She Put Her Babies to Sleep Forever Then Begged to Die | Christina Riggs | Final Meal & Last Words

No matter she was depressed, she was this, she was that. Doesn’t make up for the fact that I took two innocent people’s lives.  She tucked her children into bed. She covered them with a blanket and then she lay down beside them and waited to die. But death didn’t come for Christina Riggs that night.  It came for her children instead.

Welcome to the last chamber where we go beyond the headlines and into the darkest corners of true crime. Christina Marie Riggs entered this world on September 2nd, 1971 in Oklahoma. From the very beginning, the world she entered was fractured. Her father was absent. Her stepfather was cold and disengaged.

 There was no warmth in the spaces where warmth should have lived. And in that vacuum, something far worse moved in. By the age of seven, Christina was being sexually abused by her stepbrother. It continued for six years. By the time she was 14, a neighbor had also violated her. Two predators, one childhood, completely stolen. She described that period as the moment everything began to spiral and when you hear what her life became, it’s hard to argue with her.

Christina struggled deeply with her self-image, her weight, her worth, her place in the world. She came to believe that the only currency she had with other people was her body. So she used it. She became sexually active with multiple boys in her neighborhood chasing something that felt like acceptance even when it wasn’t.

By 16, she was drinking, smoking cigarettes, smoking marijuana. She was 16 years old and already running from something she couldn’t name. Then she got pregnant. She tried to hide it.  The father was a black teenager and Christina’s mother, Carol, made it devastatingly clear that a biracial baby was not welcome in her home.

 When the child was born, Carol pressured Christina into giving the baby up for adoption. And just like that, Christina’s first child was gone.  Here’s what makes this detail so haunting. That child, wherever he is today, may have grown up not knowing his biological mother was executed by the state of Arkansas.

 That is a weight nobody asked him to carry. But Christina didn’t collapse. Not yet. She pulled herself together in ways that most people wouldn’t expect. She graduated high school. She enrolled in nursing training and earned her license. She built a career working 12-hour shifts at the Arkansas Heart Hospital and taking additional work as an in-home care nurse.

 This was not a woman without drive. This was not a woman without intelligence. She began a relationship with a sailor. Then, around 1991, she started an affair with Timothy Thompson, a young man in the Air Force stationed at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. She was 20 years old and she was pregnant again. Christina waited until the day before Timothy’s discharge to tell him.

 He rejected her completely, denied the baby was his, and walked back to Minnesota without a second look.  She went back to the sailor, a man named John Riggs. They rekindled things. He accepted the pregnancy. On June 7th, 1992, Christina gave birth to a son. She named him Justin Dalton Thomas, giving him her maiden name, not John’s, not yet.

She and John tried for another child together. A miscarriage. They kept trying. They got married in July of 1993. She was pregnant again. She miscarried on her wedding night. On her wedding night. She sought psychiatric help. She was prescribed Prozac. It helped enough that she stopped taking it on her own without medical guidance.

 That decision would cost her more than she knew. On December 1st, 1994, Christina gave birth to a daughter, Shelby Alexis Riggs. And for a moment, it must have felt like things were finally stabilizing. They weren’t. John and Christina’s marriage collapsed. The divorce was ugly. John was taken to court for physically assaulting Justin, punching the young boy hard enough to put him in the hospital.

 Justin told investigators with devastating clarity, “My daddy hurt me, and then he went [music] away.” After that, it was just Christina, alone, two children, 12-hour shifts, $17,000 a year. Justin had been diagnosed with ADHD, and his behavior was difficult to manage. So difficult that daycare workers routinely refused to care for him.

 Child support from John was inconsistent at best. She had no village, no safety net, no one carrying any of the weight with her. She started having thoughts of suicide. She kept them to herself for 7 months. November 4th, 1997. Christina’s last shift at the Arkansas Heart Hospital. Before she left work, she took something with her, morphine and potassium chloride, [music] drugs she had access to as a nurse.

 She stopped at a pharmacy and picked up a prescription antidepressant called Elavil. Then she went to the bank and withdrew everything in her checking account. She handed it all to her mother. She got home around 10:00 that night. She sat down and wrote the letters. One to John, telling him she hoped one day he would understand.

 One to her mother, two actually, because once wasn’t enough to say what she needed to say. One to her sister Rosie, telling her to stay close to their mother, that this was going to be hard, that she was tired, that Rosie had been a great sister. She signed them all, Chrissy. Then she mixed the Elavil into water and made her children drink it, both of them. She waited as they grew drowsy.

When Justin was sedated enough, she injected him in the neck with potassium chloride, a drug that, in its undiluted form, causes agonizing, searing pain. She didn’t know it needed to be diluted. She was a nurse, but she didn’t know. Justin began to cry out. He said it hurt. He kept saying it over and over, “Mama, mama, mama.

” She picked him up, she rocked [music] him, and then she smothered him with a pillow. He fought her, he struggled, but he was 5 years old and she was his mother and she was stronger. Then she went to Shelby. 2 years old, having watched what the injection did to Justin, she didn’t use the potassium chloride this time. She smothered Shelby, too.

