Earley Story can never forget a name: Alfredo Shaw. It’s a name etched into his memory, not just because he knew Shaw from his long years working at the Shelby County Jail in Memphis, a place everyone called 201 Poplar. Story, a deeply religious man, would often chat with Shaw about God, observing the young man’s swagger that barely masked a deep-seated fear. Their paths, however, became tragically intertwined in a much more profound and devastating way. In 1994, Shaw emerged as a crucial witness in a brutal triple homicide case that had gripped Memphis. A local drug dealer, his mother, and a teenage friend were abducted, murdered, and then buried in a freshly dug grave in a South Memphis cemetery. Prosecutors targeted Tony Carruthers, a 25-year-old recently released from prison, despite having no direct evidence linking him to the horrific crime. Carruthers steadfastly maintained his innocence, but Shaw’s testimony, claiming Carruthers had confessed to him, was enough to send Carruthers to death row in 1996. Like most people, Story initially believed Carruthers was guilty. But in a cruel twist of fate, Story himself was accused of a crime he swore he didn’t commit in January 1997 – selling drugs to an undercover officer. The case against him was so thin that a judge initially dismissed it for lack of probable cause. Yet, in 1999, he was tried, convicted, and given probation. The key witness against him? Alfredo Shaw. Story was convinced he’d been set up, a target for retaliation because of his decade-long role as a whistleblower, exposing violence and abuse within the jail. “I had some enemies within the sheriff’s department,” he admitted, a quiet conviction in his voice. This conviction cost Story his job and his pension, launching him into a two-decade-long fight to clear his name. Then, just a week before Christmas 2017, a letter arrived from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, bearing the elaborate script of “Tony Von Carruthers.”
The contents of that envelope confirmed what Earley Story had suspected all along: Alfredo Shaw was a paid confidential informant. This wasn’t a secret to many in Memphis, but the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office had consistently denied it, even telling Carruthers’s post-conviction attorneys, “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 documents inside detailed drug buys Shaw had conducted for the sheriff’s department between 1991 and 1997. What was conspicuously missing, however, was any mention of Story’s alleged drug sale to Shaw. Story believed this evidence should exonerate him, but the courts disagreed. Story wasn’t entirely sure why Carruthers sent him these records, nor did he fully grasp the nuances of Carruthers’s claim of innocence. But when he learned Tennessee had set an execution date for Carruthers, a deep unease settled over him. In Story’s mind, no one, especially not Carruthers, should face execution based solely on the testimony of a man like Alfredo Shaw. “I’d hate to see him murdered, put to death, when there’s so many open ends,” Story expressed, his words heavy with concern. Tony Carruthers was scheduled to die by lethal injection at 10 a.m. on Thursday, maintaining his innocence for 32 years. On Monday, a determined group of supporters, including his family and advocates from the American Civil Liberties Union, delivered stacks of petitions to Tennessee Governor Bill Lee’s office in Nashville. Despite these urgent pleas for intervention, Governor Lee announced on Tuesday that he would not halt the execution. Carruthers’s attorneys, in their clemency petition, portrayed his case as a profound injustice, a death sentence built on a foundation of lies and a demonstrably false narrative. Among those passionately speaking out against the execution was Story, now 72, joined by another former jailer, Bernard Kimmons. Kimmons, too, claimed he was wrongfully convicted of drug dealing due to Shaw’s testimony. Wearing “Save Tony Carruthers” T-shirts, both men told a Memphis news station that Shaw had a troubling history of sending innocent people to prison. “We’re not the only ones he’s done this to,” Kimmons asserted, underscoring a systemic problem.
