Every US Prisoner EXECUTED in May 2026 | Crimes, Final Meals & Last Words

Indiziert: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]One of them said two words to a 77year-old woman in a parking lot. Slide over. 23 ft of duct tape later, she was found dead in the trunk of her own car.

[00:00:11]One of them mixed pieces of a styrofoam cup into a can of gasoline over a stolen shotgun. Then he poured it on two people sitting on a couch and lit a match. One of them broke two knives on a pregnant mother and her daughter. Then he took a shower, put on dress shoes, and told police he'd been out jogging. One of them left his ex-girlfriend on the floor for 6 hours. She begged him to call 911.

[00:00:38]He told her she deserved to die. Their baby was in the next room. Neither of them made it out alive. And one of them planned a triple murder from inside a prison cell. His best friend picked him up the day he got out. Weeks later, that friend was found under a coffin, still breathing when they put him in the ground.

[00:00:59]But only one of them looked into a camera and said, "I'm not going to be executed." And he might have been right.

[00:01:07]These are the executions of May 2026.

[00:01:11]Their crimes, their last meals, and their last words. But first, let us know where you are watching this from.

[00:01:19]We start with the man who left his ex-girlfriend on the floor for 6 hours.

[00:01:24]His name was Raymond Eugene Johnson. And the night he killed Brooke and baby Ka wasn't even the first time he had taken a life. He was 21 years old when he killed for the first time. Shot a man through a car window during an argument in Oklahoma City. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and received a 20-year sentence, but he only served nine of them. Two years after being parrolled, Raymond killed again. Brooke Whitaker was 24 years old. She was Raymond's ex-girlfriend and the mother of his baby daughter. And on the morning of June 23rd, 2007, firefighters were called to Brook's house on East Newton Street in Tulsa. They found her body on the floor of a side room. And when they found her 7-month-old baby girl on the living room floor, she was so badly burned that first responders thought she was a doll.

[00:02:18]This is what happened. During a police interview in 1995, after he was arrested for killing Clarence Ray Oliver, Raymond told detectives something that would matter a lot more 20 years later.

[00:02:30]>> I am a con artist. I'm I'm real good at it.

[00:02:33]>> State attorneys saved that recording for nearly 20 years. And in 2026, they played it for the Pardon and Parole Board, but we'll get to that. Raymond went to prison in 1996. He was released in 2005 after serving just 9 years of his 20-year sentence. And it didn't take long for things to go wrong again.

[00:02:56]After being parrolled, Raymond moved to Tulsa. That's where he met Brooke. And almost from the beginning, he made that relationship a dangerous place to be. He was physically abusive. He stalked her.

[00:03:09]He controlled who she could see and where she could work. He threatened to kill her on more than 10 separate occasions. And by April of 2007, Brooke was frightened enough that she filed a restraining order against him. Her youngest, a baby girl named Kia, was 7 months old. She was Raymond's daughter.

[00:03:28]The restraining order was eventually dropped in May when neither party showed up to a scheduled hearing. Raymond moved back in. And that decision would cost Brooke and Kia their lives.

[00:03:40]By June, Raymond had moved out. But on the night of June 22nd, he had someone drop him off near Brook's house and waited for her to come home. A few hours later, she did. And when she walked into her house and found Raymond standing there, the two got into an argument.

[00:03:57]Brooke pushed him, called him names, and grabbed a knife from the kitchen.

[00:04:01]Raymond grabbed a claw hammer and hit her in the head. She fell to the floor and asked him to call 911, but he didn't. Instead, he hit her five more times. Her skull was fractured in multiple places. There were large depressions and indentations across her head, and parts of her brain were exposed. She had defensive wounds on her hands from trying to fight back. And still, Brooke was conscious, still talking.

[00:04:28]She told him her head hurt. She told him it felt like it was going to fall off.

[00:04:33]She begged him to call for help. She begged him to let her mother come get baby Ka. She begged him to think of her children. She promised him she wouldn't tell the police what had happened. She said anything she could think of to get him to pick up the phone. But Raymond told her no. He didn't want to go back to prison. And then he told her she deserved to die. And then he left her there. According to prosecutors, Raymond kept Brooke alive for up to 6 hours. 6 hours on the floor of her own home, conscious with her skull fractured and parts of her brain exposed, begging the father of her child to call for help. At some point, Raymond went to the shed, found a gasoline can, and came back inside. He dowsed Brooke with gasoline.

