JUST IN: 5 Women Sentenced to be executed — The Most Shocking Female Texas Death Row Cases…. – YouTube Transcripts: A badge, a kitchen knife, a box cutter, a plastic bag, a rope. Five weapons, five women, five death sentences. In the United States, fewer than 1% of death row inmates are women. That means for a woman to end up on death row, she doesn’t just commit murder. She commits something the state decides is so far beyond the boundaries of what a human being is capable of that the only appropriate response is death. These are five of those women. One was a police officer who executed her own partner while wearing her badge, then drove back to the crime scene in a patrol car and pretended to be the first responder. One was a suburban mother in Texas who prosecutors say stabbed her two young sons while they slept on the living room floor, then slashed her own throat to make it look like someone else did it. And one was an 18-year-old who tortured her classmate for over 30 minutes in the woods, carved a pentagram into her chest, caved in her skull with a chunk of asphalt, plucked out a piece of the skull, and then ate breakfast with it in her pocket the next morning. One suffocated the wife of the man she loved inside a storage trailer, placed a garbage bag over her head, tried to snap her neck, and when that didn’t work, held the bag tighter until the woman stopped breathing. And one drove 3 hours across state lines to visit a pregnant woman she had befriended online, strangled her unconscious with a rope, cut the 8-month-old baby from her womb with a kitchen knife, and drove home with the newborn to present as her own child. Some of these women have already been executed. Some are still alive. One has an execution date 6 months from now. And every single one of their cases forces the same question that nobody, not the courts, not the juries, not the families left behind, has been able to answer. When women commit the most extreme violence imaginable, does justice remain the same? After spending more than 30 years on death row, Antoinette Frank remains the only woman on Louisiana’s death row, convicted of three counts of first-degree murder for the execution-style shooting of her own police partner and two members of the Vietnamese-American family she was supposed to protect. No execution date has been publicly scheduled. In this video, we will talk about her crimes along with the cases of Darlie Routier, Emilia Carr, Krista Pike, and Lisa Montgomery. Their backgrounds, their crimes, their trials, their last meals, and last words. To know why the state decided these five women deserved to die, we have to go back. Back to New Orleans in the deadliest year in its history. Back to a suburban home in Texas at 2:31 in the morning. Back to a storage trailer in rural Florida. Back to a rain-soaked footpath near a university campus in Tennessee. And back to a small house in Missouri where a pregnant woman answered the door for the last time. We start in New Orleans, and we start with the one that broke the city. In 1994, or um the year before Antoinette Frank destroyed everything she touched, New Orleans recorded 421 murders. It was the murder capital of the United States. For every 100,000 residents, the city was losing people at a rate that made the rest of the country look away. The crack epidemic had ripped entire neighborhoods out by the roots. Bodies were arriving at the coroner’s office faster than autopsies could be scheduled. Entire blocks in the 7th District and the 9th Ward had been abandoned to drug crews who operated with near total impunity. And the institution that was supposed to hold the line, the New Orleans Police Department, was rotting from the inside out. Officers were paid less than in any comparably sized city in America. The department was hemorrhaging personnel faster than it could replace them. Morale had collapsed. In that same year, multiple NOPD officers were arrested for murder, >> [clears throat] >> drug trafficking, and armed robbery. One officer was convicted of ordering a hit on a woman who had filed a complaint against him. Another was caught guarding a cocaine shipment while in uniform. The NOPD wasn’t just understaffed, it was compromised. And because of a residency requirement that restricted hiring to people who lived within Orleans Parish, the pool of eligible applicants was shrinking every year. The department was so desperate for warm bodies that the hiring process had become a formality. Background checks were half-hearted at best. Psychological evaluations were treated as suggestions. The unofficial mandate was simple. If you could physically fit into a uniform, you were in. Into that broken system walked a 21-year-old woman from Opelousas, Louisiana with a dream she had carried since childhood. Her name was Antoinette Renee Frank. She was born on April 30th, 1971. Her father, Adam Frank, was a Vietnam veteran and telephone company worker who drifted in and out of the household like a storm that never fully passed. Louisiana Department of Veterans Affairs records documented that Adam was physically and emotionally abusive toward his children from the time they were toddlers. In the early 1970s, VA physicians recorded his own admissions that he had choked his 2-year-old daughter, Antoinette, and thrown her against a wall. He was treated with antipsychotic medication. As Antoinette grew older, the nature of the abuse allegedly shifted. Her defense team would later present evidence that Adam Frank began sexually assaulting her in her teenage years. According to reports submitted during post-conviction proceedings, the abuse resulted in multiple pregnancies, each terminated by abortion. The doctors who performed the procedures were deceased by the time these claims were investigated. Her mother and siblings had already left the household by the time the sexual abuse allegedly began. A fellow police recruit would later testify to something that made people uncomfortable even to hear, that Frank and her father would interact in public as though they were romantic partners, that she sat in his lap at social events, that no one said anything. A psychologist who later treated Frank during her incarceration concluded she most likely suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and dependent personality disorder, conditions rooted in the years of abuse she endured under her father’s control. But through all of it, Antoinette Frank held on to one thing, one dream that survived every broken promise and every act of violence her childhood inflicted on her. She wanted to be a police officer. Since she was