The issue of false testimony by jailhouse informants is a devastatingly common thread in wrongful convictions, often exploited to bolster cases where the state’s evidence is flimsy. The Innocence Project has revealed that approximately a quarter of all death row exonerations stem from cases involving a jailhouse snitch. In Carruthers’s case, the absence of physical evidence linking him to the murders was glaring. Fingerprints from the crime scene have never been matched to anyone, and DNA analysis of a blanket found with the victims revealed an unknown male profile. Furthermore, some of the most sensational and horrifying details initially presented at Carruthers’s trial have been discredited over the decades. The pervasive belief that the victims were buried alive, an image that seared itself into Memphis’s collective memory, has long been debunked. While a medical examiner initially testified the victims suffocated, he later retracted his statement, and other experts confirmed there was never any credible evidence to support such a claim. These glaring red flags – a complete lack of physical evidence, the use of unreliable witnesses, and questionable forensic testimony – are tragically familiar hallmarks of wrongful convictions. However, Carruthers’s case carried an additional, uniquely shocking layer of tragedy: he was sent to death row after choosing to represent himself at trial. His attorneys have long contended that this decision sealed his fate from the outset, highlighting his extensive history of undiagnosed mental illness. In their clemency petition, they asserted he “was not competent to stand for trial, much less competent to represent himself.” Carruthers’s self-representation proved particularly disastrous when it came to Alfredo Shaw. By the time of the trial in 1996, Shaw had actually recanted his testimony implicating Carruthers in an explosive TV interview, leading prosecutors to decide against calling him as a witness. But in a cruel twist of irony, Shaw still ended up testifying – not for the state, but, bizarrely, for the defense. As the clemency petition explained, Carruthers, “in an effort to show that the prosecution had secured the indictment with an untrue story,” believed he had to call Shaw to the stand. The outcome was so catastrophic that a judge later overturned the conviction of Carruthers’s co-defendant, James Montgomery, concluding that Carruthers’s self-representation had compromised Montgomery’s right to a fair trial. Montgomery was released from prison in 2015. For Tonya, Carruthers’s sister, who joined the petition delivery in Nashville and plans to witness her brother’s execution, the past 32 years have been an agonizing nightmare. She argues that her brother’s conviction was a classic case of guilt by association, and his prior record made him an easy scapegoat for a crime he didn’t commit. For decades, she lamented, the press uncritically accepted the state’s narrative, overlooking the obvious flaws in the case. “He was already portrayed as a monster in the media before his trial ever started,” she reflected, the pain evident in her voice.
The triple murder that ultimately led to Carruthers’s death sentence began as a terrifying missing persons report. Forty-three-year-old Delois Anderson, a dedicated bank employee and night student, lived in North Memphis with her son Marcellos, her niece Laventhia, and Laventhia’s two young daughters. On the evening of February 24, 1994, Laventhia returned home to an eerie emptiness. Delois’s car was there, her purse and keys too, and a plate of greens sat untouched in the bedroom, suggesting she had just stepped out. Laventhia assumed her aunt would be back soon, but Delois never returned. The next morning, a burning white Jeep Cherokee with gold trim was discovered in Mississippi, traced back to a Memphis man who had lent it to Marcellos “Cello” Anderson. Within a week, the devastating news broke: a suspect had led police to a newly dug grave at Rose Hill cemetery in South Memphis. Authorities exhumed the body, and beneath a casket, under some wooden planks, they uncovered the remains of Delois Anderson, her son Marcellos, and 17-year-old Frederick Tucker. Their hands were bound; Delois had socks wrapped around her neck, and Tucker and Marcellos had been shot. The murders became front-page news in Memphis, sparking a frenzy of media coverage that soon turned into a public relations nightmare for law enforcement. Police had two main suspects: Carruthers and James Montgomery, whose brother had led authorities to the bodies but had since fled the state, leaving prosecutors without a key witness. Without further evidence, a judge dismissed the first-degree murder charges against the two men. Scrambling for a new lead, prosecutors urged police to “get out and beat the bushes,” as one assistant district attorney later testified. Soon after, a new witness emerged: 28-year-old Alfredo Shaw. On March 27, Shaw gave a tape-recorded statement to Memphis Police sergeants, claiming Carruthers committed the murders on behalf of drug dealers who had been robbed by Anderson and Tucker. Shaw even alleged Carruthers tried to recruit him, stating, “I stated to Tony that I did not want to be involved in that.”
