Christina Riggs was a woman from Arkansas who would be executed for the murders of her two children
Christina Riggs planned a murder suicide that ended in tragedy. Christina, who worked as a nurse, would attempt to drug her children but she failed to dilute the medication properly so it just burned her son. Riggs would then smother her two young children
Christina Riggs would then attempt to take her own life by swallowing 28 amitriptyline pills and injecting herself with potassium chloride. However she would be found the next day and rushed to the hospital
Christina Riggs would be arrested, charged, convicted and sentenced to death. Christina refused to appeal her sentence and three years after the murders she was executed on May 2, 2000 by lethal injection.
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Christina Riggs FAQ
When was Christina Riggs executed
Christina Riggs would be executed on May 2, 2000
How was Christina Riggs executed
Christina Riggs was executed by lethal injection
Christina Riggs Execution
A former nurse became the first woman to be executed in Arkansas for more than 150 years on Tuesday night, put to death by lethal injection for killing her two children in 1997.
Christina Marie Riggs’ last words were directed to the five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter she murdered. “I love you, my babies,” she said as a lethal mix of chemicals was injected into her wrist at a prison in Varner.
Riggs’ mother and lawyer initially argued that she had been suffering from post-traumatic stress from her work as a nurse treating victims of the terrorist bombing of a government building in Oklahoma City.
But Riggs, 28, waived her right to appeal and prevented her lawyer from applying for clemency, saying that she could not live with the guilt of the murders and wanted to be reunited with her children in heaven
“There is no way words can express how sorry I am for taking the lives of my babies,” she said before the execution. “Now I can be with my babies, as I always intended.”
Human rights activists said her desire to die confirmed her mental instability, and asked for the execution to be stopped on the grounds that it would amount to state-assisted suicide. But the Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee, turned down their appeal.
Yesterday Riggs’ lawyer, John Wesley Hall, said: “It started out as a suicide and ended as a suicide.”
Riggs told the police that in November 1997 she gave her son, Justin, and daughter, Shelby, some anti-depressants in a cup of water to sedate them.
She then injected a large dose of potassium chloride into her son’s neck with the aim of putting him to sleep. When he woke up and started crying, she injected him with morphine and smothered him with a pillow. She also smothered her daughter.
She laid the two dead children on her bed, before injecting herself with potassium chloride and swallowing 28 anti-depressants.
She left a suicide note for Shelby’s father saying: “I can’t live like this any more, and I couldn’t bear to leave my children behind to be a burden on you or to be separated and raised apart from their fathers and live knowing their mother killed herself.”
The prosecution portrayed her as a cold-blooded killer to whom her children were an “inconvenience”.
She was accused of leaving them locked in their room for hours while she went out at night to karaoke bars.
Doctors testifying for her said she had been severely depressed as a result of sexual abuse as a child, a series of failed relationships with men, lack of money, and lack of self-esteem because of her obesity.
She went to her death weighing 122kg (270lb). She agreed to the execution needles being put in her wrists when her executioners were unable to find a vein in her arm.
Denying that her misfortunes excused her acts, the county prosecutor, Larry Jegley, said: “She claims she was horribly depressed, she was overweight and she was a single mom, and she didn’t have enough money.
“My response to that is ‘welcome to America’. Plenty of folks are in far worse situations than she was.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/may/04/julianborger
