They say I deserve to die, but tell me, how many of you would still be alive if God judged you the way Texas judges me?
On the night of February 2nd, 1998, a woman sat inside a 12-foot by 20-foot holding cell at one of the most notorious prisons in the United States, Huntsville, Texas, and she was smiling.
Not the nervous smile of a woman searching for composure.
Not the vacant grin of someone who had stopped processing reality.
This was the calm, clear-eyed expression of someone who believed, genuinely believed, that she had already been forgiven by a power higher than any governor, any parole board, any court in the land.
Her name was Carla Faye Tucker.
She was 38 years old.
She was hours away from death.
And she had been called many things over the course of her life.
A killer.
A 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 addict.
A prostitute.
A monster.
And then, after 14 years on death row, something far more complicated.
A woman transformed.
But here is what no one could argue.
Fifteen years earlier, in the early hours of a Houston morning, Carla Faye Tucker had wielded a three-foot pickaxe inside a sleeping man’s apartment and driven it into two human beings more than 20 times each, leaving one of them with the axe still buried in her chest.
This is the story of one of the most disturbing capital cases in Texas history.
A state that has carried out more executions than any other in America.
A state where the question of who deserves to die has never been simple.
This is the case that broke that question open and never fully put it back together.
Houston, Texas, November 18th, 1959.
Carla Faye Tucker is born the youngest of three sisters to Larry Tucker, a longshoreman working the Gulf of Mexico docks, and Carolyn, a woman whose gravitational pull was always toward chaos.
The early years were ordinary enough.
A family cottage on Connie Creek.
Vacations.
The appearance of structure.
But structure in the Tucker household was always temporary.
By the time Carla was 8 years old, she was smoking cigarettes alongside her sisters.
At 10, her parents divorced, and during those proceedings, Carla learned something that would crack the foundation of whatever stability she had left.
She had been the product of an extramarital 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇.
The man she called her father was not her biological father.
She was 10 years old when she absorbed that information.
There was no counseling.
No conversation.
No soft place to land.
By 12, she was using drugs and was sexually active.
By 14, she had dropped out of school entirely and followed her mother, a rock groupie who traveled with acts like the Allman Brothers Band and the Eagles, into prostitution.
She was not being rebellious.
She was doing what she was shown.
Her mother introduced her to heroin.
By Carla’s own account, she was injecting heroin by age 11 and had not been without drugs for a single day from age 10 until the morning she was arrested nearly 14 years later.
At 16, she briefly married a mechanic named Steven Griffith, a relationship that burned out quickly in the accelerated wreckage of her life.
In her early 20s, she began running with biker circles in Houston’s Quay Point District.
And it was there, through her best friend Shawn, that she met the two men who would define the rest of her existence.
One was Jerry Lynn Dean, a 27-year-old former cable installer who would eventually marry Shawn.
The other was Danny Garrett, Daniel Ryan Garrett, 14 years older than Carla, a pill provider and street-level 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 distributor who became her live-in boyfriend.
Carla’s relationship with Jerry Lynn Dean began badly and deteriorated from there.
He had once parked his leaking motorcycle in her living room, destroying her flooring.
More significantly, and more painfully, he had destroyed the only photograph she possessed of herself with her mother.
Her mother, who would be dead before Carla turned 21.
That photograph was irreplaceable, and Dean had treated it like nothing.
The animosity between them calcified over two years into something dense and unresolved.
And by June of 1983, that unresolved rage was mixing with something far more dangerous.
Three days of uninterrupted 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 and alcohol consumption.
June 11th through June 13th, 1983.
The occasion was Carla’s sister’s birthday.
The gathering had been going since Friday.
A sustained chemical binge that included heroin, marijuana, methamphetamine, Valium, Placidyl, Dilaudid, and alcohol.
By Carla’s own account, she had not slept in three days.
By Sunday night, whatever internal restraint she possessed had been dissolved entirely.
Somewhere in the fog of that weekend, she and Garrett made a decision.
They would go to Jerry Dean’s apartment, take his motorcycle, and settle the score.
Their friend James Liebrandt came along.
At approximately 3 in the morning on Monday, June 13th, 1983, the three of them arrived at Dean’s northeast Houston apartment.
Tucker had a set of keys she claimed belonged to Shawn Dean and had fallen into her possession.
Liebrandt stayed outside searching for Dean’s El Camino.
Tucker and Garrett entered.
Dean was asleep on a mattress on the floor.
What followed was not a clean robbery gone wrong.
What followed was prolonged, brutal, and deliberate.
Tucker sat on Dean.
He woke immediately and grabbed her arms in self-defense.
Garrett grabbed a ballpeen hammer from the floor and struck Dean repeatedly in the back of the head.
Then Garrett left the room to begin loading motorcycle parts into his vehicle, leaving Tucker alone with a man who was still alive, still gurgling from the blows to his skull.
Tucker found a three-foot pickaxe resting against the wall.
She later told investigators she wanted to stop the sound Dean was making.
She swung the axe.
