JUST NOW: Harold Nichols Executed in Tennessee — His Crime, Final Meal & Last Words Revealed

On December 11th, 2025, after spending more than 35 years on death row, Harold Wayne Nichols was executed by lethal injection in Tennessee. In this video, we’ll uncover what happened, his last meal, and his last words. It was just before midnight on Friday, September 30th, 1988, when 28-year-old Wayne pulled up and parked a short distance from a quiet house in the Brainer neighborhood of Chattanooga.

Inside that house were three women, 21-year-old Karen Elise Pulley and her two roommates. Wayne knew that. From the darkness, he watched the house closely until he saw one of her roommates get dressed and leave the house. That was the moment he had been waiting for. He stepped out of his car, grabbed a short piece of lumber, a 2×4, and crept toward the home.

 He found a way in through a small bathroom window, and once inside, he moved through the hallway without making a sound. The board gripped tight in his hand. Upstairs, Karen was still asleep. She had no idea that someone had broken in and that danger was just seconds away. Wayne slipped into her room and attacked without warning, slamming the board into her head.

 She woke in panic and tried to fight him off, but he overpowered her, tore at her clothes, and her. After he was done, he hit her again and again until she stopped moving. Then he took whatever he could find and left the house, leaving Karen barely alive and bleeding on her bedroom floor. The next morning, one of Karen’s roommates returned to the house and stepped into a nightmare.

 She found Karen laying on the floor clinging to life and surrounded by blood. Paramedics rushed her to the hospital, but it was too late. She never regained consciousness and died the next day. But who had done this and why? While investigators were still gathering details from the attack on Karen, Wayne was already planning his next move.

It was just after midnight on October 20th, 1988, when he struck again, this time in Tonia, a quiet neighborhood on the edge of Chattanooga. Inside one of the houses, a 23-year-old woman was finishing her bedtime routine. Her husband worked late shifts, and she had just unlocked the side door so he could come in when he got home.

 But she didn’t know that small act of routine would leave her defenseless. Only 15 minutes passed before Wayne found the door. He let himself in, silent and deliberate, like he had done it before. He picked up a heavy brass candlestick from a table and crept toward the bedroom. The woman didn’t even have time to scream.

 The first strike split the skin on her head and the second one dropped her to the floor. She tried to crawl, dazed and bleeding, but he threatened to kill her if she didn’t stay quiet. Then he wrapped his hands around her throat and strangled her until she could no longer resist, but didn’t kill her. After that, he her.

When it was over, he told her not to move. Terrified, she knelt on the edge of the bed, barely breathing, afraid to even look up. And that’s where her husband found her, shaking in the dark when he got home from work. He immediately called the police. But the nightmare wasn’t over. While officers were still there collecting evidence, the phone rang.

 The woman answered it and froze. She recognized the voice instantly. It was him. But before she could respond, she broke and handed the phone to a nearby officer. But by then, the line had already gone quiet. And that was only the beginning. Between the fall of 1988 and early 1989, Wayne terrorized Chattanooga with a string of home invasions and violent assaults.

 He broke into the homes of at least 11 women. Some he had watched for days, others for weeks. He came armed with knives, cords, or whatever he could turn into a weapon. And once inside, he controlled every second, threatening, beating, and the women, sometimes forcing them to shower afterward or change clothes at his demand.

 He always left with something and always disappeared before the police arrived. Every attack followed the same brutal script. For three long months, detectives chased every lead. They spoke to over a hundred people, ran fingerprint comparisons, processed biological evidence, and tried to connect the dots.

 But the case went nowhere. They had no suspects and didn’t even know what weapon had been used to attack Karen. But everything changed on a Thursday night in January 1989. At exactly 8:10 p.m., East Ridge Police Captain Larry Holland picked up a call that broke the case wide open. It was an anonymous tip from a man later identified as Chuck Maul.

