The 42-year sentence followed a Walmart stabbing, a cross-country flight and a later solicitation case uncovered inside the Sumner County Jail.
GALLATIN, Tenn. — Nearly two years after a stabbing outside a Gallatin Walmart sent police searching across state lines, Larry Wayne Cole has admitted a series of crimes that prosecutors say continued after his arrest and eventually put his former spouse’s family at risk.
Judge Jennifer Nichols sentenced Cole, 21, to 42 years in prison on Aug. 4 after he pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree murder, solicitation to commit first-degree murder and offenses tied to assaults on two correctional officers. Sumner County District Attorney General Thomas Dean said the case covered two separate efforts directed at Cole’s former spouse: the July 2024 stabbing that began the prosecution and a 2025 plan, developed while Cole was jailed, to have another inmate kill the victim and members of the victim’s family. Cole is to serve the sentence in the Tennessee Department of Correction.
The final disposition answers the biggest legal question that remained after the first attack: whether the criminal case would proceed to trial. It did not. Cole’s guilty pleas resolved the charges described by prosecutors without a jury deciding the evidence. The available sentencing reports do not provide a count-by-count allocation of the 42 years, the terms of any plea agreement, a projected release date or parole information. They do establish that the case ended with admissions covering the attempted killing, the later solicitation and the conduct involving two jail officers.
The first phase began before sunrise on July 30, 2024. Gallatin police were called shortly after 6 a.m. to the Walmart at 1112 Nashville Pike for a domestic dispute involving a stabbing. Officers identified the injured man as Daniel Cole and said he was Larry Cole’s husband. Daniel Cole was reported in stable condition and expected to recover. Larry Cole had already left the scene, and police began looking for him on an attempted first-degree murder allegation.
Prosecutors later said the confrontation at the store was preceded by covert monitoring. According to Dean, Cole placed an electronic surveillance device on the victim’s vehicle and used it to track where he went. The device led Cole to the Walmart parking lot. There, prosecutors said, he found the victim sitting in a vehicle, got inside and stabbed him repeatedly. The later account described Daniel Cole as Larry Cole’s former spouse, reflecting the relationship status used by prosecutors by the time the case was sentenced.
The vehicle Cole used to leave the scene quickly became one of the most recognizable details in the search. Police said he was driving a 2023 Volkswagen Jetta with a Tennessee vanity plate spelling “LARRY.” Alerts carrying that description circulated as investigators tried to locate him. There was no immediate arrest in Tennessee. Instead, authorities said Cole traveled north, turning a local violent-crime investigation into a fugitive search that ended near the Canadian border.
Early on Aug. 5, 2024, U.S. Border Patrol agents were alerted to a vehicle near an old border crossing in the Lowelltown area of Franklin County, Maine. Sheriff Scott Nichols said the alert came at about 12:39 a.m. Agents found the vehicle and identified Cole, then 19, as the Tennessee man wanted in the Gallatin case. Maine officials said the car matched the one connected to the Walmart attack. Cole was delivered to the Franklin County Detention Center and held as a fugitive from justice while Tennessee sought his return. Gallatin police said he had been trying to cross into Canada.
Once Cole was back in Tennessee custody, however, the case acquired a second set of facts. In 2025, while he was being held in the Sumner County Jail awaiting trial, prosecutors said he tried to recruit an inmate who was preparing for release. Dean said Cole wanted that inmate to kill his former spouse and the victim’s entire family at their Wilson County residence. The proposed violence was never carried out because the inmate contacted authorities.
The report triggered a new investigation by the Sumner County Sheriff’s Office and Gallatin Police Department. Investigators recovered maps of the residence, coded references identifying the location and evidence that Cole offered payment for the killings, according to the district attorney. Prosecutors said those materials became important evidence in the solicitation case. Public reports do not state the proposed payment amount, reproduce the coded references, say where the maps were found or identify the reporting inmate. They also do not name anyone else as a charged participant in the plan.
The fact that the inmate went to authorities rather than act on the request is central to the outcome. Prosecutors said law enforcement was able to intervene before anyone at the Wilson County home was attacked. That left the second episode as a solicitation prosecution rather than another completed act of violence. It also meant the same criminal case now included conduct from two different settings: an outdoor retail parking lot where the first victim was physically injured and a jail where investigators said a second attack was being planned through another person.
A third category of conduct arose inside the jail. Dean’s office said Cole assaulted two correctional officers with the Sumner County Sheriff’s Office while incarcerated. The sentencing reports do not state when those assaults happened, what led to them or whether the officers suffered injuries. Because those details have not been made public in the sources reviewed here, the record supports only the narrower fact that Cole pleaded guilty to offenses arising from assaults on two officers and that those offenses were part of the overall sentence.
The prosecution also illustrates how the description of a criminal case changes over time. In the summer of 2024, news reports relied on police statements and correctly described Cole as accused or wanted. The district attorney’s 2026 announcement came after guilty pleas and therefore spoke from a different procedural posture. That distinction matters because the pleas establish criminal responsibility for the offenses Cole admitted, while some surrounding details still come from law enforcement’s reconstruction of how the events unfolded.
Dean’s office publicly thanked the victim and the victim’s family for their cooperation and perseverance through the prosecution. The district attorney also credited the investigation that followed the inmate’s report. Those acknowledgments point to two parts of the case that might otherwise be obscured by the length of the sentence: the original victim survived the stabbing, according to police, and the planned 2025 attack was stopped before it reached the family’s home, according to prosecutors.
Several questions remain unanswered in the public material even after sentencing. Authorities have not released a detailed timeline for the 2025 solicitation, explained exactly how the coded references were interpreted, disclosed the amount allegedly offered for the killings or described the officer assaults in detail. The reports reviewed also do not say whether Cole has initiated an appeal or another post-conviction challenge. None of those gaps changes the central disposition, but they mark the boundary between what prosecutors have publicly documented and what remains undisclosed.
Cole’s 42-year sentence is the latest verified public development in the case. He is slated to serve the term in Tennessee state prison, while no later proceeding altering the judgment has been identified in the sources reviewed for this report.
Author note: Last updated September 9, 2026.