Tennessee executes Harold Wayne Nichols

Thirty-seven years after confessing to a series of rapes and the murder of Karen Pulley, Nichols expressed remorse in final words

Strapped to a gurney in the execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution Thursday morning, Harold Wayne Nichols made a final statement.

“To the people I’ve harmed, I’m sorry,” he said, according to prison officials and media witnesses. “To my family, know that I love you. I know where I’m going to. I’m ready to go home.”

Reporters who witnessed the execution described Nichols’ spiritual adviser reading scripture and reciting prayers with him in the execution chamber.

After the lethal injection of pentobarbital was administered through an IV in Nichols’ arm, they said, he sighed and groaned as his breathing quickened and his skin gradually faded to purple. He was declared dead at 10:39 a.m., 37 years after he was sentenced for the rape and murder of Karen Pulley, a 20-year-old Chattanooga college student.

“We have waited 37 years for justice,” Pulley’s brother in law, Jeff Monroe, said during a press conference after the execution, noting that Pulley’s sister had decided at the last minute against witnessing it.

“We understand taking a life is serious,” Monroe continued. “We don’t take any pleasure in it. However, the victims, and there were many, were carefully stalked and attacked. The crimes, and there were many, were deliberate, violent and horrific.” Monroe called Nichols “a violent perpetrator” who “attacked vulnerable women in the most sadistic ways.”

“Our family was destroyed by evil that night in September 1988,” he said, “when Karen was raped and violently beaten to death in her own bedroom, left to die alone terribly injured, broken, bleeding and terrified.”

Monroe added that no punishment could atone for the damage done or heal the victims of Nichols’ crimes, “but this is a start.”

Nichols was arrested in January 1989 for raping four women in the Chattanooga area. He confessed to those attacks and also admitted to police that he’d broken into Pulley’s home months earlier and raped her before hitting her over the head with a wooden board. A roommate found her alive, according to court documents, but she died the next day. Nichols was sentenced to death in 1990 after pleading guilty to felony murder, aggravated rape and burglary.

As part of their request for clemency from Gov. Bill Lee, Nichols’ attorneys included statements from six jurors saying either that they would have chosen life without the possibility of parole if it had been an option at the time or that they have changed their mind about the death sentence since. They also emphasized Nichols’ remorse and decades of repentance, after Pulley’s mother gave him a Bible, and her forgiveness, in a series of jailhouse meetings after his sentencing.

“I am the only one responsible,” Nichols said in a statement included with his clemency application. “I’ve looked for reasons and the ‘whys’ I became the person who would do the things I’ve done, because in the end that is exactly what it is — the things I’ve done. Me. I am accountable. Only me.”

One part of the “why” offered by Nichols’ attorneys is his childhood. They described his father as “a violent, intimidating, and profoundly mentally unhinged man who terrorized his family” with physical, sexual and emotional abuse. His mother died of breast cancer when he was 10 years old, after which that abuse intensified. Leaders at the family’s church threatened to report him if he didn’t give up the children. Nichols and his sister were then moved to a church-run orphanage, where they experienced and witnessed more abuse.

The governor announced on Tuesday that “after deliberate consideration” of the case, he would not intervene in the execution, the seventh he has allowed since taking office in 2019.

One of Nichols’ attorneys, Deborah Drew, and his spiritual adviser, J.R. Davis, spoke to reporters separately after the official press conference.

“In this moment, we should not attempt to take solace in the hollow excuse that executing Wayne somehow delivered justice when we all know it did not,” Drew said, reading from a statement on behalf of the defense team. “Instead, our state sent the message that no one can rise beyond the crimes they committed decades earlier and that redemption deserves no mercy. Executing Wayne served but one goal: retribution.”

Davis said he’d known Nichols for more than 10 years. While acknowledging the “horrible crimes” he’d committed, he expressed belief in the sincerity of Nichols’ remorse and said “killing to teach people not to kill just doesn’t seem to make sense.”

Nichols is the third death row prisoner to be executed in Tennessee this year, following Oscar Smith in May and Byron Black in August, and the 10th since the state revived its death penalty in 2018.

Source: nashvillebanner.com, Steven Hale, December 11, 2025

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde

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