The Last 24 Hours of 4 Women on Death Row

Tonight we reconstruct the final 24 hours of Carla Fay Tucker, [music] Christina Riggs, and Lisa Montgomery. And we look toward 2026 for the final hours of the youngest [music] woman ever sent to the row, Christa Pike. February 3rd, 1998. the Huntsville unit in Texas. For the guards at the walls unit, it was just another Tuesday, but for the rest of the world, it was the day [music] the clock finally ran out for the pickaxe killer.

Carla Fay Tucker didn’t look like a monster. By the time her final 24 hours arrived, she looked like a [music] Sunday school teacher, soft-spoken, deeply religious and possessed of a piece that seemed entirely out of place in a death [music] house. But the law doesn’t care about a change of heart. The law remembers the night of June [music] 13th, 1983.

The crime was a drugfueled nightmare. Carla and her boyfriend had broken into the home of Jerry Lynn Dean to steal a motorcycle. What followed was a massacre. Using a three-foot pickaxe, Carla struck Jerry and his companion Deborah Thornton repeatedly. In her initial confession, she notoriously claimed that she felt a sexual surge with every swing of the axe.

It was that chilling detail that ensured she would never leave the Texas Department of Criminal Justice alive. But 14 years on death row changes a person. [music] As her execution date approached, Carla had become a global symbol. Pope John Paul II, [music] the United Nations, and even the prosecutor who put her there were all begging for clemency.

[music] They argued she was no longer the person who swung that axe. heavy. >> Inside the death watch [music] cell, the atmosphere was hauntingly quiet. The protocol is clinical. Every [music] 15 minutes, a guard scratches a note into a log book. Inmate is [music] sitting. Inmate is praying. Inmate is drinking water.

Carla didn’t spend her final hours fighting the guards or screaming at the walls. She spent them singing hymns. The sound of her voice, light and melodic, drifted through the steel bars, contrasting sharply with the heavy metallic clanging of the prison gates. As the sun began to set over Huntsville, the legal battle reached its crescendo.

Her lawyers were making frantic [music] lastminute calls to the Supreme Court. Outside the prison, hundreds of protesters gathered, some holding candles in prayer, others holding signs demanding justice for the victims. Then at 6:00 p.m., the phone in the warden’s office stayed silent. The Supreme Court had denied her final stay.

The state of Texas was moving forward. Her final meal was a testament to her transformation. No greasy burger, no final feast of excess. She requested a banana, a peach, and a garden salad with ranch dressing. It was a clean meal, as if she were preparing her body for a transition rather than an end. At 6:35 p.m.

, the walk began. It’s only a few steps from the holding cell to the chamber, but for the condemned, those steps represent a bridge. She looked at the family of Deborah Thornton, the woman she had killed with a pickaxe nearly [music] two decades earlier, and she apologized. She didn’t ask for their forgiveness. [music] She simply acknowledged their pain.

Her final words were whispered into the silence of the room. I am going to be face to face with Jesus. I love you all very much. I will see you when you get there. As the lethal chemicals began to flow, Carla Fay Tucker began to cough. She looked toward her husband, Dana Brown, a prison chaplain she had married while on the row, and she smiled.

Within moments, the woman who had become the face of the American death penalty, was gone. The pickaxe killer was dead. But as the witnesses filed out into the humid Texas night, the debate she had ignited only grew louder. Is 14 years of transformation enough to wash away the blood of a pickaxe? For Carla, the question no longer mattered. Her 24 hours were up.

But for the woman we’ll discuss next, the final 24 hours weren’t something she feared. They were something she demanded. Christina Riggs, May 2000. The Cumins [music] unit in Arkansas. On death row, inmates usually fight for every [music] second. They file appeals, write please for clemency, and their lawyers spend the final hours burning up the phone lines looking for any legal loophole.

[music] But for 32-year-old Christina Riggs, the final 24 hours [music] were different. This wasn’t a countdown to the end of her life. It was the path [music] to the liberation she had been demanding herself. Christina Riggs went down in history as a volunteer. She officially waved all her legal rights to stop [music] her execution.

