Darlie Routier Final Hours | Texas Moves Forward With Her Execution on Death Row + 2 Cases
But detectives say the young mother staged it and she’s still sitting on death row right now. Three women, three states, three death sentences. One stabbed her sons and sprayed silly string on their graves eight days later, or so a jury decided. One was condemned to die not because her fingerprints were on the murder weapon, but because a prosecutor stood in front of 12 people and held up her underwear.
And one, the youngest woman ever sentenced to death in her state, tortured a living human being for nearly an hour, carved a pentagram into her chest, and kept a piece of her skull as a souvenir. Three women sitting on death row right now in America. And the question I want you to hold in your mind for the entire next 20 minutes is this: Who among these three is actually the most dangerous woman? Because by the end of this video, the answer might not be who you think.
Hit subscribe, turn on the notification bell so you won’t miss our deep dive drops. And today, I’m going to take you inside three of the most disturbing, most contested, most morally complex capital murder cases in American history. One is a mother who has maintained her innocence for nearly three decades. One is a Sunday school teacher whose trial became a master class in how gender bias can sentence a woman to death.
And one has an actual execution date, September 30th, 2026, making her the first woman scheduled to die in her state in over 200 years. Stay with me because every one of these cases is going to leave you with questions that don’t have easy answers. And that is exactly the point. Case one, Darlie Routier. June 6th, 1996.
2:31 in the morning, Rowlett, Texas. A 911 dispatcher picks up the line and hears a woman screaming, “My babies are dying.” The call lasts 5 minutes and 44 seconds. By the time police arrive at 5801 Eagle Drive, two young boys are bleeding out on the family room floor. Devon Routier, 6 years old. Damon Routier, 5.
Both have been stabbed repeatedly. Devon is already gone. Damon is barely holding on. He would not survive. Their mother, 26-year-old Darlie Routier, is standing nearby, bleeding from her throat and both arms, conscious and talking. Within weeks, she would be charged with killing them herself. Here is what you need to understand about the world Darlie lived in before that night.
She and her husband, Daren, had built what looked, from the outside, like everything. A beautiful two-story home in an affluent Dallas suburb, a successful electronics business that brought in half a million dollars in gross revenue in 1995, a boat, a Jaguar, designer clothes, diamond rings on every finger, three sons, Devon, Damon, and 7-month-old Drake asleep in a crib upstairs the night of the murders.
But, by early 1996, cracks had begun to form. Daren’s business was hemorrhaging money. They were a month behind on the mortgage. They owed $10,000 to the IRS. The day before the murders, Daren applied for a $5,000 vacation loan and was turned down. Prosecutors would later argue that the financial pressure had pushed Darlie to a breaking point.
Darlie told investigators that she had been asleep on the couch with her boys when she was awakened by Damon touching her shoulder, crying, “Mommy, Mommy.” She said she saw a man moving through the kitchen toward the garage. She followed him. She found a knife on the floor. The man was gone. Then, she looked down and realized she was covered in blood.
Investigators immediately found things that troubled them. The garage the intruder allegedly fled through showed no disrupted dust on the window sills, no blood drops on the floor, no footprints in the mulch outside. Circular blood drops in the kitchen suggested someone had been standing still, not running, not chasing. Luminol revealed Darlie’s bloody footprints in front of the kitchen sink and evidence that blood had been cleaned up in that area.
A vacuum cleaner had been knocked over on top of her footprints. Broken glass lay on top of dried blood drops, meaning the glass had shattered after the blood was deposited. The prosecution’s case was built on the argument that Darlie had staged everything, that she had cut the garage screen herself with a bread knife, then used a larger kitchen knife to kill her sons, then staged a crime scene designed to point toward a phantom intruder, and then came the video.
Eight days after Devon and Damon were buried, the Routier family held a birthday celebration at the boys’ graves. It would have been Devon’s seventh birthday. A local news crew was there. What they captured would become the most consequential 30 seconds in Darlie Routier’s life. The cameras showed her laughing, chewing gum, spraying silly string over her sons’ headstones, smiling for an airplane pulling a happy birthday banner overhead.
