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She kissed their foreheads, adjusted their blankets, and hugged them tenderly. The children smiled, happy to see their mother so affectionate, unaware of what was about to happen. Because that night wasn’t just bedtime. It was the beginning of a countdown to death. Around 10:00, Christina told Justin he could have a candy as a reward.
Without knowing it, the boy and his sister ingested lethal doses of Eleville, a powerful anti-depressant, enough to render them unconscious. Then Christina stood silently beside their beds, watching them sleep, waiting for the pills to take effect. Justin was the first. Christina filled a syringe and injected potassium chloride directly into his veins, the same compound used in executions, but she hadn’t diluted it properly.
The boy’s body reacted instantly. He woke up confused, screaming and crying. His chest convulsed. His nerves seemed to burn from the inside. He didn’t understand what was happening. Christina panicked. She tried to fix it by giving him morphine, hoping it would calm him down, but it didn’t work. Then she took a pillow and pressed [music] it against his face.
Justin fought, kicked, scratched, crying out in desperation, “Mom, no. Mom.” But Christina [music] didn’t stop. Eventually, his small body went still. Then she turned to Shelby. This time, she couldn’t bring herself to [music] use the needle again, not after seeing what she had done to Justin. Instead, she smothered her. Shelby, still under the [music] effects of Elville, barely reacted.
She was too little to understand what was happening, and within seconds, she was gone. When it was over, Christina carried her children’s bodies to her bed. She placed them side by side, tucked them in carefully as if she were simply putting them to sleep. Then she sat down to write three farewell letters. [music] One to her mother, one to her sister, and one to her ex-husband.
In the letter to her mother, she explained that she feared her children, who had different fathers, would be separated after her death. She also wrote that she didn’t want them to grow up knowing she had taken her own life. Then Christina swallowed a massive dose of 28 Eleville pills, injected potassium chloride directly into her body, and [music] collapsed to the floor beside the bed next to the children she had just put to rest forever.
It was supposed to end there, but it didn’t. The amatipptalene I figured would help them sleep [music] 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 didn’t I don’t think he knew. I think that the amate and he just kind of, you know, blind mama.
Mama, after I let Justin get out of the bed in my bed, oh, I used a pillow and suffocated. >> The next day, November 5th, her mother, Carol, began to worry. She hadn’t heard from Christina and couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. Around 400 p.m. she entered the apartment and froze. What she saw shattered her.
Her grandchildren were dead and Christina, barely alive, lay on the floor unconscious but still breathing. Carol immediately called 911 and paramedics arrived within minutes. Christina was fading fast, but they acted quickly, loaded her into the ambulance, and rushed her to Baptist Memorial Hospital. By 5:30, doctors had pumped her stomach and stabilized her.
She survived, but the damage was already done. Back at the apartment, detectives began to piece everything together. They found syringes, traces of morphine, potassium chloride, and an empty bottle of elev. And they also found the letters. [music] One by one, the puzzle started to make sense.
PART2
They immediately contacted the hospital with a clear order. No visitors. Christina was not to see or speak to anyone, not even her own family. But her family didn’t stay idle. Shortly after midnight, they hired an attorney to protect her, and he wasted no time. He called the police directly and instructed them not to question Christina unless he was present.
But the police ignored him. The next morning, November 6th, detectives entered the hospital [music] room. They read her rights, turned on the recorder, and began asking questions. [music] And in less than 8 minutes, Christina confessed. She told them everything. How she’d tried to end all of their lives. How she saw Justin scream in pain.
How she pressed a pillow over his face to finish what she had started. How she moved the bodies onto her bed hoping they would all die together. She said she never warned anyone because [music] she didn’t think anyone could understand. By the end of that same day, Christina was booked into the Palaski County Jail and charged with two counts of capital murder.
And when she finally stood before the judge, she didn’t try to hide what she’d done. Yet, she still pleaded not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. But the damage was done. Her confession was on tape in her own voice. The letters were in her handwriting and the apartment she left behind spoke for itself.
It was a place where two children went to bed believing they were safe and never opened their eyes again. >> I can’t say exactly when the kids became a part of it. But it 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.” From the moment Christina was arrested, investigators [music] began digging into her life, searching for answers, looking for the moment everything changed.
But what they found didn’t make things clearer, only heavier. Christina Marie Riggs was born in Lton, Oklahoma, and grew up in Oklahoma City. But growing up doesn’t always mean being loved. Behind the front door, things happen that no child should ever face alone. Later, she told investigators she’d been sexually abused by a relative, [music] and by age 14, she was numbing the pain with cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana.
At 16, she became pregnant for the first time. She carried the baby to term, but gave it up for adoption, a decision she rarely spoke of afterward, but she tried to move on. She went back to high school, earned a license as a practical nurse, and for a while, her life seemed stable. [music] She spent her early 20s doing home care work before landing a job at a veterans hospital.