While advocacy groups tried to prove she was mentally ill and didn’t understand the consequences, [music] Christina waited calmly for her turn, asking for only one thing. For the state of Arkansas to [music] finally carry out her sentence. I can’t say exactly when the kids became a part of it, but it was I was sitting there thinking, well, who’s going to take care of the kids when I’m gone? Cuz up until this point, all I ever heard just my son had ADHD and people who would take care of him were always like, “He’s a handful. He

wears me out. He does this. He does that. D I get calls from the daycare. Mom was keeping them in the evening times and she was always just so exhausted and so in my mind nobody wanted them. >> Afterward, she attempted to take her own life, leaving a note stating she didn’t want her children to grow up in a world full of pain.

took the rest of the amatrial that I had, which was about 28 pills and uh injected the potassium into my arm. And that’s the last thing I remember is laying beside him. >> She survived to face trial. And from the moment the judge read the death sentence, Christina Riggs stopped fighting.

During her final 24 hours, Christina was under death watch protocol. Every 15 minutes, a guard silently logged her status. She didn’t sing hymns like Carla Fay Tucker. She didn’t seek the attention of the press. She simply waited. The atmosphere around her was saturated with a clinical cold resolve. The cell smelled of [music] disinfectant and industrial linens.

She ordered her last meal, and the choice carried a bitter irony. a supreme pizza from Pizza Hut, a salad and cherry cheesecake. It was the kind of meal usually associated with a family night or a child’s birthday [music] party. While she ate just a few yards away, the needles and IV bags were being prepared. Unlike other condemned inmates, [music] Christina spent her final hours in total isolation.

She didn’t want visitors. She didn’t want goodbyes. She was a woman who had died inside a long time ago, [music] and now she was just waiting for her body to catch up to her soul. When the time came for the last walk, [music] Christina Riggs moved down the hallway of the Cumins unit with eyes that were completely dry.

She was the first woman executed in Arkansas in over 150 years. [music] But she couldn’t have cared less. She lay down on the gurnie as if it were her own bed. As the leather straps clicked into place and her [music] former colleagues in the nursing profession searched for a vein to deliver the lethal chemicals, she looked at the [music] witnesses.

Her voice, usually quiet and raspy, was [music] steady and clear. She spoke to her children, the ones she had killed 3 years prior. I love you, my babies. I’m coming to be with you. [music] Then looking at those tasked with ending her life, she added, “No [music] one wins today, but I’m going home.” The procedure was fast. At 9:28 p.m.

, Christina Riggs was pronounced dead. While the world debated the power of redemption, in the case of Carla Fay Tucker, the story of Christina Riggs left behind only a heavy sense of emptiness. She wasn’t a victim of the system. She used the system as the final tool for her own act of despair. But if Christina Riggs opened the door to the execution chamber herself, our next subject spent her final 24 hours in the center of a legal hurricane where life and death depended on a phone call that came far too late.

Lisa Montgomery. January 12th, 2021. Terraote, Indiana. The final 24 hours of Lisa Montgomery were a frantic, highstakes legal tugofwar. While the highest courts in the land debated her life, Lisa sat nearly catatonic [music] in a cold, whitewalled cell. This wasn’t just an execution.

It was the first time the US government [music] had put a woman to death in nearly 70 years. The crime that brought her here was beyond comprehension. [music] In 2004, Lisa drove from Kansas to Missouri, strangled a pregnant woman named Bobby Joe Stinit, and performed a crude cecareian section with a kitchen knife, kidnapping the unborn child.

For 16 years, lawyers argued that Lisa was a woman shattered by extreme [music] trauma, living in a permanent state of psychosis. >> Lisa experienced unspeakable torture. It’s not abuse, it’s torture. And we know from science that that torture led to brain damage. And we know that there were multiple people who could have intervened.

But in Terraote, the law saw only the predator. >> This is a devil come [music] back to Earth disguised as Lisa McGomery. >> The federal death house is clinical and sterilized. Unlike state units, the atmosphere here is one of silent mechanical [music] efficiency. But on this night, that silence was shattered by phones that wouldn’t stop ringing.

Stays of execution were granted, then immediately vacated by the Supreme Court. Lisa was moved to the execution building, then moved back, then moved again as the legal pingpong continued. Imagine the psychological toll. Every time that heavy steel door opened, she didn’t know if it was for her last meal or her final walk.