Medical examiners would later determine that Dean suffered 28 total wounds.
Twenty of them could have been fatal.
The fatal skull fracture from Garrett’s hammer blows was compounded by Tucker’s repeated axe strikes.
When Garrett returned and delivered a final blow, Dean was already beyond any possibility of survival.
Then Tucker made a decision that sealed her fate permanently.
She turned around.
Against the wall, hidden beneath the bed covers, was a woman named Deborah Ruth Thornton.
Thirty-two years old.
An office worker who had argued with her husband the day before, left the house, met Jerry Dean at a party, and come home with him.
A stranger to this carnage.
An accident of proximity.
Tucker grazed Thornton’s shoulder with the pickaxe.
Thornton struggled.
Garrett came back, separated them, and Tucker struck Thornton repeatedly.
When it was over, the pickaxe was left embedded in Deborah Thornton’s chest.
The three of them left with motorcycle parts, Dean’s El Camino, and the motorcycle itself.
The next morning, one of Dean’s co-workers arrived to collect a ride to work.
He walked into the apartment and found both bodies.
Police investigators had no immediate suspects.
The crime scene was catastrophic.
Forensic evidence, yes, but no witnesses, no clean trail.
For five weeks, the case sat.
Then Doug Garrett made a phone call.
Doug was Danny Garrett’s brother.
He had heard enough.
He contacted his longtime friend, Houston Police Department homicide detective J.C. Moer, and told him what he knew.
That his brother and a woman named Carla Faye Tucker had committed the murders, and that their friend James Liebrandt had been present.
Moer didn’t just take the tip.
He convinced Doug Garrett to do something far more significant.
To wear a concealed microphone and go directly to the house where Tucker and Garrett were living.
On July 18th, 1983, Doug rode his motorcycle over to the McKinney Street address.
He sat with Danny and Carla Faye for approximately an hour and a half.
He let them talk.
They talked.
The conversation that was recorded that afternoon would become one of the most critical pieces of evidence at trial.
Tucker and Danny Garrett were arrested on July 20th, 1983.
James Liebrandt was also taken into custody, but would later turn state’s evidence.
In September 1983, Tucker and Garrett were formally indicted for the murders of Jerry Lynn Dean and Deborah Thornton and designated to be tried separately.
In the days after her arrest, something happened to Carla Faye Tucker that no one in the criminal justice system had anticipated.
While awaiting trial in the county jail, she picked up a Bible from a prison ministry program.
She later described what happened in her cell.
She had not understood what she was reading.
And then, before she realized it, she was on her knees on the floor of her cell, asking God to forgive her.
She became a Christian in October 1983, three months after the murders, more than five months before her trial began.
Whether that conversion was real or strategic would become the defining question of the next 14 years.
Voir dire jury selection began on March 2nd, 1984, before Judge Patricia Lykos of the 180th Judicial District Court of Harris County, Texas.
The state made clear from the outset they were seeking the death penalty.
This was extraordinary.
Capital punishment was rarely sought for female defendants anywhere in America.
But the nature of this crime, the pickaxe, the wounds, the woman hiding under the covers, had stripped away any impulse toward leniency before the jury was even seated.
Tucker pleaded not guilty.
The prosecution built its case on the wire recording, forensic evidence, and the testimony of James Liebrandt, who had turned state’s evidence.
Tucker herself testified during the punishment phase of the trial, confessing fully to her role in both killings.
She told the jury that even being subjected to what she had done to her victims would be insufficient penance for what she had committed.
The jury, eight women and four men, retired on April 19th, 1984.
They deliberated for 70 minutes before returning a guilty verdict.
During the penalty phase, the defense presented a psychiatrist who testified that Tucker had been injecting drugs since age nine, had been addicted to heroin by age 10, had not slept in three days before the murders, and had been chemically incapacitated throughout the events of June 13th.
The jury considered this for nearly three hours.
On April 25th, 1984, they recommended death by lethal injection.
The next morning, the headlines read, “Pickax murderess sentenced to die.”
Garrett was tried separately, convicted, and also sentenced to death in November 1984.
He would die of liver disease in 1993, never reaching the execution chamber.
Tucker was transported to the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, Texas, the state’s only female death row facility.
She became TDCJ death row inmate number 777.
The Mountain View Unit is a place designed to hold people until they die.
Its death row wing is a single building, red brick, one story, where women condemned by the state of Texas weighed out their appeals in 60-square-foot cells.
Tucker shared hers with Pam Perillo, another convicted double murderer whose sentence would eventually be commuted to life.
In that cell, over the years that followed, Carla Faye Tucker did something that the criminal justice system does not account for, has no category for, and in this case could not stop.
She changed.
She studied theology.
She became a voracious reader.
She counseled other inmates, mediated conflicts, and built a reputation inside the Mountain View Unit as someone the correctional staff described as a model prisoner.
The warden himself later testified that after 14 years on death row, she had in all likelihood been genuinely reformed.
