October 1, 2025 • 24 mins
Christa looks back on her early years on death row when she struggled with undiagnosed mental health issues and the role it played in the fight to save her life.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
She goes back, I guess she's in her cell in
the City County Building, and she wants to write a
note to to Daryl.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
This is John North, a journalist who covered Krista Pike's
murder trial in nineteen ninety six and watched as the
then twenty year old was sentenced to death. He's talking
about a moment right after the jury handed down their verdict,
the moment just after Christa found out that she would
be executed in the electric chair. After sobbing before the judge,
(00:30):
she was brought back to her jail cell, where it
seemed she had only one thought her boyfriend to Daryl.
To Daryl was sitting in his own jail cell, waiting
to be tried for his role in Colleen's murder. According
to court records, he was both physically and emotionally abusive
to Christa, but she didn't really have anyone else to
(00:51):
talk to.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
And she writes this note, and it essentially says, can
you believe they did this to me when I actually
tried to be nice to her?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
The most inflammatory part of that letter, the part that
would be repeated over and over again in newspapers and
in court hearings. The part that would be used to
demonstrate that Krista was incapable of remorse reads as follows,
You see what I get for trying to be nice
to the I went ahead and bashed her brains out
(01:22):
so she'd die quickly instead of letting her bleed to
death and suffer more.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
And they fry me, Ain't that some shit?
Speaker 1 (01:32):
And she says, I love you, and I'm your little devil,
And tell me what you're thinking, and I'll always be yours.
And if you need me to testify for you, I
will and tell the cops you lied and what you said.
And then she gives it to a jail matron and says,
please give this to to Darryl.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Christa's advocates argue that the note was a sign of
her unwavering devotion to and desperate need to please a
volatile teenage boy she had turned into her sole source
of support even as she faced death. She would lie
for him, take the blame for him. That he was
a lifeline for someone who grew up without anyone to
(02:15):
rely on and who feared being alone, someone who struggled
with mental illness and a brain that had been shaped
mostly by harm and in that way, Krista is a
lot like the dozens of other women who are death
sentenced in America.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
When I think of Krista's case, I think of two things.
First and foremost.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
This is Sandra Babcock, a law professor at Cornell University,
an expert in women and the death penalty.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
One is that she, like many women on death row,
had experiences of sexual violence. She was raped twice before
she was eighteen, and was also someone who lived with
mental illness.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
And there's something else that ties Christa to this group.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
When they commit a violent crime, they frequently have a
co defendant, So a lot of times women are not
committing crimes alone. They are committing them in the presence
of codefendants and oftentimes with male code defendants with whom
they have a relationship.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Many of these women see the same man who terrorizes
them as their protector. They make a brutal calculation, weighing
their options and too often determining that it's better to
be abused than to risk being alone.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
Courts are not taking their experiences of violence into account
when they sentence them.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
To Darryl was only seventeen when he and Christa killed Colleen,
so he would be sentenced to life in prison. He'll
be eligible for parole later this year. Christa wrote to
Darryl for years as she sat on death row, moosely
alone and waiting to die. I'm Sarah Trelevin and this
(04:06):
is Unrestorable Season two Proof of Life, an original podcast
from Anonymous content and iHeartRadio. After the sentence was handed down,
Krista was transported from the city jail to the Tennessee
(04:26):
Prison for Women in Nashville. Her lawyers filed appeals in
the hope of overturning her death sentence.
Speaker 5 (04:32):
I'm locked down twenty three hours a day.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
This is an interview that Krista did from prison in
nineteen ninety eight. She's wearing an institutional blue button down
shirt with a white undershirt. Her hair is in a
high ponytail tied with a blue scrunchy.
Speaker 5 (04:47):
I get to go outside in a cage for an
hour a day.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
At twenty one.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
She sounds resilient and confident, almost stoic.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
What do you think about the electric jair.
Speaker 6 (04:57):
I don't really think about that because I don't think
I'm ever going to see it.
Speaker 7 (05:01):
I know that I don't deserve to be where I'm at,
and I know that somewhere along the line, somebody's going
to see that. That's all I have left is hope.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
That hope real or just a brave face for the
cameras wouldn't last. Christa's mental health crisis was only getting worse,
and it was exacerbated by the conditions of solitary confinement.
Speaker 5 (05:24):
Solitary confinement, especially that of prolonged solitary confinement, you know,
has a variety of different psychological and physical health related consequences.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
This is Ali Winters. She's a social worker and professor
at the University of Tennessee Knoxville who has counseled Krista
in prison. Christa gave us permission to speak with her.
