Christina Riggs Execution + Last Meal + Last Words on Arkansas Death Row

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]After all I just went and got in the bed.

[00:00:03]Did my best.

[00:00:06]I I used a pillow to suffocate them.

[00:00:13]On the night of November 4th, 1997, in a quiet apartment in Sherwood, Arkansas, a woman named Christina Marie Riggs tucked her 5-year-old son and her 2-year-old daughter into bed, and then, with calculated, deliberate steps, she ended both of their lives using the very medical knowledge she had spent years acquiring to save people.

[00:00:32]This is, without question, one of the most chilling cases in the history of the American criminal justice system, not simply because of the crime itself, but because of everything that came after.

[00:00:43]The confession, the trial, the sentence, and the fact that, at every step of the way, Christina Riggs did not fight for her life. She asked for it to be taken.

[00:00:53]She became the first woman executed in Arkansas in over 150 years. She was 28 years old. She was the youngest woman executed in the United States in the modern era of capital punishment, and when they strapped her to that gurney, she didn't flinch. She didn't beg. She whispered three words, "I love you, my babies."

[00:01:12]Before we get to those final moments, we need to go back, all the way back, to the woman behind the crime. Hit subscribe. Turn on the notification bell so you won't miss our deep dive drops, because this story doesn't start in that apartment. It starts decades earlier in the life of a girl who never quite got what she needed from the world. Stay with me, because this story will challenge everything you think you know about justice, mental illness, and what it means for a state to execute someone who asked to die.

[00:01:43]Christina Marie Thomas was born on September 2nd, 1971, in Lawton, Oklahoma, and raised in Oklahoma City.

[00:01:51]From the outside, her early childhood was unremarkable, just another girl growing up in middle America. but behind closed doors, something far heavier was being pressed onto her shoulders. From the time she was a young child, Christina was sexually abused, first by her stepbrother and later [clears throat] by a neighbor. She never reported it. She told no one, not for years. She simply absorbed the damage in silence, the way children so often do when the adults around them failed to protect them.

[00:02:19]By the time she was 14, she had turned to alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana to dull the weight of what had been done to her.

[00:02:27]Two years later, at 16, she became pregnant. She carried that baby to term and gave the child up for adoption, a decision she would rarely speak of afterward, but one that clearly left a mark. She carried more than one kind of loss into adulthood. Despite everything, Christina pushed forward. She went back to school, earned her high school diploma, and remarkably, became a licensed practical nurse.

[00:02:51]For a girl who had endured the things she had, this was no small achievement.

[00:02:55]She found work at a Veterans Administration Hospital and later took on a second part-time position doing home care nursing. She was, by every professional standard, competent, reliable, and dedicated, but inside, the fractures were deepening.

[00:03:10]In 1991, Christina became pregnant again, this time by a man named Timothy Thompson, an airman stationed at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. When she told him she was carrying his child, he denied paternity and left the state, returning to Minnesota. She was alone again. She reconnected with a former boyfriend, a sailor named John Riggs, who had recently returned on leave.

[00:03:32]They resumed their relationship and in July 1993, they married. The wedding night itself ended in a miscarriage. The marriage that followed was, by Christina's own account, marked by abuse. She later told investigators that John had physically struck her young son, Justin, punching the boy in the stomach. That, she said, was the moment she ended the marriage. By the time their daughter Shelby Alexis Riggs was born in December 1994, the relationship was already deteriorating. In 1995, following the devastating Oklahoma City bombing, a tragedy Christina had worked close to as a nurse, the family relocated to Sherwood, Arkansas, to be near Christina's mother, Carol. She secured a new position at Arkansas Heart Hospital and tried, once again, to rebuild her life, but the foundation beneath her was crumbling. The divorce left her as the sole provider for two children with two different fathers, both of whom were largely absent from their lives. Child support payments were inconsistent at best. To compensate, Christina worked extra shifts through a temporary nursing agency on top of her regular hospital hours. "The more you work, the more you need daycare," she later said in a prison interview. "Then you feel bad about having them in daycare."

[00:04:47]She was, by all accounts, unraveling.