In 1995, she married Reverend Dana Lane Brown, a prison minister who had played a central role in her conversion.
In a proxy ceremony conducted inside the prison walls, they could not touch freely.
The marriage was real nonetheless.
The appeals had been grinding forward since 1984 and grinding to a halt just as steadily.
Retrial requests denied.
Appeals to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied in 1987 and 1988.
The United States Supreme Court declined to hear her case in 1989.
By the mid-1990s, every legal avenue was narrowing toward the same inevitable end.
But the world was beginning to pay attention.
Carla Faye Tucker was not the profile that capital punishment activists usually rallied around.
She was white.
She was photogenic.
She was a woman.
She was a Christian convert.
She appeared on Larry King Live.
She appeared on the 700 Club.
She spoke articulately about her crimes and her guilt and her faith.
Her cause attracted support from Pat Robertson, the conservative Christian televangelist who had publicly supported the death penalty throughout his career.
It attracted a personal plea from Pope John Paul II.
From Bianca Jagger.
From Sister Helen Prejean.
From the World Council of Churches.
From Amnesty International.
From governors of foreign nations.
And most striking of all, from Ronald Carlson, the brother of Deborah Thornton, the second victim.
Carlson had come to believe in the reality of Tucker’s change.
He became a vocal opponent of her execution, standing in the unusual position of a victim’s family member publicly arguing for the life of the woman who had killed his sister.
Deborah’s husband, Richard Thornton, held a different view.
He was ready for it to be over.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted on January 28th, 1998.
Sixteen members voted against clemency.
Two abstained.
Not a single vote in favor of sparing her life.
The execution was scheduled for February 3rd, 1998.
On the evening of February 2nd, 1998, Carla Faye Tucker was removed from her 60-square-foot cell at the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville and placed aboard a Texas Department of Criminal Justice aircraft.
She was transported approximately 160 miles east to Huntsville, to the Walls Unit, Texas’s oldest prison, built in 1849, home of the state’s execution chamber.
As the prison doors closed around her, she was moved into a 12-foot by 20-foot holding cell.
She barely slept.
She was hoping for something.
A last legal intervention.
A call that changed everything.
She knew the odds were nearly zero.
She spent that evening quietly.
She wrote letters.
She prayed.
She held on to a faith that had carried her through 14 years in a place designed to extinguish hope.
When February 3rd arrived, she woke at 6:00 a.m. and declined the standard breakfast.
Her husband, Dana Brown, had urged her to eat something, so she accepted a few crackers and a soft drink.
Between 8:00 a.m. and noon, she received her final family visits.
Her father.
Her sister.
And Dana Brown.
The visits happened with a screen between them.
They could not touch.
They could not embrace.
In those last moments together, Tucker and Brown prayed.
She was brought to tears.
They shook hands through the divider and said goodbye.
At noon, the family visits ended.
Sometime after midday, she was transported by vehicle to what prison personnel call the death house, a holding area approximately 30 feet from the execution chamber itself.
There, the final legal maneuvers were playing out in courtrooms across the country.
Her attorney, David Botsford, had filed emergency petitions with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans and the United States Supreme Court, arguing that the Board of Pardons and Paroles voting process was constitutionally flawed.
Both courts rejected the filings.
At 6:12 p. m. , Governor George W.
Bush announced publicly that he would not grant a 30-day stay of execution.
Under Texas law, the governor cannot unilaterally halt an execution.
He can only approve a recommendation from the parole board, and that board had already spoken.
Bush applied what was described as a two-question test.
Was there any doubt of guilt?
Did the defendant have full access to the protections of the law?
Tucker had confessed.
Tucker had received legal representation and exhausted every appeal.
The answer to both questions was no.
The execution would proceed.
Tucker received her final meal.
A banana.
A peach.
And a tossed salad with ranch dressing.
She had been fasting for days as an act of personal devotion, and her appetite had not returned.
She barely touched the food.
She declined a sedative.
She would face this with complete clarity.
That was her choice.
Before 6:00 p.m., she showered and dressed in a fresh white prison uniform with white shoes.
With her hair still wet, she was escorted from the holding cell.
At approximately 6:35 p.m., Carla Faye Tucker walked into the execution chamber.
The room measures 9 feet by 12 feet.
She climbed onto the gurney without assistance and was strapped across her legs and torso, her arms secured to sideboards extending from each side.
Intravenous catheters were placed in the veins of each arm.
Five people watched from the witness area she had selected.
Her sister, Carrie Weeks.
Her husband, Dana Brown.
Her friend, Jackie Anan.
Her attorney, George Secrest.
And Ronald Carlson, the brother of Deborah Thornton.
Carlson had stood by Carla Faye Tucker for years.
He was there now, as he had promised he would be.
In a separate room, Richard Thornton, Deborah’s husband, watched alongside Deborah’s son and stepdaughter.
When the moment arrived, Thornton quietly said, “Here she comes, baby doll. She is all yours.”
Tucker turned toward the window and spoke her final words.
