Convicted murderer Rae Carruth will soon be released from a North Carolina prison where he served 17 years for the murder of his pregnant girlfriend, Cherica Adams. In a telephone interview with WBTV, Carruth, 44, said he wants custody of his 18-year-old son Chancellor Lee Adams, the boy he tried to kill.
In a 15-page letter to Saundra Adams, the mother of Cherica Adams, Carruth apologized for her death, but he stopped short of admitting he arranged to have her killed to terminate her pregnancy because she refused to abort his baby.
“I’m apologizing for the loss of her daughter. I’m apologizing for the impairment of my son,” the ex-Carolina Panther wide receiver told WBTV. “I feel responsible for everything that happened. And I just want her to know that truly I am sorry for everything.”
But Adams, pictured with Chancellor, suspects that Carruth, who was convicted in 2001, wants custody of Chancellor so he can get his hands on the fortune donated by kindhearted strangers for Chancellor’s lifelong care.
The star wide receiver was a first-round NFL draft pick in 1997 who signed a four-year, $3.7 million deal that included a $1.3 million signing bonus. He did not play long enough to receive a NFL pension like O.J. Simpson after he is released.
Adams refuses to give up custody of her grandson to a convicted killer who paid hoodlums to take his unborn son’s life.
Chancellor was born with cerebral palsy and brain damage due to lack of oxygen when his mother bled out after she was shot multiple times by Van Brett Watkins in November 1999. Watkins is serving a minimum of 40 years and five months in prison.
“I’ve forgiven Rae already, but to have any type of relationship with him, there does have to be some repentance,” Adams told the Charlotte Observer on Monday. “And I think this opens the door. But I can say definitively he’s not ever going to have custody of Chancellor.
“Chancellor will be raised either by me or, after I’m gone, by someone else who loves him and who knows him,” Adams told the newspaper. “He will never be raised by a stranger — someone he doesn’t know and who tried to kill him.”
Carruth said he wrote the letter to challenge the lies Adams told about him over the years. He said one lie she told was that he never apologized.
He notes that he has apologized several times from behind bars and he accused Adams of misrepresenting his and Cherica’s relationship.
He said aside from a casual sexual encounter with Cherica, “me and your daughter were practically strangers.”
“I should be raising my son. His mother should be raising her son,” Carruth wrote in his letter. “Ms. Adams should not be doing this and I want that responsibility back.
Carruth told WBtV that he is a changed man and he wants to prove it by raising his son when he gets out. His expected release date is October 22, 2018 — a month before his son turns 19.
“If I could change anything, I’d change the whole situation,” he wrote. “His mother would still be here and I wouldn’t be where I’m at. So that’s what I’d want to change. I want the incident to never have happened at all.”
