Tony Carruthers is scheduled to die on May 21st, and right now Kim Kardashian is publicly urging the Tennessee governor to stop it. Not because she thinks the crime wasn’t serious. Three people were kidnapped, murdered, and buried beneath a stranger’s casket in a Memphis cemetery. But because there is DNA evidence sitting in a lab right now, untested for 30 years, that could answer one question the state has never been willing to ask.
Do they actually have the right man? The alternate suspect is already named. His DNA is already on file. Running the test would take days, and yet nobody has done it. The clock is ticking. May 21st is days away, and if this execution moves forward without that test being run, it cannot be undone.
Stay with me, because once you hear everything, you will not be able to stop thinking about this case. It started on the night of February 24th, 1994, in a North Memphis neighborhood caught in the middle of a violent territorial dispute. Marcellus Anderson, known to people around him was a young man who disappeared that night along with his mother Delois Anderson and his teenage friend Frederick Tucker. A week passed with no answers.
Then on March 3rd, 1994, investigators followed a tip to a cemetery on Elvis Presley Boulevard and found what they had been dreading. Beneath a freshly buried casket, under inches of dirt and a sheet of plywood, were the bodies of all three victims buried together in the same pit.
It was one of the most disturbing crime scenes Memphis had seen in years. And investigators moved quickly to find who was responsible. Two men were arrested and charged, James Montgomery and Tony Vaughn Carruthers. Both were convicted in 1996. Both were sentenced to death. But from there, the two men’s paths through the legal system went in very different directions, and that difference is at the center of everything happening right now.
The case against Carruthers was built almost entirely on witness testimony rather than physical evidence. No DNA linked him to the scene, no fingerprints matched him, and no forensic material directly connected him to the crime. The prosecution’s most critical witness was a jailhouse informant named Alfredo Shaw, who told police that Caruthers had confessed the murders to him while they were both in custody.
That testimony anchored the state’s case at trial. What the jury did not get a complete picture of was what happened around that testimony behind the scenes. Shaw publicly told reporters before trial that his statements had been fabricated and that he intended to recant.
When Caruthers called Shaw to the stand to testify to that recantation, prosecutors announced that if Shaw changed his story under oath, he would face aggravated perjury charges. Shaw’s attorney advised him privately, and Shaw ultimately testified consistently with his original statements.
Courts have since reviewed the circumstances around this with different conclusions about what it means for the case, but the sequence of events has remained a central point of dispute for Caruthers’ legal team for 30 years. The other major issue raised by his attorneys, and one that legal scholars have called historically unusual, is what happened with his right to counsel at trial.
Caruthers went through six different defense attorneys in the lead-up to trial. After conflicts with the sixth attorney, the trial judge declined to appoint him another. Caruthers represented himself at a three-count capital murder trial. Courts that reviewed this issue on appeal found that the decision fell within legal boundaries given the circumstances, but Caruthers’ current legal team argues the record shows he was denied counsel in a way that fundamentally compromised his ability to defend himself. If the
execution moves forward on May 21st, attorneys say he would become the first person in roughly a century to be executed after representing himself at trial. A distinction they argue should at minimum prompt a serious re-examination of the case before any irreversible action is taken.
Then there is the co-defendant. James Montgomery was convicted alongside Caruthers and also sentenced to death. Montgomery later won a new trial on appeal due to a separate legal issue. Rather than face a second trial, he accepted a plea agreement, served additional time, and was released from prison in 2016. He is free today, but before his release, Montgomery gave a formal statement to investigators that Caruthers legal team considers among the most significant pieces of new evidence in the case. In 2010, Montgomery told a
federal investigator that Caruthers was not involved in the kidnapping or murders at all. He named a different man, Ronnie Eyeball Irving, as the person who actually carried out the killings. Irving was murdered in 2002, which means he was never interviewed, never charged, and never cleared.
But Irving’s fingerprints and a DNA sample are on file at the medical examiner’s office. >> >> And according to the ACLU’s court filings, those samples have never been compared to the unidentified fingerprints and unmatched DNA recovered from the crime scene. That comparison has never been run in 30 years. The ACLU filed a motion in the Tennessee Supreme Court seeking that specific comparison before the execution proceeds.
The state denied the request. A state court rejected it. The ACLU is now pursuing the issue in federal court with very little time remaining. The Tennessee Innocence Project has publicly backed the call for testing. Exonerees who were themselves freed from death row after wrongful convictions have traveled to Nashville to speak on behalf of Caruthers, with several noting the pattern they see as familiar.
>> >> A case built on informant testimony, no physical match, and untested evidence that no one has been willing to look at. The state’s position, upheld through multiple rounds of appeals, is that the conviction is legally sound, that courts have reviewed the evidence and procedural history extensively, and that the sentence should proceed.