a little girl, it was the only future she could see for herself. Some people who study her case believe that desire came from a longing for control and order, a way to impose structure on a world that had given her none. Others believe it was simpler than that. She wanted the badge because the badge meant authority, and authority meant no one could ever make her feel powerless again. In June 1988, she took a job at a Walmart in Opelousas. She was fired after 6 months for giving false information on her application. After graduating high school in May 1989, she moved to New Orleans alone, got rehired at another Walmart, and waited until she turned 20, the minimum age to apply to the NOPD. On April 30th, 1991, her 20th birthday, she applied. She failed the psychological examination. The evaluator concluded that Frank had a pattern of lying and exaggerating her skills and background. A department psychiatrist named Philip Scurria examined her and recommended in no uncertain terms that she should not be hired. He described her as shallow and superficial. That should have been the end. In a functioning system, it would have been. But Frank paid for a private psychiatric evaluation. The second psychiatrist gave a more favorable assessment. The NOPD, desperate for recruits and under pressure to diversify a predominantly white force in a majority black city, accepted the second opinion. In a city tearing itself apart, Antoinette Frank fit the profile they were looking for. While she was still at the academy, her father reported her missing. He had found a note she left behind. In it, she described herself as “doomed since the day I was born.” She expressed deep self-hatred. It read like a suicide note. She returned shortly after, and nobody asked too many questions. On February 7th, 1993, the New Orleans Police Department officially hired Antoinette Frank. She presented two letters of recommendation during the process. One was supposedly signed by the sitting mayor of New Orleans, Sidney Barthelemy. The mayor later denied ever signing it. Her father, Adam Frank, disappeared sometime around June or August of 1993. Antoinette reported him missing. The report was filed. Nobody looked too hard. Despite graduating near the top of her academy class, Frank’s time on the force revealed everything the psychological evaluations had tried to warn about. Her fellow officers found her shy, strange, and lacking the basic decisiveness required for police work. She frequently seemed confused about what the job actually entailed. At times, colleagues described her behavior as outright irrational. By August 1993, just months after she was hired, her supervisors were already discussing sending her back to the academy for additional training. placed under repeated supervisory review. And yet, she stayed on the force because the NOPD needed numbers more than it needed standards. To earn extra money, Frank started working off-duty security details. She was assigned alongside another young officer, 25-year-old Ronald Ronnie Williams II, to provide security at a Vietnamese restaurant called Kim Anh, located on Bullard Avenue in New Orleans East. Now, we need to talk about the people Antoinette Frank was about to destroy because they weren’t just victims, they were lives. Full, beautiful, devoted lives. And they deserved more than a bullet and a body count. The Kim Anh restaurant was owned by Bich Vu and Nguyen Nguyen, Vietnamese immigrants who had come to the United States seeking something better. Bich arrived in 1981. His wife and children followed in 1991. They built the Kim Anh from nothing, a small Vietnamese restaurant in New Orleans East that served mainly pho and ran a small grocery store in an attached section of the building. It wasn’t glamorous. It was honest, a year, and the family ran it together. By 1995, their four children were all working in the kitchen. The eldest daughter, Hau Vu, was 24 years old. She was quiet, deeply spiritual, and planning to join the Catholic clergy as a nun. She had spent her young life serving others. The youngest son, Quang Vu, was just 17. He was planning to enter the priesthood. Two teenagers raised in a restaurant kitchen in New Orleans East, both preparing to dedicate their lives to God. Their siblings, Chau, 23, and Quoc, 18, worked alongside them every night. And then, there was Ronnie Williams. Ronald Austin Williams II was born on June 18th, 1969, and raised in New Orleans. He graduated from Brother Martin High School in 1987 and married his high school sweetheart, Mary Burris, whose family lived across the street. Their first son, Christopher, was born in 1989. Ronnie joined the NOPD in 1992. He was described by everyone who knew him as a good man, a devoted husband, and a dedicated officer. He worked the night security detail at Kim Anh to supplement his income because he had a family to support. In February 1995, Mary gave birth to their second son, Patrick. The baby was 10 days old on the night his father went to work and never came home. The Vu family loved Ronnie Williams. They considered him part of their family. They loved Antoinette Frank, too. They treated her like a daughter. They bought her birthday presents. They loaned her money when she needed it. When she was hungry after a shift, they cooked for her. They had no reason to believe the woman they had opened their hearts to was planning to take everything from them. In late November 1994, Frank responded to a call about a shooting victim. The victim was an 18-year-old drug dealer named Rogers Lacaze. She should have treated him as a victim, filed her paperwork, and moved on. Instead, something shifted. Frank became tangled up with Lacaze in a way that alarmed everyone around her. Whether it was romantic, transactional, or something more complicated has never been fully determined. What is clear is that from that point forward, the two became inseparable. Frank started bringing Lacaze with her on patrol. She let him ride in the front seat of her squad car. She introduced him to colleagues as her nephew. On at least one occasion, two officers from the 7th District spotted Lacaze driving Frank’s patrol car by himself. She even answered calls with him in the vehicle. When a fellow officer reported Lacaze’s involvement in a street altercation involving a TEC-9 semi-automatic handgun, Frank intervened and told responding officers that Lacaze was the good guy. Her supervisors warned her. Her colleagues warned her. Her partner, Ronnie Williams, warned her. Nobody could get through. Antoinette Frank had made her choice. And then, the planning began. Frank knew the