The clock reads 10:00 a.m. Inside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, a man is strapped to a gurnie. The witnesses are seated. The curtain is open. The media is watching. Everything is in place. And then nothing happens. For the next hour and 52 minutes, what unfolds inside that execution chamber will shock the nation, reignite one of the most contested murder cases in Tennessee history, and raise a question that no one in that room can answer.

 How does a man who planned a triple murder from a prison cell, put it all in writing, said it out loud at a cemetery, and carried it out exactly as he promised, end up walking out of his own execution. Hit subscribe, turn on the notification bell so you won’t miss our deep dive drops. And today, we are going inside one of the most chilling, most complicated, and most disputed cases in American criminal history.

 Three people were found buried beneath a casket in a South Memphis cemetery. Their hands were bound. The state said they were alive when they went into the ground. And the man convicted of putting them there has spent 32 years insisting he was never there at all. This is the story of Tony von Kurthers, a man who 9 years ago looked into a television camera from death row and said six words that nobody took seriously.

 I’m not going to be executed. So far he has been right. >> I’m not going to be executed. Busy roach. And I’m smiling. I’m happy because I’m going to be exonerated. To understand what happened on May 21st, 2026, you have to go back more than three decades back to 1993, back to Memphis, Tennessee, and back to two letters.

 Tony von Kurthers was incarcerated at the Mark Latrell reception center in Memphis. He was 25 years old and he was already planning. From inside his cell, Tony wrote two letters to a man named Jimmy Lee Mays. The letters weren’t vague. They weren’t cryptic. They were a blueprint. Tony described his upcoming plan as a winner. He wrote that everything he intended to do from that point forward would be, in his exact words, wellorganized and extremely violent.

 He hadn’t been released yet, but the plan was already in motion. While still serving time, Tony was assigned to a work detail at the West Tennessee Veteran Cemetery. One afternoon, as he and fellow inmates helped lower a casket into the ground, Tony turned to the man beside him and said something that would later become one of the most haunting details in this entire case.

 He said, “That would be a good way to bury somebody. If you’re going to kill them, if you ain’t got no body, you don’t have a case.” It wasn’t idle talk. It wasn’t dark humor. He already had a target selected. His name was Marcelos Anderson, but the people who knew him called him Cello. Marcelos Anderson was 21 years old.

 He was deep in the Memphis drug trade. He wore expensive jewelry, carried large amounts of cash, and kept even more money stashed inside the home of his mother, Deoys Anderson. He was known in the neighborhood, known on the streets, and by most accounts, he was the kind of young man who inspired loyalty. But the thing that made him most vulnerable to Tony Kurthers wasn’t his money, and it wasn’t his drugs. It was his trust.

Because cello considered Tony a friend, a real one. So real in fact that on November 15th, 1993, the day Tony walked out of the Mark Latrell reception center, Cello was the one waiting for him, he drove across town to pick him up. And not only that, Cello along with two of his associates handed Tony $200 in cash right there on the spot, a welcome home gift.

 Tony smiled, took the money, and said nothing about what he had been planning the entire time he was locked up. The cruelty of that detail is almost hard to process. $200 from the very people he intended to kill. One month later, a fellow inmate who had overheard Tony’s plans inside was released from custody and he did something that should have changed everything. He went directly to Cello.

He told him everything what Tony and his accomplice James Montgomery had been saying behind bars. The plan to rob him. The plan to make sure there was no body. He told Cello plainly, “Your friend is going to kill you.” And Cello didn’t believe it. He couldn’t wrap his mind around it. Tony was his boy. Tony wouldn’t do that. So Cello did nothing.

The weeks that followed moved quickly and dangerously. In mid December 1993, Tony was riding through Memphis when they came upon the scene of a drive-by shooting. One of Cello’s associates had been wounded and was hospitalized. Jonathan Montgomery, James Montgomery’s brother, was at the scene and climbed into the backseat of the car with Tony right there in that back seat.

 Tony told Jonathan it would be the perfect time to kidnap Cello. He said it would happen once James got out. And on New Year’s Eve 1993, a witness named Maize saw Tony loading three antifreeze containers into a car. The containers were filled with gasoline. Tony was getting ready. James Montgomery was released from prison on January 11th, 1994.

 He didn’t ease back into the neighborhood quietly. He walked straight up to one of Cello’s partners and told him, “It was my neighborhood before I left. Now I’m back and it’s my neighborhood again.” When the man said he wanted no trouble, James looked at him and said he felt like he was about to blow his brains out.

