Just In: Tennessee Executes Harold Wayne Nichols After 35 Years for Rape and Murder of a Young Stu..

carried out the death penalty this morning, executing serial rapist and murderer Harold Nichols. >> Nichols was sentenced to death after confessing to the 1988 rape and murder of 20-year-old Karen Pooly in Chattanooga. >> Karen was 20. She had just finished Bible school and was attending Chattanooga State to become a paralegal.

She’d been a cheerleader at Brainerd Baptist High School. She was bubbly, happy, selfless. She was looking forward to the life in front of her. >> Media witnesses say the curtains to the death chamber opened at 10:25 a.m. >> She was asleep. He was already inside the apartment. He had already found the piece of lumber.

 He was already moving through the dark hallway toward her bedroom with it in his hands. And when investigators sat across from him weeks later and asked him one question, “Would you have stopped on your own?” He did not pause. He did not look away. He did not think about it. He said, “No.” That was Harold Wayne Nichols, executed by lethal injection on December 11th, 2025 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee.

35 years on death row for the rape and murder of a 20-year-old college student named Karen Elise Pooly, killed in her own bedroom in Chattanooga in the autumn of 1988 while her roommates were out and she had every reason to believe she was safe. But before we get to that execution chamber, before we get to the final meal and the final words and the two men reciting the 23rd Psalm together until their voices broke, you need to understand the full weight of what this case actually is because this is not just the story of a crime. It is the

story of a system that had Harold Wayne Nichols in its hands twice before Karen Pooly ever went to sleep on September 30th, 1988. Twice it identified him, prosecuted him, and let him go. And the second time it let him go, a professional looked at everything in front of him, conducted an evaluation, and wrote in an official document that there was nothing unusual about this man.

Weeks after Karen died, Nichols was still out there, still moving through neighborhoods at night, still targeting women who were alone. He attacked at least 12 more across 95 days before anyone connected the pattern to a name, and the only reason they eventually got that name was not detective work. It was a jealous man making a phone call out of spite.

This is the full story of Harold Wayne Nichols, the background, the crimes, the investigation, the trial, 35 years on death row, and the final hours before the state of Tennessee carried out the sentence that six jurors cast their votes for while privately believing it would never actually happen.

 Stay with me, because this one does not let go. To understand what Harold Wayne Nichols became, you have to start where everything in a person’s story starts, not with the crimes, with the house, with the people inside it, with what a child absorbs when the environment they grow up in teaches them every single day without anyone saying a word out loud what the world is and how it works and what they are worth inside of it.

Harold Wayne Nichols was born on December 31st, 1960, in Cleveland, Tennessee, the last day of the year. The youngest child in a household that federal court records would later describe in language that does not leave room for interpretation. His father, a man known as Mack Nichols, was documented in those records as mean, abusive, and outright vile.

His mother, Nanny Lou, struggled with mental instability. The family home was cramped and sealed off from the outside world. Mack was a strict member of the Church of God of Prophecy, and his interpretation of that membership meant that no outside visitors were permitted in the house except fellow churchgoers.

The walls of that home were the boundaries of Harold’s entire world. There was nowhere to go. There was nothing to compare it to. This was simply what life was. In June of 1961, Mack’s sister, Betty Sampley, and her husband drowned during a family outing. They left behind six children. Two of them, Royce and Diana, ages 13 and 12, were brought into the Nickels household.

What Mack did to Diana in the four years that followed is documented in the federal court record. He subjected her to sexual menace and possible assault to cross those years. A 12-year-old girl brought into a household after losing both her parents, and the man who took her in abused her. That was the environment Harold grew up inside.

 Harm was not an exception to the rules of that house. It was one of the rules. In October of 1966, Nanny Lou was diagnosed with breast cancer. She fought it for four years. On January 29th, 1971, she died. Harold was 10 years old. What came after was worse than what had come before. With his mother gone, the one presence in that house that offered any counterweight to Mack, however limited that counterweight may have been, was gone, too.

Mack’s abuse of Harold and his older sister, Deborah, intensified. Less than 7 months after Nanny Lou’s death, the situation inside that house had deteriorated so severely that church leaders were forced to intervene. They could not ignore what was happening any longer. Something had to be done. The deal they reached on August 12th, 1971 is one of the most quietly damning moments in this entire case.

