The Last 24 Hours of 4 Women on Death Row + Last Meals + Last Words…

They say I deserve to die, but tell me, how many of you would still be alive if God judged you the way Texas judges me? On the night of February 2nd, 1998, a woman sat inside a 12×20 holding cell at one of the most notorious prisons in the United States, Huntsville, Texas, and she was smiling.

Not the nervous smile of a woman searching for composure, not the vacant grin of someone who had stopped processing reality. This was the calm, clear-eyed expression of someone who believed, genuinely believed, that she had already been forgiven by a power higher than any governor, any parole board, or any court in the land.

Her name was Carla Fay Tucker. She was 38 years old and hours away from death. She had been called many things over the course of her life: a killer, a drug addict, a prostitute, a monster, and then, after 14 years on death row, something far more complicated—a woman transformed.

Fifteen years earlier, in the early hours of a Houston morning, Carla Fay Tucker had wielded a three-foot pickaxe inside a sleeping man’s apartment and driven it into two human beings more than 20 times each, leaving one of them with the axe still buried in her chest. This is the story of one of the most disturbing capital cases in Texas history.

A state that has carried out more executions than any other in America, Texas is a place where the question of who deserves to die has never been simple. This is the case that broke that question open and never fully put it back together.

Carla Fay Tucker was born on November 18th, 1959, in Houston, the youngest of three sisters to Larry Tucker, a longshoreman, and Carolyn, a woman whose gravitational pull was always toward chaos. The early years were ordinary enough, but structure in the Tucker household was always temporary.

By the time Carla was 8 years old, she was smoking cigarettes alongside her sisters. At 10, her parents divorced, and during those proceedings, Carla learned something that would crack the foundation of her world: she was the product of an extramarital affair. The man she called her father was not her biological father.

There was no counseling, no conversation, no soft place to land. By 12, she was using drugs and was sexually active. By 14, she had dropped out of school entirely and followed her mother, a rock groupie who traveled with bands like the Allman Brothers and the Eagles, into prostitution.

She was not being rebellious; she was doing what she was shown. Her mother introduced her to heroin. By Carla’s own account, she was injecting heroin by age 11 and had not been without drugs for a single day from age 10 until the morning she was arrested nearly 14 years later.

At 16, she briefly married a mechanic named Steven Griffith, a relationship that burned out quickly in the accelerated wreckage of her life. In her early 20s, she began running with biker circles in Houston’s Quay Point District. It was there that she met the two men who would define the rest of her existence.

One was Jerry Dean, a 27-year-old former cable installer. The other was Daniel Ryan Garrett, 14 years older than Carla, a street-level drug distributor who became her live-in boyfriend. Carla’s relationship with Jerry Dean began badly and deteriorated from there.

Dean had once parked his leaking motorcycle in her living room, destroying her flooring. More significantly, he had destroyed the only photograph she possessed of herself with her mother. Her mother would be dead before Carla turned 21, and that photograph was irreplaceable.

The animosity between them calcified over two years into something dense and unresolved. By June of 1983, that unresolved rage was mixing with something far more dangerous: three days of uninterrupted drug and alcohol consumption.

From June 11th through June 13th, 1983, the occasion was Carla’s sister’s birthday. The gathering had been a sustained chemical binge that included heroin, methamphetamine, and alcohol. By Carla’s own account, she had not slept in three days.

Somewhere in the fog of that weekend, she and Garrett made a decision. They would go to Jerry Dean’s apartment, take his motorcycle, and settle the score. Their friend James Liebrandt came along. At approximately 3 in the morning on June 13th, they arrived at the apartment.

Tucker had a set of keys she claimed belonged to Dean’s wife. Liebrandt stayed outside while Tucker and Garrett entered. Dean was asleep on a mattress on the floor. What followed was not a clean robbery gone wrong; it was prolonged, brutal, and deliberate.

Tucker sat on Dean, who woke immediately and grabbed her arms in self-defense. Garrett grabbed a ball-peen hammer from the floor and struck Dean repeatedly in the back of the head. Garrett then left the room to load motorcycle parts, leaving Tucker alone with a man still alive and gurgling from the blows.

Tucker found a three-foot pickaxe resting against the wall. She later told investigators she wanted to stop the sound Dean was making. She swung the axe. Medical examiners would later determine that Dean suffered 28 total wounds, 20 of which could have been fatal.

When Garrett returned and delivered a final blow, Dean was already beyond survival. Then Tucker made a decision that sealed her fate permanently. She turned toward the wall, where, hidden beneath bed covers, was a woman named Deborah Ruth Thornton, an office worker who had met Dean at a party.

She was a stranger to this carnage, an accident of proximity. Tucker grazed Thornton’s shoulder with the pickaxe. Thornton struggled, Garrett came back, and they struck her repeatedly. When it was over, the pickaxe was left embedded in Deborah Thornton’s chest.

They left with motorcycle parts and the motorcycle itself. The next morning, a co-worker found both bodies. For five weeks, the case sat cold. Then, Doug Garrett, Danny’s brother, contacted a homicide detective and told him what he knew: that his brother and Carla Fay Tucker had committed the murders.

