Tennessee Executes Nicholas Todd Sutton—He Killed 4 People… Then Saved Lives on Death Row
He was very cold. Uh I’ve I’ve dealt with a lot of homicides since then, but I can’t remember ever being around someone who was so uh so uncaring and unconcerned. Uh but the Nikki that I knew at that time, again, uh had you met him and gotten acquainted with him, you’d think uh uh you know, pleasant young man, very polite, very mannerly.
But when you really got to know him, then you uh began to understand that uh uh killing someone really didn’t bother him. >> On February 20th, 2020, Nicholas Todd Sudden was executed by electric chair at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee. He was 58 years old.
In this video, we’re going to find out exactly what he did to end up strapped into that chair. what he asked for as his last meal and what he chose to say in his final moments on this earth. But here’s what makes this case different from almost every other execution you’ve heard about. The people fighting hardest to keep him alive weren’t his family.
They were prison guards, correction officers. The very people paid to keep him locked up. And some of them said without hesitation, “This man saved my life.” So before we get to the execution, we need to go back to the beginning because nothing about this story is simple. Nicholas Todd Sutton was born on July 15th, 1961 in Morristown, Tennessee.
His mother abandoned him at birth. His father mentally ill, verbally abusive, and alcoholic. Spent most of his life cycling in and out of mental institutions and county jails. Nick grew up in that chaos. And somewhere along the way, his own father introduced him to drugs. He was still a child. By the time Nick was a teenager, he had a full-blown drug addiction.
He dropped out of high school. He had no direction, no stability, and no real parental figure watching over him. Then his father died. And the one person who stepped in, the one person who opened her door to this troubled young man was his grandmother, Dorothy Virginia Sutton. She was a retired school teacher, widowed, respected in her community.
By all accounts, a kind, quiet woman who believed in her grandson when almost nobody else did. She gave him a home. She gave him money. She gave him gifts. And in December of 1979, Nick Sutton killed her. He was 18 years old. What happened in the second half of 1979 represents one of the most disturbing stretches of violence in this entire case.
In the span of just a few months, Nick Sutton killed three people. All of them people he knew. All of them killed in brutal, deliberate ways. Let’s go through them one by one. Victim one, John Michael Large. John Large was 19 years old. He was Nick’s high school friend. In August of 1979, the two of them took a trip together to Mount Sterling, North Carolina, to a property that belonged to Sutton’s aunt.
John Large never came home. Sutton killed him there. The cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. And in a detail that still shocks people today, a piece of plywood was found in John’s mouth. His body was buried in a shallow grave on that property. John’s family didn’t know what happened to him. His father spent months asking questions, going to the Sutton household, calling, searching.
John’s sister, Amy Large Cookook, was just 11 years old when her brother disappeared. She would spend the next four decades waiting for justice. Victim two, Charles Pulry Alman 3. Charles Alman was 46 years old, a contractor from Knoxville. He drove a gold Jaguar sports car and was known for calling his parents every Sunday without fail.
In September of 1979, those calls stopped. His family knew something was wrong. His car was found abandoned near Newport, Tennessee. His valuables were still inside, but Charles Alman was gone. It wasn’t until after another murder and another arrest that Sutton finally confessed to killing Alman as well. His body Sutton would eventually reveal had been disposed of.
Victim three, Dorothy Virginia Sutton. This is the one that haunts this case the most. Dorothy Sutton had taken her grandson in. She supported him financially, emotionally. A retired school teacher who chose love over fear, even when the signs were there. On the night of December 22nd, 1979, Nick Sutton attacked her.
He knocked her unconscious with a piece of firewood. Then he wrapped her body in a blanket and trash bags. He chained her to a cinder block. and he threw her, still alive, into the Nalachucky River. She drowned in the icy water. On Christmas Day, Sutton walked into the Morristown Police Department and reported his grandmother missing.
He said he’d last seen her 3 days earlier, leaving the house with an unknown man. But when investigators examined the home, they found blood stains on the carpets, the walls, the floors. Nick had also shown up to the family’s Christmas Eve dinner that year with scratches on his face, carrying all the presents his grandmother had already wrapped.
Without her, his aunts called the police. Dorothy’s body was pulled from the river 4 days later. An autopsy confirmed what investigators feared. She had been struck in the back of the head with a blunt object and then drowned. Sutton was arrested. He was convicted of first-degree murder in his grandmother’s death and sentenced to life in prison.