Harold and Deborah would be removed from Mack’s custody. The children would be taken out of the house. That part sounds like intervention. That part sounds like someone finally doing the right thing. But read the rest of the agreement. In exchange for the children’s removal, the abuse would be permanently covered up. Mack would never be reported.

 Mack would never face criminal charges. Mack would never be held accountable for a single thing he had done to his children or to Diana across the previous decade. The church leadership sat across from a man who had abused children for years, and they made him a deal that protected him completely in exchange for releasing the children he had already broken.

Harold and Deborah were placed in the Tomlinson Children’s Home, a church-run orphanage in Tennessee. Federal court records describing that institution used the phrase stereotypically harsh and inhospitable. This was not a warm environment. This was not a place that provided the stability or the care or the sense of safety that two children who had already survived what Harold and Deborah had survived desperately needed.

 This was simply somewhere else to be that was not Mack’s house. Mack never visited them once during their entire time there. On June 28th, 1977, Harold was returned to live with Mack. He was 17 years old. His father was by then collecting disability benefits, drinking heavily, and functionally absent in any meaningful sense from his own life, let alone from anyone else’s.

But he was still verbally and physically abusive and there was at least one incident during this period where Mack propositioned Harold directly. Harold declined and walked away. That detail is in the court record. Sit with what that means for a moment. A father propositioning his teenage son. Harold walked away.

 He had nowhere else to go but he walked away. Back in high school, Harold started skipping classes regularly. He began roaming the streets at night. Sometimes he did not come home at all. He would simply disappear into the residential streets of Chattanooga after dark with no particular destination and no particular plan.

 Moving quietly through neighborhoods, watching houses, watching windows, watching the ordinary routines of people living inside homes that felt nothing like the one he had grown up in. That pattern quiet night time wandering through neighborhoods, watching, waiting would follow Harold Wayne Nichols for the rest of his life and it would eventually lead him down a hallway in Brainerd toward a sleeping 20-year-old woman.

He graduated high school in August of 1979 and spent the next 2 years struggling to maintain steady employment. Nothing held. In November of 1981, he enlisted in the United States Army and was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas. While there, he became involved with a woman who was already married to another soldier.

They had a daughter together in November of 1983. That same month, Nichols was discharged from the army for poor performance. He left the woman. He left his infant daughter. He returned to Chattanooga in early 1984. Within months of his return on August 30th, 1984, Harold Wayne Nichols broke into an apartment shared by two women in Chattanooga.

He later claimed he had only intended to steal. What actually followed was an attempted sexual assault. The victim managed to fight him off and escape. Nichols was arrested on September 4th, 1984 and pleaded guilty in December of that year. He received a five-year sentence and was sent to Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary.

He served 18 months. 18 months for breaking into the home of two women and attempting to sexually assault one of them, and upon his release, a psychological evaluation was conducted. A professional sat across from Harold Wayne Nichols, reviewed what was in front of him, and produced an official finding that would be entered into the record and used to justify returning this man to the community.

The finding was this: Nothing unusual. Nothing unusual. Those two words in an official document produced by a credential professional about a man who had grown up in a documented abusive household, who had been removed from his father’s custody by church leaders who then covered the whole thing up, who had broken into a home and attempted to rape a woman, who had served less than two years of a five-year sentence.

Nothing unusual. That conclusion and the freedom it enabled would later prove to be one of the most consequential errors in this entire case. Karen Polley was still four years away from being killed, but the man who would kill her was already back on the streets of Chattanooga because an evaluation said there was nothing to worry about.

After his release, Nichols missed a parole appointment on July 9th, 1986. His parole officer filed a violation. He was returned to jail from September through October of 1986 and then released again. This time ordered to live with his father until he married his girlfriend Joanne. Harold and Joanne married on November 1st, 1986.

She worked at Sathers Candy. He took a job at a local Godfather’s Pizza. By all accounts, the marriage functioned. Joanne later said she was completely devoted to him and had no reason to suspect anything was wrong, but things were not right beneath the surface and they were getting worse. In April of 1987, Joanne underwent surgery for a blocked fallopian tube.