Speaker 6 (05:46):
I would have patients who would enter solitary confinement and
they didn't have a mental health diagnosis, but over time
they would develop significant mental health issues like mood disorders,
in particular related to depression and hopelessness and despair. There
(06:11):
were a lot of people that would actually begin experiencing
more psychotic symptoms. It would start with paranoia, like what
are they talking about? They're talking about me, They're plotting
against me, you know, and that would then in turn,
I think kind of morph into.
Speaker 5 (06:33):
This level of anxiety.
Speaker 6 (06:35):
So you would see a lot of irritability, a lot
of anxiety, a lot of pacing, you know, those kinds
of things.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Christa is the only woman on death row in Tennessee,
not uncommon for women, and so Christa is in de
facto segregation. Because death row inmates are typically separated from
the general prison population, they.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
Are often subjected to more extreme conditions of isolationation and
solitary than the men are because they are one of
a kind.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
This again is Sandra Babcock from Cornell University.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
So you saw this in Christa's case. The kinds of
segregation that she experienced were really uniquely tortuous. Women who
are incarcerated have a higher frequency of mental illness than men,
So when they come into the system of detention incarceration,
they are already experiencing many of them symptoms of trauma
(07:34):
and mental illness, and they experience those at higher rates
than men and the incarcerated population, so they are more
vulnerable to the effects of solitary confinement.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Christa was eating every meal alone. When her family visited,
they were behind plexiglass, and her primary means of communication
with other inmates was getting down on the floor and
yelling through the crack under her.
Speaker 5 (07:59):
See.
Speaker 4 (08:01):
On top of that, what we see in the cases
of women who are in prison is that they lack
many of the supports that men in prison receive from
people that they know in love on the outside. So
women tend to receive fewer visits from family members. They
don't have the same degree of social support from people
(08:22):
on the outside as many of the incarcerated men do.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
That's very interesting. I mean, is that because men are
more likely to kill someone not in their immediate orbit,
or is that because when a woman kills it's considered
less forgivable.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
I don't know that anybody's ever done research on that.
If I were to guess, I would say it's a
combination of the first thing, that many times women have
been convicted of crimes that have torn families apart. But
I think it goes beyond that. I think it's also
that women tend to be caretakers, and so if women
(09:02):
in prison are relying on their male relations to visit
them and you know, bring them news and sustain their
spirits and sustain that connection to the outside world, that
is less likely to happen.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
For men on death row, conditions are not great, but
they are less isolated. There are forty two men on
death row in Tennessee, and they live together on a
segregated unit. Ali Winters says that life in solitary can
drive the women she treats to act out in ways
that demonstrate just how desperate they are for any form
of contact. I hope I'm pronouncing this right. Can you
(09:49):
tell me the story of Esa? He say, say tell
me the story of Isa.
Speaker 5 (09:55):
Say yeah.
Speaker 6 (09:58):
Christa was out in the wreck in a cage that
has a concrete floor and then they have wire around,
you know, this concrete slab like fencing, and then razor
wire above that. And so one day when she was
(10:20):
in wreck, she was sitting there. She ended up noticing
that a turtle was coming through the grass and came
up through the fence. She grabbed the turtle, you know,
and that turtle became her world. She fed that thing
(10:40):
all kinds of stuff, like little pieces of ham, little
pieces of tuna.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Krista named the turtle Isse.
Speaker 6 (10:48):
And she had a little soap box because it was
a tiny little thing. And then every morning she would
plug her sink and fill it with water and let
you know, little essay swim around and be a turtle.
And this was not uncharacteristic of the women in solitary confinement,
(11:10):
even if they could find just a bug. I had
one lady. She adopted the exoskeleton of a cicada that
had just been left somewhere.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Like the discardage.
Speaker 6 (11:25):
The discarded shell of a cicada, but those shells still
have like little eyes and stuff. But she cared for
that thing for months, acting like it was alive and
talking to I mean, it's like this was not at
all unusual, because I think that women and maybe this
is true for the guys, but it's never really been
(11:48):
something that has been especially observed, but for the women
that there's a need to nurture.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
The effects of solitary of spending twenty three hours a
day alone in a cell aren't just psychological.
Speaker 8 (12:03):
I remember Krista being pretty curvaceous when I first met her,
and then I remember a period of a time where I
saw her and she could almost literally fit through the
trap because her body had atrophied in such a way.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
This is Ashley Sellers. She was incarcerated for twenty one years.
