Earley Story will never forget the name Alfredo Shaw.
As a longtime employee at the Shelby County Jail in downtown Memphis, Story had seen the young man come in and out of the detention facility known as 201 Poplar since the 1980s. Shaw acted cocky, but there was fear in his eyes. Story, a devout Christian, occasionally had conversations with him about God.
In 1994, Shaw became a witness in a grisly triple homicide. A local drug dealer, along with his mother and a teenage friend, had been abducted, murdered, and buried in a freshly dug grave at a cemetery in South Memphis. Prosecutors arrested 25-year-old Tony Carruthers, who had recently gotten out of prison. There was nothing directly tying him to the crime — and he swore that he had nothing to do with it. But Shaw claimed that Carruthers confessed to him. In 1996, a jury sentenced Carruthers to die.
Like most people, Story assumed Carruthers was guilty. But in January 1997, Story himself was accused of a crime he swore he did not commit. He was arrested and charged with selling drugs to an undercover officer. There was no evidence against Story — in fact, the presiding judge initially threw out his case for lack of probable cause. But in 1999, he was tried, convicted, and given probation. The main witness against him was Shaw.
Story was convinced he’d been framed. Over the previous decade he’d become known as a whistleblower, documenting violence and abuse at the jail. This made him a target for retaliation. “I had some enemies within the sheriff’s department,” he said.
“We’re not the only ones he’s done this to.”
Story lost his job and his pension as a result of his conviction. He had been fighting to clear his name for 20 years when, one week before Christmas 2017, he got an envelope in the mail from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. That return address was written in elaborate script below the name “Tony Von Carruthers.”
The envelope contained records confirming what Story had long known to be true: Shaw had been a paid confidential informant. Although this had been an open secret in Memphis for decades, the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office repeatedly denied it. “I have talked to the prosecutors who tried your client and neither is aware of any situation where Alfredo Shaw acted as a paid informant for anybody,” the office had written to Carruthers’s post-conviction attorneys.
The enclosed documents chronicled drug buys Shaw made on behalf of the sheriff’s department between 1991 and 1997. Conspicuously absent was the date when Story supposedly sold drugs to Shaw. Story believed that this should exonerate him. But the courts disagreed.
Story did not know precisely why Carruthers mailed him the records. Nor did he know the truth behind Carruthers’s innocence claim. But when he heard that Tennessee had set an execution date for Carruthers, he was deeply disturbed. No one, he says, should be executed based on the testimony of Alfredo Shaw.
“I’d hate to see him murdered, put to death, when there’s so many open ends,” he said.
Tony Carruthers is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Thursday morning at 10 a.m.
He has maintained his innocence for 32 years.
On Monday, Carruthers’s supporters, including family members and advocates from the American Civil Liberties Union, delivered a stack of petitions to the office of Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee at the state Capitol in Nashville. Despite mounting calls for Lee to stop the execution, on Tuesday he announced that he would not intervene.
In a clemency petition, his attorneys describe Carruthers’s case as a travesty of justice: a death sentence based on lies and a flimsy narrative that was bankrupt from the start. Among those who have spoken out against the execution is Story, now 72. He is joined by another ex-jailer, Bernard Kimmons, who also says he was wrongfully convicted of selling drugs based on Shaw’s testimony. Wearing “Save Tony Carruthers” T-shirts, the men told a Memphis news station that Shaw has a track record of putting innocent people in prison. “We’re not the only ones he’s done this to,” Kimmons said.
False testimony by jailhouse informants is a leading cause of wrongful convictions, often used to fill the gaps in cases where the state’s evidence is weak. The Innocence Project has found that roughly a quarter of death row exonerations are in cases involving a jailhouse snitch.
In Carruthers’s case, no physical evidence implicated him in the murders. Fingerprints from the crime scene have never been linked to anyone, and a blanket found buried with the victims has been shown to have an unknown male DNA profile. Some of the most horrifying details of the crime have also been discredited in the decades since Carruthers’s trial. The case remains infamous in Memphis because of the ubiquitous claim that the victims were buried alive. But this has long been debunked. Although a medical examiner said at trial that the victims suffocated to death, he later retracted his testimony — and other experts have said there was never anything to support it.
