JUST IN: Executed in May 2026: The Crimes, Last Meals & Final Words of 5 Death Row Inmates

In May of 2026, five men were executed across four American states. One of them broke two knives on a pregnant mother and her four-year-old daughter, then stepped into the shower, put on dress shoes, and told a police officer he had been out jogging. One of them left his ex-girlfriend on the floor for 6 hours with her skull fractured and parts of her brain exposed and told her she deserved to die.

 One of them took a stolen shotgun dispute and turned it into a homemade napalm attack that burned a 20-year-old man alive. One of them said two words to a 77year-old woman in a parking lot and 23 feet of duct tape later she was sealed inside the trunk of her own car suffocating slowly on a cold Oklahoma highway and one of them buried three people alive in a Memphis cemetery looked into a camera in two suan 7 and told the world he was never going to be executed in May 2026 the state of Tennessee tried to prove him wrong They’ve failed. These are the

executions of May 2026. Their crimes, their last meals, and their last words. Before we get into it, let us know in the comments where in the world you are watching from. Case one, Richard Knight. We start in Coral Sp. It was the summer of 2000 and a woman named Odessia Stevens was living in an apartment with her boyfriend Hans Mullings and his cousin Richard Knight.

 Odessia was 24 years old. She worked. She paid her bills. She had a 4-year-old daughter named Hanessia who slept in the bedroom and trusted that the adults in that apartment were going to keep her safe. Hanessia’s father was Hans. That made Richard Knight Hanessia’s cousin by extension, a man who was supposed to be family, someone who lived under the same roof and ate at the same table.

 He had been there for about 3 months. He didn’t contribute much. He was loud and disruptive. Kept people up late with noise. Never seemed to be moving toward anything. Hans and Odessia had asked him to leave multiple times. Nothing changed. On the night of June 27th, 2000, Hans was at work. That left Richard alone in the apartment with Odessia and four-year-old Hanessia.

 At some point that evening, the argument started again. Odessia was done. She told him she was done supporting him, done waiting for him to find his footing, done asking politely. He could stay the night. In the morning, he was leaving. She said it and she meant it. And then she went to the bedroom with Hanessia and closed the door.

 Richard walked out the front door. And as he walked through the neighborhood that night, something began to build inside him. With every step, the anger came up harder. He went over the conversation. He replayed the way she had spoken to him. He turned it over and over until whatever had walked out that front door was not the same thing that walked back in. He went straight to the kitchen.

 He picked up a knife. He walked to the master bedroom. Odessia and Hanessia had gone to sleep. The conversation was over. The decision had been made. He was leaving in the morning, but he woke her up anyway. What happened next is documented in court records, in the medical examiner’s report, in the testimony of the responding officers and in the account of the upstairs neighbor who was lying in bed listening the sounds coming through the walls.

 Richard began stabbing Odessia. Not once, not twice, over and over, she tried to fight him off. She grabbed at the blade with both hands trying to stop it. She pushed against him. She took the cuts on her palms and on her fingers, fighting back against a man with a knife. Eventually, the fight went out of her, and she curled into a fetal position on the floor, trying to make herself small, trying to put her body between herself and the blade. The blows kept coming.

 At at some point during the attack, four-year-old Hanessia woke up on the other side of the bed. Richard turned and went to her. He began stabbing her, too. He was still going when the knife snapped in his hand. The blade broke from the force, so he stopped. He walked back to the kitchen and picked up another knife.

 When he came back to the bedroom, Hanessa was no longer in the bed. She had gotten onto the floor and crawled across the room toward the closet door. She was bleeding from stab wounds in her chest and her neck. She was four years old and she had dragged herself across the floor of that bedroom trying to get to a door.

 Richard walked over to where she had made it and he was not done. Then he walked to the kitchen for the third time. He accidentally cut his own hand on a broken piece from the first blade. He took yet another knife and came back out. When he reached the hallway, he saw that Odessia had moved. She had crawled all the way from the master bedroom through the hallway into the living room near the front door.

 She was on the floor covered in blood and she was still alive. Richard walked to where she had pulled herself. He rolled her onto her back. He kept stabbing her. When her blood soaked into his hands, he reached down and wiped them clean on the carpet next to her body. Then he stood a He went to the bathroom.

 He peeled off his blood soaked t-shirt and his jeans and pushed them under the bathroom sink. He stepped into the shower and cleaned himself off. He dried himself. He put on a pair of blue polo pants and dress shoes. He walked back out to the living room, stepped around the blood on the floor, and began wiping down the knives near the front door.