Most of them at the same facility where Krista is
still being held today.
Speaker 8 (12:25):
She hasn't had access to nutrition, She hasn't had access
to sunlight to be able to have the capacity to
be bought to have good vitamin D absorption. Bone health
is a huge issue for women period, and if you
don't have access to the sun, if you don't have
access to calcium, your body is just not going to farewell.
(12:45):
And I would say, again, that's probably a huge testament
to why she has experienced the dental problems that she's experienced.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Do you know what those problems are?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
It's that something to be comfortable sharing.
Speaker 8 (12:59):
I don't know if she's completely with denters now. I
don't know that she has any of her natural teeth.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
At this point.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
And that's just fallen out over the years because of
the conditions in prison. Yeah, over time, with very few
points of contact, Christa was becoming increasingly agitated and desperate.
Speaker 7 (13:24):
I mean she would go for days without sleeping. She
was manic and she didn't know why.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
That's Kelly Gleeson, one of Krista's attorneys today.
Speaker 7 (13:31):
There were symptoms of bipolar a post traumatic stress disorder.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
But Christa didn't get a diagnosis of bipolar or PTSD
back then. She got a diagnosis of OCD or obsessive
compulsive disorder, so.
Speaker 7 (13:44):
They treated her with prozac that can be contraindicated for
bipolar disorder because it can exacerbate mania.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Instead of the medication helping her, things suddenly took a
very bad turn for Christa.
Speaker 7 (13:58):
She was convinc one point. Worms were crawling in the
walls of the prison and they were crumbling the walls,
and she was trying to tell everybody, danger, Danger, the
prison's about to collapse because of the worms in the wall.
She was not well.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
This was the summer of two thousand and one. Christa
was miserable, and she decided it was no longer worth
the fight to overturn her death sentence and keep living.
Speaker 7 (14:26):
Krista wrote Judge Leebowitz and said, I want to drop
my appeals, drop my post conviction case, and I want
you to set an execution date.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
While waiting on that decision, a fire broke out in
a part of the prison. Christa, who usually spent time
alone when she was permitted outside, was briefly paired with
two other inmates in what was called the cage a
fenced in area where she got fresh air for one
hour a day. The other inmates were named Patricia and Natasha.
Patricia was severely mentally ill.
Speaker 7 (14:58):
Patricia liked to aggravate Krista by making buzzing noises to
imitate an electric chair.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
She also had a lengthy history of violence.
Speaker 7 (15:07):
Patricia tried to kill at least three other women. In
one incident, she had taken a woman and rammed her
head between the cell door bars. Krista was able to intervene,
get the woman extracted and help her. In another incident, Patricia,
who is large and has impulse and anger control issues,
she was trying to drown a woman's head in a toilet,
(15:29):
and Christa intervened and was able to pull her away
and save that woman. In another incident, Patricia had taken
a telephone cord and was strangling a woman to death,
and Krista was able to intervene and save that woman's life.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Patricia had been threatening to kill Natasha, the third inmate
in the cage. Natasha had told Krista that she was
terrified of Patricia, and one day in August, things got
bad very fast.
Speaker 7 (15:55):
Natasha and Patricia start yelling at each other and Natasha
takes a paunch at Patricia. Krista jumps on Patricia's back,
has a shoelace and pulls it around Patricia's neck untils
She's down on the ground and becomes unconscious, and then
officers intervene.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Krista was charged with attempted murder. She was encouraged to
take a plea deal for a lesser charge, but Christa,
now in solitary for five long years, was so desperate
to get out of her cell that she told her
lawyers she wanted to.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Fight the charges.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Christa wanted to sit in court, to sit shoulder to
shoulder with her lawyers. It was the closest she could
get to a normal world, a world populated with other people,
with conversations and eye contact. She was desperate to change
out of her prison uniform and maybe even wear a dress.
But as her new trial inch closer, things only got
(16:58):
worse and worse and attempted suicide. Where she once hoped
to have her sentence overturned, her only hope now was
the petition she had in front of the court requesting
the expedite her execution.
Speaker 9 (17:14):
Well, I can't explain my thinking at the time because
I was insane, I was miserable, and I just didn't
want to be here anymore and was too weak, I
think to take my own life. And I'm not sure,
(17:35):
but it was.
Speaker 5 (17:35):
It was.
