DEATH ROW Documentary – Harold Wayne Nichols
On January 5th, 1989, Harold Wayne Nichols was taken [music] into custody on suspicion of multiple rapes in the East Ridge area and brought to the station for questioning. But the real drama, the moment when the full scope of what he’d done finally came into view, happened the [music] next day, January 6th, 1989.
Interview room. Nichols sat across from detectives and [music] began talking. He didn’t deny the attacks. He didn’t hesitate. he confessed calmly. Nicholls [music] didn’t just confirm the attacks they asked about. He started naming others. Not [music] one, not two, a chain. In the case files, most victims were reduced to initials.
T R S T P G P R. Their real name sealed to protect them. >> My daughter-in-law was his second victim. Something needs to be done. >> [snorts] >> Both Hicks and Adams are vowing to fight until Nicholls draws his last breath. >> Until that’s not a possibility anymore, there’s you don’t not be scared. >> Evidence shows until Nichols arrest in 1989, he would roam the streets of Chattanooga at night searching for vulnerable women.
[snorts] >> Not only for our family, but for the 14 or 15 other women family out there. Eventually, detectives [music] reached the question hovering over everything. What about the young woman in Brainer? What about Karen Pulley? And in time, on tape and in [music] a signed statement, Nicholls placed himself exactly where the evidence had already pointed, inside Karen’s house, up the stairs, in her bedroom that night.
He admitted breaking in. He admitted [music] raping her. He admitted beating her with a wooden board. he found inside the home and he [music] admitted what he did after. When Harold Wayne Nichols went on trial for the rape and murder of Karen Pulley, [music] there was no mystery left. He had confessed twice on tape and in writing.
The jury wasn’t there to decide [music] whether he did it. They were there to decide what his punishment should be, life in prison or death. And the courtroom quickly split into [music] two versions of the same man. A man who hunted women at night. A man who admitted he would have kept going if [music] police hadn’t stopped him.
The picture was brutal and undeniable. But the defense had a different picture. A pastor from [music] Nichols childhood church. A soft-spoken man who said Harold was a polite kid, helpful, quiet, a boy who seemed [music] gentle by nature. But the most emotional witness was his wife, Joanne. She called him a perfect gentleman, kind, mildmannered, a man who worked late trying to keep their home together when everything else in life was falling apart.
She told the jury she didn’t believe he had killed Karen Pulley on purpose, [music] and she didn’t want the state to execute her husband. All of them were sincere. All of them were telling the truth. The truth of the man they knew. When Harold Wayne Nichols testified, he didn’t describe a monster living inside him. Instead, he talked about himself as someone shaped, even broken, [music] by childhood.
A mother who died of breast cancer when he was 10. A father who sent him and [music] his sister to an orphanage because he said he couldn’t take care of them. Later, the army, jobs, [music] marriage, a life that looked normal on the outside. But according to Nicholls, something else was happening underneath. He said that before each attack, he felt overwhelmed by a strange excited state, something he claimed took away his ability to resist.
He said he never told anyone. The defense brought in psychologist Dr. Eric Enum. He gave Nicholls a diagnosis, [music] intermittent explosive disorder, a form of impulse control disorder rooted, he said, in early [music] trauma. Dr. Dr. Angum described Nicholls as someone who functioned well under strict rules, someone [music] who was calm and compliant when surrounded by structure.
But when there were no walls, no rules, no boundaries, Nicholls [music] chose violence. The psychologist didn’t say Nicholls didn’t understand what he was doing. He didn’t say Nicholls couldn’t control himself. Only this. In the absence of limits, Nicholls created his own world. [music] And in that world, he harmed women. But the moment that froze the courtroom [music] didn’t come from the psychologist.
It came from Nicholls himself. He told the jury plainly that if police hadn’t arrested him in January 1989, he would have kept attacking women. No hesitation, no confusion, [music] just a fact. He knew what he was doing. He knew he could continue. and he admitted he would [music] have. That sentence carried more weight than any expert testimony.
The prosecution reminded the jury what the Tennessee Supreme Court later wrote about this case. Justice Anderson said, “In this capital case, the defendant, Harold Wayne Nichols, plead guilty to firstdegree felony murder and was sentenced by a jury to death. At the sentencing hearing, the jury found two aggravating circumstances.
First, Nicholls five previous convictions for aggravated rape. Second, [music] the fact that the murder occurred during the commission of a felony. The jury found that these aggravating circumstances [music] outweighed any mitigating circumstances beyond a reasonable doubt and sentenced the defendant to death.
