Final 24 Hours of Christina Riggs + Last Meal + Last Words on Arkansas Death Row

Final 24 Hours of Christina Riggs + Last Meal + Last Words on Arkansas Death Row

On the night of May 2nd, 2000, a woman was strapped to a gurney inside the Cummins Unit in Varner, Arkansas. The room was quiet, the witnesses were still, and the woman on that table did not fight. She did not cry out. She did not ask anyone to stop. She had spent almost two years doing the opposite—begging the state to finish what she had started.

Her name was Christina Marie Riggs. She was 28 years old, a licensed practical nurse, and a mother. She was the first woman executed in the state of Arkansas in over 150 years. But here is what will stay with you long after this video ends: Christina Riggs was not executed despite her wishes; she was executed because of them.

She had waived every appeal, refused every intervention, and told anyone who tried to save her to stand down. From the moment she was arrested, she had one destination in mind, and she was willing to wait for it. Welcome to Convicted Criminals. Kindly subscribe and turn on the notification bell so you won’t miss our deep-dive drops into some of the most disturbing cases in the history of the American justice system—not because of what Christina did, but because of what came after, and the questions it left behind that no verdict has ever fully answered.

Before we reach that gurney, we have to go back—all the way back. What happened in a small apartment in Sherwood, Arkansas, on the night of November 4th, 1997, did not begin that night; it began decades earlier in a childhood that never stood a chance.

The details ahead are graphic and deeply distressing. Viewer discretion is strongly advised. All events are presented with care and respect for the victims: Justin Dalton Thomas, age 5, and Shelby Alexis Riggs, age 2. Their lives mattered. Their deaths should never be forgotten.

Christina Marie Thomas was born on September 2nd, 1971, in Lawton, Oklahoma, and later lived in Oklahoma City. From the outside, her early years looked ordinary, but inside the walls of the home where she grew up, something was already fracturing. She was sexually abused by both her stepbrother and a neighbor as a child and began drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, and using marijuana at age 14. That abuse by her stepbrother lasted between the ages of 8 and 13. There was no intervention, no counseling; no one came. She carried it alone.

Her family carried a long history of mental illness and suicidal tendencies. Her mother, sister, and a cousin all attempted suicide. Another cousin completed suicide. Her grandmother was twice committed to a mental institution, and her great-grandfather died by suicide inside one. This was the environment in which Christina Riggs grew up, and at 16, already numbing herself with substances, she became pregnant. She gave the child up for adoption and rarely spoke of it afterward.

She tried to rebuild. She managed to keep her life under control enough to finish high school. After graduation, Riggs became a licensed practical nurse, working two jobs: full-time at a Veterans Administration Hospital and part-time as a home care nurse. To everyone around her, she looked like someone fighting to make something of herself, and for a while, she was.

She became pregnant by a man she was dating named Timothy Thompson, who was stationed at Tinker Air Force Base. Thompson refused to accept that the child was his and returned to his native Minnesota. Justin Dalton Thomas was born on June 7th, 1992.

Single again, with an infant she was raising alone, Christina found her way back to a man she had previously dated, a Navy sailor named John Riggs. They married in July 1993. She had a miscarriage on their wedding night, but they later had a daughter, Shelby Alexis Riggs. The family moved to Sherwood, Arkansas, in 1995, where her mother lived, and Riggs obtained a job at Baptist Hospital.

She was close to her mother, had stable work, and had her children nearby. On paper, the pieces were finally coming together. However, the marriage did not survive. Christina and John later divorced after she stated he struck Justin in the stomach. Whatever fragile foundation she had built cracked at its center.

She was now a single mother of two children with different fathers, working long shifts as a nurse, relying heavily on her mother for childcare, and steadily falling apart on the inside. Her child support payments from the children’s fathers were irregular, she claimed, and daycare costs for her children were high. By this time, she was working at the Arkansas Heart Hospital. Other bills came in—car registration, insurance—placing her in an increasingly desperate financial situation.

The end of the marriage put Christina in a cycle familiar to many single parents: a budget shared by two now had to be supported by one, leading to the need to work more hours. “The more you work, the more you need daycare,” she said during a prison interview. “Then you feel bad about having them in daycare.”

