A man on Tennessee’s death row finally sent his final words before the execution that began almost thirty years after he raped and killed a college student described as “gentle, sweet, and innocent.”
At Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Harold Wayne Nichols, 64, was given a lethal injection of pentobarbital on Thursday. He declared, “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,” according to the Tennessee Department of Corrections.
Nichols, who had been on death row since 1990, had tried to suspend his execution the night before it was carried out, but the Tennessee Supreme Court denied his appeal. He died at 10:39 a.m. Thursday.
The murder that led to his death sentence occurred on September 30, 1988, when Nichols broke into the Chattanooga home of Karen Pulley, a 20‑year‑old Chattanooga State University student. Pulley was asleep in bed when he struck her with a two‑by‑four, raped her, and fled. She was taken to a hospital and died the next day.
This case was the first in a spree that spanned from September 1988 to January 1989. During that period, Nichols raped several women and attempted to rape five more in the Chattanooga area. He ultimately pleaded guilty to Pulley’s murder and admitted to raping seven additional women. While he expressed remorse, he acknowledged that he would have continued his violent behavior had he not been stopped.
The jury handed him the maximum penalty for all his charges—over 200 years for multiple counts of rape and burglary, plus the death penalty for murder—back in 1990. His execution was postponed twice: once in 2020 due to the COVID‑19 pandemic and again in 2022 when a procedural error prompted Gov. Bill Lee to halt all executions in the state.
Pulley’s sister, Lisette Monroe, told the Associated Press that her family had endured “37 years of hell” waiting for the sentence to be carried out. She said that both parents were changed forever by her sister’s death, adding, “I’ll be honest with you, neither one of my parents were ever the same after Karen’s murder.” She emphasized that while the pain will never entirely fade, she hopes the execution will bring some sense of closure, and that the family will focus instead on Karen’s happy memories.
Hal Wayne Nichols is the third person executed in Tennessee this year under a new lethal‑injection protocol that uses a single drug—pentobarbital—instead of the former three‑drug formula. © The New York Post
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