Speaker 9 (17:36):
I was in a really, really bad mental state, really bad.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
This is Krista today.
Speaker 9 (17:42):
I wasn't diagnosed, and I surely wasn't treated.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
When we first started reporting this story, we knew we
needed to hear from Krista directly. We tried to arrange
an interview, but we soon learned that that would be
near impossible. Christa's access to the outside world is dreamly limited.
She's not allowed to speak to the media without special
permission that's rarely granted, so we had to ask her
(18:07):
lawyers to record an interview with Krista. We provided the
questions they asked them.
Speaker 9 (18:13):
And it made me very agitated at times and miserable
at times. It's not easy to live in that mind state.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
It wasn't just the isolation and untreated mental illness. Christa
was also grappling with years of neglect and trauma that
shaped who she was in that moment.
Speaker 10 (18:36):
So I've been doing forensic work for over thirty years,
and the history that she reported was really remarkable for
just how extensive and severe and chronic her childhood map
treatment history is.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Bethany Brand is Professor Emerita Psychology at Tausan University. She
specializes in trauma disorders. Doctor Brand says that kids who
suffer extreme trauma and abuse at an early age, a
scale referred to as adverse childhood experiences or ACES, often
have lingering damage that lasts well into adulthood.
Speaker 11 (19:18):
Children exposed to a very high number of ASES have
incredibly high risk for behavioral problems like aggression, getting picked
on or picking on other kids for example. They have
problems with memory, they don't remember their childhood very well.
They are at high risk for all kinds of psychological
(19:40):
problems depression, anxiety, suicide, attempts to dissociation, all kinds of things.
They have a high need for psychiatric medications. One of
the ACE studies showed that people into their nineties were
at higher risk for needing antidepressants. This stuff doesn't necessarily
go away to because the abuse, the maltreatment is over.
(20:03):
So we're learning as a mental health field that this
changes people's stress response system. It changes the wiring as
well as the structures in their brain, and they don't
respond like non traumatized people when they're under great stress.
(20:24):
It's not that some people are born monsters, it's what
stress and early maltreatment can do to the brain.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
In two thousand and two, kristaph finally got what perversely
felt like some form of relief. Judge Lebowitz granted Christa's
wish to drop her appeals and die in court. Christa
sobbed profusely, thanking the judge for letting her end her misery.
Her execution date was set for August two thousand and two.
(20:56):
Not long after, lawyer Kelly Gleason became involved in christ
this case. Christa was twenty six.
Speaker 7 (21:03):
Her attorneys were struggling with how to respond to where
Christa was at, knowing that she's an intelligent person, but
knowing that she was having a very, very difficult time
with her conditions. I was consulting with them and telling
them that they could not let the conditions of confinement
drive her decision making.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Gleeson didn't want Christa to make the decision to die
from a place of desperation. Maybe there was something that
could help Christa relieve the worst of her symptoms.
Speaker 7 (21:34):
And That's when they began to request Judge li Bewitz
to appoint an expert to determine whether she was competent
to make the decision, and that is actually what led
to her first being diagnosed with the severe mental illness
of bipolar disorder.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
The doctors overseeing Christa's care decided to reevaluate her, and
that's when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and PTSD.
She was put on lithium and her moods stabilized. She
was able to sleep, and she wasn't overcome with self
loathing and a desire to end her life. In July
(22:12):
two thousand and two, just three weeks before she was
scheduled to be executed, Christa's lawyers successfully petitioned the court
to overturn the decision to abandon her appeals. But as
Christa returned to the fight for her life, as she
adapted to her new medications and started therapy and learned
about all the ways she had been set up for
(22:32):
failure in early life, as she grappled with her killing
of Colleen, she and her team would face a new challenge.
What would it take to prove to a court that
she deserves to Live.
Speaker 12 (22:45):
I think we have a myth about our justice system
that comes through the news and popular media, something about
how doing this fixes problems and that victims are made
whole once someone has been the victim. However, in a
murder rate, even robberies, it changes the victim and the
(23:10):
victim will never be whole. And we've developed a myth
about our super effective justice system that it does make
people whole and it can't.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
That's next time on Proof of Life. Unrestorable is executive
produced and hosted by me Sarah Chelevin and Beth Carras,
mixing and sound design by Reza Daiah for Anonymous Content.