These red flags — a lack of physical evidence, unreliable witnesses, and bogus forensic testimony — are all-too familiar features of wrongful convictions. But Carruthers’s case is uniquely shocking in another way: He was sent to death row after acting as his own lawyer at trial. Carruthers’s attorneys have long argued that this doomed Carruthers from the start. They write in his clemency petition that he has a long history of undiagnosed mental illness and “was not competent to stand for trial, much less competent to represent himself.”
Carruthers’s self-representation was especially self-sabotaging where Shaw, the jailhouse snitch, was concerned. By the time Carruthers went to trial in 1996, Shaw had recanted his statements implicating Carruthers in an explosive TV interview, and prosecutors decided against calling Shaw as a witness. But in a perverse irony, Shaw ended up testifying anyway — not for the state, but for the defense. “In an effort to show that the prosecution had secured the indictment with an untrue story,” the clemency petition explained. “Mr. Carruthers believed he had to call Alfredo Shaw to the stand.”
The result was so disastrous that a judge later reversed the conviction of Carruthers’s co-defendant, concluding that Carruthers’s self-representation had violated his co-defendant’s right to a fair trial. That man, James Montgomery, got out of prison in 2015.
To Carruthers’s sister, Tonya, who joined the petition delivery in Nashville — and who said she plans to witness her brother’s execution — the past 32 years have been a living nightmare. She argues that her brother’s conviction was a case of guilt by association — and that his own record made it easy for him to take the fall for a crime he did not commit.
For decades, she said, the press adopted the state’s narrative of the case without examining the obvious problems with the case. “He was already portrayed as a monster in the media before his trial ever started.”
The triple murder that sent Carruthers to death row began as a missing persons case. Forty-three-year-old Delois Anderson lived in North Memphis with her son Marcellos Anderson, her niece Laventhia, and Laventhia’s two young daughters. She worked at a bank during the day and took classes at night.
On the evening of February 24, 1994, Laventhia would later testify, she came home to an empty house. It looked like Delois had been home. “Her car was there. Her purse was there. Her keys were there,” Laventhia said. In Delois’s bedroom, a pack of cigarettes and lighter were in their usual spot, and she had apparently served herself a plate of greens for dinner.
Laventhia figured her aunt had stepped out and would return soon. But that didn’t happen; Laventhia never saw her again.
Around 2:40 a.m. the next morning, a sheriff’s deputy in Mississippi responded to a call about a car on fire just south of the Tennessee state line. The vehicle, a white Jeep Cherokee with gold trim, was traced to a Memphis man who said he had lent it to Marcellos Anderson, nicknamed Cello.
Within a week, news broke that a suspect had led police to a grave of a woman who had been recently buried at the Rose Hill cemetery in South Memphis. Authorities got permission to exhume the body. Under the casket, beneath some wooden planks, were the remains of Anderson, his mother, and 17-year-old Frederick Tucker. Their hands were bound together; Delois Anderson had a pair of socks wrapped around her neck. Tucker and Marcellos Anderson had been shot.
The murders were front-page news in Memphis, where frenzied media coverage soon turned into bad press for law enforcement officials. Police had two main suspects in custody: Carruthers and a man named James Montgomery — the brother of the man who led authorities to the bodies. But Montgomery’s brother had since fled the state, leaving prosecutors without a key witness. With no other evidence against the two defendants, a judge threw out the first-degree murder charges.
Prosecutors scrambled, urging police to “get out and beat the bushes,” as one assistant district attorney would later testify. Before long, a new witness came forward: 28-year-old Alfredo Shaw.
On March 27, Shaw gave a tape-recorded statement to a pair of sergeants with the Memphis Police Department. He said that Carruthers carried out the murders on behalf of a pair of drug dealers who had been robbed by Anderson and Tucker. In fact, he said, Carruthers had tried to enlist him in the crime. “I stated to Tony that I did not want to be involved in that,” Shaw said.
Shaw claimed that he and Carruthers were in the back of the jail’s law library when Carruthers divulged how it went down: He and Montgomery had gone to Anderson’s house in search of the stolen money but only encountered his mother, Delois. They demanded she call her son, who returned to the home with the teenage Tucker. “Carruthers told me they put the gun to Marcellos and made them all go get in the Cherokee,” Shaw said. Carruthers and Montgomery then drove the three victims to Mississippi, where Carruthers shot Anderson and Tucker and set the jeep on fire. They then drove Delois, who was still alive, to the cemetery along with the two bodies, which they threw into the grave. Delois was screaming, Shaw said. So Montgomery pushed her into the grave, too.
