JUST NOW: Tony Carruthers’ Tennessee Execution Takes an Unexpected Turn — What Happened Inside the Prison

I’m not going to be executed, Mrs. Roach. And I’m smiling and I’m happy because I’m going to be exonerated. Tony Von Caruthers had been on death row for more than 30 years. But to understand how he ended up on that gurney and what happened when he got there, we need to go back to 1993 to a prison cell and two letters that laid out everything that was about to happen.

From behind the walls of the Mark Luttrell Reception Center in Memphis, Tony sent two letters to a man named Jimmy Lee [music] Mays. He called his plan a winner. He wrote that everything he did from that point forward would be, in his words, well organized and extremely violent. And then he got out. And he did exactly what he said he would do.

While still incarcerated, Tony was assigned to a work detail at the West Tennessee Veterans Cemetery. One day, as he helped lower a body into the ground, he turned to a fellow inmate and said, “That would be a good way, you know, to bury somebody if you’re going to kill them. If you ain’t got no body, you don’t have a case.

” And it wasn’t just a thought. He already had a target picked out. His name was Marcello Sanderson, but everyone in the neighborhood called him Cello. Cello was 21 years old and deep in the drug trade. He wore expensive jewelry, carried large amounts of cash, and kept even more money stashed inside his mother, Deloice’s house.

But the thing that mattered most to Tony wasn’t the money or the drugs. It was the trust. Because Cello considered Tony a friend. A real one. The kind of friend you’d drive across town to pick up from prison on the day he got out. And that’s exactly what Cello did. On November 15th, 1993, Tony walked out of the Mark Luttrell Reception Center a free man.

 And Cello was the one waiting for him. They drove together to the home of one of Cello’s partners, 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 planned for all of them. A fellow inmate who had overheard Tony’s plans was released the following month.

And he did something that should have changed everything. He went straight to Cello and told him. He laid it all out. 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.

 But Cello didn’t believe it. He couldn’t. Tony was his boy. Tony wouldn’t do that. And so Cello did nothing. A few weeks later, Tony was riding through Memphis when he came across a drive-by shooting that had just taken place. One of Cello’s associates had been hit and was in the hospital. James’s brother happened to be at the scene and got in the car with Tony.

And right there, in the backseat, without hesitation, Tony told him it would be the perfect time to kidnap Cello. He said it would happen once James got out. And on New Year’s Eve, Tony was seen loading three antifreeze containers filled with gasoline into a car. He was getting ready. James was released from prison on January 11th, 1994.

And he didn’t ease back into the neighborhood. He took it over. He went straight to Cello’s partner and told him, “It was my neighborhood before I left, and now I’m back, and it’s my neighborhood again.” When the man said he didn’t want any trouble, James looked at him and said, “You feeling now like I’m about to blow the [ __ ] things out.

” He told them to get in line, or there would be war. And then James and Tony showed up together. They told Cello’s associates they already had their man staked out. And if there was no body, they said, there would be no case. It was almost word-for-word what Tony had said at the cemetery months earlier. The trap was set, and Cello still didn’t know it was coming.

On February 23rd, Cello borrowed a white Jeep Cherokee from a cousin. And the following afternoon, witnesses saw Cello and his 17-year-old friend Frederick Tucker riding in that Jeep with James and James’s brother. Around 5:00 p.m., the four of them pulled up to a relative’s house. James went inside and asked the woman living there to take her children and leave.

 He said he needed to take care of some business. She told a family member she thought somebody was being kidnapped. Then she gathered her kids and left. When she came back, only Tony and James were there. The Jeep was gone. James told her to leave again, and she did. When she returned before 10:00 p.m., Tony and James were still inside. And later that night, she came downstairs and saw all four of them, Tony, James, Cello, and Frederick, walk out together toward the Jeep.

She later told police that Cello and Frederick’s hands were tied behind their backs when they walked out that door. That same evening, around 8:00 p.m., Cello’s mother Delois had been eating dinner at home. A co-worker she had given a ride to earlier was the last person to see her alive. When her niece arrived around 9:00 p.m.

, Delois was gone. But everything she owned was still there. Her purse, her car, her keys, and her dinner still sitting on the table, half-eaten. She had been pulled away mid-meal and never came back. Later that night, James’s brother called a friend and told him they had gotten Cello and them.

 He said they had taken $200,000 and that a man had to kill them, folks. He asked the friend to drive him to the cemetery. The friend said no, but he lent him his car. The next morning, that car came back covered in mud. Tony and James had the interior and trunk cleaned at a car wash later that day. Chello’s borrowed Jeep was found burning in Mississippi in the early hours of February 25th.

 Torched with the gasoline Tony had prepared on New Year’s Eve. When Chello’s cousin heard about Deloach’s house, her niece picked up and realized for the first time that neither her aunt nor her cousin had come home. She filed a missing person report. And then one week passed with no answers. Then on March 3rd, 1994, James’s brother led a Memphis police detective to a grave at the Rose Hill Cemetery on Elvis Presley Boulevard.

 A woman named Dorothy Daniels had been buried there on February 25th in a plot just six graves away from where another family member was buried. Investigators disinterred Dorothy’s casket and beneath it under several inches of dirt and a single piece of plywood, they found all three of them. Chello, Frederick, and Deloach. The hands of all three were bound behind their backs.

 Frederick’s feet were also bound and his neck showed bruising from a ligature. Deloach was lying at the bottom of the grave. The two men were on top of her. The medical examiner testified at trial about what each of them went through. Chello had been shot three times. One of the wounds had severed his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down.