Vu family didn’t trust banks. She knew they kept all their earnings in cash inside the restaurant. During the weeks leading up to March 4th, 1995, Frank acquired a 9-mm pistol from the NOPD evidence room. The release order bore the signature of Judge Frank Marullo, a detail that would later blow the case wide open when the judge claimed his signature had been forged. That gun would become the murder weapon. On the evening of March 3rd, 1995, or around 9:00 p.m., Frank called the Kim Anh restaurant while working at the 7th District Police Station. Later that night, she and Lacaze visited the restaurant twice. They ordered food. They ate. They lingered. The staff was working late. The kitchen was winding down. During one of those visits, Frank stole a key to the front door. The Vu family didn’t notice it was missing until later, but Chau Vu noticed something else. She noticed the way Frank was acting, restless, distracted, different. Something felt wrong. Chau quietly took the night’s business cash and hid it inside the microwave in the kitchen. It was an instinct, a small, quiet act of self-preservation that she couldn’t fully explain at the time. It may have been the only reason she survived the night. After midnight, around 2:00 a.m. on March 4th, Frank and Lacaze returned for a third time. Frank was in her police uniform. She used the stolen key to open the front door. The restaurant was supposed to be closed. The staff was still inside cleaning up. Ronnie Williams was behind the bar, still in his police uniform, finishing his security detail. He needed the extra money. His 10-day-old son was at home. Frank moved quickly through the dining room. She pushed Chau and her brother Quoc toward the back of the restaurant, corralling them away from the front. At the same moment, Rogers Lacaze moved toward Ronnie Williams. Three gunshots. Lacaze shot Williams. The first bullet hit him in the back. Two more hit him in the head. Officer Ronnie Williams, 25 years old, father of two, married to his high school sweetheart, collapsed behind the bar in a pool of blood. He died face down, still wearing his uniform. According to police sources and court testimony, Frank then stood over her wounded colleague, the man she had patrolled with, the man who had worked beside her at this very [clears throat] restaurant for over a year, the man whose family lived minutes away, and fired into his skull. Then, she moved to the kitchen. Hau Vu and Quang Vu were there, the young woman who was going to become a nun and the teenager who was going to become a priest. When they saw the gun, they did the only thing their faith had prepared them for. They fell to their knees. They began to pray. Antoinette Frank shot them where they knelt. Hau Vu died at 24. Quang Vu died at 17. Their mother, Nguyen Nguyen, would later kneel in the same spot on that kitchen floor where her children had taken their last breath, weeping over the tile where their blood had pooled. Meanwhile, Chau Vu, her brother Quoc, and a restaurant employee named Vu Vu had managed to escape into the walk-in cooler. They crouched in the cold dark, pressed against the walls, trying not to breathe too loudly. Through the steel door, they could hear Frank and Lacaze searching the restaurant for cash. They heard movement. They heard voices. They prayed. Frank and Lacaze grabbed what money they could find and fled in Frank’s battered 1977 Ford Torino. On the dashboard sat a sun-yellowed cardboard sign printed with the star and crescent of the New Orleans Police Department and the words New Orleans Police Officer on Duty. Inside the cooler, Chau waited. She waited even after she saw Frank’s car pull away through a gap in the cooler door. She waited because she knew Frank might come back. Then, she crawled out, found the bodies of her sister and brother, and ran to the front of the restaurant. She found Ronnie Williams face down in his blood behind the bar. Frank had taken the restaurant’s phone, so Chau grabbed her own cell phone from her purse. She called 911 from inside the cooler. The line dropped twice. On the third try, she reached a friend and said four words, “The police officer was killed.” Her brother, Quoc, ran out of the restaurant and made a second call at 1:50 a.m. telling the 911 operator that a NOPD officer named Antoinette and a man had shot up the restaurant. And then Antoinette Frank did the thing that makes this case unlike any other in New Orleans history. The thing that still keeps homicide detectives up at night. She came back. She heard the 911 dispatch on her police radio. She drove to the restaurant in a patrol car. She pulled up alongside the responding officers, stepped out, and identified herself as a police officer. She walked through the front door of the Kim Anh as though she was arriving to help. Chau Vu ran out of the building when she saw the other officers. Frank followed behind her. When Chau reached the arms of another officer, Frank approached her, the woman she had tried to kill, the woman whose brother and sister she had just executed on a kitchen floor, and asked, “What happened?” Chau looked at her and said the words that would end everything. “You were there. You know everything. Why you ask me that question?” Then she turned to the other officers. “Antoinette and a short black man with gold teeth did this. You killed my brother and sister.” Frank was arrested on three counts of first-degree murder. Lacaze was arrested later that night. The tipping point was Ronnie Williams’ Chevron credit card. Lacaze had used it at a gas station in Gretna just minutes after the murders. The card that was supposed to buy gas for a dead man’s car led the police straight to his killer. Their trials were separated. Lacaze’s went first in July 1995. Despite taking the stand and claiming he was across town playing pool with his brother, the evidence crushed him. His own brother had told police, “Antoinette really messed up.” Lacaze was convicted and sentenced to death. Frank’s trial began in September. Although her defense attorneys had subpoenaed 39 witnesses, they called none of them. Not a single one. No mitigation expert was hired. No evidence of Frank’s traumatic childhood was presented. The jury heard none of it. On September 12th, 1995, the jury needed 22 minutes, 22 minutes, to return a guilty verdict on all three counts of first-degree murder. At the time, it was a record for a capital murder case in New Orleans. The next day, they deliberated for 45 minutes before recommending death. Antoinette Frank was formally sentenced to death on October the 20th, 1995. She was sent to death