Two days later, Shaw repeated the story to a grand jury.
In the two years between the indictment and the trial, however, Shaw began to have second thoughts. In February 1996, he contacted a local TV reporter and, with his identity concealed, recanted his statements on Memphis’s Channel 13. He said that he had been coerced and coached by Shelby County Assistant District Attorney Gerald Harris, who offered him money and promised to dismiss pending criminal charges against him.
Harris appeared in the TV segment too. He told the news station that Shaw was not credible. “I’m not gonna put that kind of witness on,” he said. Like all criminal defendants, Carruthers “has got a right to a fair trial.”
Carruthers and Montgomery were tried together in April 1996. Rather than the murder-for-hire plot Shaw described, prosecutors argued that the men wanted to take over the local drug trade. The theory was constructed entirely from circumstantial evidence, with witnesses testifying that said they saw the men with the victims at some point on February 24, 1994.
“It was all just stories,” Carruthers’s sister Tonya recalled. She attended the trial every day with their mother, describing it as a media circus and a hostile atmosphere. “Our family name became the scourge of the community,” she said. “We were not treated well at all in court.”
Tonya had spoken to her brother shortly after the murders. She remembers him being extremely upset. Although he ran in the same circles as Anderson and did not get along with him, he would never have killed him, she said — and he certainly would not have done anything to hurt his mother. Carruthers’s own daughter was related to the Anderson family through his ex-girlfriend. “If I knew that was gonna happen,” Tonya remembers him saying, “I would’ve done anything I could to stop it.”
Presiding over the trial was Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Joseph Dailey. Case records show that Dailey became convinced that his life was in danger due to reported death threats that swirled around the case from the start. He imposed a gag order on the press to prevent reporters from printing witnesses’ names, as well as unprecedented security measures in the courtroom and at his home.
Dailey was also fed up with Carruthers before the trial began. One by one, defense attorneys appointed to the case told the judge that their client was erratic and abusive and asked to be removed. Dailey ultimately refused to appoint any more attorneys, leaving Carruthers to represent himself. “He is the person who put himself in this position,” Dailey later said while denying Carruthers a retrial.
Several of the state’s witnesses knew Carruthers from prison. One man testified that he had worked with Carruthers on a work detail that included doing shifts in a cemetery — and that Carruthers remarked that hiding a body in a grave would be a good way to get away with a murder. “If you ain’t got no body, you don’t have a case,” he said. Another witness testified about a pair of letters Carruthers sent from prison, in which he boasted ominously about a “master plan” to settle scores on the streets. “Everything I do from now on will be well organized and extremely violent,” he wrote.
Carruthers pointed out that the letters did not actually implicate him in the killings. “He can’t say if I was just in prison just bragging or just running off at the mouth,” he told Dailey. But the judge allowed the letters as evidence.
The state had already rested its case on April 24, 1996, when Carruthers called Alfredo Shaw to the stand. His goal was to show that, as a jailhouse snitch, Shaw falsely implicated him in the murders in exchange for money and favors. But Dailey blocked Carruthers from questioning Shaw about being a confidential informant. The resulting testimony was a disaster for Carruthers.
Shaw testified that he contacted homicide detectives through a Crime Stoppers hotline after hearing about the murders on the news. Carruthers then presented him with his previous statements to police and to the grand jury, creating the impression that Shaw had been consistent in his accounts. When he tried to pivot to show that Shaw had disavowed his previous statements, it backfired. Shaw explained that he only wavered in his accounts because he’d been afraid for his life.
Carruthers and Montgomery were swiftly convicted. In his closing argument urging jurors to sentence the men to die, Harris emphasized the suffering of the victims as they slowly suffocated. “This woman, Delois Anderson, is in a grave, in a pit, alive,” he said. “The tragedy of it is that as she actually breathed in her last breath she was in effect killing herself, bringing things into her body, dirt being on top of her.” It was hard to imagine a more horrifying scene.
After a few hours, the jury came back with a death sentence.
Carruthers had been on death row for well over a decade when an investigator with his federal lawyers in Nashville did a deep dive into his life and background. Such investigations are a critical step in modern capital defense: One of the first things a lawyer is supposed to do to uncover any evidence of trauma, abuse, or mental illness — the kind of mitigating factors that can persuade a jury to spare a client’s life.
None of the attorneys originally appointed to represent Carruthers had undertaken such an investigation. And Carruthers was not able to do such work on his own behalf.