When the time came for her final meal, there was no grand request for a feast. Lisa Montgomery didn’t [music] ask for steak or lobster. She requested a simple, almost childlike meal, a Gusher’s fruit snack, and a strawberry soda. That was it. While the world outside was locked in a legal war over her life, [music] Lisa sat in silence, consuming a snack that seemed more suited for a school lunch than a final meal on death row.

Inside the cell, there [music] was no final banquet and no hymns. Lisa had retreated [music] into a private world, staring blankly at the walls, barely acknowledging the guards. Her death watch log is a record of a woman who had already checked out long [music] before the chemicals arrived.

Just after midnight on January 13th, the Supreme Court cleared the final path. The walk [music] to the federal chamber is short but heavy with the weight of the government. There is [music] no southern hospitality here. It is an assembly line of justice. As they strapped [music] her to the gurnie, the executioner asked if she had any final words.

The room held its breath, [music] waiting for a confession or a plea. Lisa Montgomery looked up, her face a mask of total exhaustion, and whispered a single word. No. No grand statement, no apology, just a final refusal to engage with a world she felt had abandoned her. At 1:31 a.m., the federal government officially closed her case. Her execution remains one of the most controversial in history, not because of the crime, but because of the state’s decision to execute a woman whose mind was arguably already gone.

But while Lisa’s story is now history, our final case is a countdown to the immediate future. Can I please hold him tight in the dock? [laughter] >> Christa Pike. >> Nashville, Tennessee. The Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. For over three decades, Christa Pike has been a ghost in the machine of the Tennessee Department of Corrections.

She arrived on death row in 1996 as a 19-year-old girl. the youngest woman in postfirm history to be handed a death sentence. Today, she is a woman entering her 50s, watching as the legal walls she spent half a lifetime building finally begin to crumble. Unlike Carla Fay Tucker or Christina Riggs, Christa Pike’s final 24 hours haven’t happened yet.

But for the first time in 30 years, we can actually see them on the horizon. With her final state and federal appeals officially exhausted, her execution date is no longer a distant what if. What will those hours look like for the woman who became the face of the 1995 Little Green Man murder? By the time she reaches that final day in 2026, Christa will have spent more time inside a prison cell than she ever spent in the outside world.

I >> don’t even remember what it feels like to be free. I’ve done I’ve lived in here longer than I’ve ever lived any one place in my life. I don’t remember what it feels like to not have somebody chain me up when I walk out a door or tell me when I can use the bathroom or eat a meal. She has aged from a teenager into a middle-aged woman behind these bars.

In Tennessee, the protocol for those final hours is rigid. 72 hours before the execution, Christa will be moved from the women’s facility at Deborah Johnson to the high security unit 2 at Riverbend. She will be offered a last meal, but in Tennessee, the law is strict. Her request is capped at a modest $20.

She won’t be having a five course banquet. Perhaps she’ll choose a final taste of the Tennessee comfort food she’s missed for three decades. Fried chicken or a burger. Or maybe, like those who went before her, she’ll opt for the simple, familiar comfort of a childhood snack, a final reminder of the girl she was before that night in 1995.

The atmosphere in unit 2 is one of hyperfocus. Every item she touches is cataloged. Every word she speaks is recorded. The guards assigned to her are picked for their professionalism. They are there to ensure she makes it to the gurnie and not a second before. >> I’m only out of my room 1 hour a day, and that’s just in another cage.

It’s like a dog cage and kennel. So, I’m either in a box or in a kennel. >> Christa has spent three decades in a 4×9 cell. She has watched the world change through a flickering television screen, seeing the ‘9s fade into a digital age she barely understands. In her final 24 hours, that world will shrink down to the size of a single room.

Her story has been the backbone of Case Reconstructed. We’ve followed the brutal details of the murder of Colleen SLMur. We’ve analyzed the skull fragment Christa kept as a trophy. But all of those debates lead to the same destination, a quiet clinical room in Nashville. As we look toward 2026, the question for you, the viewer, changes.

We are no longer just reconstructing a crime from the past. We are watching the final chapter of a 30-year countdown. >> 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 when I’m only one person. When the sun rises on that day in Tennessee, the three decades of courtroom outbursts, the prison escape plots, and the endless legal filings will all vanish. All that will remain is the death watch log and a clock that has finally reached zero.

Christa Pike once laughed in the face of the jury, thinking she was untouchable. In 2026, the laughter will be long gone.