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#Post#: 420--------------------------------------------------
~ Nicholas Sutton, 20Feb20, (TN) ~
By: BuzzC Date: February 13, 2020, 9:57 pm
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Nicky Sutton's twisted tale may end soon in Tennessee's electric
chair--
Nicholas Todd Sutton killed three people, including his
grandmother, but didn't end up on death row until he helped
fatally stab a child rapist in prison.
January 31, 2020
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Nicholas Todd "Nicky" Sutton killed three people and disposed of
their bodies before he was old enough to buy a beer.
He beat to death his high school friend, shot dead a man he
described as a drug kingpin and threw his own grandmother into a
river to drown — but he didn't get a death sentence until he
fatally stabbed a convicted child rapist in prison.
Sutton was 18 years old when he embarked on the killing spree
that shocked his community, seized the media's attention and
left East Tennesseans wondering just what he was capable of. The
teen went on to relish the spotlight as he led detectives from
two states on searches for the corpses of people who never
really existed.
Four decades later, Sutton is set to die Feb. 20. His long and
tangled story may come to an end quickly, in a sparse room with
bright lights and Tennessee's electric chair.
“If you don’t execute Nicky Sutton, then why have the death
penalty?” said Martin Coffey, a former Hamblen County Sheriff’s
Office detective who worked the case from the start.
“If you don’t execute him, who do you execute? He brutally
murdered four people, and they’re not all from the drug
industry. His grandmother raised him, and yet he put her in a
watery grave.”
Sutton was born July 15, 1961, to a mother who abandoned him in
infancy and a father who was mentally ill, violent and verbally
abusive. When the father wasn't being held in jails or mental
institutions, Sutton's attorneys say, he abused drugs and
alcohol, taught his son to do the same and lashed out with
beatings at home.
After Sutton's father died suddenly when Nicky was a teen, his
widowed grandmother adopted him. Dorothy Sutton taught third
grade at John Hay Elementary School in Morristown and had a
house in Hamblen County's Lowland community.
"She was very, very sweet," said Hamblen County Sheriff Esco
Jarnagin. "She was just a grandmother to the whole neighborhood.
Everybody knew her and loved her."
Nicky Sutton began using drugs at a young age and continued
throughout adolescence. He picked fights at school before
dropping out, kept pit bulls chained up in his backyard and
claimed to spend as much as $100 a week on ****. His grandmother
lavished him with gifts, buying him a pickup truck and a plot of
land in North Carolina, only to have him turn around and sell
them for cash.
In 1979, Sutton showed up to his family's annual Christmas Eve
dinner without his grandmother. The 18-year-old came with
scratches on his face and an armful of presents she had wrapped.
He insisted she would make the drive from Morristown to
Knoxville after dark before claiming she had left the house on a
date and never returned.
Neither story sounded like Dorothy Sutton, and her two daughters
started to suspect their nephew. They reported her missing after
she didn't show up Christmas Day.
Facing questions from detectives who found blood stains in the
carpet at his grandmother's house, Nicky Sutton first told one
tale, then another.
Investigators ultimately concluded the teen knocked his
58-year-old grandmother unconscious with a stick of firewood,
wrapped her in a blanket and trash bags, chained her to a cinder
block and threw her alive from Hale's Bridge into the Nolichucky
River.
After searchers pulled her body from the icy waters Dec. 29, an
autopsy found she had drowned in the river some 7 miles from her
home.
The retired schoolteacher might have made the mistake of telling
her grandson "no" when he asked for money. She also might have
found out he had already killed John Large, his friend from high
school who had been missing for four months, and Charles Almon,
a bankrupt contractor whose gold Jaguar had turned up abandoned
at a Newport hotel.
During his murder trial, Sutton took the stand and stunned the
jury when he claimed he and Large, 19, had pooled their cash
with Almon, 46, in a bid to buy $75,000 worth of ****. But Large
disappeared with the money, he said, and Almon soon began
demanding payment from Sutton.