row at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women in St. Gabriel near Baton Rouge. She remains there today, 30 years later, the only woman on Louisiana’s death row. But the case didn’t end with the verdict. One month after Frank was sentenced, a dog led police to a human skull with a bullet hole buried beneath Frank’s house. Her father, Adam, had stayed at that house shortly before she reported him missing in 1993. Authorities believe the skull belongs to him. As of the most recent reporting, no serious effort has been made to formally identify the remains. No new charges have been brought. Rogers Lacaze, Frank’s co-conspirator, had his death sentence overturned in 2015 when a judge ruled that a juror at his trial had concealed the fact that he was a Louisiana state trooper, a violation of the law barring commissioned law enforcement officers from serving on juries. Lacaze was resentenced to life in prison. He will never face execution. Frank’s trial involved a different jury and was unaffected. In 2023, Frank’s appeal for clemency was denied by Louisiana’s Pardon Board on a two-to-two vote. Family members of Ronnie Williams spoke at the hearing, e opposing any reduction in her sentence. In 2025, her attorneys filed a fresh post-conviction appeal arguing that her trial lawyers failed to investigate or present any evidence of her horrific childhood, the abuse, the rapes, the psychological damage. A judge granted a hearing. The Louisiana Attorney General, Liz Murrill, has fought aggressively to speed up her execution, filing writs with the state Supreme Court to override the appeal process. As of today, that legal battle continues. No execution date has been set. The lead homicide detective on the case, Eddie Rantz, spent 27 years on the force before retiring and going to law school. He still thinks about the night at the Kim Anh. He once said of Antoinette Frank, “She is, without a doubt, the most cold-hearted person I’ve ever met. ” Prosecutor Glenn Woods keeps a photograph of Hai and Kwong Vu in his office. He says it reminds him of the evil that exists in the world. Mary Williams raised Ronnie’s two boys alone. She grew close to the Vu family in the years after the murders. They see each other often. The Vus still own the Kim Anh restaurant. And somewhere in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, behind the walls of a correctional facility, Antoinette Frank is still alive, still breathing, still waiting. Case two. Darlie Routier, the mother behind glass. On June 6th, 1996 at 2:31 in the morning, 911 dispatchers in Rowlett, Texas, a quiet, tree-lined suburb northeast of Dallas, received a call that sounded like the world was ending. On the line was 26-year-old Darlie Lynn Routier. She was screaming, hysterical. “Oh my god. My babies are dying. Someone came in while we were sleeping. My babies. Somebody came in and stabbed my babies.” Police arrived within 3 minutes. What they found inside 5801 Eagle Drive would launch one of the most polarizing criminal cases in American history. 6-year-old Devon Routier lay on the living room floor. He had been stabbed twice in the chest with such force that the blade of the large kitchen knife had nearly passed all the way through his small body. He was already dead. 5-year-old Damon Routier lay nearby. He had been stabbed multiple times in the back. He was still alive when paramedics reached him, barely. His small chest rising and falling in shallow, labored breaths. He died shortly after. Darlie herself was covered in blood. A deep slash ran across her throat. Doctors would later say the cut stopped 2 mm from her carotid artery, the artery that, if severed, would have killed her in minutes. She had two slice wounds on her right forearm and one on her left shoulder. She was rushed to the hospital and treated. Her husband, Daren Routier, had been upstairs asleep with their infant son, Drake. He came downstairs to find his family destroyed. Darlie told police a story that, in the first hours, seemed almost plausible. She said she had fallen asleep on the couch watching television with Devon and Damon. She woke to Damon pressing on her shoulder crying, “Mommy. Mommy.” In the darkness, she didn’t even notice she was injured. She saw a figure, a man, moving through the kitchen toward the garage. She followed him. He dropped the knife in the utility room as he fled. For the first 48 hours, e Darlie was treated as a survivor, a victim of a violent home invasion. But as investigators processed the scene, the story started to crack. The garage showed no blood. None. No signs that anyone had run through it in a hurry. A window screen in the garage had been cut from the outside, which initially suggested a break-in point. But the window sills had undisturbed layers of dust. Nobody had climbed through. The mulch in the flower beds between the garage and the backyard gate was perfectly smooth. No footprints, no disturbance of any kind. A fingerprint was found on the windowsill, and in 2002, it was determined not to belong to anyone in the Routier family. However, an expert later testified he could not rule out Darlie’s right ring finger as the source. Then there was the sock. A bloody sock was found 75 yd from the house, all in an alley down the street. Lab tests confirmed it contained blood from both Devon and Damon. The prosecution argued that Darlie had planted the sock to support the intruder story. The defense argued its location proved someone else had been at the scene. Investigators also examined the knife wounds. Darlie’s injuries, while dramatic, especially the throat wound, were significantly less severe than the fatal wounds her sons had suffered. The prosecution’s theory was that the cuts were self-inflicted. The defense argued that no mother would slash her own throat 2 mm from her carotid artery as part of a staging, that the risk was too great, that the wound alone proved she was a victim. The prosecution’s motive was financial stress. Daren Routier’s business was struggling. The family was $22,000 in debt. Do prosecutors argued Darlie had killed her sons in a moment of overwhelming despair and then staged the scene to cover it up. Then came the moment that, more than any piece of forensic evidence, defined the trial. Days after the murders, a local news station filmed the family at a birthday memorial for Devon at the boys’ graves. The footage showed Darlie smiling, laughing, chewing gum, and spraying silly string over the headstones. The prosecution played the tape for the jury. In one clip, the mother accused of stabbing her children to death appeared not to be