Two months later, the woman in Kansas, the mother of the daughter Harold had abandoned after his army discharge, filed a paternity suit. Nichols settled out of court and began paying child support. The pressure building in his life was real. The marriage was strained, the financial obligations were new, and the thing that had been inside him since long before any of this, the thing that sent him out into the streets at night, was not going anywhere.

 Then on June 29th, 1987, at 11:45 in the evening, a woman living in East Ridge, Tennessee, spotted a man in a white t-shirt standing near her home and called the police. When officers arrived, they found found Harold Wayne Nichols leaving a wooded area approximately 300 ft from the woman’s house. He was carrying a knife.

He could not explain what he was doing there. He could not offer any account of himself that made sense. He was arrested for prowling and carrying a dangerous weapon. On July 29th, 1987, he was returned to county jail. This time for a full year. He was released in approximately July or August of 1988. Weeks later, Karen Powley was dead.

Karen Elise Powley was 20 years old. She was a student at Chattanooga State Community College working toward a career as a paralegal. Before college, she had been a cheerleader at Brainerd Baptist High School, part of the same Brainerd community where she later lived as a young adult.

 She had recently completed Bible College and her faith was not background noise in her life. It was not something she carried occasionally or reached for in difficult moments. It was central to everything she did and everyone she was. It showed up in how she treated people, in how she moved through the world, in the relationships she built and kept.

Those who knew her used the same words every time they tried to describe her. Bubbly, selfless, happy. Her sister Lizette described her as someone with a genuine mischievous streak. The kind of person who made every room feel lighter simply by walking into it. The kind of person who made other people feel more themselves in her presence.

Lizette Monroe was 23 years old in 1988. She and Karen had been inseparable their entire lives. The kind of sisters who did not need a reason to spend time together. Every Sunday after church without fail, regardless of what else was happening in either of their lives, the two of them would go to dinner. Just the two of them.

That was their thing. It had always been their thing. Lizette had just returned to the United States after 3 years living on a US Air Force base in the Philippines with her husband Jeff Monroe. She had a newborn daughter. She had been planning a trip to Chattanooga. She wanted Karen to meet her baby for the first time.

That visit never [clears throat] happened. Karen’s parents, Ann and Chuck Poly, would spend the rest of their lives carrying the weight of what happened on that September night. Both of them passed away in the years that followed, never living to see the day justice was finally delivered. Never getting to sit in that room and watch the sentence carried out.

 They went to their graves still waiting. At the time of her death, Karen shared a Brainerd apartment with two roommates. She had a future mapped out, a career direction, people who loved her without condition. She had every reason to believe that her life was just beginning, that the best of it was still ahead, that the ordinary night of September 30th, 1988, was simply another night in a long chain of nights that would carry her forward.

She went to sleep. Harold Wayne Nichols had been watching the apartment the night before. On September 29th, 1988, the night before the murder, Nichols was already outside Karen Pulley’s building in Brainerd. He found a position where he could see through a small crack in the window blinds. He stood there and watched Karen’s roommate, Lori, getting ready for her night shift.

He stayed on the property. He watched until Lori left. Then he walked away. He came back the following night with a plan. On the evening of September 30th, 1988, Nichols parked near the apartment complex and waited. He watched the building. He tracked the movement inside. He confirmed that Karen was home.

 He confirmed that she was alone. Then he moved toward the building. He entered through a bathroom window. Once he was inside the apartment, he did not immediately go upstairs. He moved through the lower floor first and located a length of 2 by 4 lumber inside the home. He picked it up. He carried it with him as he moved through the house, through the hall, up the stairs, toward the bedroom where Karen Pulley was asleep.

She did not know anyone was in the apartment. She had no warning. There was no sound that preceded what was coming. One moment she was asleep in her own bedroom in a home she lived in with people she trusted, and the next moment Harold Wayne Nichols was in the room with a board in his hands. Court records confirmed that Karen fought back.

 She did not simply absorb what was happening to her. She fought. The autopsy conducted afterward determined the official cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head resulting in skull fractures and severe brain injuries. After the attack, Nichols left the apartment, disposed of the weapon, and went home. The following morning, Karen’s roommate Susan Saunders Massie came home and found her.