[00:04:50]She was severely overweight, later described in court testimony as weighing approximately 280 lb, which, combined with her already damaged sense of self-worth, fed a depression that had been growing inside her for years.

[00:05:03]Her doctor had prescribed her Prozac.

[00:05:05]She was struggling to pay bills. She was exhausted, isolated, and increasingly convinced that no one around her, including her own family, truly wanted the burden of her children.

[00:05:16]In her mind, a narrative had taken hold, one that was deeply distorted, but, to her, felt like absolute truth. "Nobody wants them. When I'm gone, they will be separated. They will suffer. The kindest thing I can do is take them with me."

[00:05:30]That thought would become the engine of the worst night of her life. On the morning of November 4th, 1997, Christina Riggs went to work at Arkansas Heart Hospital for what would be the last time. Over the course of that shift, she moved quietly and deliberately. She filled a prescription for the powerful antidepressant Elavil, known generically as amitriptyline, at her local pharmacy.

[00:05:52]She then used her access as a hospital nurse to take potassium chloride and morphine from the facility's medication supply. These were not impulsive decisions, prosecutors would later argue that she had been planning this for two to three weeks.

[00:06:05]Potassium chloride is one of the three drugs used in lethal injections across the United States. A nurse with Christina's experience knew exactly what it could do. That afternoon, she clocked out and left the building.

[00:06:18]She stopped at her mother Carol's house to pick up Justin and Shelby, who had been staying there while she worked.

[00:06:23]Carol, a woman who knew her daughter well, later said she felt something was wrong that afternoon, a strange unease she couldn't name. She asked Christina if everything was okay. Christina said yes, handed her some money she owed, gathered the children, and left.

[00:06:39]That evening, back at the apartment, Christina fed her children, spent time with them, and maintained every appearance of a normal night. She bathed them, she played with them, she was, by all accounts, warm and affectionate. And then, once the children were ready for bed, she dissolved the Elavil tablets in water and gave the mixture to both Justin and Shelby to drink. She later told police she told Justin it was a reward, something sweet before bed.

[00:07:05]Within a short time, the sedative effects of the drug began to take hold.

[00:07:10]Both children grew drowsy. When they were sufficiently sedated, Christina filled a syringe with undiluted potassium chloride and injected the substance into Justin's neck. What happened next she would recount in her own words in a tape-recorded confession less than 48 hours later.

[00:07:25]She had made a critical error. A nurse of her experience should have known potassium chloride must be diluted before injection. Undiluted, it does not cause peaceful unconsciousness, it causes an immediate, agonizing burning sensation throughout the body as it disrupts the heart's electrical signals.

[00:07:43]Justin did not slip away quietly. He woke up. He screamed. He convulsed. His 5-year-old body writhed in pain he could not understand. Christina panicked. She grabbed a syringe of morphine and injected him hoping it would stop his suffering. It dulled the pain, but it did not stop his breathing. He was still alive. She picked up a pillow.

[00:08:03]The medical examiner would later officially record Justin Dalton Thomas's cause of death as suffocation.

[00:08:09]She then turned to her daughter, Shelby, 2 years old, still under the heavy sedation of the Elavil, barely responsive. She could not bring herself to use the needle again, not after what she had just witnessed with Justin.

[00:08:21]Instead, she pressed a pillow over Shelby's small face. Under the influence of the drugs, Shelby offered almost no resistance. Within moments, she was gone.

[00:08:31]Christina then carried both of her children's bodies to her bed. She laid them side by side, pulled a blanket over them, and arranged them carefully as though simply putting them to sleep. She sat down and wrote three letters by hand, one to her mother, one to her sister, and one to her ex-husband, John Rakes.

[00:08:50]In the letter to her mother, she explained her reasoning. She wrote that she could not bear the thought of Justin and Shelby being separated after her death, placed in different homes because they had different fathers. She wrote that she did not want them to grow up knowing their mother had taken her own life. She framed what she had done as an act of protection. Then she swallowed 28 Elavil tablets, by clinical standards, a potentially lethal dose. She then injected herself with enough undiluted potassium chloride to kill five adults, according to later forensic estimates.

