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 andthrew his own grandmother into a river to drown—but he didn't get a death sentence until he fatally stabbeda convicted child rapistin 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 teenwent 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 setto die Feb. 20. His long and tangled story may come to an end quickly, in a sparse room with bright lights and Tennessee'selectric 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.”
Drugs and beatings
Sutton was born July 15, 1961, to a mother who abandoned him in infancy and a father who was mentally ill, violentand verbally abusive. When the father wasn't being held in jails or mental institutions, Sutton's attorneys say, he abused drugs and alcohol, taughthis 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 hada house in Hamblen County's Lowland community.
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"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 cocaine. 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. Heinsistedshe would make the drive from Morristown to Knoxville after dark before claimingshe 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.
Shifting stories
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 concludedthe 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.
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The retired schoolteacher might have made the mistake of telling her grandson"no" when he asked for money. She also might have found outhe 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 cocaine. 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.
'Outlaws always get caught'
Coffey, then a fresh-faced detective, was21 years oldwhen 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, andRay 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."
Coffeysaw that side of Sutton when the teen struck a deal after his trial to lead detectives straight to Large's body — buriedon 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 weeksdragging the Nolichucky River in search of Almon’s bodywhen investigators working on an unrelated homicidein neighboring co*cke County found itby 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 intothe water. Detectives came to call the methodthe "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 peopleand gave confessions complete with names, ages and the locations of their bodies. Authorities took Sutton from jailto 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 — determinedSutton simplyhad a vivid imagination.
Long told the newspaper that Sutton enjoyed the media attentionand 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.'"
Three shivs
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 1981to killing Large and Almon at his aunt's North Carolina cabin. He started serving time at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary before beingtransferred to Morgan County Regional Correctional Facility.
State prisons arefraught with violence. Sutton hadn't served five yearswhen 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 homemadeknives lying in the bunk — and a third hidden under a lamp.
Sutton ended up beingcharged 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 circ*mstances that warranted the death penalty.
Decades of appeals followed. A number of legal challenges remain pending.
A long shot at mercy
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'sworked 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 correctionsofficial who creditsSutton withsavinghis life during a prison riot, wrote in an affidavit. "If Nick Sutton was released tomorrow, I would welcome him into my home and invitehim to be my neighbor."
A long-shot clemency petition filed with Gov. Bill Lee says thatfive 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 yearsand 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.”
Reach Travis Dorman at travis.dorman@knoxnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @travdorman.
