Tennessee execution – Tony Carruthers, sentenced to death in 1996 for a 1994 triple murder in Memphis, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Thursday at 10 a.m. His supporters delivered clemency petitions to Gov. Bill Lee, who said Tuesday he would not intervene. Former jail empl
By the time the mail arrived one week before Christmas 2017, Earley Story had spent years wondering how a life could be sentenced into a grave of its own.
Story. a longtime employee at the Shelby County Jail in downtown Memphis. had seen Alfredo Shaw come in and out of the detention facility known as 201 Poplar since the 1980s. Story. a devout Christian who sometimes spoke with Shaw about God. said Shaw often looked cocky—but with fear in his eyes. In 1994, Shaw became a witness in a grisly triple homicide. Prosecutors arrested 25-year-old Tony Carruthers—recently released from prison—after Shaw claimed Carruthers confessed to him.
In 1996, a jury sentenced Carruthers to die.
Story believed, like many around him, that Carruthers was guilty. Then, in January 1997, Story himself was accused of selling drugs to an undercover officer. He said there was no evidence against him. and that the presiding judge initially threw out his case for lack of probable cause. But in 1999, Story was tried, convicted, and given probation. Shaw was the main witness against him.
Story says he was framed. Over the previous decade, he had become known as a whistleblower documenting violence and abuse at the jail—work he believed put him in the crosshairs of retaliation. “I had some enemies within the sheriff’s department,” he said. “We’re not the only ones he’s done this to.”
After the conviction, Story lost his job and his pension. For 20 years, he tried to clear his name. Then, one week before Christmas 2017, he received an envelope from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The return address was written in elaborate script below the name “Tony Von Carruthers.”.
Inside were records that. Story says. confirmed what he had long known to be true: Shaw had been a paid confidential informant. Story said that. despite an open secret in Memphis for decades. the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office repeatedly denied it. In one letter to Carruthers’s post-conviction attorneys. the office wrote: “I have talked to the prosecutors who tried your client and neither is aware of any situation where Alfredo Shaw acted as a paid informant for anybody.”.
The documents enclosed for Story chronicled drug buys Shaw made on behalf of the sheriff’s department between 1991 and 1997. Story said conspicuously absent was the date when Story supposedly sold drugs to Shaw. He believed that should exonerate him, but the courts disagreed.
Story said he didn’t know precisely why Carruthers mailed him the records—or the full truth behind Carruthers’s innocence claim. But when Story learned Tennessee had set an execution date for Carruthers, he became deeply disturbed. “I’d hate to see him murdered, put to death, when there’s so many open ends,” he said. “No one, he says, should be executed based on the testimony of Alfredo Shaw.”.
Carruthers is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Thursday morning at 10 a.m. He has maintained his innocence for 32 years.
On Monday. Carruthers’s supporters. including family members and advocates from the American Civil Liberties Union. delivered a stack of petitions to the office of Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee at the state Capitol in Nashville. Despite mounting calls for Lee to stop the execution, on Tuesday he announced that he would not intervene.
In a clemency petition. Carruthers’s attorneys describe the case as a “travesty of justice. ” arguing that a death sentence was based on lies and a narrative that was “bankrupt from the start.” Story. now 72. spoke out against the execution alongside another ex-jailer. Bernard Kimmons. Kimmons also says he was wrongfully convicted of selling drugs based on Shaw’s testimony.
Wearing “Save Tony Carruthers” T-shirts, the men told a Memphis news station that Shaw has a track record of putting innocent people in prison. “We’re not the only ones he’s done this to,” Kimmons said.
The case has been tied to broader concerns about wrongful convictions fueled by jailhouse snitches. False testimony by jailhouse informants is a leading cause of wrongful convictions. often used to fill gaps where the state’s evidence is weak. The Innocence Project has found that roughly a quarter of death row exonerations are in cases involving a jailhouse snitch.
