True Crime Chronicles: Arkansas executed a mother who killed her children in Sherwood in 1997
- Dennis McCaslin
- Sep 11
- 3 min read
I
in the Little Rock suburb of Sherwood, a mother’s unimaginable act shattered a community and etched a grim chapter in the state’s history. On May 2, 2000, Christina Marie Riggs, a 28-year-old former nurse, became the first woman executed in Arkansas in over 150 years.
Convicted of the 1997 murders of her two children, Justin Dalton Thomas, 5, and Shelby Alexis Riggs, 2, Riggs’s story is a haunting tapestry of despair, mental illness, and a justice system pushed to its limits.
Born on September 2, 1971, in Lawton, Oklahoma, Christina Riggs’s early years were far from idyllic.
She endured sexual abuse from her stepbrother and a neighbor, traumas that cast long shadows over her life. By her teens, she was grappling with addiction to alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana.
At 16, she faced an unplanned pregnancy, giving her first child up for adoption—a decision that would haunt her. Despite these challenges, Riggs showed ambition, training as a licensed practical nurse after high school and working in home health care and at a Veterans Administration hospital.
Motherhood came again in 1992 with the birth of Justin, whose father, Timothy Thompson, denied paternity, leaving Riggs to raise her son alone. In 1994, she married Jon Riggs and welcomed her daughter, Shelby.
But the marriage unraveled amid allegations of Jon’s violence toward Justin, plunging Riggs into single motherhood and financial strain. Beneath her outward strength, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder festered, setting the stage for a tragedy no one saw coming.A
November 4, 1997, began like any other day in the Riggs household. But by nightfall, the modest Sherwood home became a crime scene. As a nurse, Riggs had access to powerful medications--and a chilling plan. She gave Justin and Shelby amitriptyline, a sedative, hoping to lull them into a painless sleep.
Then, using potassium chloride stolen from Baptist Hospital, she injected Justin, expecting the drug to stop his heart. Instead, it caused excruciating pain, and the boy writhed in agony.
Unable to secure morphine to ease his suffering, Riggs made a fateful choice: she smothered Justin with a pillow. She then turned to Shelby, ending her daughter’s life the same way.
In a final act, Riggs attempted suicide, swallowing 28 amitriptyline tablets and injecting herself with potassium chloride. But fate intervened. Her mother, Carol Thomas, found her unconscious and called for help. Riggs survived, only to face the weight of her actions in a courtroom
Riggs’s 1998 trial gripped the state. Prosecutors painted her as a calculated killer, arguing she planned the murders to escape the burdens of single motherhood. The defense, however, told a different story--one of a woman broken by depression and trauma.
Psychiatrists testified that Riggs’s mental state clouded her ability to discern right from wrong, urging a not guilty verdict by reason of mental defect. Yet the jury, after less than an hour of deliberation, convicted her of two counts of capital murder on June 30, 1998.
When the death penalty was recommended, Riggs did not resist. “I want to be with my babies,” she told her attorneys, waiving her appeals and volunteering for execution--a rare move shared by only two others in Arkansas history.
On May 2, 2000, at the Cummins Unit, Riggs faced her final moments. The execution was not without complications: medical staff struggled for nearly 20 minutes to find a vein, eventually using one in her wrist.
As the lethal injection began, Riggs’s last words carried the weight of her grief: “There is no way words can express how sorry I am for taking the lives of my babies. Now I can be with my babies, as I always intended.”
Her death marked her as the fifth woman executed in the U.S. since capital punishment’s reinstatement in 1976--and the youngest.
She was the first woman executed in Arkansas since 1845.