[00:05:17]Then, he walked to the room where seven-month-old Kia was sleeping and doused his own baby, too. He then lit a dish towel on fire, threw it on Brooke, and walked out the back door. The fire wasn't reported until 11:11 that morning, and when firefighters entered the house on East Newton Street, the inside was pitch black with smoke. Once they cleared it, they found Ka on the living room floor. Her mouth, eyelids, and nose were melted shut. The medical examiner later confirmed that she had not died from smoke inhalation. She had burned to death. Her death had been one of the most painful ways a human being can die. In a side room, they found Brooke partially underneath a bunk bed.

[00:06:00]She had no pulse and was not breathing.

[00:06:04]Paramedics restarted her heart on the way to Hillrest Medical Center, and that's when they noticed the massive fractures across her skull. She was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at the hospital. The cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head and smoke inhalation. She was 24 years old. Her three other children were not in the house that morning. They were with their fathers and Raymond was already gone.

[00:06:30]After the fire, Raymond called his other girlfriend, Jennifer, to pick him up. He smelled like gasoline. There was blood on his clothes. And as they drove away, Jennifer looked back and watched flames pouring out the front window of Brook's house. She told police everything that same afternoon. And by that evening, Raymond was in custody. He waved his Miranda rights and admitted everything.

[00:06:54]At trial, Raymond told detectives he hit Brooke five times with the hammer, but prosecutors told the jury the real number was closer to 24. And despite Raymond's claim that he never intended to harm baby Ka, prosecutors proved he had poured gasoline directly onto her.

[00:07:12]The jury convicted Raymond on all counts. Every aggravating circumstance was proven and he was sentenced to death for each of the two murders and to life in prison for arson. Raymond did not make a statement after the verdict, but the victim's family welcomed it. For the next 16 years, Raymond sat on death row.

[00:07:33]Every appeal was denied. He was originally scheduled for 2024, but the execution was delayed because the Department of Corrections staff needed a break from carrying out so many executions. So Raymond got to live two more years, not because of new evidence, because the people whose job it was to kill him needed time to recover.

[00:07:55]On April 8th, 2026, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board held a clemency hearing. Raymond appeared by video from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in Mallister. He faced the board and apologized to Brooks family. He said he had once been trusted in their circle and he knew what they had lost. He said his crime didn't define who he was, that it defined a moment he deeply regretted.

[00:08:21]But then the state took its turn.

[00:08:23]Prosecutors played video footage from Raymond's first prison stint from before the double murder. They showed the board exactly who Raymond had been before he got out. And then they played the 1995 police interview where he had called himself a con artist. The same recording from 20 years earlier. The state pointed out that Raymond had been active in church since he was a juvenile. Even during his first prison sentence, he found God, got out, and killed a mother and her baby.

[00:08:53]Prosecutors also revealed that Raymond had information about two unsolved murders, but refused to give it to police. The reason, loyalty to the gang.

[00:09:05]And then there was Alyssa, Brook's second daughter. She could not bring herself to speak. A family member read her statement instead. She said, "I never deserve this. My sisters never deserve this, and my brother never deserved this, and my mom never deserved this."

[00:09:22]She was 24 years old, but she told the board she was sitting in that room as the 5-year-old girl she had been on the day her mother and baby sister were murdered. She spoke about the missed birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, the pregnancies, the births, everything her mother never got to see.

[00:09:42]The board voted unanimously to deny clemency 5 to zero. On the evening before his execution, Raymond requested a last meal consisting of 12piece boneless chicken, a pint of gizzards, a side of fried pickles, four packets of hot sauce, and four packets of ranch dressing.

[00:10:02]Brook's mother, Andra, spent nearly two decades waiting for this day. Her family said she was never the same after the murders. All she wanted was to live long enough to see Raymond punished. But she didn't make it. She died of a heart attack 18 months before the execution.