grieving. She appeared to be celebrating. What the jury didn’t see, what wasn’t shown in the broadcast, were the extended periods before and after the silly string moment. Supporters of Darlie Routier have argued for decades that the full, the unedited footage showed a family in deep mourning with extended periods of crying, prayer, and grief. They argue the broadcast and the prosecution cherry-picked the most damaging 30 seconds and used them to assassinate her character. Whether that’s true or not, the damage was done. The silly string video became the image that defined Darlie Routier in the public mind. And once that image was set, it was almost impossible to undo. In February 1997, after several weeks of testimony, the jury deliberated for less than 10 hours. They found Darlie Routier guilty of capital murder in the death of her younger son, Damon. She was sentenced to death. She was never tried for Devon’s murder. Her husband, Daren, who was upstairs during the attack, was never charged. He has maintained her innocence for decades, but a private investigator working for Darlie’s appellate attorney later revealed that Daren had admitted to asking Darlie’s stepfather whether he knew anyone who would break into the house and steal furniture for an insurance scam. Daren initially denied making the statement. When confronted with affidavits, he admitted to the conversation. Over the next three decades, multiple rounds of DNA testing have been conducted. None of the results have conclusively identified another suspect or exonerated Routier. Her defense team has continued to argue that the investigation was flawed, that key evidence was mishandled, and that Darlie’s mental state, including possible postpartum depression and insomnia, was improperly interpreted by both the prosecution and the jury. As of today, Ann Darlie Routier remains on death row at the Patrick O’Daniel Unit in Gatesville, Texas. She is one of seven women on Texas death row. No execution date has been set. She continues to proclaim her innocence. In an interview, she said, “I cannot believe they’re doing this to me when I did not do this. I did not kill Devon or Damon.” Her case remains one of the most divisive in American true crime. For every person who believes she is a grieving mother wrongfully convicted by a prejudiced investigation and a 30-second video clip, there is someone equally certain that the physical evidence tells the only story that matters. And after nearly 30 years, neither side has budged. Case three, Emilia Carr, love, lies, and a shallow grave. In the spring of 2009 in Marion County, Florida, a custody dispute between two women and one man ended with a garbage bag, a roll of duct tape, and a shallow grave behind a storage trailer. At the center of the case were 24-year-old Emilia Lilly Carr and the 26-year-old Heather Strong. The man between them was Joshua Damien Fulgham. Heather Strong was born on March the 23rd, 1982. She was a mother of two. She worked at an Iron Skillet restaurant at a Petro gas station off Interstate 75 in Reddick, Florida. She was from Mississippi originally, and by all accounts, she was a woman trying to hold her life together under difficult circumstances. Emilia Carr had been engaged to Joshua Fulgham. Then in December 2008, Fulgham abruptly broke off the engagement and married Heather Strong instead. For Emilia, the rejection wasn’t just a breakup. It was a replacement. And it ignited something inside her that witnesses would later describe as obsessive, consuming, and increasingly dangerous. The marriage between Joshua and Heather collapsed almost immediately. Within a week, Heather was calling police. In January 2009, Joshua was arrested after threatening Heather with a shotgun. The charge of aggravated assault with a firearm was eventually dropped because Emilia Carr threatened Heather with a knife and forced her to withdraw the complaint. While Joshua sat in jail, he and Emilia rekindled their relationship. Emilia was already pregnant with Joshua’s child, 7 months along by February 2009. The love triangle had become a pressure cooker. Heather wanted to take her two children and move back to Mississippi, away from all of it. Joshua and Emilia wanted those children. And Emilia, deem according to evidence presented at trial, had already decided that the only way forward was through Heather. Before the murder, Emilia tried to hire a hitman. She offered $500 to have Heather killed. She couldn’t find anyone willing to take the job. So, she and Joshua decided to do it themselves. On February 15th, 2009, Joshua convinced Heather to come to a trailer on property belonging to Emilia’s mother in Boardman, a rural area near McIntosh, Florida. He told her Emilia had hidden money there. It was a lie designed to get her inside. When Heather arrived and stepped into the trailer, Emilia, 7 months pregnant, was waiting with a knife. What happened inside that trailer was not quick. According to both defendants’ eventual confessions and the recorded conversation that later broke the case, Heather tried to leave. Now, a struggle broke out. Joshua grabbed her. Emilia taped her. Together, they duct-taped Heather Strong to a chair. She was restrained, unable to move. Then Joshua forced his wife, the mother of his two children, to sign a document transferring custody of those children to him. Then they placed a garbage bag over Heather’s head. They tried to snap her neck. It didn’t work. Heather was still alive, still conscious beneath the bag, still fighting. So, they held the bag tighter. Emilia placed her hand over Heather’s mouth and nose through the bag. Joshua wrapped duct tape around Heather’s neck, and they held it there until Heather Strong stopped breathing. She was 26 years old, a mother, a daughter, a woman whose only crime was being connected to the wrong man. They buried her body in a shallow grave behind the trailer. For weeks, Heather’s family searched for answers. They filed missing person reports. They pleaded publicly for information. The whole time, the truth was buried in the dirt less than 100 feet from where she had died. The break came when police brought Joshua in for questioning about using Heather’s credit card after her disappearance. He initially denied everything. Then, with handcuffs on, he asked the detective a question. “You let me take my wallet to my mama, and I’ll take you to her.” Detective Sergeant Donald Bowley agreed. In the dark, Joshua led detectives down an overgrown trail to the trailer on Emilia’s mother’s property. Behind it, Bowley started digging with a shovel, one scoop at a time, until he saw Heather’s