Shaw recounted a chilling conversation with Carruthers in the jail’s law library, where Carruthers allegedly confessed the brutal details. He claimed Carruthers and Montgomery went to Anderson’s house for stolen money but found only his mother, Delois. They forced her to call Marcellos, who returned with young Tucker. “Carruthers told me they put the gun to Marcellos and made them all go get in the Cherokee,” Shaw stated. He then claimed Carruthers and Montgomery drove the three victims to Mississippi, where Carruthers shot Anderson and Tucker, then set the Jeep on fire. Delois, still alive, was reportedly driven to the cemetery with the two bodies and thrown into the grave where, according to Shaw, she was screaming before Montgomery pushed her in. Two days later, Shaw repeated this grim story to a grand jury. However, in the two years between the indictment and the trial, Shaw began to waver. In February 1996, he contacted a local TV reporter, and with his identity concealed, recanted his statements on Memphis’s Channel 13. He claimed Shelby County Assistant District Attorney Gerald Harris had coerced and coached him, offering money and promising to dismiss pending criminal charges. Harris, appearing in the same TV segment, dismissed Shaw’s credibility, declaring, “I’m not gonna put that kind of witness on.” He added that all criminal defendants, including Carruthers, “has got a right to a fair trial.” Despite this, Carruthers and Montgomery were tried together in April 1996. The prosecution, discarding Shaw’s original murder-for-hire plot, instead argued the men intended to take over the local drug trade, entirely relying on circumstantial evidence and witnesses who claimed to have seen the defendants with the victims on February 24, 1994. “It was all just stories,” Carruthers’s sister, Tonya, recalled, describing the trial as a media circus and a hostile environment for her family. She remembered her brother being deeply upset after the murders. While he knew Anderson and had conflicts with him, Tonya insisted he would never kill him, let alone hurt his mother, especially since Carruthers’s own daughter was related to the Anderson family. “If I knew that was gonna happen,” Tonya remembered him saying, “I would’ve done anything I could to stop it.”
The trial was presided over by Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Joseph Dailey, who, according to case records, became convinced his life was in danger due to death threats surrounding the case. He imposed an unprecedented gag order on the press and implemented severe security measures in the courtroom and at his home. Judge Dailey was also visibly frustrated with Carruthers before the trial even began. One by one, defense attorneys assigned to the case requested to be removed, citing Carruthers’s erratic and abusive behavior. Ultimately, Dailey refused to appoint any more lawyers, leaving Carruthers to represent himself. “He is the person who put himself in this position,” Dailey later stated when denying Carruthers a retrial. Some of the state’s witnesses knew Carruthers from prison. One ex-convict testified that while working on a cemetery detail with Carruthers, Carruthers remarked that burying a body in a grave would be an excellent way to escape murder charges, stating, “If you ain’t got no body, you don’t have a case.” Another witness spoke of letters Carruthers sent from prison, boasting ominously about a “master plan” for settling scores on the streets: “Everything I do from now on will be well organized and extremely violent.” Carruthers, representing himself, argued that the letters didn’t explicitly 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 Judge Dailey, but the judge allowed the letters as evidence. On April 24, 1996, after the state had rested its case, Carruthers made the fateful decision to call Alfredo Shaw to the stand. His intention was to expose Shaw as a jailhouse snitch who falsely implicated him for money and favors. However, Judge 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, in trying to expose Shaw’s inconsistencies, ironically ended up presenting Shaw’s previous consistent statements to the police and grand jury, solidifying the impression that Shaw had been truthful all along. When Carruthers attempted to pivot and show Shaw had recanted, it backfired spectacularly. Shaw simply explained he only wavered in his accounts because he had been afraid for his life. Carruthers and Montgomery were swiftly convicted. In his closing argument, urging jurors to sentence the men to death, Assistant District Attorney Harris vividly emphasized the victims’ suffering, particularly Delois Anderson’s slow suffocation. “This woman, Delois Anderson, is in a grave, in a pit, alive,” he declared. “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.” After only a few hours, the jury returned with a death sentence.