[00:09:20]She collapsed to the floor beside the bed where her children lay, but the potassium chloride burned a hole in the tissue of her arm before it could reach her veins. It never entered her bloodstream. The Elavil rendered her unconscious, but not fatally so.

[00:09:34]Christina Rakes did not die that night, the next day, November 5th, 1997, Christina failed to show up for work.

[00:09:42]Her mother, Carol, waited. She called.

[00:09:45]No answer. She drove to the apartment and let herself in. What she found destroyed her. Her grandchildren, Justin and Shelby, were lying in the bed, still and lifeless, and on the floor beside them, her daughter, unconscious, barely breathing.

[00:10:01]Carol called 911. The dispatcher heard her voice crack as she reported, "My daughter and her babies are dead." But paramedics, upon arrival, found that Christina was still alive. They worked quickly to stabilize her and transported her by ambulance to Baptist Memorial Hospital. Doctors pumped her stomach and administered emergency treatment. By 5:30 that afternoon, she had been stabilized.

[00:10:24]Meanwhile, detectives were already inside the apartment. They found the syringes. They found the empty Elavil bottle. They found traces of morphine and potassium chloride. And they found the three handwritten letters laying out, in Christina's own words, exactly what she had done and why. A hold was immediately placed on Christina's room.

[00:10:44]No visitors. No family contact.

[00:10:47]An attorney retained by her family called police and explicitly instructed them not to question Christina without him present. The police disregarded that instruction. On the morning of November 6th, detectives entered her hospital room. They read her Miranda rights, turned on a tape recorder, and began asking questions. In less than 8 minutes, Christina Riggs confessed to everything. She described the medications. She described her planning.

[00:11:11]She described the injection that woke Justin and his screaming and what she did to stop it. She described how she then turned to Shelby. She described placing them in her bed.

[00:11:21]She described the letters. Her voice on that recording was not the voice of a woman trying to conceal anything. It was the voice of a woman who had already decided she was done. By the end of that day, Christina was transferred from the hospital to the Pulaski County Jail. She was formally charged with two counts of capital murder.

[00:11:39]When Christina Riggs went to trial at the Pulaski County Circuit Court in June 1998, there was never any question of what she had done. The tape-recorded confession was undeniable. The physical evidence was extensive. The letters were in her own handwriting.

[00:11:54]Her defense attorneys entered a plea of not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. They argued that Christina suffered from severe chronic depression, the product of a lifetime of trauma, abuse, failed relationships, poverty, and isolation. Expert psychiatric witnesses testified on her behalf, stating that she had been in a state of major depressive episode at the time of the killings, and that her distorted thinking had led her to genuinely believe what she was doing was an act of mercy. One psychiatrist testified that Christina was a mentally ill woman who had come to believe, in her fractured state of mind, that killing her children before herself was an act of love. She did not want them to face a world without her. The prosecution told a different story.

[00:12:37]Prosecuting attorney Larry Jegley argued that Christina had not acted out of illness, but out of selfishness. He told the jury that she had grown to view her children as a burden, an obstacle to the life she wanted. He pointed to reports that she had left the children alone in the apartment at night while she went to bars to compete in karaoke contests. He argued that her suicide attempt was staged, a theatrical gesture with no real intent to die. He called her plan premeditated and calculated.

[00:13:04]And said the evidence of weeks-long preparation confirmed as much. The jury, seven women and five men, deliberated for just 55 minutes on June 30th, 1998.

[00:13:16]They returned a verdict of guilty on both counts of capital murder.

[00:13:19]Christina collapsed in the courtroom when the verdict was read. Then came the sentencing phase, and this is where the case took a turn that would define everything that followed.

[00:13:28]During sentencing, Christina's defense attorneys attempted to argue for her life. She stopped them. She stood in open court, looked at the jury, and said the following words, and she meant every one of them. "I want to die. I want to be with my babies. I started this out 7 months ago, and I want you to give me the death penalty." The jury granted her request. Judge Marion Humphrey set an initial execution date of August 15th, 1998. When she heard the date, Christina reportedly said, "I'm going home to be with my babies."