Karen was on the floor of her bedroom. She was alive. She was unconscious. Susan called for emergency services immediately. The EMT who responded to that call was a veteran of combat in Vietnam. He had seen things that most people never encounter in a lifetime. He had treated wounds in a war zone.

 He had responded to scenes that would stay with anyone who witnessed them. He told Karen’s family afterward that in all his years, including everything he had lived through and witnessed during the war, he had never encountered a scene like the one he walked into in that bedroom. Karen Pulley was transported to the hospital. She died later that same day.

 She never regained consciousness. She was 20 years old. Karen Pulley’s death on October 1st, 1988 did not end Harold Wayne Nichols’ activity. It was not a moment that stopped him or shook him or caused him to reckon with what he had done and retreat from it. What followed was 95 days that stretched across multiple neighborhoods and multiple jurisdictions throughout the Chattanooga area.

And they revealed something about this man that the original crime alone could not fully communicate. This was not an isolated explosion of violence. This was a pattern. This was something that had been building for a long time and was not going to stop on its own. Between September 30th, 1988 and January 3rd, 1989, Harold Wayne Nichols targeted at least 12 women.

His approach was consistent across every case. Women who were alone, women in situations where they had no warning and no immediate help available. He was patient in his selection. He watched before he moved. He confirmed before he acted. He had been developing these habits since the nights he spent wandering the streets of Chattanooga as a teenager.

And by the autumn of 1988, they were refined and deliberate. Both the Chattanooga Police Department and the East Ridge Police Department were separately tracking what they each recognized as a pattern of coordinated offenses. The two departments were working their own cases without yet knowing they were looking at the same man.

Victims across multiple cases described the same physical detail. A man with red hair. The press would eventually give him a name for it. They called him the red-headed stranger. On the night of January 2nd, 1989, Harold Nichols told his wife Joanne he was going out to get hamburgers. He did not come home until 7:00 the following morning.

During those hours, he carried out multiple attacks across the city. Joanne had no idea. She had no knowledge of any of it. She was at home waiting for a man she thought she knew to come back with food, and he was out there. Three days later, everything changed, and it did not change because of detective work.

 It did not change because of a forensic breakthrough or a surveillance camera or an investigator who connected a thread that no one else had seen. It changed because of a phone call made out of spite. At 8:10 in the evening on January 5th, 1989, East Ridge police captain Larry Holland received an anonymous tip. The caller alleged that Harold Wayne Nichols was the man responsible for the series of attacks that had been terrorizing the Chattanooga area and provided his date of birth.

The caller was later identified as a man named Chuck Mall. Chuck Mall had not come forward out of civic duty. He had not called because he was troubled by what Nichols had done or concerned for the safety of the community. He called because he was personally jealous of Nichols’ close friendship with his own boyfriend Larry Kilgore.

That was the motivation. Personal jealousy between two men over a friendship. That was what cracked open one of the most active and damaging criminal cases in Chattanooga’s recent history. It was not a detective’s breakthrough. It was an accident dressed up as a tip. A routine background check on Nichols immediately surfaced his 1984 conviction. Officers moved quickly.

Nichols was arrested on January 5th, 1989, the same evening the call came in. That same night investigators began showing photo lineups to victims across the connected cases. At 5:20 in the afternoon, one victim identified Nichols. An hour later, a second made a positive identification.

 Two more followed within hours after that. By 8:00 that evening, Harold Wayne Nichols was at Chattanooga Police Department headquarters. Detective Richard Heck conducted the interview on videotape. What followed was a confession. Nichols described Karen Polly’s apartment in detail. He laid out the layout of the rooms, the entry point he had used, the sequence of what had happened that night.

He told investigators where he had disposed of the weapon afterward. He answered their questions with a specificity that only someone who had been inside that apartment could have provided. And then investigators asked him one question, “Would you have stopped on your own?” He did not pause.

 He did not look away from the camera. He did not hesitate for even a moment before answering. He said, “No.” The physical evidence in the case presented complications despite the strength of the confession. The 2×4 recovered leaning against a tree, which roommate Susan Saunders Massie identified as consistent with a board stored in the home, showed no blood or fiber evidence by the time it was found in January 1989.