In Sutton's telling, he returned home Dec. 22 to discover his
grandmother lying bloodied on the living room floor. Suddenly,
Almon struck him from behind and began tearing at his face
before Sutton managed to grab the man's gun and fatally shoot
him. Then, Sutton said, he wrapped up the bodies of Almon and
his grandmother and, after saying a quick prayer, threw them
both in the Nolichucky River.
"He went through quite a story, which did not turn out to be
true at all," Coffey said.
Jurors didn't buy it either. They convicted Sutton of
first-degree murder for his grandmother's killing, and he was
sentenced to life in prison.
Coffey, then a fresh-faced detective, was 21 years old when the
case began. His inexperience was allayed by the knowledge of
Charles Long, the chief deputy of the Hamblen County Sheriff's
Office who would later be elected sheriff, and Ray Presnell, a
special agent with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
Long, in particular, developed a special relationship with young
Nicky Sutton. The teen seemed to look up to the seasoned
investigator, who served as a kind of father figure, Coffey
recalled. It was to Long that Sutton uttered most of his
confessions — stories that turned out to be a mixture of
reality, half-truths and elaborate fabrications.
"Nicky was a well-mannered, very polite young man," Coffey said.
"He was somebody who, had you met him out on the street, you
might think he was a pleasant young man to talk to. However,
when you got to know him and be around him, you began to realize
there was a very cold side to Nicky."
Coffey saw that side of Sutton when the teen struck a deal after
his trial to lead detectives straight to Large's body — buried
on land owned by Sutton's aunt in Waterville, North Carolina —
to avoid a death sentence.
"As we found the body, he said, 'You're going to see he's got a
tobacco stick sticking out of his mouth,' " said Coffey, who
went on every search Sutton led. "He said that was where he had
rammed the tobacco stick back through his mouth up into his
skull. One of his attorneys ran over to him, grabbed him by the
arm, swung him around and said, 'Don't speak until I tell you to
speak again.'
"Nicky Sutton said something like, 'What? We've got a deal.' In
that moment, he acted like he could have been eating a sandwich.
It didn't mean anything to him that he had done this to his
friend."
When it came to Almon, Sutton told only part of the truth.
Authorities realized they had wasted weeks dragging the
Nolichucky River in search of Almon’s body when investigators
working on an unrelated homicide in neighboring Cocke County
found it by accident in a flooded rock quarry. Almon's body,
like that of Dorothy Sutton, had been wrapped up with chains,
weighted with a cinder block and dropped into the water.
Detectives came to call the method the "Sutton signature."
"He told me, 'I never thought you would find it,' and said that
God must have willed it that we would find that body," Long told
the News Sentinel in May 1980. "I asked him if there were any
more."
Sutton said there were. He claimed he had killed two more people
and gave confessions complete with names, ages and the locations
of their bodies. Authorities took Sutton from jail to his aunt's
property in North Carolina and a soybean field in East
Tennessee, but once there he seemed to come down with a case of
amnesia. Investigators employed forensic experts and
contemplated using hypnosis, polygraph tests and so-called truth
serums.
Nothing worked, and detectives — with no evidence the supposed
victims existed — determined Sutton simply had a vivid
imagination.
Long told the newspaper that Sutton enjoyed the media attention
and wanted to go down in history as an outlaw.
"I told him outlaws always get caught in the end," Long said.
"And he said, 'Yeah, but no one would know they were outlaws if
nobody wrote about them.'"
Prosecutors didn't seek the death penalty for Sutton in his
grandmother's killing, and he received two more life sentences
when he pleaded guilty in 1981 to killing Large and Almon at his
aunt's North Carolina cabin.
He started serving time at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary
before being transferred to Morgan County Regional Correctional
Facility.
State prisons are fraught with violence. Sutton hadn't served
five years when an inmate saw him and another man go into the
cell of Carl Estep, convicted of raping a 9-year-old Knoxville
girl, while the jailer assigned to the area was away. As Estep's
roommate left their cell, someone turned up the volume of a TV
or radio.