Jessica Grimshaw is our executive producer, Jennifer Sears is our
executive in charge of production, and.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Nicole Pronk is our legal counsel.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
For iHeart executive producer Christina Everett, and supervising producer Abu
Zaphar
She goes back, I guess she's in her cell in
the City County Building, and she wants to write a
note to to Daryl.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
This is John North, a journalist who covered Krista Pike's
murder trial in nineteen ninety six and watched as the
then twenty year old was sentenced to death. He's talking
about a moment right after the jury handed down their verdict,
the moment just after Christa found out that she would
be executed in the electric chair. After sobbing before the judge,
(00:30):
she was brought back to her jail cell, where it
seemed she had only one thought her boyfriend to Daryl.
To Daryl was sitting in his own jail cell, waiting
to be tried for his role in Colleen's murder. According
to court records, he was both physically and emotionally abusive
to Christa, but she didn't really have anyone else to
(00:51):
talk to.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
And she writes this note, and it essentially says, can
you believe they did this to me when I actually
tried to be nice to her?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
The most inflammatory part of that letter, the part that
would be repeated over and over again in newspapers and
in court hearings. The part that would be used to
demonstrate that Krista was incapable of remorse reads as follows,
You see what I get for trying to be nice
to the I went ahead and bashed her brains out
(01:22):
so she'd die quickly instead of letting her bleed to
death and suffer more.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
And they fry me, Ain't that some shit?
Speaker 1 (01:32):
And she says, I love you, and I'm your little devil,
And tell me what you're thinking, and I'll always be yours.
And if you need me to testify for you, I
will and tell the cops you lied and what you said.
And then she gives it to a jail matron and says,
please give this to to Darryl.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Christa's advocates argue that the note was a sign of
her unwavering devotion to and desperate need to please a
volatile teenage boy she had turned into her sole source
of support even as she faced death. She would lie
for him, take the blame for him. That he was
a lifeline for someone who grew up without anyone to
(02:15):
rely on and who feared being alone, someone who struggled
with mental illness and a brain that had been shaped
mostly by harm and in that way, Krista is a
lot like the dozens of other women who are death
sentenced in America.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
When I think of Krista's case, I think of two things.
First and foremost.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
This is Sandra Babcock, a law professor at Cornell University,
an expert in women and the death penalty.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
One is that she, like many women on death row,
had experiences of sexual violence. She was raped twice before
she was eighteen, and was also someone who lived with
mental illness.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
And there's something else that ties Christa to this group.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
When they commit a violent crime, they frequently have a
co defendant, So a lot of times women are not
committing crimes alone. They are committing them in the presence
of codefendants and oftentimes with male code defendants with whom
they have a relationship.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Many of these women see the same man who terrorizes
them as their protector. They make a brutal calculation, weighing
their options and too often determining that it's better to
be abused than to risk being alone.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
Courts are not taking their experiences of violence into account
when they sentence them.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
To Darryl was only seventeen when he and Christa killed Colleen,
so he would be sentenced to life in prison. He'll
be eligible for parole later this year. Christa wrote to
Darryl for years as she sat on death row, moosely
alone and waiting to die. I'm Sarah Trelevin and this
(04:06):
is Unrestorable Season two Proof of Life, an original podcast
from Anonymous content and iHeartRadio. After the sentence was handed down,
Krista was transported from the city jail to the Tennessee
(04:26):
Prison for Women in Nashville. Her lawyers filed appeals in
the hope of overturning her death sentence.
Speaker 5 (04:32):
I'm locked down twenty three hours a day.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
This is an interview that Krista did from prison in
nineteen ninety eight. She's wearing an institutional blue button down
shirt with a white undershirt. Her hair is in a
high ponytail tied with a blue scrunchy.
Speaker 5 (04:47):
I get to go outside in a cage for an
hour a day.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
At twenty one.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
She sounds resilient and confident, almost stoic.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
What do you think about the electric jair.
Speaker 6 (04:57):
I don't really think about that because I don't think
I'm ever going to see it.
Speaker 7 (05:01):
I know that I don't deserve to be where I'm at,
and I know that somewhere along the line, somebody's going
to see that. That's all I have left is hope.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
That hope real or just a brave face for the
cameras wouldn't last. Christa's mental health crisis was only getting worse,
and it was exacerbated by the conditions of solitary confinement.
Speaker 5 (05:24):
Solitary confinement, especially that of prolonged solitary confinement, you know,
has a variety of different psychological and physical health related consequences.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
This is Ali Winters. She's a social worker and professor
at the University of Tennessee Knoxville who has counseled Krista
in prison. Christa gave us permission to speak with her.