The months that had passed since the September attack had compromised that line of evidence. A Tennessee Bureau of Investigation serology report from 1989 initially appeared to exclude Nichols as the contributor of biological material found at the scene, a finding that was later challenged by expert testimony explaining how significant blood loss and medical transfusions can affect serological test results.

The forensic picture would not be fully resolved for more than 16 years. In October of 2005, DNA testing definitively confirmed Nichols’ biological connection to the Boley case, his defense team subsequently withdrew any remaining claim of innocence on the murder count. Nichols was formally indicted on February 1st, 1989.

 A mental health evaluation in July of 1989 found him competent to stand trial. On January 6th, 1989, the day after his arrest, he had also told his wife, JoAnn, what he had done. Everything. She had no prior knowledge of any of it. She described herself later as completely devoted to him with no reason to have suspected anything.

She found out the same way everyone else did. Her husband told her. The trial of Harold Wayne Nichols opened on May 7th, 1990 in Hamilton County Criminal Court. Because of the significant public attention surrounding the case, the court granted a change of venue for jury selection only. Jurors were brought in from Sequatchie County.

The trial itself remained in Hamilton County. Defense attorneys Hugh J. Moore Jr. and Rosemary Bryan moved immediately to suppress the videotape confession. That tape was the single most damaging piece of evidence against their client. A man on camera speaking clearly describing in specific detail exactly what he had done and confirming that he would not have stopped on his own.

If they could get that tape out, the case looked very different. The court denied the motion. The tape was going before the jury. Whatever calculation Nichols then made, the result of it was that he changed course entirely. He entered guilty pleas to first-degree felony murder, aggravated rape, and first-degree burglary.

 He was not contesting the facts. He was not going to make the prosecution prove every element in front of a jury. The case moved directly into to sentencing phase. One question remained before the jury. Life or death. District Attorney Steve Bivins led the prosecution through the sentencing argument. He presented two statutory aggravating circumstances under Tennessee law.

 The first was that Nichols had five prior convictions for aggravated offenses against four separate victims. The second was that Karen Pullins’ murder had occurred during the commission of a felony burglary. Hamilton County Court Clerk Harold Rowan formally introduced the conviction records into evidence, placing the full documented history of Harold Wayne Nichols in front of the 12 people who would decide whether he lived or died.

The defense called witnesses in response. JoAnn Nichols took the stand and described their marriage as genuinely happy. She told the jury about the man she had known, the man who had come home every night and held a job and been present in their life together. Larry Kilgore, Nichols’ closest friend, told the court he was the best person he had ever known.

Three reverends testified for the defense. Reverend Butler told the jury that Nichols had been operating under the influence of an evil spirit. On cross-examination, he acknowledged that Nichols had never once sought help for this. Reverend Gonia described him as a good child who had remained a good person. Reverend Hawkins had known Nichols personally at the Tomlinson Children’s Home during the years he was placed there after being removed from max custody.

He told the court that the man he saw sitting behind the defense table reminded him of the young boy he had once known at that orphanage. Then Nichols took the stand himself. He told the jury he understood that what he had done was wrong and terrible. He said a strange feeling had compelled him and that he had been unable to stop it.

 He said he had not intended for Karen Pulley to die. And then he turned toward her family and he spoke directly to them. He said, “I wish that there was something I could do to change the things that happened. I know Ms. Pulley’s family is hurting and I’m not asking them for forgiveness. I don’t expect that. But if I could change places with Karen, I would.

” On cross-examination, the prosecution asked him plainly whether he would have continued had he not been arrested. He said yes. In his closing argument, District Attorney Beville stood before the jury and placed two images in front of them. The first was an enlarged portrait of Karen Pulley.

 It was labeled September 29th, 1988, the day before she died. The second image was from the crime scene. It was labeled September 30th, 1988. He looked at the jury and he asked them to show Harold Wayne Nichols the same mercy he had shown her. On May 12th, 1990, after deliberating for less than 2 hours, the jury returned their recommendation.