In Carruthers’s case, his supporters point to an absence of physical evidence implicating him in the murders. Fingerprints from the crime scene have never been linked to anyone. and a blanket found buried with the victims has been shown to have an unknown male DNA profile. They also say some of the most horrifying details of the crime described at trial have been discredited. The case in Memphis became infamous for the claim that the victims were buried alive. but that has long been debunked. Although a medical examiner said at trial that the victims suffocated to death. he later retracted his testimony. and other experts said there was never anything to support it.
What supporters say makes the case particularly shocking is what they see as Carruthers’s own role in how he was tried. They argue he was sent to death row after acting as his own lawyer at trial.
Carruthers’s attorneys say that doomed him from the start. In his clemency petition, they write that he has a long history of undiagnosed mental illness and “was not competent to stand for trial, much less competent to represent himself.”
They say Shaw’s involvement was especially self-sabotaging. By the time Carruthers went to trial in 1996. Shaw had recanted his statements implicating Carruthers in an explosive TV interview. and prosecutors decided against calling Shaw as a witness. But Shaw ended up testifying anyway—Story says for the defense, not the state. The clemency petition described it this way: “In an effort to show that the prosecution had secured the indictment with an untrue story. ” Carruthers believed he had to call Alfredo Shaw to the stand.
In the clemency petition. attorneys say the outcome was so disastrous that a judge later reversed the conviction of Carruthers’s co-defendant. concluding that Carruthers’s self-representation violated the co-defendant’s right to a fair trial. The co-defendant, James Montgomery, got out of prison in 2015.
To Carruthers’s sister. Tonya. who joined the petition delivery in Nashville and said she plans to witness her brother’s execution. the last 32 years have been a nightmare. She argues he was convicted through guilt by association and says her brother’s history made it easier for prosecutors to ask him to carry the story.
For decades, she said, the press adopted the state’s narrative without examining problems in the case. “He was already portrayed as a monster in the media before his trial ever started.”
The triple murder began as a missing persons case tied to 43-year-old Delois Anderson, who lived in North Memphis with her son Marcellos Anderson, her niece Laventhia, and Laventhia’s two young daughters. She worked at a bank during the day and took classes at night.
On the evening of February 24, 1994, Laventhia later testified she came home to an empty house. She said it looked like Delois had been home: “Her car was there. Her purse was there. Her keys were there.” Laventhia said Delois’s bedroom had a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in their usual spot. and that Delois appeared to have served herself a plate of greens for dinner.
Laventhia figured her aunt had stepped out and would return soon. But she never saw her again.
Around 2:40 a.m. the next morning, a sheriff’s deputy in Mississippi responded to a call about a car on fire just south of the Tennessee state line. The vehicle was a white Jeep Cherokee with gold trim. It was traced to a Memphis man who said he had lent it to Marcellos Anderson, nicknamed Cello.
Within a week. authorities said news broke that a suspect led police to a grave of a woman buried recently at Rose Hill cemetery in South Memphis. With permission to exhume the body. authorities said the remains of Anderson. his mother. and 17-year-old Frederick Tucker were found under the casket and beneath wooden planks. They said the victims’ hands were bound together; Delois Anderson had a pair of socks wrapped around her neck. They said Tucker and Marcellos Anderson had been shot.
Supporters say the details that emerged would shape how the city viewed law enforcement and the accused. Tonya said she recalled a courtroom atmosphere that felt hostile and turned her family into a target. “Our family name became the scourge of the community,” she said.
In early reporting. police had two main suspects in custody: Carruthers and James Montgomery. identified as the brother of the man who led authorities to the bodies. But they said Montgomery’s brother had fled the state, leaving prosecutors without a key witness. With no other evidence against the defendants, a judge threw out first-degree murder charges.
Prosecutors then scrambled, pushing police to “get out and beat the bushes,” as an assistant district attorney later testified. They said a new witness came forward: 28-year-old Alfredo Shaw.
On March 27, Shaw gave a tape-recorded statement to a pair of sergeants with the Memphis Police Department. In the statement. Shaw said Carruthers carried out the murders on behalf of drug dealers who had been robbed by Anderson and Tucker. He also said Carruthers tried to enlist him in the crime. “I stated to Tony that I did not want to be involved in that,” Shaw said.