She addressed the family of Jerry Lynn Dean and the family of Deborah Thornton.
She said she was sorry.
She asked God to give them peace.
She told her husband she loved him.
She told everyone in the room she loved them.
She said she was going to be face to face with Jesus now.
She thanked Warden Jim Baggett.
And then she said, “I’ll see you when you get there. I’ll wait for you.”
After she finished speaking, she licked her lips, and witnesses reported that she began to hum softly, quietly, waiting.
The three-𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 protocol began at 6:37 p.m.
Sodium thiopental to induce unconsciousness.
Pancuronium bromide to paralyze the respiratory muscles.
Potassium chloride to stop the heart.
Two minutes after the injection sequence began, witnesses heard two deep sighs.
Then silence.
At 6:45 p.m., eight minutes after the drugs entered her bloodstream, Carla Faye Tucker was pronounced dead.
She was 38 years old.
She died with a smile on her face.
Her eyes were still open, fixed on the ceiling, as though she were searching for something beyond the concrete and the fluorescent light.
She was the first woman executed in the United States since Velma Barfield in North Carolina in 1984.
She was the first woman executed in Texas since Chipita Rodriguez in 1863.
One hundred and thirty-five years earlier.
Within days of her execution, Fred Allen, the captain of the Huntsville death house team, who had overseen more than 120 executions, suffered a complete emotional breakdown.
He resigned his position, forfeiting his pension.
He later said, “I was pro-capital punishment. After Carla Faye, no sir, nobody has the right to take another life. I don’t care if it’s the law.”
One of the prosecutors who had convicted Danny Garrett had made a statement that stayed with many who followed this case closely.
The Carla Tucker who killed Jerry Dean and Deborah Thornton cannot be executed because that person no longer exists.
But Texas executed someone.
And the question of who that someone was, the woman of 1983 or the woman of 1998, is one that American jurisprudence has never fully resolved.
Two people went to sleep inside an apartment in northeast Houston on the night of June 12th, 1983, and never woke up.
Jerry Lynn Dean was 27 years old.
Deborah Ruth Thornton was 32.
She was in the wrong place.
She had simply made a choice the night before to walk away from a fight with her husband and go somewhere else.
And that choice had put her in a stranger’s bed when a stranger walked in with a pickaxe.
They deserve to be the beginning and the end of every conversation about this case.
But Carla Faye Tucker’s execution never stopped being debated.
Not by legal scholars.
Not by death penalty abolitionists.
Not by evangelical Christians.
Not by people who believe in the absolute authority of the state.
And not by the retired FBI profiler who still says Tucker was everybody’s worst nightmare.
Not because she wasn’t guilty.
She was.
She never denied it.
But because the question she raised, of whether a human being who has genuinely become a different person in every measurable way should still be killed for what a previous version of themselves did, is a question that cuts to the bone of what justice is actually for.
Texas answered it with three drugs and a clock.
The rest of us are still answering.
I don’t fear dying.
What I fear is a world that can’t see the difference between justice and revenge.
After I let Justin get on the bed in my bed, I used a pillow and suffocated him.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Before we get to those final moments, we need to go back, all the way back, to the woman behind the crime.
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.
Christina Marie Thomas was born on September 2nd, 1971, in Lawton, Oklahoma, and raised in Oklahoma City.
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 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 fail to protect them.
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.
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.
She earned her high school diploma.
And remarkably, she became a licensed practical nurse.
For a girl who had endured the things she had, this was no small achievement.
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.
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.
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.”
She was, by all accounts, unraveling.
She was severely overweight, later described in court testimony as weighing approximately 280 pounds, which, combined with her already damaged sense of self-worth, fed a depression that had been growing inside her for years.
Her doctor had prescribed her Prozac.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
She stopped at her mother Carol’s house to pick up Justin and Shelby, who had been staying there while she worked.
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.
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.
Within a short time, the sedative effects of the 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 began to take hold.
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.
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.
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.
The medical examiner would later officially record Justin Dalton Thomas’s cause of death as suffocation.
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.
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.
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 Riggs.
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.
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.
Christina Riggs did not die that night.
The next day, November 5th, 1997, Christina failed to show up for work.
Her mother, Carol, waited.
She called.
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.
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.
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.
No visitors.
No family contact.
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 eight minutes, Christina Riggs confessed to everything.
She described the medications.
She described her planning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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, they returned a verdict of guilty on both counts of capital murder.
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.
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 met every one of them.
“I want to die. I want to be with my babies. I started this out seven 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.”
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.
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.
“Sometimes I can’t think about them,” she told the Arkansas Times in 1999.
“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.
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.
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.
She was asking the state to complete what she had failed to do herself on November 4th, 1997.
The Arkansas Supreme Court upheld her conviction and death sentence in a 6-to-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.
No application for clemency was ever filed.
Christina Riggs had forbidden her attorney from filing one.
On Sunday, April 30th, 2000, three 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.
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.
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.
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 two and a half 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.
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 and 9:00 p.m. at the Cummins Unit in Varner, Arkansas.