face. Joshua confessed. He blamed Emilia. Emilia denied everything. She blamed Joshua. The investigation stalled until Joshua’s sister, Michelle Gustafson, contacted police and agreed to wear a wire. In a secretly recorded conversation, Emilia admitted everything. She described placing the bag over Heather’s head. She described the moment Heather stopped moving. She expressed surprise, not at the horror of what had happened, but that Joshua had actually gone through with the plan. She had never taken him seriously, she said, until it was done. On December 7th, 2010, after 2 and 1/2 hours of deliberation, a jury found Emilia Carr guilty of first-degree murder and kidnapping. During the penalty phase, her family took the stand and described the abuse that had shaped her life, sexual abuse by her father beginning at age four, lasting until she was 15, after which she was placed in state custody. She was married at 16 and pregnant by 17. By 24, she had four children by different men. The jury voted seven to five for death. On February 22nd, 2011, she was formally sentenced to death by lethal injection. At 26, she became one of the youngest women on Florida’s death row. Joshua Fulgham was tried separately in April 2012. He was convicted of the same charges, first-degree murder and kidnapping, but his jury voted eight to four for life in prison without parole. The judge followed the recommendation. Two people, one murder, the woman got death, the man got life. In 2017, following changes to Florida’s sentencing laws that now required a unanimous jury recommendation for death, a judge overturned Emilia Carr’s death sentence. The state declined to seek a new death penalty phase. She was resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Today, Emilia Carr remains incarcerated. She has maintained her innocence from the beginning, but the tape, the tape of her voice in her own words describing how she helped kill Heather Strong, has never gone away. Case four, Christa Pike, the youngest woman on death row. On the rainy night of January 12th, 1995 in Knoxville, Tennessee, four teenagers walked off the campus of the Knoxville Job Corps Center together. Three of them had a plan. The fourth, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, had no idea what was about to happen to her. Colleen was a Job Corps student, quiet, trying to build a life. She had told her mother, May Martinez, that she was having problems with another student, a girl named Christa Pike. But she had no reason to think that walking off campus with Christa, Christa’s boyfriend, Tadaryl Ship, and their friend, Shadalla Peterson, would be anything more than an attempt to smooth things over. They told Colleen they wanted to make peace. They offered to share some marijuana. They walked together down the Cumberland Avenue strip, cut across Tyson Park, and made their way to a secluded paved pathway on the University of Tennessee Agricultural Campus. It was dark. It was isolated. They were alone. Christa Gail Pike was born on March 10th, 1976 in Beckley, West Virginia, 2 months premature. Her parents had a violent, unstable relationship, married for 2 years, divorced after her mother was caught having an affair, and remarried for another 2 years after her mother attempted suicide. Both parents were frequently negligent. An aunt later testified that as an infant, being Christa, would crawl through piles of dog feces because nobody cleaned the house. Her mother continued drinking heavily even after learning her toddler was having severe seizures. Court filings from post-conviction proceedings revealed that Christa was exposed to alcohol in utero. Medical experts later determined that the prenatal exposure caused structural damage to the part of her brain responsible for impulse control and behavioral regulation. As she grew, she experienced physical and sexual abuse. By the time she arrived at the Knoxville Job Corps at 18, she was a teenager with a damaged brain, undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and PTSD, and a life filled with trauma that no one in any position of authority had ever addressed. At Job Corps, Christa fell into a relationship with Tadaryl Ship, who was 17. The relationship was volatile and, according to later court filings, abusive. When Christa became convinced that Colleen Slemmer was trying to steal Ship from her, the jealousy didn’t fade. It metastasized. Over the course of several days, witnesses described Pike talking repeatedly about confronting Slemmer. This was not a spontaneous outburst. It was a plan that built slowly, then erupted. That night, when they reached the isolated pathway, Christa turned on Colleen. She accused her of trying to take Ship, and then she attacked. For the next 30 minutes to an hour, according to Pike’s own later estimate, Colleen Slemmer was beaten, taunted, slashed, and tortured. Pike and Ship used a small meat cleaver and a box cutter to slice into Slemmer’s skin. They carved a pentagram into her chest. They attempted to carve another into her forehead. When Slemmer begged them to stop, Pike mocked her. Peterson stood nearby and watched. The attack ended when Pike picked up a large chunk of asphalt from the ground and smashed it into Colleen Slemmer’s skull. The blow was fatal. Slemmer’s body was left on the pathway, and then Christa Pike bent down and plucked a fragment of bone from the wound in Colleen Slemmer’s skull. My, she wrapped it in a napkin and slipped it into the pocket of her leather jacket. The next morning, at breakfast in the Job Corps cafeteria, Pike bragged about what she had done. She took out the piece of skull and showed it to classmates. “And yes,” she announced, “I’m eating breakfast with it.” The Job Corps logbook showed that four students had signed out together the night before. Only three had returned. A groundskeeper found Slemmer’s body that morning, and he later testified that she was so badly beaten, he initially mistook her for a dead animal. Within 36 hours, Pike, Ship, and Peterson were arrested. Detectives found the skull fragment in Pike’s jacket pocket. Pike confessed soon after, but insisted they had only meant to scare Slemmer, and that things spiraled out of control. On March 22nd, 1996, Pike was found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy. Eight days later, she was sentenced to death. She was 20 years old, one of the youngest women ever sentenced to death in the modern era of American capital punishment. Ship, who was 17 and therefore ineligible for the death penalty, was convicted and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. He was