And it was only after that conviction, facing additional charges, that he finally led authorities to the bodies of John Large and Charles Alman in exchange for a plea deal that spared him the death penalty for those two killings. He received three consecutive life sentences. Most people assumed that was the end of the Nick Sutton story.
three life sentences, no possibility of parole for decades. A young man who had destroyed four lives, including his own, locked away in Tennessee’s most dangerous prisons. But it wasn’t the end, because inside those prisons, a fifth chapter was being written. And this time, it would cost him his life. Victim four, Carl Isaac Estep.
By 1985, Nick Sutton was 23 years old and housed at the Morgan County Regional Correctional Facility in East Tennessee. The prison was overcrowded, violent, dangerous. Men lived in constant fear of attack. Carl Estep was a fellow inmate. And in early January of 1985, the two of them got into a dispute over drugs. Estep didn’t just threaten Sutton quietly.
He made his intentions known to staff to other inmates. He told people he was going to kill Nick Sutton. He allegedly armed himself with a homemade knife. Prison staff, according to Sutton’s attorneys, did nothing. On January 15th, 1985, Sutton along with three other inmates went to Estep’s cell. They stabbed him 38 times. Estep died in that cell.
Sutton and two codefendants were charged with first-degree murder. In March of 1986, the jury convicted him and sentenced him to death. He had been offered a plea deal, life in prison, but it required his codefendant to also accept a sentence of 30 to 40 years. The codefendant refused and so Nicholas Sutton was sentenced to die.
He was 25 years old. He would spend the next 34 years on death row. Over the next three decades, Sutton’s lawyers filed appeal after appeal. They argued that his troubled childhood was never properly presented to the jury as a mitigating factor. They argued that he had been forced to attend his trial in shackles and handcuffs, visible to jurors, a violation of his right to due process.
In 2011, a federal judge dissenting from a ruling against Sutton wrote plainly, “Nicholas Sutton’s childhood was horrific. A psychologist testified that his home life had been unstable, often violent, and threatening, that his father had made Nick’s life a living hell. The courts, however, were not moved enough to reverse the sentence.
One by one, the appeals were denied. And through all of this, something else was happening inside the walls of Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Something nobody expected. This is the part of Nick Sutton’s story that makes it unlike almost any other death row case in American history.
Because while he was waiting to die, he started saving lives. Not once, not twice, multiple times. That same year he was charged with Estep’s murder. A riot broke out at the Tennessee State Prison. A correction officer named Tony Eden found himself surrounded by five inmates armed with knives and other weapons. They were trying to take him hostage.
Nick Sutton stepped in. According to Eden’s own sworn statement, Nick risked his safety and well-being in order to save me from possible death. I owe my life to Nick Sutton. If Nick Sutton was released tomorrow, I would welcome him into my home and invite him to be my neighbor. Nearly a decade later, a female prison manager named Cheryl Donaldson slipped and fell while carrying her keys and radio in the prison unit.
Other inmates could have taken advantage of that moment. Instead, Nick Sutton rushed to her side. He helped her to her feet. He retrieved her keys and her radio, and he called for staff to come assist her. He sprang into action, she later wrote. He did exactly the opposite of what I feared. Then there’s Paul House. Paul House was another death row inmate at Riverbend, a man who would later be exonerated and released after his conviction was overturned.
But before that happened, while he was still on death row, House developed multiple sclerosis. Untreated, he lost the ability to walk. The prison refused him a wheelchair. Nick Sutton started carrying him. Every single day, Sutton carried Paul house to the shower, helped him wash, and carried him to visits with his mother.
Paul’s mother told the governor directly. Nick is the only reason Paul is alive today. And then there was Lee Hall Jr., another death row inmate who went blind during his years of incarceration and was denied a cane or a walking stick. Nick Sutton became his guide. Every day he walked Hall through the unit, making sure he didn’t fall, didn’t get hurt, and didn’t get taken advantage of.
When Tennessee executed Lee Hall in December of 2019, his parents sent Nick Sutton a Christmas card to thank him for everything he had done for their son. Seven current and former Tennessee Department of Correction officials came forward in support of Sutton’s clemency petition. They call them, and these are their words, an honest, kind, and trustworthy man who has used his time in prison to better himself and show that change is possible.