[00:10:19]On the morning of May 14th, 2026, Raymond Eugene Johnson was led from his holding cell to the execution chamber at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in Mallister. He was strapped to the gurnie and when asked if he had any final words, he looked toward the witnesses and said, "To Brooke and Kia and your family, I want to apologize for my actions and the pain I caused you. I hope people can speak your names without my name attached to it. I hurt you one day. I hope you can forgive me. His spiritual adviser, Kurt Borgman, then began reading scripture. As he spoke, a single tear rolled out of Raymond's left eye. Prison officials began administering the three drug injection at 10:00 a.m. A doctor declared him unconscious about 6 minutes later.

[00:11:06]Raymond was pronounced dead at 10:12 a.m. He was 52 years old. He had spent more than 16 years on death row. That same evening, while Oklahoma was processing Raymond's death, Texas was preparing its own execution. And this one would make history. 23 feet of duct tape. That's how much was wrapped around a 77year-old woman's face inside the trunk of her own car. Her nose was physically pushed sideways from the pressure. She couldn't breathe. She suffocated slowly, sealed in that trunk somewhere on a highway in Oklahoma. And it all started because she went grocery shopping on a Friday morning. On the morning of January 30th, 2004, the parking lot at the Tom Thumb grocery store in Fort Worth, Texas was busy with shoppers. One of those shoppers was Laura Lee Crane. She was 77 years old, a retired director of the Starpoint School at Texas Christian University, a school dedicated to children with learning disabilities. Friday was her regular shopping day. She lived nearby. She knew the store. And she was still sitting in her car in that Tom Thumb parking lot when Edward Lee Busby walked up and opened her driver's side door. He said two words, "Slide over." And she complied.

[00:12:27]A woman named Kitty Latimer climbed into the back seat. The two of them needed a car to get out of Fort Worth. They owed money for drugs. And when Edward spotted Laura sitting alone in that parking lot, he made his decision. From the Tom Thumb parking lot, Edward drove Laura's car while Kitty sat behind him. And Laura sat in the front passenger seat. And by all accounts, Laura was calm. She turned to Kitty in the back seat and said, "Hi, darling." Then she turned to Edward behind the wheel and asked what his mother would say if she knew he was doing this. A 77year-old woman just carjacked outside a grocery store in broad daylight in Fort Worth. And her instinct was to talk to these two like human beings. They used Laura's ATM card for cash, then forced her into the trunk. For the next 36 to 48 hours, Edward and Kitty drove through Texas and Oklahoma. They stopped at motel. They looked for cocaine. And at some point during those hours, with Laura still locked inside the trunk, Edward wrapped duct tape around her face. Layer after layer, over her nose, over her mouth, over everything. The medical examiner in Oklahoma would later testify that approximately 23 ft of duct tape had been applied to Laura's face with enough force to physically deviate her nose from its natural position. She could not breathe through any part of her face and she slowly suffocated inside that trunk on a cold winter drive through Oklahoma.

[00:13:58]They dumped Laura's body off an embankment near Davis, Oklahoma. And 2 days after the abduction, an Oklahoma City police officer pulled Edward over.

[00:14:07]He was still driving Laura's car. He was arrested on the spot. But Edward pointed the finger at Kitty. He told investigators that Kitty had been the brains of the entire operation, that he had been following her lead the whole time, that she had told him to tape Laura's head up. He said several times that he hadn't meant to kill her. He said he'd prayed with Laura before it happened. Kitty told Fort Worth detectives a completely different story.

[00:14:35]She said Edward was the one in control from the moment they walked into that Tom Thumb parking lot. That he had directed everything. that when she asked him what he was doing testing car doors, he told her to shut up. And the physical evidence from the crime lab sealed it.

[00:14:51]Only Edward's fingerprints were found on the duct tape recovered from Laura's face. Not Kitty's fingerprints, his.

[00:14:59]Kitty pleaded guilty and got life. She's still locked up today. The jury convicted Edward of capital murder and sentenced him to death. 6 days before the scheduled execution on May 8th, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans issued a temporary stay. But on the afternoon of May 14th, just hours before the scheduled execution inside the Huntsville unit, the Supreme Court sided with Texas. In a divided 6 to3 decision, the court lifted the Fifth Circuit stay and cleared the way for the lethal injection to proceed that evening. On the evening of May 14th, 2026, Edward Lee Busby was led from his holding cell to the execution chamber.