 He told them to get in line or there would be war. Then James and Tony showed up together. They told Cello’s associates they already had their man staked out. And they repeated almost word for word what Tony had said at the cemetery months earlier. If there’s no body, there’s no case. The trap was fully set.

 Cello still didn’t see it coming. On February 23rd, 1994, Cello borrowed a white Jeep Cherokee from a cousin. The following afternoon, February 24th, witnesses saw Cello and his 17-year-old friend Frederick Tucker riding in that Jeep with James Montgomery and James’s brother, Jonathan. Around 500 in the evening, the group arrived at the home of Nikita Shaw, a cousin of the Montgomery brothers.

 James went inside and asked her to take her children and leave. He said he needed to handle some business. She told a family member she believed someone was about to be kidnapped. Then she gathered her kids and walked out the door. Meanwhile, that same evening around 8:00 p.m. Deoys Anderson was at home eating dinner.

 A co-orker she had given a ride to that afternoon was the last person to see her before she vanished when her niece Lventhia arrived around 9:00 p.m. Deoys was gone. Her dinner was still on the table, halfeaten. Her purse was there, her car was there, her keys were there. She had been pulled away mid meal and never came back.

 Later that night, Jonathan Montgomery called a friend. He told him they had gotten Cello and the others. He said they had taken $200,000. He said a man had to kill those folks. He asked the friend to drive him to the cemetery. The friend refused, but he lent Jonathan 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. Cello’s borrowed Jeep was found burning in Mississippi in the early hours of February 25th, torched with the gasoline Tony had been loading into containers on New Year’s Eve. When Cello’s cousin heard about the Jeep, he called Deoysa’s house. Levventhia picked up and realized for the first time that neither her aunt nor her cousin had come home, she filed a missing person report.

 One full week passed with no answers. On March 3rd, 1994, Jonathan Montgomery led a Memphis police detective to the Rose Hill Cemetery on Elvis Presley Boulevard in South Memphis. He directed the detective to the grave of a woman named Dorothy Daniels, who had been buried there on February 25th, one day after the victims disappeared.

 Her plot was located just six graves away from where a Montgomery family relative was buried. Investigators obtained a court order and exumed Dorothy Daniels’s casket beneath it under several inches of dirt and a single piece of plywood. They found all three of them, Marcelos Anderson, Frederick Tucker, Deoys Anderson. The hands of all three victims were bound behind their backs.

 Frederick Tucker’s feet were also bound and his neck showed bruising consistent with a liature. Deoys Anderson was lying at the bottom of the grave. The two men were on top of her. The medical examiner who testified at trial, Dr. O. C. Smith, described what each of them had endured. Marcelos had been shot three times.

 One bullet had severed his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down, but the shot had also torn through his windpipe, and blood was filling his airway and lungs. The medical examiner testified that he had been conscious and drowning in his own blood underground in the dark, unable to move a single muscle below his neck.

 Frederick Tucker had been shot in the chest and suffered severe blunt force trauma. Deoys Anderson had been strangled. Dirt had been packed into her mouth and nose. A red sock was found tied around her neck. The medical examiner testified that all three of them were alive when they were placed in that grave. A jail house witness named Alfredo Shaw later testified that Tony had described the entire sequence to him while they were both awaiting trial.

 According to Shaw, Tony said they went to Deoysa’s house first looking for Cello and his money. Cello wasn’t there, so they forced Aloy to call her son to tell him to come home that something important had happened and she did. When Cello arrived, they forced all three at gunpoint into the jeep and drove to Mississippi.

 They shot Cello and Frederick. They burned the jeep. Then they drove all three back to Memphis in a stolen vehicle and took them to the cemetery. And according to that same witness, when they lowered Cello and Frederick into the grave, Deoyy’s Anderson started screaming. One of them told her to shut up or she would die like her son.

 Then they pushed her in. The case went to trial in April 1996 and what happened in that courtroom was unlike almost any capital case in the modern era of American juristprudence. By the time proceedings began, Tony Kurthers had gone through six different attorneys. 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. His attorneys and the court later argued that Tony’s paranoia and delusional thinking prevented him from cooperating with any council. But the presiding judge, Joseph Daly, viewed the behavior as willful misconduct.

 After Tony drove away his sixth attorney, Judge Daly made a decision that would follow this case for the next three decades. He ordered Tony to represent himself. Tony begged for another attorney, his most recent lawyer. Once he realized what was happening, asked the judge to let him return. Judge Daly said no.