That is the legal reality Caruthers is facing as of today. A system that has reviewed the case many times and at each stage found no basis to overturn it. There is one more layer to this case that his attorneys have raised in recent filings, and it relates directly to the death sentence itself rather than the conviction.
At the penalty phase of the trial, prosecutors argued that the murders were especially heinous by presenting testimony from the medical examiner that the three victims had been buried alive. That claim shaped how jurors understood the severity of what happened and influenced the sentencing decision.
In the years since the trial, other forensic experts reviewed the evidence and concluded the victims were not alive when they were placed in that pit. Two jurors who voted for death have since said in statements that this information would have affected their sentencing decision. Caruthers’ attorneys now argue that the sentence was built on a factual premise that has since been seriously challenged by forensic science, and that this alone should be enough to pause the process and allow a proper review before
May 21st. That is the backdrop for what Kim Kardashian posted this week. She has used her platform before on criminal justice cases, and this week she directed her audience to contact Governor Bill Lee directly. Her message focused specifically on the DNA and fingerprint evidence that has not been tested against the alternate suspect identified by Montgomery.
Governor Lee has the authority to grant clemency, commute the sentence, or issue a stay to allow testing to occur before the execution date. As of this recording, he has not done so. Nearly 30,000 people have signed the ACLU’s petition. Emergency appeals are moving through federal court. >> >> Tony Caruthers, who has maintained his innocence since 1994 and rejected a plea offer for life in prison on the grounds that he would not plead guilty to something he did not do, is at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in
Nashville, the facility where Tennessee has carried out 10 executions since 2018. What this case keeps returning to is a straightforward question that has not yet received a straightforward answer. The alternate suspect is named. His biological material is on file. The unmatched evidence from the crime scene exists.
Running the comparison is a technical matter of days, not months. Courts have declined to require it, arguing the existing record is sufficient. Attorneys for Caruthers argue that when an execution is 5 days away >> >> and there is testable physical evidence that has never been examined against the most credible alternate suspect in the case, the burden should be on the state to explain why the test should not happen, not on the defense to prove in advance what the results would show. That argument has not prevailed in
court so far. Whether it does before May 21st is still an open question. For anyone following this case for the first time, the core facts are these. Three people were murdered in Memphis in 1994, a horrific crime that devastated the families of Marcellus Anderson, Delois Anderson, and Frederick Tucker.
And those families deserve to know with certainty that the person being executed for those deaths is actually responsible. The system has reviewed this case and concluded it has the right man. Caruthers’ attorneys, the ACLU, the Tennessee Innocence Project, and a growing number of voices outside the legal system are asking the state to run one additional test before a decision that cannot be reversed.
May 21st is days away. The governor’s office has not responded publicly to the clemency request, and the federal court challenge is still pending. This story is not finished, but it is very close to being so. Cases like this one tend to surface attention that sits at the center of every death penalty debate, not just in Tennessee, but across the country.
The legal system has multiple layers of review precisely because the stakes are permanent. Courts reviewed this case at the trial level, the appellate level, and through post-conviction proceedings across three decades. At each stage, judges examined the record and found the conviction legally sufficient.
That process is not nothing, but the argument being made right now is not that the courts were careless. It is that a specific piece of physical evidence, which did not exist in a testable form when many of those reviews happened, is now available and has not been used. DNA technology in 2026 can do things it could not do in 1996 or even 2010.
The comparison being requested is between evidence already in the state’s possession and a sample already in the medical examiner’s files. No new investigation, no new witnesses, no reopening of old arguments, just a laboratory comparison that would either eliminate the alternate suspect from the picture entirely or raise questions the state would then have to address.
The ACLU’s position is that running the test protects everyone. If the results confirm the existing conviction, the state proceeds with certainty. If they raise new doubts, the state avoids an outcome it cannot undo. Prosecutors and courts have not accepted that framing, and their decisions carry legal authority.
But the public pressure building around this case from advocacy organizations, from exonerees, from a celebrity with one of the largest social media audiences in the world, suggests that a significant number of people believe the test should happen regardless of how confident the system is in.
The outcome, May 21st, will answer the question of whether that pressure was enough. If you want to stay updated as this develops, the next few days are going to move quickly, so make sure you are subscribed because we will cover whatever happens next. Tennessee has four executions scheduled in 2026, and Tony Carruthers is first, which means how this case ends will set the tone for everything that follows.
Whether the DNA gets tested before May 21st, whether the governor steps in, whether a federal court issues an emergency order, all of that is still unresolved right now, and the window to change the outcome is closing by the hour.