denied parole in October 2025. Peterson, who served as a lookout, testified against Pike and Ship. She received probation. Three teenagers, one murder, one got death, one got life, one walked free. While incarcerated, Pike’s violent behavior continued. In 2001, she attacked another inmate by strangulation, earning a separate conviction. In 2004, she was convicted of attempted murder of another incarcerated woman during a prison fire. In 2012, authorities uncovered an escape plan. It was stopped before it could be executed. For nearly 30 years, Christa Pike was held in what her attorneys described as functional solitary confinement, a cell the size of a parking space with almost no meaningful human contact. She is the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. In September 2024, her lawyers reached a settlement that allowed her to work and socialize with other women in general population for the first time. On September 30th, 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued a death warrant. Christa Pike is scheduled to be executed on September 30th, 2026 at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. If the execution proceeds, she will be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Pike has since filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s lethal injection protocol citing her medical conditions and her religious beliefs as a practicing Buddhist. Her attorneys argue that the state’s requirement that she propose an alternative method of execution forces her to participate in her own death, which violates her faith. Colleen Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has waited over 30 years. She has said, “I would like Tennessee to hear my plea and finally end this after 30 years.” Pike herself has spoken publicly about her crime. She once said, “I think I deserve to be in here for the rest of my life. I do. I know I do. I know I don’t deserve to be out walking around with everybody else in normal society. I did something horrible that is unacceptable, and I realize that. But I don’t deserve to die for the actions of three individuals.” Case five, Lisa Montgomery, dead woman. Walking on December the 16th, 2004, a 36-year-old woman named Lisa Montgomery left her home in Melvern, Kansas, and drove nearly 3 hours to a small house in the town of Skidmore, Missouri. She had a plan. She had been building it for months, and by the end of the day, it would produce one of the most horrifying crimes in American history. Her destination was the home of 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a young woman who bred rat terrier dogs with her husband. Bobbie Jo was 8 months pregnant, and she was excited about the baby. She was excited about the puppies she had for sale. She had no reason to fear the woman who was coming to visit. Lisa Montgomery had been communicating with Stinnett for weeks through an online dog breeding chat room called Ratter Chatter. Montgomery used a fake name, Darlene Fisher. She told Stinnett she was also pregnant. The two women exchanged emails about their pregnancies. They bonded over dogs and babies. On December 15th, Montgomery messaged Stinnett and said she wanted to buy a puppy. They agreed to meet the next day. Montgomery told Stinnett she was from Fairfax, Missouri, a town near Skidmore. In reality, she was driving from Kansas. Montgomery arrived at Stinnett’s home in the late morning. Bobbie Jo let her in. What happened next was not a crime of impulse. It was a crime that had been researched, planned, and rehearsed in Montgomery’s mind long before she knocked on that door. Montgomery attacked Stinnett. She produced a rope and wrapped it around Bobbie Jo’s neck. She strangled the young mother until she lost consciousness. Bobbie Jo Stinnett was still alive or had only just died when Montgomery took a kitchen knife and began cutting. She performed a crude, violent cesarean section on the kitchen floor, opening Bobbie Jo’s abdomen and extracting the 8-month-old fetus from her womb. The baby survived. Montgomery gathered up the newborn, left Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s body on the floor, and drove back to Kansas. Hours later, she presented the baby to her husband and community as her own child. She had been telling everyone for months that she was pregnant, and this was the child she had promised them. The deception was complete. When Bobbie Jo’s mother arrived at the house and found her daughter’s lifeless body, the investigation moved at lightning speed. An Amber Alert was issued in the early hours of December 17th for the missing newborn. Digital evidence, hm, the emails, the chat room conversations, the Darlene Fisher alias, all pointed to Lisa Montgomery. The following day, FBI agents located her at her home in Melvern, Kansas. She was holding the stolen newborn in her arms. The baby was alive, healthy. Against all odds, the infant had survived the extraction and the hours that followed. The child was returned to the father. Lisa Montgomery was arrested and charged with kidnapping resulting in death, a federal crime because of the interstate nature of the offense. The crime itself was indefensible. The prosecution’s case was overwhelming. But the defense introduced a portrait of Lisa Montgomery that forced the jury, the courts, and ultimately the country to confront a question that no one wanted to answer. Lisa Montgomery was born brain-damaged. Her mother drank heavily during the pregnancy, and the fetal alcohol exposure caused structural and functional damage to her brain. Scientific imaging conducted later in life confirmed the damage was real, measurable, and permanent. She was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy, bipolar disorder, and complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Her childhood was a catalog of atrocities. Her stepfather began raping her when she was a child. Her mother knew about the abuse. According to a nearly 7,000-page clemency petition filed by her attorneys, or her mother did not just fail to stop it, she facilitated it. She allegedly trafficked her own daughter to other men. Many people knew what was happening to Lisa. A neighbor, a cousin who was a law enforcement officer, the judge in her mother’s divorce. Nobody intervened. Her older sister, Diane Mattingly, was placed in foster care. She has publicly confirmed that she, too, was abused in the home. She spent years arguing that Lisa’s life should be spared. The defense argued that the murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett was committed during a psychotic break, the product of decades of untreated