Death. The judge followed the recommendation. In addition to the death sentence, Nichols received 60 years for aggravated rape and 15 years for burglary in the Pulley case, along with an aggregate of 225 years across his remaining convictions. And then something happened in that courtroom that nobody present had anticipated, something that has stayed with everyone who has ever heard this case in any form.

Because it is one of the most extraordinary things that has ever happened in the aftermath of a death sentence being read. Karen Pulley’s mother, Ann, stood up. She asked to speak with Harold Wayne Nichols face-to-face. The two of them walked together into the jury room and closed the door behind them. The courtroom waited.

 Whatever was said in that room in those minutes was between the two of them. When Ann Pyle came back out, she told those close to her what she had told him. She had told him she forgave him, not for his sake, for hers. She had decided that she was not going to spend the rest of her life carrying hatred for this man inside her alongside the grief she was already carrying for her daughter.

She was not going to let what he had done take anything more from her than it had already taken. She visited him twice more in jail after that day. On one of those visits, she brought him something, a Bible. She had inscribed it with a personal note written in her own hand. She had opened it to her daughter’s favorite verses and underlined them.

Karen Pyle’s favorite passages, marked by her mother, given to the man who had killed her. Harold Wayne Nichols kept that Bible for the remaining 35 years of his life. Years later, six of the jurors who had voted for death made statements that added another dimension to the already complicated moral landscape of this case.

They said publicly that when they cast their votes for death in that jury room in May of 1990, they did so believing that Tennessee would never actually carry out the sentence. They thought they were voting for a legal outcome that would never become a physical reality. That belief, held by six of the 12 people who decided Harold Nichols should die, raises a question about what a death sentence actually means when the people imposing it do not believe it will be enforced.

It is a question this case never fully answers. The death sentence handed down on May 12th, 1990 did not close anything. It opened a legal process that would run for 35 years and touch every level of the American court system. In 1994, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the death sentence in State versus Nichols.

In January of 1995, the United States Supreme Court declined to review the case. That same year, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals upheld his remaining convictions. The appeals continued moving through the system, each one reviewed, each one denied. In May of 2003, Nichols filed a federal habeas corpus petition.

During that process, a psychiatrist diagnosed him with intermittent explosive disorder. This was notably the same condition that a doctor had identified during the original murder trial, a diagnosis that had not altered the outcome of the sentencing then and did not alter the outcome of the appeals process now.

In December of 2007, he was resentenced on his non-capital offenses, receiving 25-year minimum terms on each count running concurrently. While those legal proceedings moved through the courts, Harold Wayne Nichols was living out his sentence at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. He worked maintenance on unit two, handling plumbing and electrical repairs on death row.

He was not a high-profile presence. He was not a man who drew attention to himself inside the institution. People who encountered him during those years, corrections officers, staff, other inmates, consistently described the same thing, a man who appeared genuinely remorseful, a man who seemed changed in ways that were observable and consistent over decades from the person he had been in 1988.

That observation was not limited to people inside the prison. Two former Hamilton County prosecutors who had worked the original Nichols case publicly stated their support for clemency. These were not defense advocates or death penalty opponents. These were the people who had argued for his conviction.

 They had spent years on the case. They had seen the evidence and the crime and the victim’s family and all of it. And after watching what Nichols had become over 30 years, they said publicly that they believed he should not be executed. Six of the original 12 jurors submitted statements either supporting life without parole or indicating that they had reconsidered their position on the death sentence.

People who had been in that room and voted for death in 1990 were now saying 30 years later that they were not sure they would vote the same way. In 2018, Hamilton County District Attorneys reached an agreement that would have effectively resentenced Nichols to life without parole. The deal was structured. The paperwork existed.

It was presented to the judge. The judge refused to accept it. One judge’s decision prevented an agreement between prosecutors and defense from taking effect and kept the death sentence in place. That single ruling sent the case back into the appellate track where it would remain for years. Nichols had originally selected the electric chair as his method of execution, an option that remained available to Tennessee inmates convicted before January of 1999.

 When the state contacted him in 2025 to confirm his choice, he let the deadline pass without responding. Under Tennessee law, that default meant lethal injection. His first execution date had been set for August of 2020. Governor Bill Lee granted a stay due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, a statewide review of Tennessee’s execution procedures found that drugs used in prior executions had not been properly tested.

