Botched Execution: Tennessee Made Him Suffer For 107 Minutes — Then Gave Up
“I’m not going to be executed,” and I’m smiling, I’m happy because I’m going to be exonerated.
Look at him, sitting there, calm, almost smiling. A man who has spent over three decades on death row, and he is smiling. Six words, that’s all he said. Six words straight into the camera. Back in 2007, and nearly two decades later, the state of Tennessee showed up to prove him wrong. They couldn’t. A medical complication halted the execution of convicted killer Tony Carruthers with a needle already in his arm. The governor granted a one-year reprieve from a second execution attempt.
But this story isn’t just about a man who survived his own execution date. It goes much deeper than that. It starts with two letters written from inside a prison cell. It runs through a grave hidden underneath someone else’s casket. It passes through a courtroom where almost everything that could go wrong did. And it ends on a gurney on the morning of May 21st, 2026, where something extraordinary happened. Hit that like button and subscribe to this channel because this is far from being over.
And to understand all of it, we have to go back, way back to 1993. Tony Carruthers, 57 years old at the time of his scheduled execution. He’d been sitting on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville for more than 30 years, longer than some people watching this have been alive.
To understand how he got there, you need to picture Memphis in the early ’90s. A city where the drug trade ran deep, where loyalty was currency, and where the wrong kind of trust could cost you everything. Tony wasn’t a stranger to that world, not even close. What set his case apart wasn’t just the crimes he was convicted of; it was the level of planning allegedly behind them. Deliberate, calculated, documented. And that last word is important because some of it was actually written down.
Here’s the other thing worth knowing up front, though, and hold on to this: not a single piece of physical evidence ever directly tied Tony Carruthers to these crimes. Every conviction rested on what people said they heard. That detail is going to matter a lot.
Here’s where the story actually begins. Not at a crime scene, not in a courtroom, but inside a prison cell at the Mark Luttrell Reception Center in Memphis, where Tony Carruthers is still serving time and already planning what comes next. He writes two letters to a man named Jimmy Lee Mays. In those letters, he describes what he has in mind. He calls it a winner. He promises that everything moving forward will be, and these are his words, “well-organized and extremely violent.”
But, if you think the letters are unsettling, wait. Around the same time, Tony is assigned to a work detail at the West Tennessee Veterans Cemetery. Part of the job involves helping lower caskets into the ground. One day, standing at an open grave, he turns to a fellow inmate and says that this would be a good way to get rid of someone. “No body,” he says, “no case.” He’s not speaking in the abstract. He already has a specific person in mind.
Think about what that means for a second. This wasn’t a moment of anger or impulse. This was a man, still behind bars, months away from release, carefully working out the details of something he intended to follow through on. Whether you believe he ultimately carried it out or not, the level of premeditation alleged here is something else entirely.
The target had a name, Marcelos Anderson, but everyone in the neighborhood called him Cello. Cello was 21 years old, well-connected in the local drug trade, and by most accounts, not hard to find. He wore jewelry, moved with money, and kept a significant amount of cash stashed at his mother Delois’s house. On paper, he looked like exactly the kind of person someone might want to rob.
But according to the prosecution, what Tony was really after wasn’t just the money, it was the access that came with trust. Because Cello didn’t see Tony as a threat. He saw him as a friend, a genuine one. The kind of friend you show up for. On November 15th, 1993, Tony walked out of Mark Luttrell Reception Center a free man, and Cello was right there waiting to pick him up.
They drove together to a partner’s place, where Cello and two associates handed Tony $200 in cash, a welcome home gift. Tony took it, smiled, said nothing. There’s something about that moment that’s hard to shake. According to the state’s case, the people placing money into Tony’s hands that day were the very same people he had already been planning to kill. He accepted the gift, gave nothing away, and walked back out into Memphis like it was just another day. The clock was already running.
Here’s the part of the story that is genuinely hard to sit with. Shortly after Tony’s release, a fellow inmate who had been inside with him, someone who had heard the conversations between Tony and his accomplice James Montgomery, was released. And the first thing he did was go find Cello. He told him everything. The plan to rob him, the talk about hiding a body, the detail about “no body meaning no case.”