[00:15:41]He was strapped to the gurnie. When the warden asked if he had a final statement, Edward spoke directly to Laura's family members watching through the witness room window. Sir, ma'am, I am so sorry. I ask that you please, please don't hate me and that you can find it in your heart to forgive me for the part that I played in what happened to her. Miss Crane was a lovely woman. I never meant anything bad to happen to her. He said he wished he could take it all back. He said he had no right to get in that car. He turned toward his sister who was praying on the other side of the glass and told her to find a church and pick up her cross. I'm here because this is the will of God, he said. Prison officials began administering the lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbatital.

[00:16:26]Edward took a sharp breath on the gurnie, closed his eyes, and gasped.

[00:16:31]Then he made snoring sounds that grew progressively quieter inside the chamber. Within 40 seconds, all movement stopped. Edward Lee Busby was pronounced dead at 8:11 p.m. He was 53 years old.

[00:16:44]He was the 600th person executed in the state of Texas since 1982.

[00:16:50]6 days later, Arizona carried out its first execution of 2026. And this one started with something as small as a missing shotgun. But stay with this video because after this case, we get to a man who wrote letters from prison describing a master plan, then buried three people alive under a coffin in a Memphis cemetery. That story is coming.

[00:17:12]In the summer of 2002, 39-year-old Leroy was living with his girlfriend Jonah in a crowded duplex in the Sunny Slope area of Phoenix.

[00:17:22]20-year-old Charles Perez and his girlfriend Nova Bant also lived there along with a man named Eddie Keith, his wife, and their two young daughters.

[00:17:32]When a shotgun went missing, Charles and Nova blamed Leroy and Yona. They got kicked out, but Leroy did not let it go.

[00:17:41]On the evening of July 12th, Leroy, Jonah, their friend, and a man named Justin Johnson spent the night at the house smoking they had bought from Charles earlier that day. Hours passed and at around 3:30 in the morning, while the rest of the neighborhood was asleep, Leroy got up and walked to Jack's duplex.

[00:18:02]Outside, he ran into Eddie Keith. And what happened next was not the act of someone in a blind rage. Leroy told Eddie to get his wife and children out of the apartment. He said he was going to teach Charles and Jack a lesson, that nobody gets away with talking about him and Yona. Eddie pleaded with him not to do it. Leroy agreed to spare Jack, but he told Eddie it was too late for Charles. Then he warned him that he was the only person who knew about this and if anyone said anything, Leroy would know who talked.

[00:18:34]And then he looked at Eddie and told him he had pretty little girls. Eddie grabbed his wife and his daughters and ran.

[00:18:42]Yona's brother Jeffrey let Leroy into the apartment. Inside, Charles and his girlfriend were sitting next to each other on a couch near the front door.

[00:18:51]Leroy looked at them and told Charles he shouldn't talk behind other people's backs, but neither of them got a chance to respond. Leroy poured gasoline over both of them and threw a lit match. But this was not ordinary gasoline. Before walking to that apartment, Leroy had mixed pieces of a styrofoam cup into the fuel. He believed it would create a thick paste-like substance that would cling to skin and be harder to put out.

[00:19:20]He had thought about this. He had prepared for it. And now Charles and Nova were covered in it.

[00:19:27]They were engulfed in flames almost instantly. Both of them ran screaming from the apartment. The fire tore through the duplex and spread into the adjoining unit. Jack and Jeffrey escaped from one side and a woman named Mary escaped from the other. First responders rushed Charles and Nova to the hospital.

[00:19:46]Both had thirdderee burns covering more than 75% of their bodies. Charles Perez died the following day. He was 20 years old. After the fire, Leroy walked back to his friend's house. And at some point that night, he called the house and asked Jonah a single question, whether it smelled like burning flesh.

[00:20:07]Then he asked Justin Johnson, who was with him that night, if he was going to talk. He testified that someone in that house, either Leroy or Yona, threatened him with harm if he said anything to anyone. But Novabanta survived. And while she was still in the hospital, barely alive, burned over 3/4 of her body, she told her nurse the name of the man who had set her on fire, Leroy Dean McIll.

[00:20:34]At trial, Novabanta took the stand and told the jury exactly what happened. She showed them the injuries she still carried from that night.