 He gave them a name and a date of birth, leading them straight to Wayne. Chuck said that this was the man they were looking for. He was behind the that had been terrorizing Chattanooga for months. And the officers listening knew they had to move fast. Within minutes, detectives ran Wayne’s record and found a 1984 conviction for burglary and attempted The pattern fit too well to dismiss.

They pulled his photo and showed it to four of his potential victims. One by one, each woman pointed to the same face without hesitation. This was the man who attacked them, and the warrant for his arrest was signed that same night. By 11:06 p.m., police surrounded his house. Wayne was arrested and taken to the East Ridge Station, where he waved his rights without blinking.

 And less than an hour later, the confessions started pouring out. On video, Wayne confessed to four of the But this wasn’t enough for the detectives, and the questioning went on until dawn. By morning, Wayne was giving up even more names, more attacks. Some of them hadn’t even been reported yet. It was becoming clear that he had harmed far more women than anyone had realized.

That same evening, more victims came into view lineups. Every single one of them recognized his face. And when they questioned him again, he finally mentioned Karen. On camera, he explained how he had broken into her room, attacked her, and left her bleeding on the floor. The case that had haunted investigators for months now had a face.

And just hours later, he led them to a vacant lot in East Ridge, showing them the spot where he had ditched the 2×4 used to crush her skull. And just two days after that, his own wife came forward saying Wayne had told her everything. By February 1st, 1989, the state charged him with Karen Pulley’s and murder.

 And soon more charges followed, one for nearly every woman he had attacked. And when psychologists examined him that summer, they confirmed what the evidence already made clear. He was fully competent and he knew exactly what he had done. The trial for Karen’s murder began on May 7th, 1990 in Hamilton County.

 But because the case had already received heavy media coverage, jurors were brought in from Sumar County to avoid any local bias. Before things got underway, Wayne’s attorneys tried to block the jury from seeing his taped confession, but the court denied that motion. And once that happened, Wayne gave up any effort to fight the charges.

He plead guilty to firstdegree murder. aggravated and burglary. The judge accepted his plea without hesitation. And with that, the trial moved straight to the sentencing phase, and prosecutors wasted no time making their stance known. They would seek the death penalty for the murder of Karen. Their case focused on two aggravating factors.

 That the murder occurred during a sexual assault and that Wayne already had a history of violent felony convictions. That combination, they argued, made him a continued threat. For the first time, jurors heard the full scope of what happened that night. Not just Wayne’s own words, but the brutal details that followed.

 Paramedics, police officers, and Karen’s roommates all took the stand, recounting the scene they had walked into. A small bedroom turned into a nightmare. One of the paramedics, William Craig, took the stand and described a scene that even his years in Vietnam hadn’t prepared him for. He told the jury how Karen’s skull was so badly crushed that he thought she was a child when he first saw her.

 He had responded to countless emergencies, but nothing compared to what he saw that night. Karen’s roommates followed, each one adding more weight to the nightmare. They talked about the house they had shared, the normaly of that evening and how it shattered in an instant. Then came the videotaped confession. The jury sat in silence as Wayne walked investigators through everything that had happened and police followed up with a recreation of his path through the house guided by his own words.

Finally, the medical examiner, Dr. Frank King, explained the brutality of the attack in clear clinical terms. He described the multiple fractures, the torn tissue, the amount of force required to inflict them, and confirmed that a 2×4 was likely the weapon. He also told the jury that theual assault Karen suffered had been her first experience, and that the damage to her body required a level of force beyond what anyone should endure.

 Each witness added to the same unshakable truth. The horror of that night and the man responsible. But when the prosecution stepped back, the defense stepped forward with something else. A picture of a man, not a monster. Wayne’s wife, Joanne, took the stand and called him kind, gentle, even.

 She said that recently Wayne worked long shifts and sometimes never came home until morning. She had told herself it was overtime or bad hours at the restaurant. And even when Wayne admitted to her what he did to Karen, calling it an accident, she still couldn’t believe him. Nothing she knew about him suggested he was capable of something like that.