Speaker 6 (05:46):
I would have patients who would enter solitary confinement and
they didn't have a mental health diagnosis, but over time
they would develop significant mental health issues like mood disorders,
in particular related to depression and hopelessness and despair. There
(06:11):
were a lot of people that would actually begin experiencing
more psychotic symptoms. It would start with paranoia, like what
are they talking about? They're talking about me, They're plotting
against me, you know, and that would then in turn,
I think kind of morph into.
Speaker 5 (06:33):
This level of anxiety.
Speaker 6 (06:35):
So you would see a lot of irritability, a lot
of anxiety, a lot of pacing, you know, those kinds
of things.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Christa is the only woman on death row in Tennessee,
not uncommon for women, and so Christa is in de
facto segregation. Because death row inmates are typically separated from
the general prison population, they.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
Are often subjected to more extreme conditions of isolationation and
solitary than the men are because they are one of
a kind.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
This again is Sandra Babcock from Cornell University.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
So you saw this in Christa's case. The kinds of
segregation that she experienced were really uniquely tortuous. Women who
are incarcerated have a higher frequency of mental illness than men,
So when they come into the system of detention incarceration,
they are already experiencing many of them symptoms of trauma
(07:34):
and mental illness, and they experience those at higher rates
than men and the incarcerated population, so they are more
vulnerable to the effects of solitary confinement.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Christa was eating every meal alone. When her family visited,
they were behind plexiglass, and her primary means of communication
with other inmates was getting down on the floor and
yelling through the crack under her.
Speaker 5 (07:59):
See.
Speaker 4 (08:01):
On top of that, what we see in the cases
of women who are in prison is that they lack
many of the supports that men in prison receive from
people that they know in love on the outside. So
women tend to receive fewer visits from family members. They
don't have the same degree of social support from people
(08:22):
on the outside as many of the incarcerated men do.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
That's very interesting. I mean, is that because men are
more likely to kill someone not in their immediate orbit,
or is that because when a woman kills it's considered
less forgivable.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
I don't know that anybody's ever done research on that.
If I were to guess, I would say it's a
combination of the first thing, that many times women have
been convicted of crimes that have torn families apart. But
I think it goes beyond that. I think it's also
that women tend to be caretakers, and so if women
(09:02):
in prison are relying on their male relations to visit
them and you know, bring them news and sustain their
spirits and sustain that connection to the outside world, that
is less likely to happen.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
For men on death row, conditions are not great, but
they are less isolated. There are forty two men on
death row in Tennessee, and they live together on a
segregated unit. Ali Winters says that life in solitary can
drive the women she treats to act out in ways
that demonstrate just how desperate they are for any form
of contact. I hope I'm pronouncing this right. Can you
(09:49):
tell me the story of Esa? He say, say tell
me the story of Isa.
Speaker 5 (09:55):
Say yeah.
Speaker 6 (09:58):
Christa was out in the wreck in a cage that
has a concrete floor and then they have wire around,
you know, this concrete slab like fencing, and then razor
wire above that. And so one day when she was
(10:20):
in wreck, she was sitting there. She ended up noticing
that a turtle was coming through the grass and came
up through the fence. She grabbed the turtle, you know,
and that turtle became her world. She fed that thing
(10:40):
all kinds of stuff, like little pieces of ham, little
pieces of tuna.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Krista named the turtle Isse.
Speaker 6 (10:48):
And she had a little soap box because it was
a tiny little thing. And then every morning she would
plug her sink and fill it with water and let
you know, little essay swim around and be a turtle.
And this was not uncharacteristic of the women in solitary confinement,
(11:10):
even if they could find just a bug. I had
one lady. She adopted the exoskeleton of a cicada that
had just been left somewhere.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
Like the discardage.
Speaker 6 (11:25):
The discarded shell of a cicada, but those shells still
have like little eyes and stuff. But she cared for
that thing for months, acting like it was alive and
talking to I mean, it's like this was not at
all unusual, because I think that women and maybe this
is true for the guys, but it's never really been
(11:48):
something that has been especially observed, but for the women
that there's a need to nurture.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
The effects of solitary of spending twenty three hours a
day alone in a cell aren't just psychological.
Speaker 8 (12:03):
I remember Krista being pretty curvaceous when I first met her,
and then I remember a period of a time where I
saw her and she could almost literally fit through the
trap because her body had atrophied in such a way.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
This is Ashley Sellers. She was incarcerated for twenty one years.
