Execution of Harold Wayne Nichols (12/11/25) | DEATH ROW Documentary — Tennessee Case

Harold Nichols confessed to the rape and murder of  a student at Chattanooga State University in 1988. In a strong, clear voice, Harold  Wayne Nichols began to tell the   jury a little about himself. He cried  as he described a difficult childhood,   losing his mother when he was only 10  and spending some time in an orphanage.

The jury had reached its decision. The punishment  was death. Harold Wayne Nichols plead guilty to   first-degree felony murder and was sentenced  by a jury to death. At the sentencing hearing,   the jury found two aggravating circumstances.  First, Nicholls five previous convictions for   aggravated rape. Second, the fact that the murder  occurred during the commission of a felony.  

The jury found that these aggravating  circumstances outweighed any mitigating   circumstances beyond a reasonable doubt  and sentenced the defendant to death. It was 1990 in a Tennessee courtroom. 29-year-old  Harold Wayne Nichols stood before a judge as the   state sentenced him to die for the rape  and murder of 25-year-old Karen Pulley.

This was a guy who has never shown  mercy to any one of these victims.  He’s never shown sympathy. He’s never shown compassion   or concern. The only thing he’s ever  shown is selfishness, self-centerness,   and “whatever Wayne wants, Wayne gets.” Harold Wayne Nichols awaits the electric  chair for the 1988 brutal rape and murder   of Karen Pulley. That’s not the only  crime that landed him behind bars.

Deputies started toward him, ready to lead him  away. And then something happened no one expected.   Karen’s mother, Anne Pulley, stepped forward.  She didn’t ask to speak to the judge. She didn’t   turn to the cameras. She asked to speak to him…  Minutes after hearing that her daughter’s killer   would be executed, she walked closer and quietly  spoke to Nicholls about faith, about salvation.

A defense attorney who watched it happen  would later say he felt she was trying,   in her words, “to save this boy’s soul.” Years later, Nichols lawyers would  call that moment a turning point for   him. And by the time we reach the end of  this story, you’ll learn one unexpected   fact about this man on death row.

 And  one more detail you rarely see in death   penalty cases. Because this isn’t just  the story of a man in a death row cell. On the night of September 30th, 1988,   nothing in Karen Pulley’s life suggested  danger. She was 21, working, studying,   sharing a house with roommates in the quiet  Brainerd neighborhood of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her friends remembered her as warm, responsible,   the kind of person who left notes on the  fridge and stayed up late finishing coursework.

That night, her roommates were out. For a  few rare hours, the entire house was hers.   She didn’t know someone was watching  it. Like a hunter watching prey. Harold Wayne Nichols wasn’t  wandering aimlessly that   night. He picked houses where a woman  was alone. He checked doors, windows,   weak points, and when he reached Karen’s  house, he found what he was looking for.

He slipped inside through the first floor.  He wasn’t there to learn who lived there.   He was there to take what he came for.  He moved through the rooms in silence,   then found the staircase and began to climb. At  the top of those stairs was Karen’s bedroom. What   happened next lasted only minutes, but it split  her life in two.

 Karen was in her room when a   man she’d never seen stepped into the doorway.  She had no time to scream, no one to run to,   no one to hear her. Nichols grabbed what  he could find, a wooden board from inside   the house. Something heavy enough to become  a weapon. He beat her with it more than once. Doctors would later describe her  injuries in the dry language of   medicine.

 Severe head trauma, catastrophic damage,   the kind of injuries the human body cannot recover  from. Those blows turned a rape into a murder. When the attack ended, Karen was lying on the  floor next to her bed, alive but barely conscious,   unable to get up, unable to call out. Nichols  looked at her, at the young woman who would   not survive what he’d done, and he walked  away.

 He went back down the same stairs,   through the same rooms, into the quiet Tennessee  night. Somewhere along the way, he got rid of the   board and his clothes. From the outside, the house  looked normal again. A dark window, a still porch,   nothing unusual. Inside, on the floor of  her own bedroom, a young woman was dying. Morning came like any other.

 One  of Karen’s roommates returned home,   walked upstairs, and saw her on the floor,   unconscious, barely breathing. She called  911. Paramedics rushed Karen to the hospital.   Doctors fought to save her, but the injuries  were too severe. Karen Pulley died soon after. In the official paperwork, it would be classified  as “rape and murder in a residential neighborhood.

”   But for Chattanooga and for the women living  there, it was something else. The moment they   realized a predator was moving through their  city at night. Stories started surfacing.   A broken front door. A car door pulled  open in the dark. A stranger inside a   home that was supposed to be locked and  safe. Different neighborhoods.

 Different   women. But the same shadow in the night. A  man hunting for the moment a woman was alone. Inside the police department, detectives  began lining up case files. But when they   pushed those folders together,  a pattern appeared. Detectives   knew they weren’t looking for a one-time  offender. They were tracking a predator.

January 5th, 1989. Early morning. The phone  rang in the East Ridge police station. An   anonymous caller. No name, no details, just a  sentence. Harold Wayne Nichols. He’s the one   doing the rapes. The name hadn’t appeared  in their investigation before. The officer   typed it into the system and immediately saw a  red flag.