 Shelby struggled less. She placed Shelby’s body in the bed next to Justin’s. She pulled a blanket over them both. She smoked a cigarette. She had a drink. And then she swallowed 28 Elavil tablets and injected herself with the same potassium chloride she’d used on Justin. Undiluted. The injection burned a hole in her arm the size of a silver dollar coin.

She lay down. She expected to die. But she didn’t.  The next morning, November 5th, Christina’s mother, Carol, couldn’t reach her by phone. Christina hadn’t shown up to work. Carol drove to the apartment and let herself in. She walked to the bedroom. She found her grandchildren dead under that blanket.

 She found her daughter barely breathing, clinging to a faint pulse. Carol screamed and called 911. Christina was rushed to Baptist Memorial Medical Center, placed in the ICU, her stomach pumped, charcoal administered to absorb what remained of the drugs in her system. She survived.

 Back at the apartment, police had found everything.  The amitriptyline I figured would help [music] them sleep, so they wouldn’t wake up and feel nothing. And the potassium chloride was supposed to stop their heart. You know, no pain, no nothing, just I don’t think he knew. I think that the amitriptyline And he just kind of, you [music] know, whined, “Mama. Mama.

” After I laid Justin out in the bed, in my bed, I I used a pillow and suffocated him.  The  syringes, the medications, and all four handwritten letters. When investigators came to question her in the hospital, Christina confessed to everything, every detail. She didn’t hesitate.  The trial of Christina Riggs opened in June of 1998 in Pulaski County, Arkansas.

 Her attorneys argued that the interrogation conducted while she was recovering in the ICU was improper and that her confession should be thrown out. The court disagreed. Dr. Buford, a physician who examined her on November 6th, just 2 days after the incident, testified that Christina was alert, [music] oriented, and fully capable of coherent communication.

 There was no indication of hallucination or disorientation. Christina initially entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury rejected it. They found her guilty on both counts of capital murder. Then came the sentencing phase, and what happened next was something the courtroom was not prepared for. Christina stood up and fired her own defense.

She refused to allow her attorneys to make any arguments on her behalf during sentencing. She spoke directly. She told the court she wanted the death penalty, that she wanted [music] to be with her babies. “I want to die,” she said. “I want to be with my babies. Give me the death penalty.” Judge Marion Humphrey obliged.

 On June 30th, 1998, Christina Riggs was sentenced to death by lethal injection. She immediately waived all appeals. The courts evaluated her mental competency and determined she was fully capable of making that decision. They allowed it. Christina Riggs became the only woman on death row at the Arkansas Department of Corrections McPherson Unit, housed alone in a three-cell wing.

She was content. She said so herself. She said she would be with her babies.  No matter she was depressed, she was this, she was that.  Doesn’t make up for the fact that I took two innocent people’s lives. They were my babies.  Christina spent the next 2 years waiting for what she had already asked for.

Prison staff placed her on a diabetic diet. She had gained more than 50 lb since her incarceration, bringing her weight to 270 lb. The state was managing her health while simultaneously preparing to end her life. That detail alone has sparked debate that continues to this day. For her last meal, she left the diet behind entirely.

 She ordered a supreme pizza and a salad from Mod’s Pizza, fried okra from Brown’s Chicken, a cherry limeade and a strawberry shortcake from Walmart. A final meal that was almost ordinary, almost like anyone’s Friday night. On May 2nd, 2000, at 9:18 in the evening, Christina Riggs was brought to the execution chamber.

 She was 38 years old. She was calm. But the execution did not begin on time. For nearly 20 minutes, the medical team searched for a viable vein in her elbow. They couldn’t find one. Christina, without being asked twice, told them to use her wrist instead. Even in this moment, the last moment of her life, she was trying to make it easier for everyone else.

Her final statement to the witnesses and officials gathered in that room, “No words can express just how sorry I am for taking the lives of my babies.” Her final words, spoken quietly just before the injection began, “I love you, my babies.” And then the potassium chloride, the same drug she had used on Justin, the same drug that had burned through her arm 2 years prior, entered her body for the last time.

 Christina Marie Riggs was pronounced dead. She became the first woman executed in the state of Arkansas since 1976. Here is what I keep coming back to. Christina Riggs was not born a killer. She was born into abuse. She survived predators. She survived abandonment. She survived miscarriages and a violent marriage and poverty and isolation.

 She was a nurse who cared for veterans and the elderly. She was a woman who, by almost every account, was drowning and reached out for help too late in all the wrong ways. None of that excuses what she did to Justin and Shelby. Nothing ever will. Two children are gone. A 5-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl who had no say in any of it.

 Their names deserve to outlast hers. But this story forces a question that has no clean answer. At what point does a broken system, one that fails mothers, underfunds mental health care, ignores abuse, and leaves women alone with children and no support, become part of the crime? I’m not asking you to forgive Christina Riggs.

 I’m asking you to sit with the discomfort of a story where there are no heroes, only damage, only loss, only two small children under a blanket, and a woman who thought death was the only door left open. Rest in peace, Shelby. Rest in peace, Justin. If this story moved you, if it made you think, or question, or feel something you weren’t expecting, subscribe to The Last Chamber.

 New cases every week.  And if there is a case you want me to cover, a name, a story, a case that you feel the world needs to hear, drop it in the comments below. This channel exists because of you, and your suggestions shape every episode we make. I’ll see you in the next chamber.