Lisette Monroe was a 23-year-old new mother in 1988 when she lost her beloved little sister in the most horrific way possible.
Karen Pulley was raped and murdered.
The man who did it was arrested several months later for a string of other rapes and burglaries around Chattanooga. He confessed his crimes to the police. Now, more than 37 years later, Harold Nichols is scheduled to be executed by the state of Tennessee. Monroe can’t wait for it to be over.
In 1988, Ronald Regan was president and “Faith” by George Michael was at the top of the charts. Monroe had just returned to the United States after 3 years of living on an Air Force base in the Philippines with her airman husband.
One of the things she had missed most while overseas was daily contact with her little sister. They had written letters and shared phone calls from the base, but things were not like they had been in back in Chattanooga. The girls were inseparable as children. Even at the ages of 20 and 17, they had spent every Sunday together. After a full day of church activities, the sisters would go out to dinner.
“Karen and I thought we were so grown up,” Monroe recalls. “I think it was something as simple as Wendy’s, but we would be sitting there and talking about our lives that week and how things had gone.”
Back in the U.S. after three years apart, Monroe was planning a trip to Tennessee to catch up on her sister’s life as a 20-year-old college student at Chattanooga State and introduce Pulley to her infant niece.
The longed-for visit would never happen.
“It’s like having a wound, and every time you turn around the band-aid is ripped off again,” she says of the years since the murder. Despite Nichols pleading guilty, there have been endless court battles over his death sentence — constant reminders to Monroe of the worst thing that ever happened.
“It’s almost like we’ve been through 37 years of hell, just over and over and over again,” she says.
Monroe knows people have a tendency to remember departed loved ones as better or more perfect than they were in life, but in Karen’s case, “She really was an angel,” she says. Monroe recalls her sister as “gentle, sweet and innocent.”
One memory that stands out is the two of them dancing together as small children. They were at their grandparents’ house in Virginia for Christmas and had been given matching red nightgowns with fluffy white collars by their grandmother. The family was watching the Lawrence Welk Show when a segment came on where the orchestra would play and audience members would dance.
“I just remember the two of us twirling around the living room in our little princess Christmas dress nighties,” Monroe says. “That image just reminds me so much of the good times with her, and the joy, and how much we loved each other.”
After her sister was murdered, everything changed.
“Chattanooga was my home. And my husband and I moved back to Chattanooga in the early 90s after he got out of the Air Force,” Monroe says. “We thought we were going to be able to make a home there with our two daughters.”
But reminders of the murder were everywhere. Eventually they moved clear across the country to the Pacific Northwest to start over.
Monroe’s mother made the decision to meet with Nichols after he was sentenced to death. She prayed with him and gave him a Bible.
Monroe is still upset about that, mostly because she thinks it has been misconstrued to suggest that her mother would have wanted leniency for Nichols.
“You have to step back a minute and think about the fact that this woman had just lost her baby girl in the most horrific way possible, and she was grieving and still in shock,” Monroe says. “I’ll be honest with you, neither one of my parents were ever the same after Karen’s murder.”
Monroe plans to be in Nashville on Dec. 11, the day scheduled for Nichols’ execution, although she hasn’t yet decided if she will be in the witness room. She knows the pain of losing her sister will never completely go away, but she hopes that Nichols’ death will bring some peace.
“We can focus on the happy memories of Karen,” she says, “and the love that we had for her, and all of that, rather than every time we turn around, we’re reliving her murder.”
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