 Nichols had a prior sexual assault   case from 1984. Suddenly, everything lined  up a little too well. They showed it to one   of the women who had survived an attack. She  looked at it for a few seconds and said it was   him. That was all police needed. There was  no dramatic chase, no late night showdown. The official record is simple.

 On January 5th,  1989, Harold Wayne Nichols was taken into custody   on suspicion of multiple rapes in the East Ridge  area and brought to the station for questioning. But the real drama, the moment when the full  scope of what he’d done finally came into view,   happened the next day. January 6th, 1989.  Interview room. Nichols sat across from   detectives and began talking. He didn’t deny  the attacks. He didn’t hesitate. He confessed.  

Calmly. Nichols didn’t just confirm  the attacks they asked about. He   started naming others. Not one, not two, a  chain. In the case files, most victims were   reduced to initials T.R., S.T., P.G., P.R. Their real names sealed to protect them. My daughter-in-law was his second  victim. Something needs to be done.

Both Hicks and Adams are vowing to fight  until Nichols draws his last breath. Until that’s not a possibility anymore,  there’s… you don’t not be scared. Evidence shows until Nichols arrest in 1989,   he would roam the streets of Chattanooga  at night searching for vulnerable women. Not only for our family, but for the  14 or 15 other women family out there.

Eventually, detectives reached the question  hovering over everything. What about the   young woman in Brainerd? What about Karen Pulley?  And in time, on tape and in a signed statement,   Nichols placed himself exactly where the evidence  had already pointed. Inside Karen’s house, up the   stairs, in her bedroom that night. He admitted  breaking in. He admitted raping her.

 He admitted   beating her with a wooden board he found inside  the home. And he admitted what he did after. When Harold Wayne Nichols went on trial for  the rape and murder of Karen Pulley, there was   no mystery left. He had confessed twice on tape  and in writing. The jury wasn’t there to decide   whether he did it. They were there to decide what  his punishment should be: life in prison or death.

And the courtroom quickly split into  two versions of the same man. A man   who hunted women at night. A man who  admitted he would have kept going   if police hadn’t stopped him. The  picture was brutal and undeniable. But the defense had a different picture.

 A pastor  from Nichols childhood church, a soft-spoken man   who said “Harold was a polite kid, helpful,  quiet. A boy who seemed gentle by nature.” But the most emotional witness was his wife,  Joanne. She called him “a perfect gentleman,   kind, mildmannered. A man who worked late  trying to keep their home together when   everything else in life was falling apart.

”  She told the jury she didn’t believe he had   killed Karen Pulley on purpose, and she didn’t  want the state to execute her husband. All of   them were sincere. All of them were telling  the truth. The truth of the man they knew. When Harold Wayne Nichols testified, he didn’t  describe a monster living inside him. Instead,   he talked about himself as someone shaped,  even broken, by childhood.

 A mother who died   of breast cancer when he was 10. A father  who sent him and his sister to an orphanage,   because he said he couldn’t take care of  them. Later, the army, jobs, marriage,   a life that looked normal on the outside. But  according to Nichols, something else was happening   underneath.

 He said that before each attack,  he felt overwhelmed by a strange excited state,   something he claimed took away his ability  to resist. He said he never told anyone. The defense brought in psychologist Dr.  Eric Engum. He gave Nichols a diagnosis,   “intermittent explosive disorder”, a form  of impulse control disorder rooted, he said,   “in early trauma”. Dr.

 Engum described Nichols as  “someone who functioned well under strict rules,   someone who was calm and compliant  when surrounded by structure.” But   when there were no walls, no rules,  no boundaries, Nichols chose violence. The psychologist didn’t say Nichols didn’t  understand what he was doing. He didn’t   say Nichols couldn’t control himself.  Only this.

 In the absence of limits,   Nichols created his own world. And  in that world, he harmed women. But the moment that froze the courtroom didn’t  come from the psychologist. It came from Nichols   himself. He told the jury plainly that “if  police hadn’t arrested him in January 1989,   he would have kept attacking women.” No  hesitation, no confusion, just a fact.

 He   knew what he was doing. He knew he could  continue. And he admitted he would have. That sentence carried more weight than any  expert testimony. The prosecution reminded   the jury what the Tennessee Supreme Court later  wrote about this case. Justice Anderson said,   “In this capital case, the defendant,  Harold Wayne Nichols, plead guilty to   first-degree felony murder and was sentenced  by a jury to death.

 At the sentencing hearing,   the jury found two aggravating circumstances.  First, Nichols five previous convictions for   aggravated rape. Second, the fact that the murder  occurred during the commission of a felony. The   jury found that these aggravating circumstances  outweighed any mitigating circumstances beyond   a reasonable doubt and sentenced the defendant  to death.