Most of them at the same facility where Krista is
still being held today.
Speaker 8 (12:25):
She hasn't had access to nutrition, She hasn't had access
to sunlight to be able to have the capacity to
be bought to have good vitamin D absorption. Bone health
is a huge issue for women period, and if you
don't have access to the sun, if you don't have
access to calcium, your body is just not going to farewell.
(12:45):
And I would say, again, that's probably a huge testament
to why she has experienced the dental problems that she's experienced.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Do you know what those problems are?
Speaker 3 (12:57):
It's that something to be comfortable sharing.
Speaker 8 (12:59):
I don't know if she's completely with denters now. I
don't know that she has any of her natural teeth.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
At this point.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
And that's just fallen out over the years because of
the conditions in prison. Yeah, over time, with very few
points of contact, Christa was becoming increasingly agitated and desperate.
Speaker 7 (13:24):
I mean she would go for days without sleeping. She
was manic and she didn't know why.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
That's Kelly Gleeson, one of Krista's attorneys today.
Speaker 7 (13:31):
There were symptoms of bipolar a post traumatic stress disorder.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
But Christa didn't get a diagnosis of bipolar or PTSD
back then. She got a diagnosis of OCD or obsessive
compulsive disorder, so.
Speaker 7 (13:44):
They treated her with prozac that can be contraindicated for
bipolar disorder because it can exacerbate mania.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Instead of the medication helping her, things suddenly took a
very bad turn for Christa.
Speaker 7 (13:58):
She was convinc one point. Worms were crawling in the
walls of the prison and they were crumbling the walls,
and she was trying to tell everybody, danger, Danger, the
prison's about to collapse because of the worms in the wall.
She was not well.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
This was the summer of two thousand and one. Christa
was miserable, and she decided it was no longer worth
the fight to overturn her death sentence and keep living.
Speaker 7 (14:26):
Krista wrote Judge Leebowitz and said, I want to drop
my appeals, drop my post conviction case, and I want
you to set an execution date.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
While waiting on that decision, a fire broke out in
a part of the prison. Christa, who usually spent time
alone when she was permitted outside, was briefly paired with
two other inmates in what was called the cage a
fenced in area where she got fresh air for one
hour a day. The other inmates were named Patricia and Natasha.
Patricia was severely mentally ill.
Speaker 7 (14:58):
Patricia liked to aggravate Krista by making buzzing noises to
imitate an electric chair.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
She also had a lengthy history of violence.
Speaker 7 (15:07):
Patricia tried to kill at least three other women. In
one incident, she had taken a woman and rammed her
head between the cell door bars. Krista was able to intervene,
get the woman extracted and help her. In another incident, Patricia,
who is large and has impulse and anger control issues,
she was trying to drown a woman's head in a toilet,
(15:29):
and Christa intervened and was able to pull her away
and save that woman. In another incident, Patricia had taken
a telephone cord and was strangling a woman to death,
and Krista was able to intervene and save that woman's life.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Patricia had been threatening to kill Natasha, the third inmate
in the cage. Natasha had told Krista that she was
terrified of Patricia, and one day in August, things got
bad very fast.
Speaker 7 (15:55):
Natasha and Patricia start yelling at each other and Natasha
takes a paunch at Patricia. Krista jumps on Patricia's back,
has a shoelace and pulls it around Patricia's neck untils
She's down on the ground and becomes unconscious, and then
officers intervene.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Krista was charged with attempted murder. She was encouraged to
take a plea deal for a lesser charge, but Christa,
now in solitary for five long years, was so desperate
to get out of her cell that she told her
lawyers she wanted to.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Fight the charges.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Christa wanted to sit in court, to sit shoulder to
shoulder with her lawyers. It was the closest she could
get to a normal world, a world populated with other people,
with conversations and eye contact. She was desperate to change
out of her prison uniform and maybe even wear a dress.
But as her new trial inch closer, things only got
(16:58):
worse and worse and attempted suicide. Where she once hoped
to have her sentence overturned, her only hope now was
the petition she had in front of the court requesting
the expedite her execution.
Speaker 9 (17:14):
Well, I can't explain my thinking at the time because
I was insane, I was miserable, and I just didn't
want to be here anymore and was too weak, I
think to take my own life. And I'm not sure,
(17:35):
but it was.
Speaker 5 (17:35):
It was.
Speaker 9 (17:36):
I was in a really, really bad mental state, really bad.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
This is Krista today.
