NASHVILLE, TN– Lisette Munro was a 23-year-old new mother in 1988 when she lost her beloved little sister in the most horrific way possible.
Karen Polley was raped and murdered.
The man who did it was arrested several months later for a series of other rapes and robberies around Chattanooga, Tennessee. He confessed his crimes to the police. Now, more than 37 years later, Harold Nichols is scheduled to be executed in Tennessee. Monroe can’t wait for it to be over.
In 1988, Ronald Reagan was president and George Michael’s song “Faith” 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 pilot husband.
One of the things she missed most while abroad was the daily contact with her little sister. They wrote letters and exchanged phone calls from the base, but things were not the same in Chattanooga. The girls were inseparable as children. Even when they were 20 and 17, they spent every Sunday together. After a full day of church activities, the sisters were going out to dinner.
“Karen and I thought we were too old,” Monroe recalls. “I think it was something as simple as Wendy’s, but we were sitting there and talking about our lives that week and how things had gone.”
Returning to the United States after three years of separation, Monroe was planning a trip to Tennessee to follow her sister’s life as a 20-year-old college student at Chattanooga State and to introduce Polly to her infant niece.
The long-awaited visit will never happen.
“It’s like having a wound, and every time you turn around, the bandage comes off again,” she says of the years after the murder. Although Nichols pleaded guilty, there were endless court battles over his death sentence — a constant reminder to Monroe of the worst thing that ever happened.
“It’s like we’ve been through 37 years of hell, over and over again,” she says.
Monroe knows that people have a tendency to remember their departed loved ones as better or more perfect than they were in life, but in Karen’s case, “she was truly an angel,” she says. Monroe remembers her sister as “sweet, kind and innocent.”
One memorable memory is of them dancing together as young children. They were at their grandparents’ house in Virginia for Christmas and their grandmother had given them matching red nightgowns with soft white collars. The family was watching a Lawrence Welk show when a clip came on where the orchestra would play and the audience would dance.
“I just remember the two of us running around the living room wearing our little princess Christmas nighties,” Monroe says. “This photo reminds me so much of the good times I had with her, the joy, and how much we loved each other.”
After her sister was killed, everything changed.
“Chattanooga was my home,” Monroe says. “My husband and I moved back to Chattanooga in the early 1990s after he got out of the Air Force.” “We thought we would be able to build a home there with our two daughters.”
But reminders of the killing were everywhere. Eventually they moved 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 the Bible. Monroe remains upset by this, mostly because she believes it was misconstrued to indicate that her mother wanted to go easy on Nichols.
“You have to step back a minute and think about the fact that this woman had just lost her baby in the most horrific way possible, and she was grieving and still in shock,” Monroe says. “I’ll be honest with you, neither of my parents were the same after Karen was killed.”
Monroe plans to be in Nashville on Dec. 11, the day Nichols is scheduled to be executed, although she has not yet decided whether she will be in the witness room. She knows the pain of losing her sister will never completely go away, but she hopes Nichols’ death will bring some peace.
“We can focus on the happy memories of Karen, and the love we had for her, and all that, instead of reliving the memory of her murder every time we turn around,” she says.