He looked Cello in the eye and told him, “Your friend is planning to kill you.” Cello didn’t believe it. Tony was his boy. That kind of thing didn’t happen between real friends. So he let it go. Did nothing. Told no one. Someone tried to stop what was coming. The warning was clear. It was direct, and it reached the right person. But, the one man who needed to act on it simply couldn’t bring himself to believe it was real.
The warning was given. The clock kept running. A few weeks after Tony’s release, he’s riding through Memphis when he comes across the aftermath of a drive-by shooting. One of Cello’s associates has been hit. James Montgomery’s brother happens to be at the scene and gets into the car with Tony. And right there, without skipping a beat, Tony tells him it would be the perfect moment to make a move on Cello. He says it’ll happen once James is out.
On New Year’s Eve, Tony is seen loading three antifreeze containers filled with gasoline into a car. He isn’t hiding it. He’s getting ready.
On January 11th, 1994, James Montgomery walks out of prison. He doesn’t ease back into the neighborhood quietly. He goes straight to Cello’s partner and makes his position clear. This was his neighborhood before he left. And now that he’s back, nothing has changed. When the man says he wants no trouble, James tells him he feels like blowing his brains out. Then James and Tony show up together. They tell Cello’s associates their man is already staked out. And they say, almost word for word, what Tony said at that cemetery months earlier. “No body, no case.”
The trap is fully set. Cello still has no idea. On February 23rd, Cello borrows a white Jeep Cherokee from a cousin. That detail matters. The following afternoon, witnesses place Cello and his 17-year-old friend, Frederick Tucker, in that Jeep, alongside James Montgomery and James’s brother. Around 5:00 in the evening, all four of them pull up to a relative’s house.
James goes inside and tells the woman living there to take her children and leave. He has business to handle. She doesn’t argue. She tells a family member on her way out that she thinks someone is being kidnapped. Then she gathers her kids and goes. When she comes back, the Jeep is gone. Only Tony and James are inside. James tells her to leave again. She does.
She returns before 10:00 that night. Tony and James are still there. And then, sometime later, she comes downstairs and sees all four of them. Tony, James, Cello, and Frederick moving together toward the Jeep. She would later tell police that both Cello and Frederick had their hands tied behind their backs when they walked out that door.
At the same time, on the other side of Memphis, something else is happening. Around 8:00 that evening, Delois Anderson, Cello’s mother, is at home eating dinner. A co-worker she had given a ride to earlier in the day becomes the last person to see her alive. When Delois’s niece arrives around 9:00, she finds the house exactly as it was left mid-evening. Purse on the counter, car in the driveway, keys still there, dinner sitting on the table half-eaten. Delois was gone, but everything she owned was still there. Two things were unfolding at the same time on opposite sides of the city. One at a house where the Jeep was parked, one at a dinner table that never got cleared. Both heading toward the same place.
Late that same night, James’s brother calls a friend. He tells them they got Cello and the others. He says they took $200,000. He says, “A man had to kill those people.” Then he asks the friend to drive him to the cemetery. The friend says, “No,” but hands over his car keys.
The next morning, that car comes back covered in mud. Tony and James take it to a car wash and have the interior and trunk cleaned. In the early hours of February 25th, Cello’s borrowed Jeep is found burning in Mississippi, using the same gasoline Tony had loaded into a car on New Year’s Eve. When Cello’s cousin hears about the Jeep, he calls Delois’s house. Her niece picks up, and it hits her for the first time that neither her aunt nor her cousin has come home. She files a missing person’s report.
A full week passes. Nothing. Then came the trial testimony from a jailhouse informant, evidence that would later become one of the most contested parts of the entire case. According to that witness, Tony described the night in detail. They went to Delois’s house first looking for Cello and his money. When Cello wasn’t there, they forced Delois to call her son home. When he arrived, all three were taken at gunpoint and forced into the Jeep. They drove to Mississippi, shot Cello and Frederick, and torched the vehicle.
Then they transported all three back to Memphis and headed to the cemetery. And when Cello and Frederick were lowered into the grave, Delois started screaming. She was told to stop or she would die the same way her son just did. Then they pushed her in.