[00:20:43]Then the prosecution introduced one more detail. While Leroy was sitting in jail awaiting trial, he had tried to have a witness against him killed and that made the verdict final. The jury returned a sentence of death.

[00:20:59]Leroy spent the next 21 years on death row and every appeal was denied.

[00:21:05]On the evening before his execution, Leroy was served his final meal. He had requested onion rings, bread and butter, cottage pie, a green salad, and a slice of chocolate cake.

[00:21:16]The next morning at 10:01 a.m., he was brought into the execution chamber. He was dressed in white. At 10:04, the curtain to the witness room opened. A spiritual adviser was with him. Before the procedure began, Leroy was given the opportunity to make a final statement.

[00:21:34]He looked around the room and said, "I just want to thank everyone for being so accommodating and nice." And then he said, "I'm going home soon." Those were his last words. At 10:14, the drugs were administered. Leroy showed no resistance. He took a few heavy breaths and made short snoring sounds. And then he went still. Leroy Dean McIll was pronounced dead at 10:26 a.m. He was 63 years old.

[00:22:03]The next day, Florida carried out its own execution. And this one started with an argument over a place to stay. On May 21st, 2026, after spending 20 years on death row, Richard Knight was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison. But the reason he ended up on death row, his cousin's girlfriend asked him to move out of her apartment. She told him he could leave in the morning.

[00:22:30]Instead, Richard went for a walk. Then, he came back and before the night was over, a mother and her four-year-old daughter were dead on the floor of their own apartment. The mother was 6 weeks pregnant with her second child. This is what happened. In the summer of 2000, Richard was living in a Broward County apartment with his cousin Hans, Hans's girlfriend, Odacia Stevens, and Odacia's 4-year-old daughter, Hanessia. He had overstayed his welcome. They had asked him to leave multiple times. On the night of June 27th, Hans was at work.

[00:23:05]Richard was alone with Odessia and her daughter. Sometime that night, the argument started up again. Odessia told Richard she was done. She was done supporting him, done waiting for him to figure it out and done asking politely.

[00:23:20]She wanted him gone.

[00:23:22]Richard asked her for more time. He told her he had just gotten a job, but Odysia had heard it before. She told him no, he could leave in the morning. So, Richard walked out the front door and into the Broward County night. And as he walked through the neighborhood, something inside him shifted. With every step, he got angrier. He replayed the conversation. He stewed on it. And by the time he turned around and walked back to the apartment, he was not the same person who had left. He went straight to the master bedroom. Odacia and Hanessia had gone to bed. The argument was over. The decision had been made. He was leaving in the morning. But Richard woke her up. And this time the conversation did not end with words.

[00:24:09]Richard turned around, walked to the kitchen, and grabbed a knife. When he stepped back into the master bedroom, Odessia was on one side of the bed.

[00:24:18]Four-year-old Hanessia was lying on the other. He went to Odessia first. He began stabbing her, not once, not twice, but over and over and over again. She tried to fight him off with her bare hands. She tried to push him away, but the blows kept coming. Eventually, she stopped fighting back and curled into a fetal position on the floor, trying to protect herself from the knife. And then Richard turned to the other side of the bed. He began stabbing her, too. He kept going until the knife blade snapped in his hand. The blade literally broke from the force, so he stopped, walked back to the kitchen, and grabbed another one.

[00:24:58]When he returned to the bedroom, Hanessia was no longer on the bed. She had crawled across the floor and made it to the closet door. Bleeding from stab wounds in her chest and neck, she had dragged herself across the bedroom floor trying to get away. She was drowning in her own blood by the time he walked back in. And Richard was not done. He went to the kitchen a third time. He accidentally sliced his own hand on one of the broken knife pieces from the first blade. He grabbed yet another knife, and when he walked back out toward the living room, he saw that Odessia had moved. She had crawled all the way from the master bedroom through the hallway to the front of the apartment. She was lying on the living room floor near the entrance, still alive, covered in her own blood.

[00:25:47]Richard walked over, rolled her onto her back, and continued stabbing her. When the blood from her body covered his hands, he wiped them clean on the carpet next to her.

[00:25:58]And then, as if none of it had happened, he went to the bathroom. He peeled off his blood soaked t-shirt and jean shorts and shoved them under the bathroom sink.