The process began at approximately 9:00 p.m., but it did not go smoothly at first.
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.
Christina’s veins, compromised from the potassium chloride self-injection she had survived in 1997, were difficult to access.
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.
“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.”
Her bottom lip quivered.
She closed her eyes.
She lay almost perfectly still.
Christina Marie Riggs was pronounced dead at 9:28 p.m. Central Daylight Time on May 2nd, 2000.
She was 28 years old.
She was the first woman executed in Arkansas since 1845, 155 years prior.
She was the fifth woman executed in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
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.
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.
It was the state completing a task she had failed to complete herself.
They called for a reprieve.
They were denied.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He had his whole life ahead of him.
Shelby Alexis Riggs was 2 years old.
She had barely begun.
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.
No matter how complex the psychology, no matter how many layers of trauma and depression and systemic failure 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?
Was it justice?
Or was it the state completing the final act of a woman’s suicide?
Should a court ever accept a condemned person’s request to waive their own appeals?
Can someone gripped by profound, documented mental illness be considered legally competent to choose death, even if a judge signs off on that evaluation?
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?
This is a case that doesn’t have easy answers, and that’s exactly why it deserves to be discussed.
Justin Dalton Thomas.
Shelby Alexis Riggs.
They were real children.
They are not forgotten.
Two women, both convicted of murder, both sentenced to death in the state of Texas, both executed by lethal injection inside the same death chamber.
And yet, the crimes they committed could not be more different from each other.
One was accused of wiping out her entire family, a husband, a 7-year-old boy, and a baby girl not yet 2 years old, for $100,000 in life insurance.
The other was convicted of slowly, methodically starving a 9-year-old child to death over the course of years, binding him with electrical cords while food sat in the very same apartment.
One of them maintained her innocence from the moment she was arrested until the second she stopped breathing on the gurney.
The other admitted to restraining the child herself on multiple occasions.
And here is the question that cuts through everything you are about to hear.
Who is the most dangerous woman between the two?
By the end of this story, your answer may surprise you.
April 7th, 1987, Houston, Texas, a neighborhood called West Mount Houston on the northwest edge of the city.
At 8:27 in the evening, Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy R.W. Ricks responded to a call about a possible shooting at an apartment complex, address 6126 West Mount Houston.
When he stepped through the door of that apartment, what he found stopped him cold.
Adrian Newton, 23 years old, was slumped on the couch, a single bullet wound to the head.
7-year-old Alton Newton was in his bed, shot in the chest.
21-month-old Farah Elaine Newton, still in the crib stage, barely a toddler, was in her bed, also shot in the chest.
Three members of the same family killed in the same apartment on the same evening.
And there were no signs of forced entry.
No signs of a struggle.
The door had simply been opened from the inside.
Standing outside when the deputy arrived was a young woman named Frances Newton, 21 years old, and her cousin, Sandre Nelms.
Frances was Adrian’s wife.
The mother of those children.
And she was the last person known to have been alone with all three of them.
To understand what prosecutors would later argue, you have to understand what was happening inside that marriage in the weeks before those three people were killed.
Frances and Adrian Newton were not a happy couple.
They were living under the same roof, but they were both seeing other people.
Adrian had a girlfriend named Ramona Bell.
In fact, on the very night of the murders, Bell called Adrian’s phone at 6:45 in the evening.
She and Adrian spoke for about 15 minutes.
During that conversation, according to Bell’s own account, Adrian told her he was tired and wanted to go to sleep, but not until Frances left, because, in his own words, he did not trust her.
That was one of the last conversations Adrian Newton ever had.
Earlier that same evening, Adrian’s brother, Sterling, had been living in the apartment.
Frances had asked Sterling to step out for a while.
She wanted time alone with Adrian to talk about their problems.
Sterling left.
Within two hours, all three of them were dead.
And then came the evidence that prosecutors would argue told the entire story before the investigation even began.
On March 18th, 1987, just three weeks before the murders, Frances Newton had taken out two fresh $50,000 life insurance policies.
One on Adrian.
One on 21-month-old Farah.
A separate policy already existed on Alton combined.
Prosecutors argued Frances stood to collect approximately $100,000, a figure that became the spine of the entire case against her.
But there was something else.
Frances had forged Adrian’s signature on one of the policies, signing his name herself.
She explained this by saying she had used household money to pay the premiums and didn’t want Adrian to find out.
But to investigators, that explanation sounded less like embarrassment and more like planning.
The same evening the bodies were found, Sandre Nelms, Frances’s own cousin, told a homicide detective something that would change everything.
She told him about a blue bag.
Frances had taken that bag out of her car and placed it inside an abandoned house belonging to her parents.
Earlier that very evening, before the police were ever called.
Detectives went to that abandoned house.
Inside the blue bag, they found a .25 caliber semi-automatic pistol.
Ballistics testing would later be used to argue that this was the gun that fired the bullets that killed Adrian, Alton, and Farah Newton.