mental illness compounded by a lifetime of sexual torture. They argued that if Lisa Montgomery had received treatment and medication at any point in her life, the crime would never have happened. The prosecution rejected that argument completely. They pointed to the planning. Montgomery had researched cesarean procedures online. She had purchased supplies in advance. She had maintained the pregnancy deception for months, telling friends and family she was expecting. Every element of the crime, they argued, demonstrated premeditation, intent, and awareness. This was not a psychotic episode. This was a calculated, methodical act. In October 2007, a federal jury convicted Montgomery of kidnapping resulting in death. She was sentenced to death. She became the only woman on federal death row. For the next 13 years, her case became one of the most debated in modern American legal history. Over 1,000 current and former prosecutors, anti-violence advocates, anti-trafficking organizations, and mental health professionals signed petitions asking for her sentence to be commuted to life in prison. Even people who believed she was guilty of a monstrous crime argued that executing a woman with her level of brain damage and psychological trauma crossed a constitutional line. The courts disagreed. Every appeal was denied. In the final weeks of the Trump administration, which had overseen a historically aggressive push to resume federal executions after a 17-year hiatus, Montgomery’s execution date was set for December 2020. It was postponed after her attorneys contracted COVID-19. A new date was set for January 12th, 2021. What followed was one of the most chaotic legal battles in recent memory. Multiple courts issued stays of execution. Multiple courts reversed them. Emergency motions were filed arguing Montgomery had suffered a severe mental breakdown and no longer understood why she was being executed. District courts and appellate courts traded rulings throughout the day and into the night. The case bounced from Washington, D.C. to Chicago to Indiana and back again. At midnight on January 13th, 2021, the Supreme Court cleared the way. The Bureau of Prisons issued a new execution notice. Lisa Montgomery was transferred from a federal women’s prison in Texas to the execution chamber at the federal correctional complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. She had been on death row for over 13 years. In her final days, she kept a calendar in her cell. On it, she had marked one date, January 20th, 2021, Joe Biden’s inauguration. Biden had promised to enact a moratorium on federal executions. She was counting down to the day she believed might save her life. She missed it by 1 week. When Lisa Montgomery was strapped to the gurney and asked if she had any final words, she answered with one word, “No.” At 1:31 a.m. Eastern Time on January 13th, 2021, Lisa Montgomery was pronounced dead by lethal injection. She was the first woman executed by the federal government in 67 years. The 11th prisoner put to death in a 6-month federal execution spree unprecedented in the 20th or 21st century. 6 months later, President Biden enacted the moratorium. No federal executions have taken place since. Five women, five death sentences, five completely different outcomes. Antoinette Frank sits on Louisiana’s death row 31 years after the killing on murders, still the only woman on the state’s death row. Her appeals working through the courts as the state’s attorney general fights to execute her. Her co-conspirator, Rogers Lacaze, who fired the first shots that killed Ronnie Williams, had his death sentence overturned on a technicality. He serves life in prison. He will never face execution. Darlie Routier sits on Texas death row, still proclaiming her innocence, still waiting for DNA evidence to either free her or confirm what the prosecution always believed. No execution date has been set. Nearly 30 years have passed since Devon and Damon were laid to rest. Emilia Carr, once the youngest woman on Florida’s death row, had her sentence reduced to life without parole after the state changed its sentencing laws. Her co-defendant, Joshua Fulgham, who participated in the same murder, who held Heather Strong down, who wrapped the tape around her neck, was never sentenced to death. Christa Pike is scheduled to die on September 30th, 2026. If the execution proceeds, she will be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Her co-defendant, Tederal Ship, who participated in the same murder, who helped carve the pentagram, who helped Colleen Slemmer to death, serves life in prison with the possibility of parole. And Lisa Montgomery is dead, executed in the final days of a presidency that carried out more federal executions in 6 months than the country had seen in decades. One week before a new president who opposed the death penalty took office, her last word was no. Here is what connects these five cases beyond the obvious. In four out of five, a male co-defendant was involved in the same crime. In every single one of those four cases, the man received a lighter sentence than the woman. Lacaze got life. Fulgham got life. Ship got life with parole. Peterson walked on probation. The women got death. That disparity is not a coincidence, and it is not an accident. It is a pattern that scholars, attorneys, and advocacy groups have studied for decades. When a woman commits extreme violence, particularly violence that violates what society expects a woman to be, a mother, a caretaker, a protector. The system doesn’t just punish the crime. It punishes the betrayal of an idea. The idea of what a woman is supposed to be. These five cases do not prove that theory. But they make it very, very hard to ignore. Every one of these women committed or was convicted of terrible violence. Every one of these cases involves victims who deserved to live. Every one of these cases left behind families that are still grieving. Still hurting. Still waiting for something that looks like closure. But the question these cases leave behind has never been answered. Not by a jury. Not by a judge. Not by a governor. Not by a president. When women commit the most extreme violence, does the system respond with justice? Or does it respond with something else? Something older and deeper and harder to name. Some of these women are still alive. These are real cases with real consequences. And the question they leave behind was not settled in any courtroom. Do you believe justice was served? Or do these cases reveal something broken in the way we decide who lives and who dies? Where do you draw the line?