 That is when he heard the knock. He looked through the peepphole. Broward County police officers were standing in the hallway. Richard did not open the door. He turned around and ran to his bedroom window and climbed out into the night. What he did not know was that the woman in the apartment directly above his had been lying in bed for the last hour.

 She had heard thumping through the walls. She had heard two female voices. One of them was a child crying. She had called 911 at 12:21 in the morning. When officers entered the apartment, they found Odessia on the living room floor, surrounded by broken knife pieces. In the master bedroom, little Hanesia was on the floor next to the closet door, the place she had been trying to get to when he came back.

 Officer Natalie Machchini had gone around to the far side of the building. About a hundred yards from the apartment behind a row of hedges. She found an standing in the dark. He was visibly wet even though it was not raining. He was wearing dress clothes and dress shoes. He told her he had been out jogging.

 He had a scratch on his chest, scrapes on his shoulder, fresh cuts on both hands, blood on his shirt, and blood on a $10 bill sitting in his pocket. The medical examiner who examined both bodies testified at trial about what Richard Knight had done to Odessia Stevens. She had 21 stab wounds. 14 of them were concentrated in her neck.

 She had 24 additional puncture and scratch wounds across her body. There was bruising around her throat from what appeared to be a cord or a belt, and she had deep defensive wounds on both hands where she had grabbed the blade trying to stop it. Odessia was 6 weeks pregnant at the time of the attack. The medical examiner also testified that she had been conscious for between 10 and 15 minutes after the first stab wound landed.

 She was awake and aware through most of what he did to her. She tried to fight back. She crawled the length of that apartment and was found on the floor near the front door, still alive before he came back and finished it. Hanesia had four stab wounds in her chest and neck. She had defensive wounds on her small hands. She had bruising on her arms consistent with being grabbed and bruising on her neck consistent with manual strangulation.

She was four years old. The case took six years to reach trial. Richard was convicted in 2006. Every single juror voted for death. While he was in the Broward County Jail awaiting trial, he had confessed to another inmate who testified against him at trial. For the next 20 years, every appeal was denied. Governor Ron DeSantis signed his death warrant on April 23rd, 2026.

On the morning of May 21st, Richard woke at 4:40 a.m. He had no visitors. He did not request a spiritual adviser. He did not request a last meal. Nobody came to see him that day. At 6:00 p.m., the curtain to the witnessed shroom opened. He was already strapped to the gurnie with his arms out and an IV in place.

The warden asked if he wished to make a final statement. Richard Knight looked up and said, “I want to give thanks to Yahweh who is the most high.” Those were his last words. He did not say Odessia’s name. He did not say Hanessia’s name. He did not apologize. The execution began immediately.

 He closed his eyes and barely moved as the drugs entered his system. 10 minutes later, a medic was called in and Richard Knight was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. He was 47 years old. Florida’s seventh execution of 2026. After it was done, Hans Mulling stood outside the prison and said three words. We miss you, Odessia. Case two, Raymond Eugene Johnson.

 The next execution of May 2026 took place a week earlier on the 14th, and it started with a claw hammer and ended with a 7-month-old baby burning to death on a living room floor Raymond Eugene Johnson had killed before. In 1995, he shot a man named Clarence Ray Oliver through a car window during an argument in Oklahoma City.

 He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and got a 20-year sentence. He served nine of them. He was released in 2005, moved to Tulsa, and met Brook Whitaker. What followed was not a relationship. It was a pattern of domination that Raymond imposed on Brook’s life from nearly the beginning. He was physically abusive. He stalked her.

 He controlled who she could see and where she could work. He threatened to kill her on more than 10 separate occasions. By April of 2007, Brooke was frightened enough that she filed a restraining order. Her youngest child, a baby girl named Kia, was Raymond’s daughter. The restrainings order was eventually dropped when neither of them appeared at the scheduled hearing.

Raymond moved back in. Then by June, he had moved out again. On the night of June 22nd, Raymond had someone drop him off near Brook’s house on East Newton Street. He waited for her to come home. When she walked through the door and founded him standing there, they began to argue. Brooke pushed him.

 She grabbed a kitchen knife. Raymon picked up a claw hammer and hit her in the head. She fell to the floor. He hit her again and again, five times by his own account, closer to 24. According to prosecutors, Brook’s skull fractured in multiple places. There were large depressions across the surface of her skull. Parts of her brain were exposed.