The weapon was traced back to a man named Michael Mouton, who told police he had loaned it months earlier to his cousin Jeffrey Fillo.
Fillo, it turned out, was the man Frances Newton had been seen on the side with.
Her boyfriend.
So, the murder weapon belonged, at least indirectly, to Frances Newton’s own lover.
On top of that, state forensic technicians reported finding nitrite residue consistent with gunpowder near the hem of Frances’s skirt.
To the prosecution, it suggested she had fired a weapon at close range.
Frances had an explanation for the bag.
She said she had found the gun in Adrian’s drawer days before, assumed it was connected to something illegal, and hid it in her son Alton’s backpack to keep Adrian out of trouble.
She insisted the gun was Adrian’s, not hers.
The defense pushed hard on what the prosecution did not have.
No fingerprints on the weapon connecting Frances.
No DNA.
No eyewitness.
No one who saw her pull a trigger.
And the ballistics evidence, her attorneys argued, was not conclusive.
But the jury did not see it that way.
In 1988, after a trial that lasted just days, Frances Newton was found guilty of capital murder.
She was 22 years old when the sentence came down.
Death by lethal injection.
Here is where the case becomes genuinely complicated, and where it has continued to disturb legal observers for decades.
Frances Newton maintained, from her first interrogation in 1987 until her last breath in 2005, that she did not 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her family.
She pointed to a man she only knew as Charlie, a 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 dealer, she said, to whom Adrian owed money.
Prosecutors dismissed this entirely.
Adrian’s own father, Lewis Newton, said publicly, “My son didn’t use drugs. Why does she keep saying this? Charlie?
Who is Charlie? There ain’t no Charlie. She’s Charlie.”
But her defense attorneys and outside investigators raised a different picture.
They pointed to the fact that the Houston Police Department’s own records suggested Adrian Newton had connections to 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 activity.
That the debt in question may have been significantly larger than the $500 initially reported, possibly as high as $1,500.
Her legal team argued that someone tied to that 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 world had gone to the apartment that evening with orders to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 if the money wasn’t produced.
There was also the matter of the gun.
A sworn affidavit from Frances’s own father stated that a Harris County Sheriff’s sergeant told him police had actually recovered not one but two guns at the scene, and that Frances would eventually be released.
That second gun was never officially documented.
It was never tested.
It was never entered into evidence.
And then there was the original defense attorney, Ron Mock.
He was later barred from handling capital cases entirely after a pattern of failures.
Three jurors from Frances’s original trial came forward years later and said they would not have voted to convict if they had known about all the evidence that existed.
Two former Texas criminal justice officials publicly urged the state not to execute her, stating she posed no future danger to society, a standard legally required for the death penalty to apply.
The forensic evidence used to convict her.
By the time her attorneys tried to retest it, the 1987 gunshot residue tests had destroyed the original particles on the skirt.
There was nothing left to analyze.
Evidence boxes from the case had been stored unsealed, contaminated alongside unrelated items.
A crime lab so poorly managed that key materials had gone missing entirely.
Every door Frances Newton tried to open, she found it had already been sealed shut.
Sometimes by the very system that was supposed to protect her right to a fair trial.
July 26th, 2004, Arlington, Texas, a small apartment.
A woman named Marcella Williams called 911 in the morning hours, telling the dispatcher her 9-year-old son had stopped breathing.
The dispatcher began walking her through CPR instructions.
And then, without explanation, the line went dead.
When paramedics arrived and Lisa Coleman opened the door, she told them Devonte had just eaten, had vomited, and they had taken him to the bathroom to clean him up.
He had only just stopped breathing moments ago, she said.
That claim collapsed the moment paramedics stepped into that bathroom.
Devonte Marcel Williams was lying on the floor wearing only a diaper.
He was 9 years old.
He weighed 35 pounds.
Roughly half the weight of an average child his age.
His small body looked, according to responding paramedic Troy Brooks, like that of a child between 3 and 5 years old.
And when Brooks made physical contact, the truth became immediately, horrifyingly clear.
Rigor mortis had already set in.
Devonte had been dead for hours.
His body told a story that words can barely hold.
More than 250 separate injuries.
Scars.
Wounds.
Burns.
And ligature marks.
Infected wounds around his wrists and ankles, showing where he had been bound repeatedly with plastic extension cords.
A fresh tear at the corner of his mouth.
A mark on the side of his head near his ear.
And in the corner of the room, investigators found a golf club with blood on it.
The medical examiner’s official cause of death: severe malnutrition.
Pneumonia was listed as a contributing factor.
His organs had begun shutting down before he ever stopped breathing.
The pediatric nutritional drink that Marcella and Lisa claimed they had tried to give him.
His body was already too far gone to absorb it.
Devonte had been born in 1995 to Marcella Williams, who was just 14 years old at the time of his birth.
He came into the world premature, with developmental delays and special needs that would follow him his entire short life.
By the time he was two months old, Child Protective Services had already opened a file on the household.