But he was still conscious. The bullet had torn through his windpipe and blood was filling his airway and lungs. He had been drowning in his own blood underground, in the dark, unable to move. Frederick had been shot in the chest and had suffered severe blunt force trauma. Delowise had been strangled.

 Dirt had been packed into her mouth and nose, and a red sock had been found tied around her neck. The medical examiner testified that all three of them were alive when they were put in that grave. A jailhouse witness later testified that Tony had told him everything while they were both awaiting trial. According to that witness, Tony described how they went to Delowise’s house first looking for Chevelle and his money.

When Chevelle wasn’t there, they told Delowise to call her son and tell him to come home. That something important had happened. And she did. When Chevelle arrived, they forced all three of them into the Jeep at gunpoint. They drove to Mississippi, shot Chevelle and Frederick, and burned the Jeep. Then they drove all three back to Memphis in a stolen car and took them to the cemetery.

And according to that same witness, when they lowered Chevelle and Frederick into the grave, Delowise started screaming. One of them told her to shut up or she would die like her son, and then they pushed her in. The case went to trial in April 1996. But the trial itself was unlike almost any capital case in modern American history.

Tony had gone through six attorneys before the proceedings began. He hadn’t just fired them. He had threatened them. Multiple lawyers received death threats. One attorney’s family lived in fear because of him. The presiding judge, Joseph Daily, 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 the next three decades. He ordered Tony to represent himself. Tony pleaded for another lawyer. His most recent attorney, once he realized what was happening, begged the judge to let him come back, but Judge Daily said no.

 He called it a sanction for Tony’s misconduct. Tony, with no legal training, no experience, and no understanding of how a trial works, was now his own defense attorney in a case where the state was trying to execute him. His performance was later described by post-conviction attorneys as one of the most singularly inept, ineffective, and disastrous cross-examinations possible.

One that seemed designed to secure not only a guilty verdict, but a death sentence. The state’s case was built on witness after witness placing Tony at the center of everything. The letters, the cemetery, the conversations in the car, the night at the house, and a jailhouse informant who testified that Tony had described the killings to him in detail while they were both awaiting trial.

In their closing argument, the lead prosecutor told the jury, “If these murders don’t qualify for the death penalty, then none ever will.” And then he said, “If you want to know what it’s like to suffocate, just hold your breath for 30 or 45 seconds. We can never know how Delowa and Marcellos and Frederick felt.

” The jury convicted Tony on all counts. Three murders, three kidnappings, one robbery, and then that same jury sentenced him to death three times, one for each victim. Marcellos Anderson was 21 years old. >> [music] >> Frederick Tucker was 17. Delowa Anderson was 43. Their bodies were found beneath a casket at the Rose Hill Cemetery on Elvis Presley Boulevard in Memphis, Tennessee.

They had been bound, shot, strangled, and buried together in the same grave. Tony had planned it from a prison cell. He had said it out loud at a cemetery. He had written it down in letters. He had taken $200 from the people he was about to kill. And then he carried it out exactly as promised. For more than 30 years, Tony sat on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville while his case worked its way through the courts.

His co-defendant James was granted a new trial in 2000 after an appeals court ruled the two men should have been tried separately. James took a plea deal, received a 27-year sentence, and was released from prison in 2015. He has been a free man for more than a decade. While Tony never left death row, then in 2007, he did something no one expected.

He agreed to talk. In 2007, Tony gave his first and only interview from behind bars. He spoke to a Memphis news station from Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex. He denied everything. He said, “I wasn’t there.” And then, looking straight into the camera, he said this. Well, it was pretty gruesome, wouldn’t you say? Absolutely, but I wasn’t there.

 I’m not going to be executed in this approach. And I’m smiling, I’m happy because I’m going to be exonerated. His own attorney at the time called Tony by far the most intelligent defendant I’ve ever represented. Tony on camera called that same attorney a crook. In recent years, the case drew renewed attention. Defense attorneys argued that the jailhouse informant who helped convict Tony had been secretly paid by the state, something prosecutors had denied for 30 years.

In 2024, evidence was finally handed over that confirmed it. And there was the question of the buried alive testimony. After the trial, other forensic experts reviewed the evidence and concluded the victims were likely dead before they went into the ground. Two jurors later signed declarations saying they would not have voted for death had they known that.

But Frederick’s father, Andry Steel, saw it differently. He said, “He did this, he did it. It’s been 30 years. It’s time.” Throughout the years, Tony had written him letters and sent him recordings from death row. But Andry never read or listened to a single one of them. He said he planned to be in the room when the execution was carried out.

He said, “I forgive him for killing my son, and may God have mercy on your soul. It is time that you go meet your maker. It’s time.” On the morning of May 21st, 2026, Tony Carruthers was escorted to the execution chamber at Riverbend. Media witnesses were brought in at 9:45 a.m.

 The execution was scheduled for 10:00, but at 10:00 a.m. 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 into a large vein in the middle of the chest. That failed, too. For nearly 2 hours, Tony Carruthers lay on that gurney while prison officials tried to find a way to kill him.

His attorney said he was in pain, that there was lots of blood, and still [music] they couldn’t get the needle in. At 11:52 a.m., the IV lines were removed. A witness heard a prison official say the execution would not continue at this time. Tony’s attorneys immediately filed an emergency motion with the Tennessee Supreme Court.

And Andry Steel, Frederick Tucker’s father, who had planned to be in that room, who had said, “It is time that you go meet your maker,” watched them try for nearly 2 hours and fail. Tony Caruthers is still alive on death row and as of today no new execution date has been set. In 2007, he looked into a camera and said six words, “I’m not going to be executed.” So far, he’s been right.

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