[00:26:07]He stepped into the shower. He cleaned himself up. He put on a pair of blue polo pants and dress shoes. Then he walked back out to the living room, stepped around the blood, and started wiping down the knives near the front door.

[00:26:21]That is when he heard the knock.

[00:26:24]Richard looked through the peepphole.

[00:26:26]Broward County police officers were standing in the hallway outside the apartment. He did not open the door. He turned around, sprinted to his bedroom, and climbed out the window into the night. What Richard did not know was that the upstairs neighbor in the apartment building had been listening.

[00:26:44]Around midnight, she had heard loud thumping sounds coming through the walls. She heard two female voices. One of them was a child crying. She picked up her phone and called 911 at 12:21 in the morning. The crying continued after the police cars arrived. Officers found Odessia on the living room floor surrounded by broken knife pieces. And in the master bedroom, little Hanessia was curled up on the floor next to the closet door. Meanwhile, Officer Natalie Mockchnney had walked around to the far side of the building, and there on the other side of a row of hedges about a hundred yards from the apartment, she spotted a man. He was visibly wet, even though it was not raining. He was wearing dress clothes and dress shoes.

[00:27:31]He told her he had been out jogging, but he had a scratch across his chest, a scrape on his shoulder, fresh cuts on both of his hands. There was blood on his shirt and there was blood on a $10 bill sitting in his pocket.

[00:27:45]Inside the apartment, two people he knew were found dead. And the man who did this to them had just told a police officer he was out for a jog.

[00:27:54]The case against Richard Knight took 6 years to make it to trial. But the story of who he was goes back further than that night in Broward County. The medical examiner who had examined both bodies took the stand in the Broward County courtroom and described what Richard had done. Odessia had 21 stab wounds. 14 of them were concentrated in her neck. She had 24 additional puncture and scratch wounds across her body.

[00:28:23]There was bruising around her throat from what appeared to be a belt or a cord. And she had deep defensive wounds on both of her hands where she had grabbed at the blade trying to stop it.

[00:28:34]Odessia was 6 weeks pregnant at the time of the attack. And that was not it. The medical examiner estimated that Odessia had been conscious for 10 to 15 minutes after the attack started in the master bedroom. She had been awake and aware through the stabbing. She had tried to fight back. She had tried to run. She had made it all the way from the bedroom to the living room. And she had been found there and attacked again.

[00:29:01]10 to 15 minutes. That is how long Odacia Stevens fought for her life on the floor of her own apartment while her daughter lay bleeding in the bedroom behind her. Hanessia had four stab wounds in her upper chest and neck. She had defensive wounds on her small hands where she had tried to block the knife.

[00:29:21]There were bruises on her arms from being grabbed and bruises on her neck consistent with manual strangulation.

[00:29:28]The jury found Richard guilty on both counts and every single juror voted for death. For the next 19 years, every appeal was denied. On April 23rd, 2026, Governor Ronda Santis signed his death warrant. Richard woke up at 4:40 in the morning on the day of his execution. He remained compliant throughout the day.

[00:29:51]He was allowed to request a special last meal, but he declined. He did not meet with any visitors. He did not ask for a spiritual adviser, and nobody came to see him. Or maybe nobody wanted to. At 6:00 p.m., the curtain to the witness room went up. Richard was already strapped down with his arms extended and an IV line in place. The warden asked if he wished to make a final statement.

[00:30:16]Richard looked up and said, "I want to give thanks to Yahweh, who is the most high." Yahweh is the Hebrew name for God. Those were his last words. He did not mention Odessia. He did not mention Hanessia. And he did not apologize.

[00:30:32]The execution process began immediately after. Richard closed his eyes and barely moved as the drugs entered his system. After about 10 minutes, a medic was called into the room. He was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. Richard Knight was 47 years old.

[00:30:50]That same day, Tennessee was scheduled to carry out an execution that had been 30 years in the making. And this might be the most disturbing case in this entire video. It started with two letters written from inside a prison cell. In those letters, he laid out what he called a master plan. He wrote that everything he did from that point forward would be, in his words, wellorganized and extremely violent. And then he got out and he did exactly what he said he would do. In the summer of 1993, Tony was serving time at the Mark Lutrell Reception Center in Memphis.