By 1999, both Devonte and his younger sister had been removed from Marcella’s care after investigators found evidence that left no room for interpretation.
His hair was falling out.
He had bruises along his spine.
Swelling on his lips.
And physical evidence of 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 to other parts of his body.
CPS placed direct blame on Lisa Coleman, who had been in Marcella’s life since Devonte was very young.
Marcella fought to get her children back.
After a year in foster care, she succeeded, but only after agreeing in writing to end her relationship with Lisa Coleman and to keep Lisa away from her children permanently.
For a while, the arrangement held.
And then, by 2002, Lisa quietly moved back in.
And what followed was a systematic disappearance.
Not of Devonte’s body, but of Devonte’s existence in the outside world.
School reports from that period show Devonte simply stopped appearing.
The school called.
Marcella told them they had moved out of the district.
Child Protective Services attempted follow-up visits nine times between November and December of 2002 alone.
No one answered.
There was no sign of Devonte.
Just silence.
He had been hidden.
And no one who had any authority to find him would ever see him alive again.
To understand what happened in that apartment, you have to understand what shaped Lisa Coleman long before Devonte Williams was ever born.
Lisa’s own beginning was marked by trauma before she could walk.
She was the product of rape.
Born after her mother was assaulted by her own stepfather.
From the start, Lisa was made to feel like a wound that no one wanted to look at.
Her mother called her by a nickname that became a brand.
Pig.
And repeated it until it settled into her like something permanent.
She grew up in a home where violence was routine.
An uncle beat her with extension cords.
The same kind later found wrapped around Devonte’s wrists.
CPS stepped in.
But instead of safety, Lisa found a series of foster homes that ranged from neglectful to actively abusive.
She was stabbed by a cousin.
She was given alcohol and drugs by family members before she reached her teens.
She dropped out of school in the 10th grade.
By 15, she had given birth to her first child.
By her early 20s, she had been to prison twice for burglary and 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔-related offenses.
By the time Lisa Coleman met Marcella Williams, she carried inside her a lifetime of pain that had never been processed, never been treated, and never been given an exit.
That pain, in the end, would be transferred onto a child who had no one powerful enough to stop it.
When police brought Lisa in for questioning, she did not claim innocence in the way Frances Newton had.
She acknowledged disciplining Devonte with a belt.
She said she had stopped, not out of remorse, but because the bruises were becoming too visible.
And she admitted that both she and Marcella had restrained Devonte with extension cords on more than one occasion, including the night he died.
At trial, prosecutors argued that for Devonte’s death to qualify as capital murder, they needed to prove an aggravating felony had occurred alongside the killing.
They pointed to the cord marks on his wrists and ankles.
The pantry he had been locked inside.
The years of deliberate isolation from the outside world.
And the withholding of food while groceries sat in the same apartment.
This wasn’t simply 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮, they argued.
It was captivity.
It was kidnapping by another name, conducted over years inside the child’s own home.
The defense argued that Lisa did not live in the apartment full-time.
That Devonte had always been underweight even as an infant.
And that his death was the tragic result of poor parenting rather than intentional murder.
Her attorney insisted she was innocent of capital murder and warned the jury that executing her would mean executing an innocent woman.
The jury took one hour to reach a verdict.
Lisa Coleman was found guilty of capital murder.
She was sentenced to death.
The year was 2006.
Before trial, prosecutors had offered both women the same plea deal.
Life in prison with eligibility for parole after 40 years.
Marcella Williams, Devonte’s own mother, accepted the deal.
Lisa Coleman refused.
That decision locked her fate.
Marcella Williams will be eligible for parole in 2044.
Frances Newton arrived on Texas death row in November 1988.
She would remain there for nearly 18 years.
Longer than many prisoners serve for crimes that do not carry a death sentence.
During those years, she became something of a cause.
The NAACP took up her case.
Amnesty International called for a review of the evidence.
Three of the original jurors who convicted her came forward publicly.
United States Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee stood at the federal building in Houston and called for the state to stop.
Outside advocates, clergy, and community leaders organized vigils and pressed the courts.
She was granted a rare 120-day reprieve by Governor Rick Perry in December 2004, with just two hours to spare before her first scheduled execution, to allow time for forensic evidence to be retested.
But when the lab tried to retest the gunshot residue from her skirt, the original 1987 testing had destroyed the particles.
There was nothing left to test.
Every subsequent appeal was denied.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 7-to-0 not to recommend clemency.
Even Adrian’s own parents wrote a letter asking that Frances’s life be spared.
It made no difference.
On September 12th, 2005, the parole board issued its final denial.
Two days later, her attorney told reporters she had expected to win.
She had not.
Lisa Coleman arrived on Texas death row in 2006.
She spent 8 years there.
Far less time than Frances.
But time she used differently.
Where Frances had fought the system, petition after petition, appeal after appeal, maintaining her innocence at every turn, Lisa Coleman moved through those years with a different kind of weight.
She built friendships with the other women on death row.
She maintained contact with her own son and with family members.
She did not challenge the conviction with the same sustained legal fervor that Frances had.