On March 3rd, 1994, one week after the missing person’s report was filed, James’s brother led a Memphis police detective to a grave at Rose Hill Cemetery on Elvis Presley Boulevard. On paper, it was the burial site of a woman named Dorothy Daniels, interred on February 25th, the same day Cello’s Jeep was found burning in Mississippi. When investigators lifted Dorothy’s casket and dug beneath it, they found a single piece of plywood, and under that, all three of them: Marcelos Anderson, Frederick Tucker, and Delois Anderson.
The hands of all three were bound behind their backs. Frederick’s feet were also bound, and his neck showed ligature markings. Delois was at the bottom of the grave. The two men were on top of her.
The medical examiner’s testimony at trial was difficult to hear. Marcelos had been shot three times. One of those bullets severed his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down, but still conscious. His windpipe had been torn through. Blood was filling his lungs. Unable to move, underground, in the dark. Frederick had been shot in the chest and sustained severe blunt force trauma. Delois had been strangled. Dirt was packed into her mouth and nose. A red sock was tied around her neck.
The medical examiner told the jury that all three were alive when they were placed in that grave. That testimony would later be challenged. Post-trial forensic experts reviewed the same evidence and concluded the victims were most likely already dead before burial. Two jurors subsequently signed declarations stating that information would have changed their vote on the death sentence. But in 1996, the jury heard only one version.
April 1996, the case finally goes to trial, and this is where the story takes a turn that would define the next three decades of legal battles. Before proceedings even began, Tony had cycled through six attorneys. He didn’t simply disagree with them or request replacements. He threatened them. Multiple lawyers received death threats. At least one attorney’s family lived in genuine fear because of him. Judge Joseph Daley made repeated attempts to keep qualified counsel in place. Tony pushed every single one of them out.
So, Judge Daley made a decision that would follow this case for 30 years. He ordered Tony to represent himself, framing it as a direct sanction for Tony’s own conduct. Tony pleaded for another lawyer. His most recent attorney asked the judge to let him return. Judge Daley said, “No.” Tony Carruthers, with no legal training, no courtroom experience, and no understanding of how capital proceedings work, was now his own defense attorney in a trial where the state was seeking his execution.
Post-conviction attorneys later described his cross-examinations as singularly inept, ineffective, and disastrous. Some assessments suggested his performance in that courtroom appeared almost designed to produce both a guilty verdict and a death sentence. The prosecution built its case on the letters, the cemetery remark, the witness accounts placing Tony at the house on February 24th, and the jailhouse informant who testified Tony had described the killings to him in detail.
In closing, the lead prosecutor told the jury that if these murders did not qualify for the death penalty, then none ever would. The jury convicted Tony on all counts. Three murders, three kidnappings, one robbery. Then they sentenced him to death three times, once for each victim. Worth saying again: not one piece of physical evidence ever linked Tony Carruthers directly to these crimes. Every conviction rested entirely on what witnesses claimed to have heard.
The years moved. Tony didn’t. He remained at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution while his case worked through the courts. Then in 2000, an appeals court ruled that Tony and James Montgomery should have been tried separately. James was granted a new trial. He took a plea deal, accepted a 27-year sentence, and walked out of prison in 2015. He has been a free man for over a decade. Tony never left death row.
Then in 2007, something that nobody really expected happened. Tony agreed to talk. He gave his first and only interview from Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex, speaking to a Memphis news station. He denied everything, flat out. “Absolutely, but I wasn’t there.” And then, looking directly into the camera with that calm that is genuinely hard to read, he delivered the six words we opened with. “I’m not going to be executed,” this is a quote, “and I’m smiling, I’m happy because I’m going to be exonerated.”
His own attorney at the time described him as the most intelligent defendant he had ever represented. On camera, Tony called that same attorney a crook. Make of that what you will. Tony Carruthers has never been a straightforward person to figure out, and somehow, that makes this story even harder to look away from.
In the years leading up to the scheduled execution, the case began drawing attention well beyond Memphis. The American Civil Liberties Union took up Tony’s cause publicly, pointing to what they described as serious compounding problems: no physical evidence, a defendant forced to represent himself, and informants who had since recanted or been discredited. More than 130,000 people signed a petition demanding that fingerprint and DNA testing be completed before any execution moved forward. Advocates delivered that petition directly to the Tennessee State Capitol. Even Kim Kardashian weighed in, urging her followers to call the governor’s office.