She had defensive wounds on her hands from trying to fight back. And still, she was conscious. She was still talking to him. She told him her head hurt. She told him it felt like it was going to fall off. She begged him to call 911. She begged him to let her mother come and take baby Kia. She begged him to think of her children.

 She promised she would never tell the police what had happened. She said anything she could think of to get him to pick up the phone. Raymond told her no. He told her he didn’t want to go back to prison. And then he told her she deserved to die. And then he left her on the floor. According to prosecutors, Raymond kept Brooke alive for up to 6 hours.

 6 hours on the floor of her own home with her skull fractured and parts of her brain exposed, conscious, begging the father of her baby to pick up the phone. At some point, Raymond went to the shed, found a gasoline can, and came back inside. He dowsed Brooke. Then, he walked to the room where seven-month-old Kia was sleeping and dowsted his own baby, too.

 He lit a dish towel, threw it on Brooke, and walked out the back door. He called his other girlfriend, Jennifer, to pick him up. He smelled like gasoline. There was blood on his clothes. As they drove away from Newton Street, Jennifer looked back and watched flames pouring out of the front window. When firefighters entered the house, the inside was pitch black with smoke.

 Once they cleared it, they found baby Kaya on the living room floor. Her mouth was melted shut. Her eyelids were melted shut. Her nose was melted shut. One of the firefighters said he thought she was a burned doll. The medical examiner later confirmed that Kia Whitaker did not die from smoke inhalation. She burned to death.

 In a side room, firefighters found Brooke partially underneath a bunk bed. Paramedics restarted her heart on the way to Hillrest Medical Center. She was pronounced dead shortly after arrival. She was 24 years old. Raymond had waved his Miranda rights that same evening and admitted everything. Jennifer told police everything that same afternoon.

 At the April 2026 clemency hearing, Raymond apologized to the family and said his crime defined a moment, not who he was. Then the state took its turn. Prosecutors played a 1995 recording from Raymond’s first prison stint in which he had told detectives on camera, “I am a con artist. I’m real good at it.

” They had saved that recording for 20 years, and they played it for the board. They also revealed that Raymond had information about two unsolved murders, but had refused to give it to investigators. Gang loyalty. The board voted 5 to zero to deny clemency. Brook’s mother, Andra, had waited nearly 20 years to see this day. She died of a heart attack 18 months before it arrived.

 On the morning of May 14th, Raymond Eugene Johnson was led to the execution chamber at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in Mallister. His last meal had been 12 pieces of boneless chicken, a pint of gizzards, fried pickles, four packets of hot sauce, and four packets of ranch dressing. When asked if he had final words, he looked toward the witnesses and said, “To Brooke and Ka and your family, I apologize for any pain I have caused you. I know I hurt you.

 One day I hope you can forgive me. I hope one day people can speak your name without it being tied to mine.” His spiritual adviser began reading scripture. A single tear rolled from Raymon’s left eye. Prison officials began the three drug injection at 10 a.m. He was pronounced dead at 10:12 a.m. He was 52 years old.

 He had spent more than 16 years on death row. After it was over, Brook’s aunt Angie Short stood outside the penitentiary and said, “This didn’t bring them back, but we’ll no longer have to see his face on TV. He’s no longer associated with Brooke and Kaa. And now I think we can finally begin to heal after 20 years.

 Case three, Edward Lee Busby. On the morning of January 30th, 2004, a 77year-old woman named Laura Lee Crane was doing what she always did on a Friday. She went grocery shopping at the Tom Thumbs store in Fort Worth, Texas. Laura was a retired director of the Starpoint School at Texas Christian University, a school dedicated to children with learning disabilities.

She lived nearby. The store was familiar. She was still sitting in her car in that parking lot when Edward Lee Busby walked up and opened her driver’s side door. He said two words, “Slide over.” A woman named Kathleen Latimer, who went by Kitty, climbed into the back seat. They needed a car.

 They owed money for drugs. When Edward spotted Laura sitting alone, he made his decision. Laura Crane’s instinct, carjacked in broad daylight at 77 years old, was not to scream. She turned to Kitty in the back seat and said, “Hi, darling.” She turned to Edward behind the wheel and asked him what his mother would think if she knew what he was doing.