Perhaps because her attorney’s argument was never about innocence in the broadest sense.
It was about the legal charge.
About whether kidnapping had actually occurred.
About whether the death penalty was proportionally applied.
That argument failed at every level of the courts.
Her execution date was set.
The United States Supreme Court rejected her final appeal.
And on September 17th, 2014, Lisa Coleman walked into the execution chamber at the Huntsville Unit, knowing she was not walking back out.
The night before her execution, officers transported Frances Newton the 120 miles from the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, the last home for women on Texas Death Row, to the Walls Unit in Huntsville.
The ride was taken in silence, long after dark.
And by all accounts, Frances was composed but emotional.
Her tears visible at points during the journey.
At Huntsville, she was placed in a small holding cell just steps from the execution chamber.
Observation was constant.
Sleep, by all accounts, barely came.
Instead, Frances prayed through the small hours of the morning.
Head bowed.
Hands clasped.
Hour after hour.
Family visited through glass.
Her parents.
Siblings.
Close relatives.
Her husband and children were absent.
They had been gone 18 years.
In the only way they could be gone.
Her attorney, John Karup, visited in the final hours.
He later described her as calm, composed, strong, and optimistic, even then, that a miracle might arrive.
They discussed the two remaining appeals before the United States Supreme Court.
The broken crime lab.
The missing evidence.
The incompetent counsel who had cost her the right to a full hearing.
At exactly 5:00 p.m. on September 14th, 2005, a phone call came in to the Walls Unit.
The United States Supreme Court had denied both appeals.
Without dissent.
Frances received the news, closed her eyes, offered a silent prayer, and said nothing else.
She was offered a last phone call.
She declined.
She made no last meal request.
She received the standard prison tray.
When the warden offered her a final prayer before the chemicals began, she declined softly.
She told him she had already prayed hours ago.
When asked for a final statement, she shook her head.
At 6:07 p.m., the chemicals began to flow.
Sodium thiopental.
Pancuronium bromide.
Potassium chloride.
In the witness room, her parents gripped each other’s hands.
Frances turned her head toward them.
She tried to mouth something.
Witnesses believed it was, “I love you.”
The sedative took hold almost immediately.
Her eyes fluttered.
A soft cough.
A single gasp.
And then silence.
At 6:17 p.m., Frances Elaine Newton was pronounced dead.
She was 40 years old.
She had spent nearly 18 years on death row.
She was the first Black woman executed in Texas since the era of the Civil War.
Nine years later, in the same building and in the same chamber, Lisa Coleman’s final morning was a different kind of farewell.
She ate the standard prison meal.
A fried pork chop.
Macaroni and cheese.
Carrots.
Green beans.
Navy beans.
Sliced bread.
And pineapple orange cake.
She had been given no special request.
She spent the morning talking with visitors.
Sometimes crying.
Sometimes laughing.
According to prison staff, when the United States Supreme Court rejected her final appeal that afternoon, she was told.
She received it.
And she kept talking with the people around her.
When she was strapped to the gurney and given the chance to speak, Lisa Coleman looked through the window at the witnesses gathered on her side.
Friends.
And an aunt who had come to watch her leave.
She smiled at them.
She nodded.
She told the women still on death row to keep their heads up.
Then she spoke of her family, her son, and her God.
“I just want to tell my family I love them. My son, I love him. God is good.
I’m done.”
She mouthed an audible kiss toward her aunt.
She laughed softly, briefly.
She said, “Love you all.”
She closed her eyes, took two short breaths, and was still.
At 6:24 p.m. on September 17th, 2014, Lisa Coleman was pronounced dead, 12 minutes after the 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 was administered.
She was 38 years old.
Two women.
Both executed in Huntsville, Texas.
Both gone before the age of 41.
And that question I asked you at the very beginning still stands.
Who was the most dangerous woman between the two?
The answer is not as clean as a verdict.
Frances Newton, accused of killing three people she loved for money, spent nearly two decades insisting she was innocent.
Three jurors agreed in hindsight that they had rushed to judgment.
Evidence was destroyed.
A key gun was possibly never tested.
A broken crime lab left questions permanently unanswered.
Whether she was guilty or not, the process that led to her death was cracked at its foundation.
Lisa Coleman, convicted of participating in the slow, prolonged torture and starvation of a child already failed by every protective system around him, never denied what she admitted in that police interrogation room.
The child in her case had no one.
He had been hidden from the world.
He had been bound.
He had been starved.
And the woman who birthed him took a plea deal while the woman who lived with her went to the needle.
Frances Newton died claiming innocence.
Lisa Coleman died saying, “God is good.”
Neither answer makes the dead any less dead.
Devonte Williams was 9 years old.
Alton Newton was 7.
Farah Elaine Newton was not yet 2.
And the question of who was more dangerous, the woman who may have pulled a trigger once, or the woman who participated in a prolonged nightmare that lasted years, is a question that says as much about the justice system that sentenced them both as it says about either of them.