Five of the jurors who had originally sentenced him to death, now supported commuting his sentence. And members of his victim’s own families, including relatives of his grandmother and Charles Alman, asked the governor to spare his life. Charles Alman’s nephew said plainly that executing Sutton would only add violence on top of violence.
In January of 2020, Sutton’s legal team, led by former federal judge Kevin Sharp, filed a formal clemency petition with Tennessee Governor Bill Lee. The petition made a simple argument. The man who was sentenced to death in 1986 no longer existed. He had maintained a clean, disciplinary record since 1990. He had confronted his addiction.
He had shown genuine remorse. He had saved lives. Nick Sutton has gone from a lifetaker to a lifesaver. Sharp wrote. The petition had support from correction officials, jurors, and victims families alike. On February 19th, 2020, one day before the scheduled execution, Governor Bill Lee issued his response. After careful consideration of Nicola Sutton’s request for clemency and a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the state of Tennessee and will not be intervening. That was it.
No further explanation, no acknowledgement of the officers who had come forward, no comment on the jurors who had changed their minds. The execution would go forward. On the morning of February 20th, 2020, Nicholas Sutton was moved to death watch. The final phase before an execution where every movement is monitored, every moment is controlled.
His spiritual adviser came to see him. Together they shared communion. Welch’s grape juice and a small wafer. Then came his last meal. Nick Sutton requested fried pork chops, mashed potatoes with gravy, and peach pie with vanilla ice cream. A simple meal, a southern meal. The kind of food that probably reminded him of somewhere or someone from a long time ago.
He ate it and then he waited at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee. The witnesses were led in just after 700 p.m. Central time. Through a glass petition, they could see the electric chair. And in it, Nicholas Todd Sutton, when asked if he had any final words, he spoke. He spoke at length. I would like to thank my wife for being such a good witness to the Lord and for my family and many friends for their love and support as they tried so very hard to save my life.
Don’t ever give up on the power of Jesus Christ to take impossible situations and correct them. He’s fixed me. I’m just grateful to be a servant of God and I’m looking forward to being in his presence. He said nothing about his victims. He said nothing about Carl Lepp or Dorothy Sutton or John Large or Charles Alman. He closed his eyes.
At 7:18 p.m. Central time, the first bolt of electricity hit his body. Witnesses described his body jerking backward into the chair, his fingers tightening on the armrests. Then a second bolt. For 6 minutes, witnesses watched through the glass for any sign of movement. Then the blinds were lowered.
2 minutes later, at 7:26 p.m. Central, Nicholas Todd Sutton, was declared dead. After the execution, his attorney, Steven Ferrell, stepped outside and read a longer written statement that Sutton had prepared. I have made a lot of friends along the way, and a lot of people have enriched my life. They have reached out to me and pulled me up and I am grateful for that.
Don’t ever give up on the ability of Jesus Christ to fix someone or any problem. I hope I do a much better job in the next life than I did in this one. Outside the prison, Amy Large Cookook, whose brother John was killed by Sudden when she was just 11 years old, issued a statement through the Tennessee Department of Correction.
John was denied the opportunity to live a full life with a family of his own. My children were denied meeting a wonderful man who would have spoiled them rotten and loved them with all his heart. He suffered a terrible and horrific death and for that I will never forgive Mr. Sutton. She also said she didn’t know if she would ever have full closure.
At least, she said, quoting a friend, that chapter will be over. Nicholas Todd Sutton became on February 20th, 2020, the last person in the United States to be executed by electric chair. He spent 34 years on death row. He entered that system as a violent, addicted, deeply troubled 23-year-old.
He left it by most accounts of people who actually knew him as a different man entirely. Whether that mattered, whether it should have mattered is a question that reasonable people have disagreed on ever since. The law said he had to die for what he did to Carl Estep in 1985. The correction officers who stood up for him said the law was about to kill the wrong version of who he was.
Both things can be true at once. What isn’t up for debate is this. Four people are dead because of Nicholas Todd Sutton, Dorothy Sutton, John Large, Charles Alman, Carl Eststeep. Each of them had people who loved them. Each of them had futures that were taken away. And at least one of them, Amy Large Cook, never found the closure she was looking for, even after the execution was carried out.
If a person genuinely changes, if they spend decades proving through their actions and not just their words that they are no longer the person who committed those crimes, does that change what justice looks like or does justice only look backward? Leave your thoughts in the comments below. Until next time.