 They used her ATM card for cash. Then they forced her into the trunk. For the next 36 to 48 hours, Edward and Kitty drove through Texas and into Oklahoma. They stopped at a motel. They looked for cocaine. And at some point during those hours, with Laura still locked inside that trunk, Edward began wrapping duct tape around her face, layer after layer over her nose, over her mouth, over everything.

The medical examiner in Oklahoma testified that approximately 23 ft of duct tape had been applied to Laura Crane’s face with enough force to physically push her nose sideways from its natural position. She could not breathe through any part of her face. She suffocated slowly inside the trunk of her own car on a cold winter drive through Oklahoma.

 They dumped her body off an embankment near Davis, Oklahoma. Two days after the abduction, an Oklahoma City police officer pulled Edward over. He was still driving Laura’s car. He was arrested on the spot. Edward pointed the finger at Kitty. He said she had been the brains of the operation, that she had told him to tape Laura’s head.

 Kitty told investigators Edward was in control from the moment they walked into that parking lot. The physical evidence settled it. Only Edward’s fingerprints were found on the duct tape removed from L’s face, not Kitty’s. His Kitty pleaded guilty and received S sentence. She is still in a Texas prison today.

 Edward was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 2005. His execution had been stayed twice before, once in 2020 for the COVID pandemic and once in 2021 over an intellectual disability claim. Both the prosecution’s own experts and Edward’s defense experts agreed he was intellectually disabled. Six days before the May 14th execution, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary stay to review that claim.

 On the afternoon of the execution, the United States Supreme Court overturned the stay in a divided 6 to3 decision and cleared the way for the lethal injection to proceed. Edward Lee Busby was pronounced dead at 8:11 p.m. at the Huntsville unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Before the drugs went in, he had spoken to Laura’s family through the witness room window.

 He said, “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 told his sister who was watching through the glass to find a church and pick up her cross.

 He said, “I’m here because this is the will of God.” He was 53 years old. Edward Lee Busby was the 600th person executed in the state of Texas since 1982. Texas has carried out more executions than any other state in the country, accounting for roughly 36% of every execution performed in the United States since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, more than the next four states combined.

Number 600 was a man who most experts agreed was intellectually disabled. executed on the same day that across the state line in Oklahoma they were burying Raymond Eugene Johnson. Case four, Leroy Dean McIll. 6 days later, Arizona carried out its first execution of 2026, and it started with something as small as a missing shotgun.

 In the summer of 2002, 39year-old Leroy Dean McIll was living with his girlfriend Yona in a crowded duplex in the Sunny Slope area of Phoenix. 20-year-old Charles Perez and his girlfriend Nova Bant also lived there along with a man named Jack Yates. His friend Eddie Keith, Eddie’s wife, and their two young daughters.

 When a shotgun went missing from the duplex, Charles and Nova blamed Leroy and Yona. The two of them were kicked out. Leroy did not let it go. That same evening, Leroy bought drugs from Charles. Hours passed. At around 3:30 in the morning, while the rest of the neighborhood was asleep, Leroy walked toward Jack’s duplex. He found Eddie Keith outside.

What happened next was not the act of someone in a blind rage. Leroy told Eddie to get his wife and his daughters out of the apartment. He was going to teach Charles a lesson. Nobody gets away with talking about him and Yona. He threatened Eddie. Told him he was the only person who knew about this. and if anyone said anything, Leroy would know who talked.

 Then he looked at Eddie and told him he had pretty little girls. Eddie grabbed his wife and his daughters and ran. Before Leroy walked to that apartment, he had done something that no one in a blind rage does. He had taken a styrofoam cup, broken it into pieces, and mixed it into his can of gasoline. He believed the dissolved styrofoam would create a thick pastel-like substance that clung to skin and was harder to extinguish, something closer to npal than to ordinary fuel.

 He had thought about this. He had planned for it. He walked into the apartment where Charles Perez and Novabanta were sitting together on a couch near the front door. He told them they shouldn’t talk behind people’s backs. Neither of them had time to respond. He poured the gasoline mixture over both of them and threw a lit match.

 They were engulfed almost instantly. Both ran screaming from the apartment in flames. The fire tore through the duplex and spread into the adjoining unit. Charles Perez died in the hospital the following day. He was 20 years old. Thirdderee burns had covered 80% of his body. Novabanta survived with thirdderee burns over 75% of hers.