Others followed. Pastors, friends, and neighbors described him as soft-spoken, remorseful, someone who had been overtaken by something darker. One preacher claimed an evil spirit had taken control of Wayne, while another insisted he was still a good person somewhere beneath the surface. And when Wayne took the stand, he didn’t try to deny what happened.

 Instead, he opened a window into the past, back to when he was just 10 years old and lost his mother to cancer. One day, he was a boy living at home. The next, his father dropped him off at an orphanage without saying why. He said he didn’t remember much from those years, only fragments, different adults coming and going, and people he bonded with disappearing without warning.

 And just when he was about to be adopted, he said, they changed their mind and sent him back to his father. But that return didn’t bring comfort. It brought arguments, distance, and a father who didn’t seem to know what to do with him. He enlisted in the army, hoping structure and discipline might fix what felt broken.

 And for a while it seemed to work. He earned an honorable discharge in 1984, something he carried with pride. Two years later, he married Joanne. They built a life together that he thought was worth holding on to. Even when things got hard, he took a job at Godfather’s Pizza and didn’t just clock in and out.

 He worked his way up from cook to assistant manager. He kept up with child support for a daughter from an earlier relationship. And on paper, it looked like he was finally getting it right. But then he described the nights when something inside him snapped. When his mind would go blank and all that remained was something he called a strange energized feeling.

 A rush that blocked out everything, reason, fear, even guilt. Until violence was the only thing left on his mind. He said he didn’t want it, didn’t understand it, and couldn’t stop it once it started. And yet he never asked anyone for help. He never warned Joanne. He never tried to get treatment. And he carried the secret alone until the night everything collapsed.

Wayne insisted he never meant to kill Karen. But when he was pressed, he admitted that if he hadn’t been caught, he would have kept going. Psychologist Dr. Eric Enum was the last to testify. He called Wayne’s condition intermittent explosive disorder, describing a man who bottled up rage until it burst into violence.

 He spoke of a boy shaped by loss, a father who punished harshly, a mother who died without warning, and caretakers who disappeared one by one. All that pain, he said, had turned inward until it finally erupted. But for the jury, none of it could undo what Wayne had done to Karen. On the morning of May 12th, 1990, the jury returned with their verdict.

 After only two hours of deliberation, their decision was final. Harold Wayne Nichols would die for what he had done to Karen. The verdict form carried four reasons. The deliberate, calculated killing of Karen, the sheer brutality of it, his complete lack of remorse, and finally the absence of even the most basic respect for human life.

 The jury was unanimous. They agreed that the weight of those aggravating factors crushed any attempt at mercy. Beyond a reasonable doubt, they found no reason to spare his life. Wayne was also convicted in five separate cases involving four women. For each conviction, he received long prison sentences, decades behind bars that would have kept him locked away for the rest of his life, even without the death penalty.

But still, for more than 35 years, Wayne fought to stay alive. His lawyers launched appeal after appeal, claiming childhood trauma, psychological disorders, and years of emotional neglect should have spared him from execution. But every court that reviewed his case saw the same thing. A man who had confessed in detail to a brutal murder and a string of violent.

 The evidence was overwhelming and mercy never came. Instead of mercy, he got a date, December 11th, 2025. Under Tennessee law, inmates convicted before 1999 could choose between the electric chair or lethal injection. But Wayne refused to pick either. So by default, the state chose lethal injection, the method he had avoided for years.

Back in 2020, when his execution was first scheduled, he chose the electric chair, maybe thinking it would be quicker, maybe more certain. But before that day ever came, the pandemic swept across the country and shut nearly everything down. Executions paused, courtrooms emptied, and his death warrant expired before it could be carried out.

Over the years, Wayne slowly built a different life than the one that brought him there. His clemency petition on November 7th painted a picture of a man who settled into the routine of a maximum security unit and over time became the inmate who kept the place steadier. He had grown into someone the officers trusted when things turned tense, someone who stepped in before fights broke out.