“Perhaps the most prominent issue affecting Tony’s family is that of severe mental illness,” the investigator later wrote in a report. Relatives across generations had schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and Carruthers displayed symptoms of both. When he was 14, his mother, Jane Carruthers, admitted him to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. He stayed for five days.
Before long, Carruthers was in and out of juvenile jails. Staff at one facility recommended that he be placed “in a structured therapeutic environment,” but this was easier said than done. His mother was a single parent raising four children; while she worked hard all her life, she struggled to afford the family’s basic needs, let alone cover the kind of care her son might have needed.
“She was extremely hard-working,” Tonya said about her mother, who died a few years ago. “Oftentimes she worked two jobs.” For years she did overnight shifts at the Sheraton hotel in downtown Memphis, where Tonya remembered having occasional meals. Although Tonya described many challenges throughout their childhood, she went on to thrive in a way that her brother never did. Carruthers had anger issues, his sister told the investigator, which worsened as he got older.
After Carruthers turned 20 — an age where mental illness commonly manifests — he became increasingly manic and volatile. On one occasion, according to the report, Carruthers was accused of setting a fire at a house where he was staying. After being restrained and placed in a police car, Carruthers “ate the vinyl off the left rear passenger door, spitting chunks of it on the floor,” according to a police report. A Memphis officer still remembered the episode years later, describing it as a kind of “psychosis.”
At the time, such episodes were attributed to drugs or alcohol. But Carruthers’s legal team was certain that undiagnosed mental illness played a role. Although he repeatedly refused to cooperate with evaluations that could have yielded more specific diagnoses, defense experts nonetheless concluded that he had a type of schizoaffective disorder, whose symptoms included “pervasive delusions and paranoia.”
This was consistent with Carruthers’s behavior at trial, which jurors found off-putting, as well as his ongoing hostility toward his defense attorneys. To date, his case records are filled with declarations, transcripts, and countless letters documenting the fraught relationship with lawyers who were ill-equipped to represent Carruthers — and who Carruthers believed were conspiring against him.
After he was sent to death row, Carruthers became fixated on a belief that he was going to win a lucrative lawsuit against his lawyers. One state post-conviction lawyer memorialized a meeting in which Carruthers showed him a photograph of a green 2006 Jaguar; Carruthers said he planned to buy it with the proceeds from his civil litigation. “He was totally serious about this,” the lawyer wrote. “Tony also told me that it would be okay if the staff poisons him to death, because then his daughter will get a lot of money from the state, and that is his biggest concern.”
Carruthers has always rejected the suggestion that he was not competent to stand trial. While Tonya does not deny that he has shown symptoms of mental illness, she also points out that his paranoia is, in fact, well-founded given what happened in his case.
Decades after Carruthers was sentenced to die, both James Montgomery and Alfredo Shaw gave statements to his defense investigators saying that Carruthers did not participate in the crime. Montgomery pointed at a different man, who died in 2002, as the person who helped kidnap and kill the victims. But the courts refused to allow testing that might confirm this claim.
Shaw, meanwhile, met with a defense investigator on three different occasions while in federal prison in 2011. According to the investigator, he repeated what he had told the TV reporter in 1996, adding that, after the interview aired, police and prosecutors threatened to go after him if he did not revert to his original account. Shaw became visibly tense and upset as he spoke, the investigator wrote.
“I testified falsely at trial because I was fearful that the District Attorney’s Office would retaliate against me.”
The investigator summarized Shaw’s account in a declaration. “I testified falsely at trial because I was fearful that the District Attorney’s Office would retaliate against me,” it read. But Shaw said he was too scared to sign it.
It would take another six years for Carruthers’s attorneys to obtain the first batch of records confirming that Shaw was a paid informant — the same ones that Earley Story later received in the mail. And it was not until 2024 that they obtained additional records casting light on Shaw’s history as a confidential informant, not only for the sheriff’s department, but also for the Memphis Police Department as well. The records showed once again that Shaw was a paid snitch, with every incentive to lie on the stand. By then, Carruthers’s appeals had long been exhausted.
On the eve of his execution, the full story behind Carruthers’s case now stands to be buried with him. The state may put Carruthers to death, Tonya said, but families on both sides still deserve to know the truth of what happened in 1994.
In the meantime, she wants the public to know that he is not the killer who was portrayed in the press. “Please let people know that my brother is not a monster.”