 Nichols later appealed his sentence,   claiming there were errors in the sentencing  phase, but after reviewing the record,   we concluded that any such errors were harmless  beyond a reasonable doubt and did not affect the   jury’s decision to impose death. Accordingly,  we affirm the jury’s sentence of death. In 1990, after the death sentence was handed  down, Harold Wayne Nichols was transferred to   Tennessee’s death row. He arrived with almost  nothing.

 His prison clothes, a few documents,   and a Bible. The same Bible Karen Pulley’s mother  had given him in the courtroom after the verdict. He followed rules, kept to himself. The guards  called him “a cooperative inmate.” But to the   prison psychologist, it matched something else.  Nichols functioned best inside strict walls.   When others built the structure, he obeyed  it. When there were no walls, he hunted.

On death row, days blur. The  world shrinks to a concrete cell,   a steel door, and a narrow slot for meals. Years folded into years. Today, at 64 years old,  he remains on death row at the Riverbend Maximum   Security Institution in Nashville. His execution  is scheduled for December 11th, 2025 at 10 a.m.

Because he refused to choose between  the electric chair and lethal injection,   Tennessee law made the choice  for him, lethal injection. Attorneys for death row inmate Harold Wayne  Nichols are suing the state of Tennessee,   accusing prison officials of violating the  Public Records Act.

 The lawsuit claims the   Department of Correction is refusing to release  key documents about its execution protocol just   weeks before Nichols has to choose how he’ll  die. His attorneys say the state is hiding   behind a secrecy statute, even after witnesses  reported signs of pain during recent executions   using the drug pentobarbital. Nichols is  scheduled to be executed on December 11th.

It’s extremely important for the  state to protect the identity of   the entities who are supplying  the lethal injection chemicals. He has lived under a death sentence for more than  3 decades. And now a date has finally been set for   him.

 But even as the clock moves closer to that  December morning, Nichols lawyers are fighting to   keep him alive. Not by arguing innocence, but by  arguing something else. That the state should not   kill him. But there was a problem. Modern DNA  testing. When the samples were finally tested   with contemporary forensic methods, the answer was  clear. The semen belonged to Harold Wayne Nichols. Knowing everything you know about  Wayne Nichols today.

 What do you   think his punishment should be? Should the death sentence stand?  Should it be changed? Or should he be spared altogether? If it really comes down to an execution,  would you choose the electric chair,   lethal injection, or no execution at all?  Drop your thoughts in the  comments, but keep it respectful.

There’s a part of Harold Wayne Nichols life that  almost never appears in headlines. On death row,   Nichols began making art. In handwritten notes, he  says it helps him “shine a light on issues.” The   cradle to prison pipeline, the death penalty, mass  incarceration. But the art reveals something else.

What a person imagines when the  world they live in is made of   steel and cinder block. What escape  looks like when escape is impossible. Nicholls hasn’t seen real stars in more than  25 years. Two art instructors photographed the   night sky for him. The sky he remembered, but  could no longer witness.

 And he painted his own   version. Deep violet acrylics, thin silhouettes  of trees, a sky he will never stand under again.  In his note to the piece, he wrote,  “Prison has taught me many things. One   of them is the importance of small  things like the stars at night.” For years, Nicholls worked on a two-man prison  maintenance crew handling electrical repairs.  

One day, his supervisor, a free-world employee,   grabbed a live wire and was nearly  killed. When medical staff walked him out,   shaking and stunned, Nichols remembered one  detail. After almost dying from the shock,   the thing he cared about most was that his  glasses had broken.

 And then Nichols wrote,   “Is it strange that a man sentenced to die in the  electric chair works fixing electrical wiring? One of his most unusual works is a  small diorama, a painted prison door,   a narrow vertical viewing slot,  a meal slot below it. Inside,   a collage of photographs of Nichols’s family  and friends, and in front of those photos,   a tiny mirror. When you lean in to look  inside, you don’t see him, you see yourself.

Another drawing of his is simple. A world  without prisons. In his exhibition note,   Nicholls wrote, “No one here wants  to see a monument to themselves,   but I wanted to show people what the world  could look like if my idea became real.” His largest project was a collaboration with  another death row inmate, Ron Cauthern.

 From   cardboard scraps, leftover paint, and  trash collected in the recreation room,   they built a 4×5 m airplane. Along its sides,  winding lines, like veins. On the nose,   a skull, a music box motor connected to  the propeller. Turn it, the blades spin,   and the melody “Somewhere out there” begins  to play. A song about hope.

 Built by men,   the state intends to kill. The airplane  was dismantled inside the prison,   carried out piece by piece, and reassembled in a  New York art gallery. Visitors walked around it,   photographed it, studied it, not knowing that  the men who made it may never see the sky again. So, what do these works show? Are they  evidence of transformation, reflection,   regret, or simply the creativity of a  man adapting to a life without freedom? Only one idea is clear. Prison didn’t  make Harold Wayne Nichols harmless.  

He was only harmless when someone else built  the walls around him. But inside those walls,   he built something, too. Paintings,  sculptures, small worlds, imagined skies. Tell me what you think in the comments. And if you want more stories told   without sensationalism and without excuses,  subscribe and join us in the next episode.