However, the prosecution would challenge this picture entirely. Pulaski County Prosecutor Larry Jegley said flatly, “My response to that is welcome to America. Plenty of folks are in far worse situations than she was.” At the core of his case was the belief that Riggs was not overwhelmed, but calculating—that she viewed her children as an inconvenience and an interference.

The truth, as it often is in cases like this, lived somewhere in the difficult and uncomfortable space between both versions.

What is not disputed is what happened next. On November 4th, 1997, Christina Riggs acquired the antidepressant Elavil from her pharmacy and obtained potassium chloride and morphine from the hospital where she was employed. She left Arkansas Heart Hospital that afternoon for the last time. She stopped at her mother’s house, collected the children, paid a debt she owed, and headed home.

She cooked for them. She played with them. She went through every motion of a normal evening with the calm of someone who had already made peace with a decision others could not yet see. She mixed an amount of the antidepressant drug Elavil with water and made the children drink it. Elavil carries a powerful sedative effect. Both Justin and Shelby felt drowsy and drifted toward sleep.

Then Christina Riggs filled a syringe. She filled the first syringe with potassium chloride, a substance that can cause heart failure. Her oldest child, Justin, 5 years old, was then injected, but in an error that would define the horror of what followed, Riggs failed to dilute the substance. The child jolted awake in agony. Justin, frightened and in pain, did not understand what was happening. She injected Justin with morphine, she said, to ease his pain, but it had no sufficient effect. The boy was still alive, still suffering. A medical examiner later declared the cause of death for Justin and his sister to be suffocation. They had been smothered to death with a pillow.

Then Christina turned to Shelby, not yet 3 years old. She smothered her daughter without injecting her after witnessing the pain the potassium chloride had caused Justin. Shelby barely resisted; she was too young, too small, and too deeply sedated to understand what was happening.

When it was over, the children were found dead in Riggs’ bed. She had tucked them in together, side by side, as if they were simply sleeping. Then she sat down and wrote three letters: one to her mother, one to her sister, and one to her ex-husband. In her suicide note to her mother, she wrote, “I feel as if a dark cloud has hung over my life.” She explained that she feared her children would be separated after her death and that she did not want them to grow up knowing their mother had taken her own life. In her fractured reasoning, what she had done was an act of mercy.

She then took 28 Elavil tablets—normally a lethal dose—and injected herself with enough undiluted potassium chloride to kill five people. She fell to the floor. It was supposed to end there. For Christina Riggs, this was supposed to be the conclusion, but it wasn’t.

Riggs’ mother went to her daughter’s home when Riggs failed to show up for work the next day and found the two children dead and Riggs unconscious. Frantically, she told a 911 dispatcher, “My daughter and her babies are dead.” But first responders found a trace of life in Riggs. The potassium chloride had burned a hole in her arm instead of entering her veins, and the overdose of Elavil had not been enough. By some combination of biological resistance and sheer medical intervention, Christina Riggs survived. Paramedics loaded her into an ambulance and rushed her to Baptist Memorial Hospital, where doctors worked quickly to stabilize her.

Back at the apartment on Bronco Lane in Sherwood, detectives worked the scene: syringes, morphine residue, potassium chloride, an empty bottle of Elavil, and three handwritten farewell letters laying out, in Christina’s own words, exactly what she had done and why.

Police issued an immediate order: no visitors. Christina Riggs was not to speak with anyone—not family, not friends—until investigators had their chance. Her family moved quickly, retaining attorney John Wesley Hall Jr. within hours. Hall contacted police directly, instructing them not to question his client without him present. The motion was rejected. The trial court ruled that her statement was admissible, and the trial proceeded.

The following morning, November 6th, detectives entered Christina’s hospital room, read her Miranda rights, switched on a recorder, and began asking questions. Police interviewed Riggs after she was revived and obtained an 8-minute tape-recorded confession detailing the murders. In those 8 minutes, with the Elavil still coursing through her system, Christina told them everything. She described giving the children the sedative. She described injecting Justin with potassium chloride. She described his reaction, the pain, the crying, and how she had injected morphine next. She described pressing a pillow against his face. She described turning to Shelby. And she described carrying their bodies to the bed.

“The amitriptyline I figured would help 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 nothing. I don’t think he knew. I think that the amitriptyline… and he just kind of, you know, ‘Mama, Mama.’ After I laid Justin down in my bed, I used a pillow and suffocated [him]… arranging them beside each other and lying down to die.”