[00:31:27]From behind those walls, he sent two letters to a man named Jimmy Lee Mays.

[00:31:32]He called his plan a winner. He wrote about making the streets pay him, and he made a promise on paper that a jury would hear. Years later, while still incarcerated, Tony was assigned to a work detail at the West Tennessee Veteran Cemetery. One day, as he helped lower a body into the ground, he turned to a fellow inmate and said, "That would be a good way, you know, to bury somebody if you're going to kill them. If you ain't got no body, you don't have a case." And it wasn't just a thought. He already had a target picked out. His name was Marello Sanderson, but everyone in the neighborhood called him Cello. Cello was 21 years old and deep in the drug trade. He wore expensive jewelry, carried large amounts of cash, and kept even more money stashed inside his mother, Delawas's house. But the thing that mattered most to Tony wasn't the money or the drugs. It was the trust. Because cello considered Tony a friend, a real one. The kind of friend you'd drive across town to pick up from prison on the day he got out. And that's exactly what Cello did. On November 15th, 1993, Tony walked out of the Mark Lutrell reception center, a free man.

[00:32:48]And Cello was the one waiting for him.

[00:32:51]They drove together to the home of one of Cello's partners, where Cello and two of his associates handed Tony $200 in cash, a welcome home gift. Tony smiled, took the money, and said nothing about what he had planned for all of them. A fellow inmate who had overheard Tony's plans was released the following month, and he did something that should have changed everything. He went straight to Cello and told him. He laid it all out.

[00:33:19]what Tony and his accomplice, James Montgomery, had been saying behind bars, the plan to rob him, the plan to hide the body. He told Cello that his friend was going to kill him. But Cello didn't believe it. He couldn't. Tony was his boy. Tony wouldn't do that. And so Cello did nothing. Tony's accomplice, James Montgomery, was released from prison in January 1994. And within weeks, the two of them were telling people they had their target staked out. If there was no body, they said there would be no case.

[00:33:52]The same words Tony had used at the cemetery.

[00:33:56]On February 24th, Tony and James lured Cello and his 17-year-old friend Frederick Tucker into a jeep. A woman at the house where they stopped later told police she saw Cello and Frederick walk out with their hands tied behind their backs.

[00:34:12]That same evening around 8:00 p.m., Cello's mother, Deawa, had been eating dinner at home. A co-orker she had given a ride to earlier, was the last person to see her alive. When her niece arrived around 9:00 p.m., Deawa was gone. But everything she owned was still there.

[00:34:31]Her purse, her car, her keys, and her dinner still sitting on the table, halfeaten. She had been pulled away midmeal and never came back.

[00:34:41]The Jeep was found torched in Mississippi. Cello's family filed a missing person report. And then one week passed with no answers.

[00:34:50]Then on March 3rd, 1994, James' brother led a Memphis police detective to a grave at the Rose Hill Cemetery on Elvis Presley Boulevard. A woman named Dorothy Daniels had been buried there on February 25th in a plot just six graves away from where another family member was buried. Investigators disinterred Dorothy's casket and beneath it under several inches of dirt and a single piece of plywood they found all three of them. Cello, Frederick, and Dilawa.

[00:35:22]The hands of all three were bound behind their backs. Frederick's feet were also bound and his neck showed bruising from a liature. Dilawa was lying at the bottom of the grave. The two men were on top of her. The medical examiner testified at trial about what each of them went through. Cello had been shot three times. One of the wounds had severed his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down, but he was still conscious. The bullet had torn through his windpipe, and blood was filling his airway and lungs. He had been drowning in his own blood underground in the dark, unable to move.

[00:36:02]Frederick had been shot in the chest and had suffered severe blunt force trauma.

[00:36:07]Diloa had been strangled. Dirt had been packed into her mouth and nose, and a red sock had been found tied around her neck. The medical examiner testified that all three of them were alive when they were put in that grave.

[00:36:22]A jail house witness later testified that Tony had told him everything while they were both awaiting trial. According to that witness, Tony described how they went to Deawaz's house first, looking for Cello and his money. When Chello wasn't there, they told Deoaz to call her son and tell him to come home, that something important had happened. And she did. When Cello arrived, they forced all three of them into the Jeep at gunpoint.