 He mentored younger inmates, helped diffuse conflicts, and spoke to at risk teens during scared straight tours, hoping to steer them off the path that had destroyed his own life. He wasn’t just doing time. He was trying to rewrite who he was on the outside. But according to the petition, that change didn’t begin inside a cell.

 It started the moment the jury sealed his fate. Right after the judge read the verdict, Karen Pulley’s mother, Anne, had asked to speak to him. They sat across from each other, Wayne in shackles, and still in shock. Yet what she offered wasn’t anger. She talked to him about faith, about forgiveness, about saving what little of him might still be saved.

 His attorney, Rosemary Brian, watched the two of them cry together, and later said it felt like Anne was trying to save this kid’s soul. Anne met with him twice more before he was moved out of the county jail. On one visit, she handed him a Bible. He wasn’t much for reading, but he took it anyway, and he kept it.

For 35 years, it stayed with him through every move, every lockdown, every solitary stretch in that 6 by9 cell. Those early conversations grew into a quiet determination to do better with the life he had left. The petition included statements from former officers and volunteers who had watched him for years.

 One of them, former correction Lieutenant Tony Eden, said Wayne was one of the warmest and kindest inmates he had ever supervised. He remembered him as a steadying force, calm, respectful, and the kind of inmate others followed. Another former officer, Hugh Rushton, described him the same way. A leader, someone who pushed other men to improve themselves, not just survive their time.

All of it. Anne’s forgiveness, the Bible she placed in his hands, the decades spent inside became the foundation of the argument that Wayne wasn’t the same man who walked into Karen Pulley’s home all those years ago. But it wasn’t enough. The date stood. Just days before his execution, Governor Lee wrote, “After deliberate consideration of Harold Wayne Nichols’s request for clemency and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the state of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene.” And with that decision,

the execution was officially moving forward. For the families affected, the weight has been agonizing. In a recent interview, Karen’s sister said the decades that followed her sister’s murder have been 37 years of hell. She remembered her sister as gentle, sweet, and innocent, and said she hoped that once the execution is behind them, she will finally be able to focus on the good memories, not the horror of what happened.

 A surviving victim shared the same pain. She said the execution was long overdue nearly 40 years after Harold’s crimes terrorized an entire community, shattered Karen’s family, and left many women traumatized for life. I hope he gets everything he has coming, she said. Like most prisoners on death row, Harold was given the chance to request a final meal.

 In Tennessee, inmates are typically granted $20 for whatever they choose, and Harold knew exactly what he wanted. He asked for beef brisket, kleslaw, a baked potato, onion rings, deileled eggs, and cheese biscuits, all washed down with fruit tea. On the morning of December 11th, 2025, Wayne was led into the execution chamber.

 When asked if he had any final words, he spoke calmly and with emotion. To the people I’ve harmed, I’m sorry. To my family, know that I love you. To my friends, I love each one of you. I know where I’m going. I’m ready to go home. At 10:25 a.m., the curtain to the witness room opened. Wayne lay on the gurnie wearing a yellow prison suit and his thick black glasses.

 His arms were stretched out, a sheet pulled neatly to his waist as the medical team completed their preparations. Wayne’s sister sat in the witness room, visibly shaken as the process began. His spiritual adviser stood beside him, offering quiet words of comfort. A minute later, the adviser began reading from the Bible.

 He paused several times, his voice breaking with emotion. Wayne tapped his foot lightly as he listened. By 10:29 a.m., Wayne was nodding and blinking slowly. A minute later, his breathing deepened and grew heavier, causing his mustache to move as the drugs took effect. His breaths gradually slowed and his face changed in color from red to purple as his body became still.

 Just minutes later, the blinds closed. At 10:39 a.m., he was officially pronounced dead. Harold Wayne Nichols was 64 years old. What do you think? Has justice been served? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.