Speaker 9 (17:42):
I wasn't diagnosed, and I surely wasn't treated.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
When we first started reporting this story, we knew we
needed to hear from Krista directly. We tried to arrange
an interview, but we soon learned that that would be
near impossible. Christa's access to the outside world is dreamly limited.
She's not allowed to speak to the media without special
permission that's rarely granted, so we had to ask her
(18:07):
lawyers to record an interview with Krista. We provided the
questions they asked them.
Speaker 9 (18:13):
And it made me very agitated at times and miserable
at times. It's not easy to live in that mind state.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
It wasn't just the isolation and untreated mental illness. Christa
was also grappling with years of neglect and trauma that
shaped who she was in that moment.
Speaker 10 (18:36):
So I've been doing forensic work for over thirty years,
and the history that she reported was really remarkable for
just how extensive and severe and chronic her childhood map
treatment history is.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Bethany Brand is Professor Emerita Psychology at Tausan University. She
specializes in trauma disorders. Doctor Brand says that kids who
suffer extreme trauma and abuse at an early age, a
scale referred to as adverse childhood experiences or ACES, often
have lingering damage that lasts well into adulthood.
Speaker 11 (19:18):
Children exposed to a very high number of ASES have
incredibly high risk for behavioral problems like aggression, getting picked
on or picking on other kids for example. They have
problems with memory, they don't remember their childhood very well.
They are at high risk for all kinds of psychological
(19:40):
problems depression, anxiety, suicide, attempts to dissociation, all kinds of things.
They have a high need for psychiatric medications. One of
the ACE studies showed that people into their nineties were
at higher risk for needing antidepressants. This stuff doesn't necessarily
go away to because the abuse, the maltreatment is over.
(20:03):
So we're learning as a mental health field that this
changes people's stress response system. It changes the wiring as
well as the structures in their brain, and they don't
respond like non traumatized people when they're under great stress.
(20:24):
It's not that some people are born monsters, it's what
stress and early maltreatment can do to the brain.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
In two thousand and two, kristaph finally got what perversely
felt like some form of relief. Judge Lebowitz granted Christa's
wish to drop her appeals and die in court. Christa
sobbed profusely, thanking the judge for letting her end her misery.
Her execution date was set for August two thousand and two.
(20:56):
Not long after, lawyer Kelly Gleason became involved in christ
this case. Christa was twenty six.
Speaker 7 (21:03):
Her attorneys were struggling with how to respond to where
Christa was at, knowing that she's an intelligent person, but
knowing that she was having a very, very difficult time
with her conditions. I was consulting with them and telling
them that they could not let the conditions of confinement
drive her decision making.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Gleeson didn't want Christa to make the decision to die
from a place of desperation. Maybe there was something that
could help Christa relieve the worst of her symptoms.
Speaker 7 (21:34):
And That's when they began to request Judge li Bewitz
to appoint an expert to determine whether she was competent
to make the decision, and that is actually what led
to her first being diagnosed with the severe mental illness
of bipolar disorder.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
The doctors overseeing Christa's care decided to reevaluate her, and
that's when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and PTSD.
She was put on lithium and her moods stabilized. She
was able to sleep, and she wasn't overcome with self
loathing and a desire to end her life. In July
(22:12):
two thousand and two, just three weeks before she was
scheduled to be executed, Christa's lawyers successfully petitioned the court
to overturn the decision to abandon her appeals. But as
Christa returned to the fight for her life, as she
adapted to her new medications and started therapy and learned
about all the ways she had been set up for
(22:32):
failure in early life, as she grappled with her killing
of Colleen, she and her team would face a new challenge.
What would it take to prove to a court that
she deserves to Live.
Speaker 12 (22:45):
I think we have a myth about our justice system
that comes through the news and popular media, something about
how doing this fixes problems and that victims are made
whole once someone has been the victim. However, in a
murder rate, even robberies, it changes the victim and the
(23:10):
victim will never be whole. And we've developed a myth
about our super effective justice system that it does make
people whole and it can't.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
That's next time on Proof of Life. Unrestorable is executive
produced and hosted by me Sarah Chelevin and Beth Carras,
mixing and sound design by Reza Daiah for Anonymous Content.
Jessica Grimshaw is our executive producer, Jennifer Sears is our
executive in charge of production, and.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Nicole Pronk is our legal counsel.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
For iHeart executive producer Christina Everett, and supervising producer Abu
Zaphar
Hosts And Creators
Beth Karas
Sarah Treleaven
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