Then there was the informant question, the one sitting at the very center of the conviction. The key jailhouse witness who testified that Tony had confessed everything in detail—it later emerged he was a paid police informant. Prosecutors had denied that for 30 years. In 2024, documentation confirming the payment was finally handed over.
Tony’s attorneys also filed for clemency on mental health grounds, arguing that schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, combined with documented brain damage, had left him genuinely unable to understand what his execution meant, believing instead that the government was using the threat of death to pressure him into accepting a plea deal that existed only in his own mind.
And then there was Andrew Steel, Frederick Tucker’s father. He had a different view entirely. Tony had sent him letters and recordings from death row over the years. Andrew never opened a single one. He said he forgave Tony for killing his son. And then he said it was time for Tony to meet his maker. Both of those things are true at the same time. Sit with that.
The morning of May 21st, 2026, Tony Carruthers is escorted into the execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Media witnesses are brought in at 9:45 in the morning. The execution is scheduled for 10:00. 10:00 comes. The medical team does establish a primary IV line. That part goes as planned. But Tennessee’s execution protocol requires a second line, a backup vein, as a fail-safe. They cannot find one.
They try one site, then another, then another. When every standard option is exhausted, they move to a central line, a long catheter designed to be inserted into a large vein in the center of the chest—a more invasive procedure, a last resort. That fails too. Tony’s attorney, Maria De Liberato, is in that room watching all of it. She later stands in front of reporters and tells them, “They tortured him. He was in pain.”
In real-time, his legal team files emergency motions with both the federal court and the Tennessee Supreme Court, arguing that the repeated attempts amount to cruel and unusual punishment. For nearly two hours, Tony Carruthers lies strapped to that gurney while officials work around him trying to find a way to carry out the execution. At 11:52 in the morning, the lines are removed. A witness in the room hears a prison official say the execution will not continue at this time. Andrew Steel, who had come to that facility specifically to watch Tony Carruthers die, watched this instead.
And this wasn’t an isolated incident. In 2024, officials in Idaho attempted to establish an IV line on Thomas Creech eight separate times before calling it off. Idaho subsequently made the firing squad its primary method of execution. Alabama suspended executions for several months following similar failures. Tennessee was already under serious scrutiny after an independent review revealed that lethal injection drugs used in previous executions had never been fully tested for purity or potency, and that two officials responsible for overseeing that process had given incorrect testimony under oath. This wasn’t a fluke. It was part of a much wider pattern.
Within hours, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee announced a one-year reprieve for Tony Carruthers. Not exoneration, not a new trial. A pause. 12 months. The Department of Corrections released a formal statement confirming what had happened inside that chamber: Primary line successfully established, no suitable backup vein located, Central line procedure attempted and failed, Execution called off.
When Maria De Liberato heard the reprieve announced, she was already standing in front of reporters. At the time, she broke down in tears. “Amazing. I am so grateful.” The ACLU issued a statement saying they would continue fighting on Tony’s behalf and called on Tennessee to stop what they described as torturing a man while refusing to address serious unresolved questions about his innocence.
As of now, no new execution date has been set, but “measured” is the right word here. Andrew Steel went home without the closure he traveled there for. The families of Marcelos Anderson, Frederick Tucker, and Delois Anderson are still waiting for an ending. There isn’t one yet.
Back to where we started, 2007. A prison interview room. Tony Carruthers looks directly into the camera, calm, almost smiling, and says six words: “I’m not going to be executed.” On the morning of May 21st, 2026, the state of Tennessee spent nearly two hours trying to make those words wrong. They couldn’t.
What happens next is genuinely open. The one-year reprieve doesn’t close anything. It only delays the question. The paid informant evidence, the DNA and fingerprint testing that advocates have demanded, the mental competency arguments, the two jurors who said their sentencing vote would have been different with complete information—none of it is resolved.
James Montgomery, Tony’s co-defendant, has been living freely for over a decade. And Tony Carruthers, a man convicted of one of the most disturbing triple murders in Tennessee history, or, depending entirely on who you ask, a man whose conviction rested on paid, discredited informants in a trial so compromised it barely resembles due process, is still alive on death row 30-plus years later. Still there.
In 2007 he said six words. So far, he’s been right. Subscribe and turn on your notification because this story is not finished.