Prosecutor Greg Davis played that video for the jury over and over. Some jurors admitted watching it seven or eight times during deliberations. What the jury never saw was the footage captured by police surveillance equipment that had been secretly placed at the gravesite. Footage that showed the Routier family holding a solemn, cheerful memorial service before the cameras rolled.
The silly string was supposed to come after the grief, as a tribute. But because of legal complications surrounding the covert surveillance, that context was never shown to 12 people deciding whether Darlie lived or died. There was something else the jury never fully grappled with. A bloody sock containing DNA from both Devon and Damon was found 75 yards away in an alley behind the house.
The prosecution claimed Darlie planted it. But here is the problem with that theory. Once her throat was cut, Darlie was losing blood at a significant rate. There was no trail of her blood on the back patio, the fence, the alley, or anywhere outside the house. None. And the medical examiner testified that Damon could not have survived more than 9 minutes after being stabbed.
Darlie was on the 911 call for 5 minutes and 44 seconds. A police officer arrived as that call ended. Damon was still alive when paramedics got there. Do the math. Darlie Routier would have had roughly 2 minutes to stab two children, cut a garage screen, plant a sock 3/4 of a football field away, slash her own throat to within 2 mm of her carotid artery, stage an entire crime scene, and call 911.
On February 1st, 1997, the jury returned a guilty verdict. 3 days later, Darlie Routier was sentenced to death. She has been on death row at the Patrick O’Daniel Unit in Gatesville, Texas for nearly 29 years. She has never touched her surviving son, Drake, who was 7 months old the night his brothers were killed and is now 30 years old, except through bulletproof glass.
As of today, DNA testing that was court-ordered in 2024 is still pending. A bloody fingerprint found at the crime scene does not match anyone in the Routier family. Neither does a fingerprint found on the garage windowsill. No execution date has ever been set. Darlie Routier continues to say she did not kill her sons.
After nearly three decades, the state of Texas has never been certain enough to schedule the day she dies. Case two, Brenda Andrew. November 20th, 2001. 2 days before Thanksgiving, Oklahoma City. Rob Andrew drove to his former family home to pick up his children for the holiday. His estranged wife, Brenda, asked him to come into the garage first.
She said she needed help relighting the pilot light on the furnace. Two shotgun blasts rang out. Rob Andrew collapsed on the garage floor and died. Brenda Andrew was shot once, a superficial wound to her arm, barely breaking the skin, with gunpowder burns suggesting it was fired at extremely close range. She called 911.
When police arrived, she told them two masked gunmen had attacked them both. Nothing at the scene supported that story. To understand what happened in that garage, you have to understand what had been building for years in that marriage. Brenda Evers grew up in Enid, Oklahoma in a devout Lutheran household. She was the quiet, straight A student who never missed church and kept her clothes buttoned to the collar.
In high school, she met Rob Andrew at a public swimming pool. He pursued her. She married him at 21. From the outside, they were exactly what a conservative Oklahoma community expected. An advertising executive husband with a six-figure salary, a wife who became a stay-at-home mother, two children, Sunday school classes every week, but the marriage had been hollow for years.
By the late 1990s, Brenda had begun an affair with James Pavatt, a church friend and insurance broker. Pavatt sold Rob an $800,000 life insurance policy. Brenda was the primary beneficiary. By October 2001, Brenda had filed for divorce. By November, Rob was dead. James Pavatt eventually confessed to pulling the trigger.
He insisted he had acted alone. Prosecutors did not believe him. They charged Brenda as the mastermind. What happened at her 2004 trial is one of the most documented examples of prosecutorial gender bias in the history of American capital cases. The prosecution had a problem. They had no physical evidence directly linking Brenda’s hands to the murder, so they went after her character instead with surgical precision and no restraint.
They called witnesses to testify about affairs Brenda had in the 1980s, more than 20 years before the murder. They asked multiple witnesses separately to describe what she was wearing to dinner years before the crime, whether her outfits were modest enough. They brought up a book found in her possession.
They attacked her as a mother, asking one witness nine separate times what a good mother would do, then whether Brenda had failed in that regard. Over 30 times throughout the trial, prosecutors raised the fact that Brenda Andrew did not cry enough in public, and in closing arguments, the prosecutor walked to a suitcase Brenda had packed when she fled to Mexico in the days after Rob’s death.