Shaw claimed he and Carruthers were in the back of the jail’s law library when Carruthers told him how it went down. Shaw said Carruthers and Montgomery went to Anderson’s house looking for stolen money. encountered Delois. demanded she call her son. and that Tucker returned with Marcellos Anderson. Shaw said Carruthers told him the men put the gun to Marcellos and made the group get in the Cherokee. drove the victims to Mississippi. shot Anderson and Tucker. and set the jeep on fire. Shaw said they then drove Delois. who was still alive. to the cemetery along with the bodies and threw them into the grave. He said Delois was screaming, and that Montgomery pushed her into the grave, too.
Two days later, Shaw repeated his story to a grand jury.
But in the two years between indictment and trial, Shaw began to have second thoughts. In February 1996, he contacted a local TV reporter and, with his identity concealed, recanted his statements on Memphis’s Channel 13. He said he had been coerced and coached by Shelby County Assistant District Attorney Gerald Harris. who offered money and promised to dismiss pending criminal charges against him.
Harris appeared in the TV segment too. Harris told the news station that Shaw was not credible. “I’m not gonna put that kind of witness on,” he said. He added that Carruthers had “got a right to a fair trial.”
Carruthers and Montgomery were tried together in April 1996. Prosecutors argued the men wanted to take over the local drug trade rather than the murder-for-hire plot Shaw described. They said the theory was constructed entirely from circumstantial evidence and that witnesses testified they saw the men with the victims at some point on February 24. 1994.
Tonya recalled the trial as a media circus and described an atmosphere that made it difficult for her family. “We were not treated well at all in court,” she said.
Presiding over the trial was Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Joseph Dailey. Case records show Dailey said he became convinced his life was in danger due to reported death threats that swirled around the case from the start. Dailey imposed a gag order on the press to prevent reporters from printing witnesses’ names. and ordered unprecedented security measures in the courtroom and at his home.
Dailey also, according to the case record, refused defense requests to remove attorneys before trial. Defense attorneys appointed to the case one by one told the judge Carruthers was erratic and abusive and asked to be removed. Dailey declined to appoint any more attorneys, leaving Carruthers to represent himself. “He is the person who put himself in this position,” Dailey later said while denying Carruthers a retrial.
Several state witnesses knew Carruthers from prison. One man testified that he had worked with Carruthers on a work detail that included shifts in a cemetery and that Carruthers remarked that hiding a body in a grave would be a way to get away with murder. “If you ain’t got no body, you don’t have a case,” the witness said.
Another witness testified about letters Carruthers sent from prison where he boasted about a “master plan” to settle scores. “Everything I do from now on will be well organized and extremely violent,” he wrote.
Carruthers pointed out the letters did not actually implicate him in the killings, telling Dailey: “He can’t say if I was just in prison just bragging or just running off at the mouth.” The judge allowed the letters as evidence.
The state rested April 24, 1996, before Carruthers called Shaw to the stand. Carruthers’s goal, supporters say, was to show Shaw falsely implicated him in exchange for money and favors. But Dailey blocked Carruthers from questioning Shaw about being a confidential informant. Shaw testified that he contacted homicide detectives through a Crime Stoppers hotline after hearing about the murders on the news.
In court. Carruthers presented Shaw with his previous statements to police and to the grand jury. supporters say. creating the impression Shaw had been consistent. When Carruthers tried to pivot to show Shaw had disavowed the previous statements. Shaw said he only changed because he was afraid for his life.
Carruthers and Montgomery were convicted. Harris. in his closing argument urging jurors to sentence the men to die. emphasized what he said was the suffocating suffering of the victims. He said. “This woman. Delois Anderson. is in a grave. in a pit. alive.” He continued: “The tragedy of it is that as she actually breathed in her last breath she was in effect killing herself. bringing things into her body. dirt being on top of her.” After a few hours. the jury returned a death sentence.