Executions across the state were paused while the issue was addressed. A new single drug pentobarbital protocol was approved in December of 2024. In March of 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court set a new execution date, December 11th, 2025. On December 9th, 2025, Governor Lee formally denied clemency. It was the seventh execution he had allowed since taking office.

The United States Supreme Court declined to issue a stay. Every door that had been opened across 35 years of litigation had been closed. Karen’s parents were not alive to see it. Ann and Chuck Pooley had both passed away in the years following their daughter’s death, carrying that weight until the end without ever seeing the sentence carried out.

The visit Ann had made to that jury room, the Bible she had given him, the forgiveness she had offered not for his sake, but for hers. All of that had happened, and then she had died still waiting for the day the law finished what she had started. On December 11th, 2025, Harold Wayne Nichols woke before dawn at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.

 He showered. He received visitors in the hours that remained to him. His final meal had been served the previous evening, beef brisket, coleslaw, a baked potato, onion rings, deviled eggs, cheese biscuits, and fruit tea. Outside the prison, anti-death penalty protesters gathered on the grounds. Among them was a man who worked in faith-based prison ministry at Riverbend, who said he had met Nichols personally and believed that rehabilitation, not execution, was the right response to who this man had become over 35 years.

Inside the execution chamber, spiritual adviser GR Davis stood beside Harold Wayne Nichols. The two men had a relationship built across years of ministry inside Riverbend. Together in the chamber, they recited the 23rd Psalm. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. Both of their voices became strained at points as the words moved through them.

They recited the Lord’s Prayer after that. After the final amen, Davis continued speaking quietly to Nichols. Nichols nodded. Officials asked for his final statement. He said, “To the people I’ve harmed, I’m sorry. To my family, know that I love you. I know where I’m going. I’m ready to go home.” Pentobarbital was administered.

Harold Wayne Nichols was pronounced dead at 10:39 in the morning on December 11th, 2025. He was the 10th execution carried out in Tennessee since the state resumed the practice in 2018. While it happened, the Pulley family held a private celebration of Karen’s life at home. Lizette Monroe could not attend the execution.

 Her husband, Jeff Monroe, addressed the press on behalf of the family, thanking Detective Richard Heck, the Chattanooga Police Department, the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office, and the Department of Corrections by name. He thanked each of them specifically and deliberately. These were the people and the institutions that had carried this case across 37 years and delivered what his family had been waiting for.

Defense attorney Deborah Drew said the execution sent a message that redemption deserves no mercy. J.R. Davis said he believed the transformation he had witnessed in Harold Wayne Nichols over the years of their relationship was genuine. Karen Elise Puley was 20 years old. She was a student working toward a career as a paralegal. She was a cheerleader.

 She was a woman of faith. She was a sister who went to Sunday dinner every week without fail. She was a young woman whose sister had been planning a visit so she could meet a newborn niece for the first time. She was taken from her own bedroom by a man the system had already caught, convicted, evaluated, and released with a piece of paper saying there was nothing unusual about him.

 She fought back. That is in the court record. In the final moments of her life, with a man standing over her in the dark, she fought back. And the Bible her mother inscribed with her favorite verses and gave to the man who killed her sat on Harold Wayne Nichols’ shelf at Riverbend for 35 years until the morning the state of Tennessee carried out his sentence.

Now, here’s the question I want to leave you with today. Six of the 12 jurors who voted for death in 1990 later said they cast those votes believing Tennessee would never actually carry out the sentence. Two of the prosecutors who built the original case against Nichols publicly supported clemency after watching who he had become over 30 years.

A deal to resentence him to life without parole was agreed upon by both sides in 2018, and a judge refused to accept it. And a spiritual adviser who knew him personally said the transformation was real. Given all of that, given everything you have heard today, do you believe December 11th, 2025 was justice? Or do you believe that what Harold Wayne Nichols became across 35 years on death row deserved a different answer? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

 This is exactly the kind of question this channel exists to ask. If this story stayed with you, if Karen Polley deserves to be remembered, subscribe to True Crime Matter right now and turn on your notifications. Every case on this channel is someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s 20-year-old with a future still ahead of her. We tell their stories the way they deserve to be told.

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