Years later, long after Carruthers had been on death row for over a decade, an investigator working with his federal lawyers in Nashville began a deep dive into his life and background. This kind of investigation is a crucial step in modern capital defense, aiming to uncover any evidence of trauma, abuse, or mental illness – mitigating factors that could persuade a jury to spare a client’s life. Disturbingly, none of the attorneys initially appointed to represent Carruthers had ever undertaken such an investigation, and Carruthers, representing himself, was incapable of doing so. “Perhaps the most prominent issue affecting Tony’s family is that of severe mental illness,” the investigator later documented in a report. Relatives across generations suffered from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and Carruthers himself displayed symptoms of both. At 14, his mother, Jane Carruthers, had him admitted to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, where he stayed for five days. Soon after, Carruthers was in and out of juvenile detention centers. Staff at one facility recommended he be placed in a “structured therapeutic environment,” a recommendation easier said than done. His mother, a single parent raising four children, worked tirelessly but struggled to provide for basic necessities, let alone the specialized care her son likely needed. “She was extremely hard-working,” Tonya said about her mother, who passed away a few years ago. “Oftentimes she worked two jobs.” Tonya remembered occasional meals at the Sheraton hotel where her mother often worked overnight shifts. While Tonya faced many challenges growing up, she was able to thrive in a way her brother never did. Carruthers, his sister told the investigator, had significant anger issues that worsened with age. After turning 20, an age when mental illness frequently manifests, Carruthers became increasingly manic and volatile. The report detailed an instance where he was accused of setting fire to 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, years later, still remembered the episode, describing it as a form of “psychosis.” At the time, such episodes were often attributed to drug or alcohol use. However, Carruthers’s legal team became convinced that undiagnosed mental illness played a significant role. Although he continuously refused to cooperate with evaluations that might have provided more specific diagnoses, defense experts still concluded he had a type of schizoaffective disorder, characterized by “pervasive delusions and paranoia.” This diagnosis provided a powerful explanation for Carruthers’s behavior at trial, which jurors found off-putting, and his persistent hostility toward his defense attorneys. To this day, his case records are filled with declarations, transcripts, and countless letters detailing the fraught relationships with lawyers who were ill-equipped to represent him and whom Carruthers believed were conspiring against him. After being sent to death row, Carruthers became fixated on the belief that he would win a lucrative lawsuit against his lawyers. One state post-conviction lawyer recounted a meeting where Carruthers showed him a photograph of a green 2006 Jaguar, which he planned to buy 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 consistently rejected the notion that he was not competent to stand trial. While Tonya acknowledged his symptoms of mental illness, she also pointed out that, given the circumstances of his case, his paranoia was, in fact, well-founded. Decades after Carruthers was sentenced to die, both James Montgomery and Alfredo Shaw gave statements to his defense investigators, asserting that Carruthers did not participate in the crime. Montgomery implicated a different individual, who died in 2002, as the person who helped kidnap and kill the victims. However, the courts refused to allow testing that might confirm this claim. Meanwhile, Shaw met with a defense investigator on three separate occasions in 2011 while in federal prison. According to the investigator, Shaw reiterated what he had told the TV reporter in 1996, adding that after the interview aired, police and prosecutors threatened him if he did not revert to his original account. The investigator noted Shaw became visibly tense and upset during their conversations. “I testified falsely at trial because I was fearful that the District Attorney’s Office would retaliate against me,” read a summary of Shaw’s account in a declaration, which Shaw, however, was too scared to sign. It would take another six years for Carruthers’s attorneys to finally obtain the initial batch of records confirming Shaw was a paid informant – the very documents Earley Story later received in the mail. And it wasn’t until 2024 that they obtained additional records shedding light on Shaw’s extensive history as a confidential informant, not just for the sheriff’s department but also for the Memphis Police Department. These records unequivocally showed 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, complex story behind Carruthers’s case now stands to be buried with him. The state may put Carruthers to death, Tonya said, but the families on both sides still deserve to know the truth of what happened in 1994. In the meantime, she wants the public to understand that her brother is not the monstrous killer portrayed in the press. “Please let people know that my brother is not a monster,” she pleaded, a desperate plea for justice and understanding.