[00:13:59]Following sentencing, Christina was transferred to a facility that had not previously existed in the state of Arkansas, because no woman had ever been placed on death row in the state's modern history. A three-cell female death row section was established specifically for her at the McPherson Unit in Newport, Jackson County. She was the only woman in it.

[00:14:19]By all documented accounts, her conditions were not harsh. She was treated with basic dignity. She was allowed regular visits from her mother, Carol, who came to see her every day from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. She could watch television, read books, several per week, supplied by her mother, and she was permitted limited personal grooming. She was allowed to curl her hair and wear a small amount of makeup, but inside the quiet cell, the weight of what she had done never lifted.

[00:14:46]"Sometimes I can't think about them," she told the Arkansas Times in 1999.

[00:14:51]"It's like they're being ripped away from me all over again." She also faced something she had not anticipated, the hostility of other inmates. She was spat on. She was verbally attacked. Women who had committed violent crimes themselves drew a clear line between their offenses and hers. In prison culture, killing your own children occupies a category of its own.

[00:15:12]Her mental state was fragile, and the legal system, aware of this, required her to undergo a full psychological evaluation before they would accept her waiver of appeals.

[00:15:22]In July 1998, the Arkansas Supreme Court reviewed the matter and accepted the finding that she was legally competent to make the decision to drop her appeals. She was not arguing for freedom. She was not arguing for mercy.

[00:15:35]She was asking the state to complete what she had failed to do herself on November 4th, 1997.

[00:15:41]The Arkansas Supreme Court upheld her conviction and death sentence in a 6-2 1 ruling. She waived every remaining appeal. Governor Mike Huckabee reviewed the case and declined to intervene, acknowledging publicly that the decision was, in his words, uncomfortable, particularly because of her gender and because her victims were children, but he said he would weigh the matter as objectively as the process required.

[00:16:04]No application for clemency was ever filed. Christina Riggs had forbidden her attorney from filing one.

[00:16:10]On Sunday, April 30th, 2000, 3 days before her scheduled execution, Christina Marie Riggs was flown from the McPherson Unit to the Cummins Unit, the Arkansas State Prison Complex outside Pine Bluff, where executions are carried out. The transfer was quiet and without incident. She did not resist. She did not break down. She was placed in a pre-execution holding area and began the final days of her life.

[00:16:35]Her mother, Carol, was permitted to be with her during those final days. As she had been throughout her time at McPherson, the visits were conducted through a clear plastic window in the visitation hall.

[00:16:46]On the night before her execution, Christina was offered her last meal, a privilege extended to every condemned inmate in the state of Arkansas. She chose a supreme pizza, a garden salad, pickled okra, strawberry shortcake, and cherry lemonade.

[00:17:01]She received no other visitors that night, though she was permitted to. She spent the final hours in that holding cell with her thoughts, her letters, her guilt, and whatever peace she had managed to locate in the 2 and 1/2 years she had spent preparing to die. There was no last minute appeal, no clemency request, no attorney rushing to a courthouse at midnight, no protesters outside holding signs with her name.

[00:17:25]Christina Riggs did not want to be saved. On the evening of Tuesday, May 2nd, 2000, the execution of Christina Marie Riggs was scheduled to begin between the hours of 8:00 and 9:00 p.m.

[00:17:36]at the Cummins Unit in Varner, Arkansas.

[00:17:38]The process began at approximately 9:00 p.m., but it did not go smoothly at first.

[00:17:43]The execution team struggled for approximately 15 to 18 minutes to locate a suitable vein for the insertion of the intravenous catheters required to administer the lethal injection.

[00:17:53]Christina's veins, compromised from the potassium chloride self-injection she had survived in 1997, were difficult to access.

[00:18:01]She remained on the gurney throughout this process, conscious, calm, and cooperative. When it became clear that the usual sites were not viable, Christina herself agreed to have the catheters placed in the veins of her wrists. She offered no complaint. She offered no protest. Then she was strapped down. Witnesses were present as required by Arkansas law. The room was quiet. Christina Riggs opened her mouth and delivered her final statement, words she had almost certainly prepared, carried with her, rehearsed in the silence of that cell.