He was convinced to wear a concealed microphone to the house where Tucker and Garrett lived. On July 18th, 1983, he let them talk. The conversation recorded that afternoon became one of the most critical pieces of evidence at their trial.

Tucker and Garrett were arrested on July 20th, 1983. In the days after her arrest, something happened that no one expected. While awaiting trial in the county jail, she picked up a Bible. She later described being on her knees on the floor of her cell, asking God to forgive her.

She became a Christian in October 1983, months before her trial. Whether that conversion was real or strategic became the defining question of the next 14 years. Jury selection began in March 1984, and the state made it clear they were seeking the death penalty.

Capital punishment was rarely sought for female defendants, but the nature of the crime had stripped away any impulse toward leniency. Tucker pleaded not guilty, but the prosecution built an airtight case on the wire recording, forensic evidence, and the testimony of James Liebrandt.

During the punishment phase, Tucker testified and confessed fully to her role. She told the jury that even being subjected to what she had done to her victims would be insufficient penance. The jury deliberated for only 70 minutes before returning a guilty verdict.

On April 25th, 1984, they recommended death by lethal injection. Tucker was transported to the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, Texas, the state’s only female death row facility. She became TDCJ death row inmate number 777.

In that 60-square-foot cell, over the years that followed, Carla Fay Tucker did something the criminal justice system has no category for: she changed. She studied theology, counseled other inmates, and mediated conflicts.

The warden himself later testified that after 14 years on death row, she had, in all likelihood, been genuinely reformed. In 1995, she married Reverend Dana Lane Brown, a prison minister who had played a central role in her conversion, in a proxy ceremony.

Every legal avenue eventually narrowed toward the same end, but the world began to pay attention. Carla Fay Tucker was not the profile that activists usually rallied around; she was white, photogenic, and a Christian convert.

Her cause attracted support from Pat Robertson, Pope John Paul II, Bianca Jagger, and, most strikingly, Ronald Carlson, the brother of Deborah Thornton. Carlson had come to believe in the reality of Tucker’s change and became a vocal opponent of her execution.

On January 28th, 1998, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 16-0 against clemency. On the evening of February 2nd, Tucker was moved to the Walls Unit in Huntsville. She barely slept, spending the night writing letters and praying.

When February 3rd arrived, she declined breakfast, accepting only crackers and a soft drink. Her final family visits were conducted through a screen. At noon, the visits ended, and she was transported to the “death house,” 30 feet from the chamber.

At 6:12 p.m., Governor George W. Bush announced he would not grant a stay. He applied a two-question test: was there doubt of guilt, and did she have access to the law? Tucker had confessed, and her appeals were exhausted. The execution would proceed.

At 6:35 p.m., she walked into the execution chamber and climbed onto the gurney. She addressed the families of her victims, saying she was sorry and asking God to give them peace. She told her husband she loved him and said she was going to be face-to-face with Jesus.

After finishing, she licked her lips, and witnesses reported she began to hum softly. The drugs—sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride—began to flow. At 6:45 p.m., Carla Fay Tucker was pronounced dead.

She was the first woman executed in the United States since 1984. Within days of her death, the captain of the execution team, who had overseen more than 120 executions, resigned, stating that no one has the right to take another life.

The question of who Carla Fay Tucker was—the woman of 1983 or the woman of 1998—remains one that jurisprudence has never fully resolved.

On the night of November 4th, 1997, in a quiet apartment in Sherwood, Arkansas, a woman named Christina Marie Riggs tucked her 5-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter into bed. Then, with calculated, deliberate steps, she ended both of their lives using the medical knowledge she had acquired to save people.

Christina Riggs became the first woman executed in Arkansas in over 150 years. She was 28 years old, the youngest woman executed in the modern era of capital punishment. When she was strapped to the gurney, she whispered: “I love you, my babies.”

Christina Marie Thomas was born on September 2nd, 1971, in Oklahoma. Her childhood was marked by sexual abuse that she never reported. By 14, she had turned to drugs and alcohol to dull the weight of her trauma.

At 16, she became pregnant, giving the child up for adoption. Despite everything, she pushed forward and became a licensed practical nurse, finding work at a Veterans Administration hospital. But the internal fractures were deepening.

In 1991, she became pregnant again, only to be abandoned by the father. In 1993, she married a sailor named John Riggs. Their wedding night ended in a miscarriage, and the marriage was marked by abuse.

By the time their daughter Shelby was born in 1994, the relationship was deteriorating. Following the Oklahoma City bombing, the family moved to Arkansas, but the divorce left Christina as the sole provider for two children with two different fathers.

She worked extra shifts, felt isolated, and became convinced that no one wanted her children. She believed that when she died, they would be separated and suffer. She concluded that the kindest thing she could do was take them with her.

On November 4th, 1997, she left work and stopped at her mother’s house to pick up Justin and Shelby. That evening, she fed them and bathed them, maintaining the appearance of a normal night. Once they were ready for bed, she dissolved antidepressant tablets in water and gave the mixture to them.