[00:36:50]They drove to Mississippi, shot Cello and Frederick, and burned the Jeep. Then they drove all three back to Memphis in a stolen car and took them to the cemetery.

[00:37:01]And according to that same witness, when they lowered Cello and Frederick into the grave, De Laisa started screaming.

[00:37:08]One of them told her to shut up or she would die like her son. And then they pushed her in. The case went to trial in April 1996, but the trial itself was unlike almost any capital case in modern American history. Tony had gone through six attorneys before the proceedings began.

[00:37:27]He hadn't just fired them, he had threatened them. Multiple lawyers received death threats. One attorney's family lived in fear because of him. The presiding judge, Joseph Daly, had tried repeatedly to keep counsel in place, but Tony had driven every single one of them away. And so, the judge made a decision that would follow this case for the next three decades. He ordered Tony to represent himself. Tony pleaded for another lawyer. His most recent attorney, once he realized what was happening, begged the judge to let him come back, but Judge Daly said no. He called it a sanction for Tony's misconduct.

[00:38:06]Tony, with no legal training, no experience, and no understanding of how a trial works, was now his own defense attorney in a case where the state was trying to execute him.

[00:38:18]His performance was later described by postconviction attorneys as one of the most singularly inept, ineffective, and disastrous cross-examinations possible.

[00:38:28]One that seemed designed to secure not only a guilty verdict, but a death sentence.

[00:38:34]The prosecutor told the jury, "If these murders don't qualify for the death penalty, then none ever will." The jury convicted Tony on all counts. Three murders, three kidnappings, one robbery, and then that same jury sentenced him to death three times, one for each victim.

[00:38:52]For more than 30 years, Tony sat on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, while his case worked its way through the courts. His codefendant, James, was granted a new trial in 2000 after an appeals court ruled the two men should have been tried separately.

[00:39:11]James took a plea deal, received a 27-year sentence, and was released from prison in 2015. He has been a free man for more than a decade. While Tony never left Death Row, then in 2007, he did something no one expected. He agreed to talk. In 2007, Tony gave his first and only interview from behind bars. He spoke to a Memphis news station from Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex. He denied everything. He said, "I wasn't there." And then looking straight into the camera, he said this.

[00:39:46]>> Well, it was pretty gruesome, wouldn't you say?

[00:39:49]>> Absolutely. But I wasn't there. I'm not going to be executed. Busy Roach. And I'm smiling. I'm happy because I'm going to be exonerated.

[00:39:58]>> But Tony was wrong. Even though the case drew national attention, even though the jailhouse informant who helped convict him turned out to have been secretly paid by the state, and even though two jurors signed declarations saying they would not have voted for death, the Supreme Court didn't stop the execution.

[00:40:17]On the morning of May 21st, 2026, Tony Kurthers was escorted to the execution chamber at Riverbend. Media witnesses were brought in at 9:45 a.m. The execution was scheduled for 10:00, but at 10:00 a.m. nothing happened.

[00:40:34]Executioners could not find a vein. They tried one site, then another, then another. When the standard IV lines failed, they attempted a central line, a long tube inserted into a large vein in the middle of the chest. That failed, too. For nearly two hours, Tony Kurthers lay on that gurnie while prison officials tried to find a way to kill him. His attorney said he was in pain, that there was lots of blood, and still they couldn't get the needle in. At 11:52 a.m., the IV lines were removed. A witness heard a prison official say the execution would not continue at this time.

[00:41:12]and Andre Steele, Frederick Tucker's father, who had planned to be in that room, who had said, "It is time that you go meet your maker, watched them try for nearly 2 hours and fail." Tony's attorneys immediately filed an emergency motion with the Tennessee Supreme Court.

[00:41:29]And then at 1 p.m., Governor Bill Lee made it official. He granted Tony Kurthers a temporary reprieve from execution for one year. His attorney was addressing reporters when the news came through. She started crying. That's amazing, she said. I'm so grateful.

[00:41:48]Tony Kurthers is still alive on death row. He has been given one more year. In 2007, he looked into a camera and said six words. I'm not going to be executed.

[00:42:00]So far, he's been right. This concludes all executions carried out in May 2026.

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