 He called it a sanction. And so Tony Kurthers, a man with no legal training, no understanding of trial procedure, and no experience navigating a courtroom, became his own defense attorney in a case where the state of Tennessee was seeking to execute him three times over. His performance at trial was later described by postconviction attorneys as one of the most inept, damaging, and disastrous cross-examinations in any recorded capital case.

 an examination that appeared, in their words, designed not just to result in a guilty verdict, but in 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 Alfredo Shaw, who testified that Tony had described the killings to him in detail while they were both awaiting trial.

 In closing arguments, the lead prosecutor told the jury, “If these murders don’t qualify for the death penalty, then none ever will.” He then told them, “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 Deoys and Marcelos and Frederick felt.” The jury convicted Tony Kurthers on all counts.

Three murders, three kidnappings, one robbery. Then that same jury sentenced him to death three times. Once for each victim. Marcelos’s Anderson was 21 years old, Frederick Tucker was 17, and Deoy’s 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 32 years, Tony Kurthers sat on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

 While his case moved through round after round of appeals, his codefendant, James Montgomery, fared very differently. In 2000, an appeals court ruled that the two men should have been tried separately and granted James a new trial. James accepted a plea deal, received a 27-year sentence, and was released from prison in 2015.

 He has been a free man for over a decade. Then in 2007, something unexpected happened. Tony agreed to talk. He gave his first and only interview from behind bars. Speaking to Memphis television station Action News 5 from inside Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex. He denied everything.

 When the reporter asked him, “Well, it was pretty gruesome, wouldn’t you say?” Tony answered, “Absolutely, but I wasn’t there.” And then he looked straight into the camera and said, “I’m not going to be executed. Busy roach. And I’m smiling. I’m happy because I’m going to be exonerated. His own attorney at the time described Tony as by far the most intelligent defendant he had ever represented.

 Tony on camera called that same attorney a crook. In the years that followed, the case began attracting new attention and new controversy. Defense attorneys argued that Alfredo Shaw, the jailhouse informant whose testimony had been central to Tony’s conviction, had been secretly paid by the state. Prosecutors had denied this for 30 years.

 In 2024, evidence was finally handed over that confirmed it. There was also the question of the buried alive testimony. After trial, other forensic experts reviewed the autopsy findings and concluded the victims were likely already dead before they were placed in the grave. Two jurors later signed declaration stating that had they known this, they would not have voted for a death sentence.

 And then there was the DNA. The ACLU filed an emergency motion in April 2026, arguing that unmatched fingerprints and DNA from the crime scene had never been compared to an alternative suspect, a man named Ronnie Eyeball Irving, who James Montgomery had identified in a 2010 statement as the actual perpetrator. Montgomery, while serving out the remainder of his sentence, told an investigator that he had carried out the kidnappings and dispatched Irving to abduct Deoys and that Tony Kurthers had not been involved. The state refused to authorize

the testing. Frederick Tucker’s father, Andrew Steele, saw it all very differently. He said, “He did this. He did it. It’s been 30 years. It’s time.” Throughout the years, Tony had sent Andrew letters and recordings from Death Row. Andrew had never read a single one. He had never listened to a single one. He said he planned to be in the room when it 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. The days leading into May 21st, 2026 were a whirlwind of legal maneuvering that moved faster than almost anyone could track. The Tennessee Supreme Court had set Tony’s execution date back in October 2025 in the weeks and months before the scheduled date.

 His attorneys fought on every front, arguing he was mentally incompetent to be executed, that his delusions prevented him from rationally understanding the reason for his execution and that DNA testing could still prove his innocence. Courts denied the requests one by one. On Tuesday, May 19th, 2 days before the scheduled execution, Governor Bill Lee issued a statement after deliberate consideration.

 He said he was upholding the sentence and did not plan to intervene. On Wednesday, May 20th, the day before the United States Court of Appeals rejected a petition filed by Kurthers as attorneys, the ACLU immediately escalated to the United States Supreme Court, filing an emergency stay request overnight. Tony Kurther spent his last known night in a holding cell at Riverbend.

 At protests outside the Tennessee State Capital, family members, abolitionists, and over 130,000 petition signitories had called for the execution to be stopped. State Representative Justin J. Pearson of Memphis stood with them. Inside the prison, the machinery of a state execution was moving forward. The execution was scheduled for 10:00 a.m.