Her defense would later argue, credibly, that she did not know where she was or what day it was and that she was hallucinating about the officers arriving on an escalator to talk to her. Hall argued his client was still in a drug-induced hallucinatory state when she made that confession and that her waiver of Miranda rights could not have been knowing or intelligent under those circumstances. The court disagreed.

Christina was transferred to the Pulaski County Jail and charged with two counts of capital murder. Everything the state needed was already in its possession: the physical evidence from the apartment, the letters written in her own hand, and eight minutes of her own voice on tape.

Christina came to trial at the Pulaski County Circuit Court in June 1998 and entered a plea of not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. Her defense did not dispute the fact that she had killed her children. The argument was not about what happened; it was about what state of mind made it happen and whether that state of mind absolved her of criminal responsibility.

Her defense attorneys claimed she had a long history of depression and low self-esteem. She was relatively poor, a single mother, and very overweight at 280 pounds. Defense attorney John Wesley Hall structured her defense around the claim of mental illness. Riggs was severely and chronically depressed, medical experts testified. Her trauma from childhood sexual abuse had never been addressed, and it was compounded by a hereditary chemical imbalance—the latter evident in her family’s long history of depression and suicide.

For the defense, a psychiatrist and a psychologist testified that her actions were the result of severe depression. They gave their opinion that, to her, the children’s deaths were an act of love and an extension of her own suicide. The psychologist testified that the pathological suicidal depression she was in effectively precluded her from being able to do something more reasonable or appropriate.

The prosecution dismantled that argument point by point. Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley’s case centered on his belief that Riggs was evil, that her attempted suicide was a ruse, and that she viewed the children as an inconvenience and an interference with what she wanted to pursue. Though several psychiatrists testified that Riggs should be found innocent by reason of mental defect because she suffered major depression and could not appreciate the wrongness of her actions, the seven-woman, five-man jury deliberated for only 55 minutes before finding her guilty on June 30th, 1998.

Fifty-five minutes for two counts of capital murder. When the verdict was read, Christina collapsed in the courtroom.

Then came the sentencing phase, and what happened next was unlike almost anything seen in the modern American legal system. During the penalty phase, Riggs insisted her attorney stand down. Instead, she told the jurors directly, “I want to die. I want to be with my babies. I want you to give me the death penalty.” She added, “I started this out 7 months ago, and I want you to give me the death penalty. I don’t want you to feel guilty.”

The jury granted her request. Circuit Judge Marion Humphrey sentenced her to death by lethal injection. Christina quietly said, “Thank you,” and squeezed her attorney’s hand. When Judge Humphrey formally declared she would be executed, Christina Riggs whispered, “I’m going home to be with my babies.”

The initial execution date was set for August 15th, 1998, but the legal process had not finished with her yet. A death row for women was established specifically for her at the McPherson Unit of the Arkansas Department of Correction in Newport. Prior to her arrival, the state had never held a woman on death row. There had never been a woman sentenced to death in Arkansas’s modern history. Christina Riggs did not just become the first woman executed in the state in over a century; she was the one who made the state build the room to hold her.

She was the only inmate housed in a three-cell female death row facility at the McPherson Unit in Newport. By all accounts, she was well cared for. She was allowed to meet with occasional visitors in a visitation hall not far from her cell. She was handcuffed whenever she was outside her cell and talked to visitors through a clear plastic window. Her days were filled with monotony, silence, solitude, and soul-crushing guilt. She did not fight.

She received letters from strangers urging her to appeal. Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union, sent petitions and filed motions on her behalf. They argued that her execution would amount, in effect, to completing the suicide she had attempted by the same method in 1997. Her own attorney agreed. John Wesley Hall later said, “It started out as a suicide and ended as a suicide.”

But Christina Riggs was unmoved. She was what, in the death penalty business, they call a “volunteer.” She had made her choice the night of November 4th, 1997. The state’s needle was simply the last line of a decision already written.

The penalty was appealed to the Arkansas Supreme Court despite her wishes, which upheld the verdict in a 6-to-1 opinion. Riggs waived further appeals of her death sentence. The waiver was accepted after she underwent a formal competency evaluation. Evaluators determined that she possessed the competence to knowingly and intelligently waive her post-conviction remedies—a finding upheld by the circuit court on January 21st, 2000.