[00:18:33]"There is no way, no words can express how sorry I am for taking the lives of my babies. No way I can make up for or take away the pain I have caused everyone who knew and loved them." She paused. "I hope someday maybe everyone can forgive me. Now I can be with my babies as I always intended." And then, as the lethal solution began to flow through the catheters in her wrists, she whispered the last words she would ever say on this earth, "I love you, my babies."

[00:19:00]Her bottom lip quivered. She closed her eyes. She lay almost perfectly still.

[00:19:06]Christina Marie Riggs was pronounced dead at 9:28 p.m. Central Daylight Time on May 2nd, 2000. She was 28 years old.

[00:19:14]She was the first woman executed in Arkansas since 1845, 155 years prior.

[00:19:20]She was the fifth woman executed in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

[00:19:27]Her attorney, John Wesley Hall, spoke to reporters in the aftermath. He said, "It started out as a suicide and ended as a suicide." The execution of Christina Marie Riggs ignited a debate that has never fully been resolved.

[00:19:41]Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, argued strenuously that the state had effectively participated in assisted suicide, that executing a mentally ill woman who wanted to die was not justice.

[00:19:53]It was the state completing a task she had failed to complete herself. They called for a reprieve. They were denied.

[00:20:00]Psychiatric professionals who had reviewed the case noted that her decision to waive appeals was itself a symptom of her illness, that a person in a state of profound depression and suicidal ideation cannot be considered fully competent to make life or death legal decisions, regardless of how a court rules. Others pointed to unanswered questions about the integrity of her confession.

[00:20:20]The statement was taken while she was recovering from a drug overdose, having just ingested 28 powerful antidepressant tablets without her attorney present the morning after the crime. Her blood levels had not been tested or cleared before police entered that hospital room.

[00:20:35]The prosecution, for its part, maintained that Christina Riggs was a woman who had calculated the deaths of her children over several weeks, who had used her professional training to plan and execute those deaths, and who had never shown the kind of remorse that might suggest genuine mental illness rather than cold premeditation. The jury agreed, the state agreed, and ultimately, so did she.

[00:20:57]Justin Dalton Thomas was 5 years old when he died. He had been described by those who knew him as an energetic, affectionate boy, yes, active and challenging as 5-year-olds are, but deeply loved by his grandmother, Carol.

[00:21:11]He had his whole life ahead of him.

[00:21:13]Shelby Alexis Riggs was 2 years old. She had barely begun.

[00:21:17]Neither of them had a choice. They trusted the one person in the world who was supposed to protect them above all others, and that person made a decision for them that was not hers to make. That is the undeniable center of this case.

[00:21:29]No matter how complex the psychology, no matter how many layers of trauma and depression and systemic failures surrounded Christina Riggs, two children died in that apartment, and they deserved to live. So, here is the question that this case leaves behind, and it is a question that legal scholars, mental health professionals, and ordinary people are still asking today. Was justice truly served in Varner, Arkansas, on the night of May 2nd, 2000?

[00:21:54]Was it justice, or was it the state completing the final act of a woman's suicide?

[00:22:00]Should a court ever accept a condemned person's request to waive their own appeals?

[00:22:04]Can someone gripped by profound, documented mental illness be considered legally competent to choose death, even if a judge signs off on that evaluation?

[00:22:13]And perhaps most painfully, could any of this have been prevented? Was there a moment, a phone call, a doctor's visit, a social worker's intervention, that could have changed the course of November 4th, 1997?

[00:22:26]I want to know what you think.

[00:22:27]Leave your thoughts in the comments below. This is a case that doesn't have easy answers, and that's exactly why it deserves to be discussed. If you're watching this and you're in a dark place right now, please reach out to someone.

[00:22:39]The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day. Just dial or text 988.

[00:22:47]If you found this video valuable, please consider hitting the like button. It helps this channel reach more people who are looking for serious, carefully researched true crime content. Subscribe so you don't miss the next case. Justin Dalton Thomas, Shelby Alexis Rigs, they were real children. They are not forgotten. This is today's video. See you in the next.