Corrections officers soon found Estep bleeding in his bunk,
where he died of 38 stab wounds Jan. 15, 1985.
Sutton and Estep had been in a dispute over drugs, and Estep
said he had a knife and would kill Sutton. Searches of Estep's
cell after he was killed turned up two homemade knives lying in
the bunk — and a third hidden under a lamp.
Sutton ended up being charged with murder alongside two other
inmates, one of whom was acquitted while the other received a
life sentence and is now out on parole.
Yet jurors sentenced Sutton to die, finding his history of
violence and the nature of the killing to be aggravating
circumstances that warranted the death penalty.
Decades of appeals followed. A number of legal challenges remain
pending.
If Sutton is executed as scheduled, he may not go down in
history as an outlaw but as just another inmate to die in a
string of executions since Tennessee resumed capital punishment
in August 2018.
He would be the seventh man executed by the state since then,
the 139th person put to death here since 1916 and the only
Tennessean ever executed for killing a fellow inmate.
Sutton's legal team has pleaded for mercy in recent weeks,
arguing the 58-year-old who's spent most of his life behind bars
is far from the troubled young man who committed such egregious
crimes a generation ago. His attorneys say he's worked hard to
transform himself into a model inmate with a strong Christian
faith who is beloved within prison walls. He has even saved
lives while incarcerated, they say, protecting corrections
officers from inmate violence and caring for the sick on death
row.
"Nick is deeply remorseful for his crimes, for the lives he has
taken, and for the pain that he has caused his victims'
families," Tony Eden, a retired corrections official who credits
Sutton with saving his life during a prison riot, wrote in an
affidavit. "If Nick Sutton was released tomorrow, I would
welcome him into my home and invite him to be my neighbor."
A long-shot clemency petition filed with Gov. Bill Lee says that
five jurors who sentenced Sutton to die now support a life
sentence. It also includes statements from some of the family
members of some of his victims — Estep's oldest daughter,
Sutton's own cousin and two of Almon's relatives — who feel the
same way.
But not all relatives of Sutton's victims agree.
"I'm happy for him," said Amy Large Cook, John Large's sister
and only surviving immediate family member. "Maybe he won't go
to hell."
Cook said Sutton still deserves to die. She plans to be at
Riverbend Maximum Security Institution when he sits in the
electric chair, though only Estep's family is allowed to watch.
Thomas Davis, the longtime husband of Dorothy Sutton's only
surviving daughter, said his wife did not want to talk about the
execution. He said Sutton is an evil man who has tormented the
family for years and that no one he knows keeps up with the
case.
“We’ve written him off, and he’s just totally somebody who
shouldn’t even be part of society," Davis said. "He won’t, I
guess, in another month or so.”
HTML http://ktla.com/2020/02/20/convicted-killer-who-saved-the-lives-of-3-corrections-officers-is-set-to-be-executed-in-tennessee/
#Post#: 421--------------------------------------------------
Re: ~ Nicholas Sutton, 20Feb20, (TN) ~
By: BuzzC Date: February 20, 2020, 7:54 pm
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Tennessee execution: Nicholas Todd Sutton executed by electric
chair--
Thursday, February 20, 2020
Tennessee executed death row inmate Nicholas Todd Sutton in the
electric chair Thursday night, marking the fifth time the state
has used the method since 2018.
Sutton, 58, was pronounced dead at 7:26 p.m. CST, according to
the Tennessee Department of Corrections.
He was the 139th person put to death in Tennessee since 1916,
and the seventh inmate executed since the state resumed capital
punishment in August 2018.
Sutton was convicted of killing four people, including his
grandmother Dorothy Sutton, his high school friend John Large
and Charles Almon. He was sentenced to death for his involvement
in the fatal stabbing of fellow inmate Carl Estep in 1985.
Tennessee was originally set to execute Sutton in 2015. Legal
delays blocked that date.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied a request for a stay minutes
before he was put to death.
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