When they were sufficiently sedated, she injected Justin with undiluted potassium chloride. He woke up, screamed, and convulsed in agony. Christina panicked, injected him with morphine, and when that failed to kill him, used a pillow to suffocate him.

She then pressed a pillow over Shelby’s face. Afterward, she laid their bodies on her bed, wrote three letters explaining her reasons, and attempted to take her own life by swallowing pills and injecting herself with potassium chloride.

The potassium chloride burned her skin, failing to reach her bloodstream. The pills rendered her unconscious, but she survived. The next day, her mother found the children dead and Christina unconscious on the floor.

After being stabilized in the hospital, she confessed to everything in a recorded interview. She was charged with two counts of capital murder. At her trial in June 1998, her defense argued she was mentally ill, but the jury returned a guilty verdict in just 55 minutes.

During the sentencing phase, Christina stopped her attorneys from arguing for her life. She looked at the jury and said, “I want to die. I want to be with my babies. I want you to give me the death penalty.” The jury granted her request.

She was the only woman on death row in Arkansas. She was treated with basic dignity, but the weight of what she had done never lifted. She faced hostility from other inmates, who drew a sharp line between their crimes and the killing of one’s own children.

She waived every remaining appeal. Governor Mike Huckabee declined to intervene, acknowledging the decision was uncomfortable but legally objective. Christina Riggs did not want to be saved.

On the night of May 2nd, 2000, the execution team struggled for 18 minutes to find a vein in her compromised arms. She remained conscious, calm, and cooperative, offering her wrists for the needles.

Before the drugs flowed, she said: “No words can express how sorry I am for taking the lives of my babies. I hope someday maybe everyone can forgive me. Now I can be with my babies as I always intended.”

She was pronounced dead at 9:28 p.m. Her execution ignited a fierce debate about assisted suicide and whether a person in a state of profound depression can truly be considered competent to choose their own death.

Justin and Shelby were real children who were forgotten by no one. The case remains a haunting reflection on the intersection of trauma, mental illness, and a justice system that sometimes completes the very tragedy it was meant to judge.

Two women, both convicted of murder, both sentenced to death in Texas, and both executed in the same chamber. Yet, their crimes could not have been more different.

Adrien Newton was 23 when she was shot. Her 7-year-old son, Alton, and 21-month-old daughter, Farah, were also killed in their apartment on April 7th, 1987. Francis Newton, the children’s mother, was 21 years old and the last person to have seen them alive.

Prosecutors argued that Francis had taken out life insurance policies on her husband and children just weeks before the murders. They claimed she stood to collect $100,000. Her husband was having an affair, and their marriage was in turmoil.

Police found a blue bag in an abandoned house containing a .25 caliber pistol that ballistics suggested was the murder weapon. The gun belonged to Francis’s boyfriend. Francis claimed she had found the gun in her husband’s drawer and hid it to keep him out of trouble.

There were no fingerprints, no DNA, and no eyewitnesses. Yet, in 1988, Francis Newton was found guilty and sentenced to death. For the next 18 years, she maintained her innocence, pointing toward a drug dealer her husband owed money to.

Her defense was hindered by an attorney who was later barred from capital cases, and a crime lab that was so poorly managed that evidence was contaminated and eventually destroyed. Three of the original jurors eventually stated they would not have voted to convict had they known the full evidence.

In contrast, the case of Lisa Coleman began in July 2004 when she called 911 to report that her 9-year-old son, Devonte Williams, had stopped breathing. When paramedics arrived, the reality was horrific.

Devonte weighed only 35 pounds and had been dead for hours. His body was covered in more than 250 injuries, including ligature marks from being bound with extension cords. He had been slowly starved to death while groceries sat in the same apartment.

Lisa Coleman had a history of abuse and prison time. When questioned, she admitted to restraining Devonte with cords. At trial, prosecutors argued this was not just abuse, but kidnapping and captivity. Lisa was sentenced to death in 2006.

The plea deals offered to both women were telling. Marcela Williams, Devonte’s mother, accepted a life sentence. Lisa Coleman refused, and that decision sealed her fate.

Francis Newton arrived on death row in 1988 and spent nearly two decades fighting the system. Even after a 120-day reprieve by Governor Rick Perry, every legal door was eventually shut. On September 14th, 2005, she was executed. She died mouthing “I love you” to her parents.

Lisa Coleman spent eight years on death row. She did not maintain the same level of legal fervor, often using her time to build relationships with other inmates. On September 17th, 2014, she was executed, telling her family she loved them and saying, “God is good.”

Two women, both gone before the age of 41. The question of who was the most dangerous is not as clean as a verdict. Francis Newton’s case was defined by a system that failed to ensure a fair trial, leaving a permanent shadow of doubt over her guilt.

Lisa Coleman’s case was a documented nightmare of prolonged torture that she never denied. Neither outcome brings back the children who were lost. Devonte Williams was nine, Alton Newton was seven, and Farah Elaine Newton was less than two.

The story of these women says as much about the justice system that sentenced them as it does about the choices they made. In the end, the law provided the final answer, but the questions of justice, truth, and mercy remain open for all of us to contemplate.