 From her hospital bed, barely alive, she told her nurse the name of the man who had set her on fire. After walking away from the burning building that morning, Leroy had called back to his girlfriend and asked her a single question, whether it smelled like burning flesh. While awaiting trial, Leroy tried to have a witness against him killed.

 That detail reached the jury and made the verdict final. He was convicted in under an hour. On the morning of May 20th, 2026, Leroy Dean McIll was led into the execution chamber at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence. He had spent 21 years on death row. His last meal had been onion rings, bread and butter, cottage pie, a green salad, and a slice of chocolate cake.

 A spiritual adviser was in the room with him. Before the drugs were administered, Leroy was offered the opportunity to speak. He looked around the room and said, “I just want to thank everyone for being so accommodating and nice.” And then, “I’m going home soon.” Those were his last words. At 10:13 a.m., witnesses observed him taking deep, heavy breaths.

 A snoring sound followed. Then, the room went still. Leroy Dean McIll was pronounced dead at 10:26 a.m. He was 63 years old. Arizona’s first execution of 2026. Case five, Tony von Kurthers. Now we get to the case that has sat in the back of this entire video since the first sentence. The case that started in a Tennessee prison cell in 1993 with two letters that described in writing a master plan.

 one that was, in the author’s own words, going to be well organized and extremely violent. And then he got out and he did exactly what he said. In the summer of 1993, 24year-old Tony von Kurthers was serving time at the Mark Lutil reception center in Memphis. From behind those walls, he wrote two letters to a man named Jimmy Lee Mays. He called his plan a winner.

He wrote about making the streets pay him, and he put a promise on paper that a jury would hear three years later. But the letters weren’t the only signal. While serving time at that facility, Kurthers was assigned to a work detail at the West Tennessee Veteran Cemetery. One after noon, as he helped lower a casket into the ground, he turned to a fellow inmate and said, “That would be a good way to bury somebody if you’re going to kill them.

 If you ain’t got no body, you don’t have a case. He wasn’t speaking in theory. He already had a target. His name was Marcelos Anderson. Everyone in the neighborhood called him Cello. Cello was 21 years old and deep in the drug trade. He wore expensive jewelry, kept large amounts of cash on him, and stored even more money inside his mother Dawas’s house.

 But the thing that mattered most about Cello, the thing that made him useful to Kurthers was not the money. It was the trust. Because Chello considered Tony a real friend. The kind of friend who drives across town to pick you up from prison the day you walk out. And that is exactly what Cello did. On November 15th, 1993, Tony Kurthers walked out of the Mark Lutal reception center a free man.

 and Chello was the one waiting for him in the parking lot. They drove together to one of Cello’s partners’ homes 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 already planned for all of them. The following month, a fellow inmate who had overheard Tony’s plans was released and did something that should have changed everything.

 He went directly to Cello and told him everything. 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. Cello didn’t believe it. He couldn’t. Tony was his boy. Tony wouldn’t do that. So Cello did nothing.

 James Montgomery was released from prison in January 1994. 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. On the evening of February 24th, 1994, Tony and James lured Cello and his 17-year-old friend Frederick Tucker into a Jeep Cherokee.

A woman at the house stop told police later that she had watched Cello and Frederick walk out with their hands tied behind their backs. That same evening around 8:00 p.m. Cello’s mother Dwis had been eating dinner at home. A co-orker she had given a ride to ear earlier that day was the last person to see her alive.

 When Dewis’s niece arrived around 9:00 that night, Deawa was gone. Her purse was on the table. Her car keys were there. Her dinner was still sitting where she had left it, halfeaten. She had been pulled out of her own kitchen in the middle of a meal and she never came back. The borrowed Jeep was found burned in Mississippi. Cello’s family filed a missing person’s report. One week passed.

 Then on March 3rd, 1994, James Montgomery’s brother led a Memphis police detective to a plot at Rose Hill Cemetery on Elvis Presley Boulevard. A woman named Dorothy Daniels had been buried there the previous week in a plot just six graves away from another family member’s resting place. When investigators disinterred Dorothy’s casket beneath it under several inches of dirt and a single piece of plywood they found all three of them cello Frederick Delwis.

 Their hands were bound behind their backs. Frederick’s feet were also bound. Delwis was lying at the bottom of the grave. The two men were on top of her. At trial, the medical examiner testified about what each of them endured. Cello had been shot three times. One bullet had severed his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down, but he was still conscious.

