Nicholas Todd Sutton

Nicholas Todd Sutton (July 15, 1961 – February 20, 2020) was an American serial killer who was responsible for murdering two acquaintances and his own grandmother in North Carolina and Tennessee from August to December 1979. Convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for these crimes, Sutton, among three others, later participated in a 1985 murder of a fellow inmate over drugs. For this final crime, he was sentenced to death and executed in 2020 by electric chair. As he grew up, Sutton was taught to use drugs by his father, leading to a drug addiction that would last up until his incarceration. Shortly after, Sutton was detained for questioning, while investigators examined tips in order to locate Mrs. Sutton's body, one of which led them to a property in North Carolina. After a two-day long search, the 58-year-old's body was found at the bottom of the river, with a forensic autopsy determining that she had been hit in the back of the head with a blunt instrument, but later drowned after being thrown into the river. Thinking she was dead, he decided to get rid of the body to avoid being suspected of committing murder.

Following his conviction, Sutton changed his story, claiming that the actual killer was 46-year-old Charles Pomery Almon III, a Knoxville contractor who was pressing him for money. During the investigations, Sutton confessed to yet another murder: that of his 19-year-old childhood friend, John Michael Large, with whom he shared an apartment in Knoxville. He claimed that sometime from August 10 to 22, he had set up a meeting with Large at his aunt's remote farm in Waterville, North Carolina, where he kept a stash of marijuana and white liquor. At that time, the two friends had been involved in a bitter argument over money, as Large supposedly had to use $25,000 to buy cocaine from Ohio, but never got around to doing so.

With Sutton's directions, police quickly located Large's burial site, exhumed the body and sent it to Chapel Hill for an autopsy. On May 14, scuba divers investigating an old rock quarry near Newport uncovered the remains of at least four bodies, one of which was thought to belong to Almon. Like his other victims, it bore what the investigators had termed "Sutton's signature" - it was wrapped up in bags, weighed with cinderblocks and sunk at the bottom of the quarry. The other bodies were determined to be unrelated to the case. Upon hearing of the discovery, Sutton spontaneously confessed to two additional victims: an Alcoa teenager he had apparently killed in July 1978 and buried in North Carolina, and a supposed drug buyer from Atlanta he had also buried on the family farm. As a result of these confessions, the search at the quarry was temporarily called off. In an effort to locate them, prosecutors offered a plea deal with the convict, sparing him a death sentence in exchange for him revealing the burial site locations.

To avoid a possible death sentence, Sutton pleaded guilty to both murder charges, subsequently receiving two more life imprisonment terms. At his sentencing, Sutton claimed that he had committed the killings in a fit of anger and was reckless, willingly accepting his sentence.

In early January 1985, the two got into a dispute over drugs, with Estep threatening to kill Sutton using a homemade knife. In response, Sutton and three other inmates (23-year-old Charles Arnold Freeman; 33-year-old Thomas Street and 22-year-old David Wesley Stufflestreet) decided to arm themselves with knives and take revenge on Estep. On January 15, the quartet went to Estep's cell and stabbed him 38 times. None were charged until May 20, with Sutton, Freeman and Street being charged with first-degree murder while Stufflestreet was charged as an accessory.

Appeals and execution In the decades following his death sentence conviction, Sutton and his lawyers launched repeated appeals to various courts, arguing that his troubled personal life and good behavior after the incident were mitigating factors.

In the end, Sutton's death sentence was confirmed, as Governor Bill Lee rejected his clemency application a week before the scheduled execution date. This was soon followed by a refusal from the Supreme Court to issue a stay of execution. His last words were "I'm just grateful to be a servant of God." Sutton is the most recent person to be executed by electric chair in the United States, as of 2026.