kenny found Irick standing in the doorway looking vacant, before finding Paula unconscious on the living room floor in a pool of her own blood.

After finding a pulse, Kenny wrapped Paula in a blanket and took her to the nearest children's hospital, where a doctor attempted unsuccessfully for 45 minutes to revive her.

[8] In addition, the severe tears in her vagina and rectum were confirmed to be consistent with rape, as well as a head injury sustained during her ordeal being attributed to blunt force trauma that may have knocked her unconscious.

As a result of Paula's murder, the Knoxville police department told the public on the morning of April 16 to be on the lookout for a man matching Irick's physical description.

[7] Police testified that Irick readily confessed to murdering Paula Dyer, both verbally and in writing, and described his behavior as cooperative and remorseful.

In July 2018, a bench trial was held in Nashville regarding a lawsuit against the TDoC and its execution protocol, filed by over half of the population of Tennessee's death row.

[16] In 2022, the execution of Oscar Franklin Smith was called off last minute by Governor Bill Lee due to a "technical oversight" in the lethal injection procedure.

A review conducted by The Tennessean which looked over thousands of pages of court records showed that Tennessee and its contractors had regularly deviated from the lethal injection protocol.