After Carruthers had been on death row for well over a decade. supporters say federal lawyers in Nashville conducted a deep dive into his life and background. Such investigations. attorneys say. are part of capital defense and aim to uncover trauma. abuse. or mental illness that could persuade a jury to spare a life.
Relatives and attorneys say none of the attorneys originally appointed to represent Carruthers undertook such an investigation, and that Carruthers could not do it himself.
In a report. an investigator later wrote: “Perhaps the most prominent issue affecting Tony’s family is that of severe mental illness.” The report said that relatives across generations had schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and that Carruthers displayed symptoms of both. It said that when Carruthers was 14, his mother, Jane Carruthers, admitted him to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. He stayed for five days.
Supporters say Carruthers spent years in and out of juvenile jails. and that staff at one facility recommended a “structured therapeutic environment. ” a step the report said proved hard to afford. Tonya described their mother as extremely hard-working. working two jobs and taking overnight shifts at the Sheraton hotel in downtown Memphis.
The report said that after Carruthers turned 20, he became increasingly manic and volatile. It described an incident where he was accused of setting a fire at a house where he was staying. After being restrained and placed in a police car. the report said Carruthers “ate the vinyl off the left rear passenger door. spitting chunks of it on the floor. ” according to a police report. A Memphis officer remembered the episode years later and described it as a kind of “psychosis.”.
Defense experts. supporters say. concluded Carruthers had schizoaffective disorder. with symptoms including “pervasive delusions and paranoia.” The report said his trial behavior and his ongoing hostility toward defense attorneys reflected what jurors saw as off-putting and that his case records contain declarations. transcripts. and letters detailing a fraught relationship with lawyers he believed were conspiring against him.
After arriving on death row, Carruthers became fixated on the belief he would win a lucrative lawsuit against his lawyers. A state post-conviction lawyer memorialized a meeting in which Carruthers showed him a photograph of a green 2006 Jaguar and said he planned to buy it if he won. The lawyer wrote: “He was totally serious about this.” The lawyer also wrote that Carruthers told him it would be okay if staff poisons him to death. because then his daughter would get a lot of money from the state—his biggest concern.
Carruthers has rejected suggestions that he was not competent to stand trial. Tonya does not deny he has shown symptoms of mental illness, but she argues his paranoia was well-founded given what happened in the case.
Decades after Carruthers was sentenced. both James Montgomery and Alfredo Shaw provided statements to defense investigators saying Carruthers did not participate in the crime. Montgomery pointed to a different man, who died in 2002, as the person who helped kidnap and kill the victims. Supporters say courts refused to allow testing that might confirm the claim.
Shaw met with a defense investigator on three different occasions while in federal prison in 2011. According to the investigator. he repeated what he had told the TV reporter in 1996. adding that after the interview aired. police and prosecutors threatened him if he did not revert to his original account. The investigator wrote that Shaw became visibly tense and upset as he spoke.
“I testified falsely at trial because I was fearful that the District Attorney’s Office would retaliate against me,” Shaw’s statement read in the declaration the investigator summarized. The declaration said Shaw said he was too scared to sign it.
It took another six years for Carruthers’s attorneys to obtain the first batch of records confirming Shaw was a paid informant—the same ones Story later received. Additional records casting light on Shaw’s history as a confidential informant for both the sheriff’s department and the Memphis Police Department were not obtained until 2024.
Supporters say those records show Shaw was a paid snitch with every incentive to lie on the stand. By the time those appeals were exhausted, they say, the full story could not stop the execution.
On the eve of Carruthers’s execution. his supporters say the truth of what happened in 1994 may be buried with him unless the case remains examined beyond the state’s decision. Tonya said families on both sides still deserve to know what really happened. In the meantime, she wants the public to know he is not the killer portrayed in the press. “Please let people know that my brother is not a monster.”.
Tony Carruthers Tennessee execution Bill Lee Alfredo Shaw jail informant wrongful conviction Shelby County Jail clemency petition