During this period, Riggs articulated her reasoning clearly: “I’ll be with my children and with God. I’ll be where there’s no more pain.”

Her mother was with her each day from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The two women sat separated by glass, tethered by something that had no name—a bond between a grandmother who had found her grandchildren dead on a November morning and the daughter who put them there.

Governor Mike Huckabee reviewed the case. Huckabee said that deciding Riggs’ execution date was uncomfortable because of her sex and because her victims were children. “With all candor, I find myself very much aware that this would be a first in Arkansas,” he said. “I’m not particularly comfortable or necessarily happy with that. On the other hand, I recognize the crime and the process that we have to go through.”

No applications for clemency were filed. Christina had forbidden it.

On Sunday, April 30th, 2000, Riggs was flown from McPherson to the Cummins Unit in preparation for her execution—three days before the needle, three days in a different kind of waiting. The execution date was set for the evening of May 2nd, 2000.

In those final hours, Christina Riggs was offered her last meal. She chose a supreme pizza, a salad, pickled okra, strawberry shortcake, and cherry lemonade—a meal that felt almost deliberately ordinary, as if she were trying, one last time, to inhabit the life of a normal person before it ended.

She received no visitors that day, though she was permitted to. She had already said everything she needed to say. She had made her peace—or whatever shape peace takes inside a woman who spent nearly two years locked inside herself with the knowledge of what she had done.

On the evening of May 2nd, 2000, Christina Riggs was transported to the death chamber at the Cummins Unit. The execution began 18 minutes late because of difficulty in finding a suitable vein to place the catheters into. Christina agreed to have the catheters placed in veins in her wrists. She did not protest the delay. She did not ask to stop. She lay still and waited.

Once strapped to the gurney, she said, “There is no way words can express just 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 then. Now I can be with my babies as I always intended.” And finally, as the drugs began to flow, “I love you, my babies.”

The execution went smoothly, and she was certified dead 9 minutes later. Christina Marie Riggs was pronounced dead at 9:28 p.m. She was 28 years old.

Riggs was the fifth woman executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 and the first woman executed in Arkansas since 1845. She also remains the youngest woman to be executed in the United States in the modern era. Justin Dalton Thomas was 5 years old. Shelby Alexis Riggs was 2 years old. Neither of them got to choose.

What do you do with a case like this? The law answered its question on June 30th, 1998, in 55 minutes. The state answered its question on May 2nd, 2000, in 9 minutes. But the questions that remain—the ones no jury and no execution schedule can touch—have been sitting in rooms like this one ever since.

Was Christina Riggs a calculated killer who saw her children as a burden and used the language of mental illness as a shield? That was the prosecution’s answer, and 12 people agreed. Or was she a profoundly mentally ill woman shaped by childhood trauma that was never treated, by a family history of suicide and depression that ran back generations, who, in the depths of a break with reality, committed an act she genuinely believed was an act of love? That was the defense’s answer, and it found no traction with the jury.

What makes this case different from almost any other is what came after the verdict. Most condemned inmates fight for their lives until there is nothing left to fight with. Christina Riggs fought to end hers. She did not ask for mercy; she asked for the needle. She said, “Thank you,” when they gave it to her, and she waited patiently for nearly two years until the state fulfilled what she had always called her intention.

Her attorney called it a state-assisted suicide. Amnesty International called it an execution of a mentally ill woman who had no capacity to make the choice being honored. Governor Huckabee called it an uncomfortable but legally necessary process. The prosecutor called it justice for two children who never had a voice.

And somewhere beyond all of it are Justin and Shelby, a 5-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl who went to sleep one November night believing they were safe. They deserved better. That part, at least, is not in dispute.

If this case has you thinking, drop your thoughts in the comments below. Do you believe the justice system got this one right? Was there a point where intervention could have changed everything? Should the state have stopped her from waiving those appeals? Your perspective matters.

This channel exists because of the conversations you bring to these cases—the serious, thoughtful ones that go beyond the headlines. If you’re new here, welcome. Kindly subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming next. And if you’ve been here a while, share this one. These are the cases that deserve to be talked about with the weight they carry.

Justin and Shelby deserved better. Make sure their story is heard. This is today’s story. We will see you in the next.