The bullet had also torn through his windpipe, and blood was filling his airway. He was drowning in his own blood in the dark underground, unable to move a single part of his body. Frederick had been shot in the chest and suffered severe blunt force trauma. Dilwa had been strangled. Dirt had been packed into her mouth and her nose.

 A red sock had been tied around her neck. The metal examiner testified that all three of them were alive when they were lowered into that grave. A jailhouse witness who had shared a cell block with Tony while both awaited trial testified that Tony had described what happened at the cemetery.

 According to that witness, when they lowered Kell and Frederick into the grave, Dwis began screaming. One of them told her to shut up or she would die like her son. Then they pushed her in. The trial was unlike almost any capital case in modern American history. Tony had burned through six attorneys before the proceedings even began.

 He hadn’t just fired them, he had threatened them. Multiple lawyers received death threats. One attorney’s family lived in genuine fear because of him. 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 three decades.

 He ordered Tony to represent himself as a sanction for his own misconduct. Tony with no legal training, no courtroom experience, no understanding of how a capital trial works, became his own defense attorney in a case where the state was trying to execute him. Postconviction attorneys later described his performance as one of the most quum, singularly inept and disastrous cross-examinations possible in a capital case.

 one that appeared designed not to establish doubt, but to secure both a guilty verdict and a death sentence. 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. Then that same jury sentenced him to death three times over, once for each victim.

 James Montgomery, tried separately after winning a new trial on appeal, took a plea deal. He received a 27-year sentence and was released from prison in 2015. He has been a free man for more than a decade. Jonathan Montgomery, the third member of the group who was indicted in the killings, died before his trial ever began.

 Tony Kurthers spent more than 30 years at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. In 2007, he gave his first and only television interview from Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex. He spoke to a Memphis news station, denied everything, and then looked directly into the camera and said, “I’m not going to be executed.” He said it with a smile.

 He said he was going to be exonerated. The Supreme Court did not stop this execution. Governor Bill Lee refused to intervene. 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 10:0.

 At 10, nothing happened. 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 directly into a large vein in the middle of the chest. That failed, too. For nearly 2 hours, Tony Kurthers lay on that gurnie while state officials tried to find a way to kill him.

 His attorney said he was in pain. She said there was a lot of blood. Andre Steel, Frederick Tucker’s father, had planned to be in that room. He had waited 30 years for this day. He watched them try for nearly 2 hours and fail. At 11:52 a.m., the IV lines were removed. A prison official was heard saying the execution would not continue at this time

. At 100 p.m., Governor Bill Lee made it official. Tony Kurthers was granted a temporary reprieve from execution for one year. When Tony’s attorney heard the news, she was already speaking to reporters outside. She stopped mid-sentence. She started crying. “That’s amazing,” she said. “I’m so grateful. Tony Kurthers is still alive.

 He is still on death row at Riverbend. He has been given one more year. Now, there are things about this case that are not disputed. Three people were murdered in Memphis in 1994. Marcelos Anderson, his mother Dwis, and 17-year-old Frederick Tucker. They were bound, shot, and buried beneath another woman’s coffin. Their families have spent 30 years waiting for something that still has not arrived.

 What is disputed is whether the man who has been on death row since 1996 is the man who put them there. The key jailhouse witness who testified that Tony confessed to him was later found to have been secretly paid by the state. Two jurors signed declarations saying they would not have voted for death had they known everything they now know.

 No physical evidence has ever directly tied Tony Kurthers to the murders. DNA and fingerprint testing on evidence from the crime scenes has never been performed. Courts have denied every request. Tony’s codefendant, James Montgomery, is free. Has been for over a decade. And in 2007, looking into a camera from behind bars, Tony Kurthers said, “Six.

 I’m not going to be executed.” So far, in May 2026, he was right. He has one more year. The question this video is going to leave with you is not a simple one, because this month gave us all of it at once. A man who burned a baby. A man who buried three people alive. A man who wiped his hands on the carpet next to a four-year-old he had just stabbed and then went and put on dress shoes.

 A man who wrote his plan in a letter before he walked out of a prison cell. And a man whose execution the state of Tennessee tried to carry out for two hours and failed. Five cases, four states, and the one thread running through all of them, the thing that connects every single one of these stories.

 The system that is supposed to deliver fi finality, sometimes delivers it to the wrong people and sometimes it cannot deliver it at all. Drop your answer in the comments. Which case is still sitting in your head right now and why?