On the morning of May 21st, 2026, media witnesses were brought into Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. At 9:45 in the morning, the gurnie was in place. The curtains were parted. The witnesses were seated. At 10:00 a.m., the execution did not begin. Legal teams were still waiting on the United States Supreme Court’s decision on the ACLU’s emergency stay request.

 The high court rejected it. The execution was authorized to proceed and then the problems began. The execution team attempted to establish an introvenous line in a peripheral vein. They found one, a primary vein was accessed, but Tennessee’s 2025 lethal injection protocol requires a backup for line and they could not find one.

 They tried one site, then another, then another. When the peripheral lines failed, the state’s protocol required the contracted physician to establish a central line, a long catheter inserted into a large vein in the middle of the chest. That physician, it was later revealed in court filings, had not placed a central line in approximately 13 years.

 They held no hospital privileges anywhere in the country and they chose to attempt the central line in a subclavian vein identified by medical experts as the most dangerous vein for this procedure using a manual landmark method rather than ultrasound guidance which is the modern standard of care. That attempt failed too.

 Tony’s attorney, Maria Deliberado of the ACLU, was a witness inside that room. She watched. She later said she saw Tony wincing and groaning. She described what she witnessed as horrible. She said there was lots of blood. For nearly 2 hours, Tony Kurthers lay on that gurnie while the state of Tennessee tried to find a way to kill him.

 At 11:49 a.m., Deliberado was told the execution was on hold and that Tony was being checked by medical personnel. At 11:52 a.m., the four lines were removed. A prison official announced that the execution would not continue. Deliberado stepped outside to speak with reporters. Mid-sentence, an announcement came through.

 Governor Bill Lee, the same governor who just two days earlier had said he would not intervene, was granting Tony Kurthers a one-year reprieve from execution. Deliberado stopped mid-sentence. “That’s amazing,” she said and began crying. “I’m so grateful.” Inside the prison, Andrew Steele, Frederick Tucker’s father, had planned to be in that room when it was done.

 He had waited 32 years for this day and he had watched them try for nearly 2 hours and fail. Tony Kurthers is alive on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. As of today, no new execution date has been set beyond the one-year reprieve. The ACLU called what happened inside that chamber torture. They said the state had first forced Tony to represent himself at trial, convicted him based on the testimony of a paid informant with no physical evidence, denied him DNA testing that could have exonerated him, and then subjected him to a botched

execution that its own medical personnel were not equipped to carry out properly. The question of DNA testing remains unresolved. Unmatched fingerprints and DNA from the crime scene have never been compared to the alternative suspect James Montgomery identified in 2010. The state continues to resist testing.

 The question of mental competency remains unresolved. Tony’s attorneys have argued for years in court filings that he lives with psychotic delusions, that he genuinely believes the government is bluffing, that he will be exonerated, that millions of dollars are owed to him, that his own attorneys are part of a conspiracy against him.

 He refused to speak with his legal team for extended periods. Courts found him competent to be executed. His attorneys disagree. And then there is the family. Frederick Tucker’s father never read the letters, never listened to the recordings, waited 32 years, and watched the state fail. Three people were bound, shot, strangled, and buried together in one grave at the Rose Hill Cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee.

 In February 1994, Marcelo’s Anderson was 21. Frederick Tucker was 17. Deoys Anderson was 43. Whatever the truth is about Tony Kurthers’s precise role, whether the informant testimony was reliable, whether the buried alive finding was accurate, whether DNA evidence would change the picture, those three people went into the ground with their hands tied behind their backs.

 And nothing about what happened on May 21st, 2026 changes that. In 2007, a man on death row looked into a camera and said six words, “I’m not going to be executed.” Tony Kurthers has now survived his own execution. A year from now, Tennessee will face the same question again. The case is not closed. The DNA remains untested. The clock is running.

 And the most chilling part of this entire story. Tony Kurthers, the man who said at a cemetery that if there’s no body, there’s no case, is still breathing. The bodies have been found. The case has been tried. But he is still here. If this case raised questions for you about guilt, about evidence, about what the justice system gets right and what it gets wrong, you are not alone.

 Over 130,000 people signed petitions in the weeks before this execution. Two jurors who convicted him have since said they would not have voted for death if they had known what they know now. The next chapter of this story is still being written. If you want to be here when it is, subscribe right now. Hit the bell.

You will not miss the update when it comes. Drop in the comments, do you think the state should run the DNA test? And do you believe Tony Kurthers belongs on death row? I will see you in the next one.