Nicholls later appealed his sentence, claiming there were errors in the sentencing phase, but after reviewing the record, we concluded that any such errors were harmless beyond a reasonable doubt and did not affect [music] the jury’s decision to impose death. Accordingly, we affirm the jury’s sentence of death.
In 1990, after the death sentence was handed down, Harold Wayne Nichols was transferred to Tennessee’s death row. He arrived with almost nothing. His prison clothes, a few documents, and a Bible. The same Bible Karen Pulley’s mother had given him in the courtroom after the verdict.
He followed rules, kept to himself. The guards called him a cooperative [music] inmate. But to the prison psychologist, it matched something else. Nicholls functioned best inside strict walls. When others [music] built the structure, he obeyed it. When there were no walls, he hunted. On death row, days blur. The world shrinks [music] to a concrete cell, a steel door, and a narrow slot for meals.
Years folded into years. Today, at 64 years old, he remains on death row at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. His execution is scheduled for December 11th, 2025 at 10:00 a.m. Because he refused to choose between [music] the electric chair and lethal injection, Tennessee law made the choice for him, lethal injection.
>> Attorneys for death row inmate Harold Wayne Nichols are suing the state of Tennessee, accusing prison officials of violating the Public Records Act. The lawsuit claims the Department of Correction is refusing to release key documents about its execution protocol. Just weeks before Nicholls has to choose how he’ll die, his attorneys say [music] the state is hiding behind a secrecy statute, even after witnesses reported signs of pain during recent executions using the drug pentobatital.
Nichols is scheduled to be executed on December 11th. >> It’s extremely important for the state to protect the identity of the entities who are supplying the lethal injection chemicals. He has lived under a death sentence for more than three decades. And now a date has finally been set for him. But even as the clock moves closer to that December [music] morning, Nicholls lawyers are fighting to keep him alive.
Not by arguing innocence, but by arguing something else. That the state should not kill him. But there was a problem. Modern DNA testing. When the samples were finally tested with contemporary [music] forensic methods, the answer was clear. The seaman belonged to Harold Wayne Nichols. Knowing everything you know about Wayne Nichols today, what do you think his punishment should be? Should the death sentence [music] stand, should it be changed, or should he be spared altogether? If it really comes down to an execution, would you choose the
electric chair, lethal [music] injection, or no execution at all? Drop your thoughts in the comments, but keep it respectful. There’s a part of Harold Wayne Nichols life that almost never [music] appears in headlines. On Death Row, Nicholls began making art. In handwritten [music] notes, he says it helps him shine a light on issues.
The cradle to prison pipeline, the death penalty, mass incarceration. But the [music] art reveals something else. What a person imagines when the world they live in is made of steel and [music] cinder block. What escape looks like when escape is impossible. Nicholls hasn’t seen real stars in more than 25 years.
Two art instructors photographed [music] the night sky for him. The sky he remembered but could no longer witness. And he painted his own version. Deep violet [music] acrylics, thin silhouettes of trees, a sky he will never stand [music] under again. In his note to the piece, he wrote, “Prison has taught me many things.
One of them is the importance of [music] small things like the stars at night.” For years, Nicholls worked on a twoman prison maintenance crew handling electrical repairs. One day, his supervisor, a Freeworld [music] employee, grabbed a live wire and was nearly killed. When medical staff walked him out, shaking and stunned, Nicholls remembered one detail.
After almost dying from the shock, the thing he [music] cared about most was that his glasses had broken. And then Nicholls wrote, “Is it strange that a man sentenced [music] to die in the electric chair works fixing electrical wiring?” One of his most unusual works is a small diarama, a painted prison door, a narrow vertical viewing [music] slot, a meal slot below it.
Inside a collage of photographs [music] of Nichols’s family and friends, and in front of those photos, a tiny mirror. When you [music] lean in to look inside, you don’t see him, you see yourself. Another drawing of his is simple, a world without [music] prisons. In his exhibition note, Nicholls wrote, “No one here wants to see a monument to themselves, but I wanted to show people what the world could look like if my idea became real.
” His largest [music] project was a collaboration with another death row inmate, Ron Cawthorne. From cardboard [music] scraps, leftover paint, and trash collected in the recreation room, they built a 4×5 m [music] airplane. Along its sides, winding lines like veins. On the nose, a skull, a music box motor [music] connected to the propeller. Turn it.
The blades spin and the melody Somewhere out there [music] begins to play. A song about hope built by men the state [music] intends to