He opened it, he reached in, and he held her underwear, specifically her thong, up in front of the jury just hours before deliberations began and asked, “Would a grieving widow pack this?” Throughout the trial, prosecutors called her a hoochie and a [ __ ] puppy. The jury sentenced her to death. Judge Arlene Johnson of the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals later wrote that the prosecution’s evidence had no purpose other than to hammer home that Brenda Andrew is a bad wife, a bad mother, and a bad woman, and that the
effect was to trivialize the value of her life in the minds of the jurors. In January 2025, the United States Supreme Court agreed something had gone wrong. In a 7-2 ruling, the court remanded her case back to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, ordering them to determine whether the gender-biased evidence had made her trial fundamentally unconstitutional.
But in January 2026, the 10th Circuit ruled against her. They found she had not challenged much of the gender evidence during her state appeals, and therefore the state court could not be faulted for not addressing it. The panel upheld the denial of habeas relief. In April 2026, just 2 weeks ago, Brenda Andrew’s attorneys filed a new petition asking the 10th Circuit to reconsider, arguing the panel had conducted only a partial review that excluded the full cumulative weight of the sex stereotyping record.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond’s office has already stated, “Once all appeals are exhausted, they will request an execution date.” Brenda Andrew is 61 years old. She is the only woman on Oklahoma’s death row. She has spent over 21 years in a 6×9 cell. James Pavatt, the man who confessed to pulling the trigger, sits on death row beside her.
Whether Brenda Andrew helped plan a murder or was convicted of being the wrong kind of woman is a question the courts are still in 2026 unable to cleanly answer. Case three, Krista Pike. January 12th, 1995, Knoxville, Tennessee. A cold and rainy night on the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus. Four young people walked out of the Knoxville Job Corps Center together.
Three of them came back. 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer did not. What happened to her in that abandoned, isolated stretch of ground near a steam plant that night is one of the most brutal crimes in Tennessee history, and the woman who orchestrated it was just 18 years old. Krista Gail Pike was born in Beckley, West Virginia in 1976 into a childhood that reads like a case study in institutional failure.
Her mother struggled with alcohol and drug abuse and prioritized romantic relationships over her daughter’s care. Krista was bounced between relatives, subjected to abuse from an early age, and was addicted to marijuana by 9 years old. By 12, she was drinking heavily. Her father eventually expelled her from his home.
The juvenile system cycled her through and spat her out without a diagnosis, without treatment, without a plan. What the system did give her was a pamphlet about the Job Corps, a federal program designed to give low-income youth vocational training and a fresh start. She applied. She was accepted. She moved to Knoxville, and she met a 17-year-old boy named Tadaryl Shipp.
Together, Krista and Tadaryl developed an with the occult, and Krista developed a separate obsession, her classmate Colleen Slemmer. Colleen was from Orange Park, Florida. She had enrolled in the same computer programming class as Krista and had become friends with Tadaryl before Krista arrived. That was enough.
In Krista’s mind, Colleen was a threat to the only thing she had, and Krista decided Colleen had to die. She didn’t just decide, she planned. She told a friend named Shidala Peterson she intended to kill Colleen. She told Tatro they needed to take their occult beliefs to the next level with a human sacrifice. She borrowed a box cutter from the Job Corps Center.
She obtained a utility knife and on the evening of January 12th, she offered Colleen marijuana as a gesture of peace and led her along with Tatro and Shadala to a remote, dark, isolated area where no one would hear anything. What followed lasted between 30 and 60 minutes. Krista and Tatro slashed Colleen’s throat with a box cutter at least six times.
They inflicted deep cuts across her back with a utility knife. They forced her to remove her blouse and stuffed a cloth in her mouth so her screams couldn’t carry. When Colleen tried to run, Tatro chased her down and dragged her back. Throughout the attack, forensic evidence later revealed, Colleen Slemmer fought desperately.
Defensive wounds covered her arms and her hands. She begged them to stop. She kept begging. While she was still alive, they carved a pentagram into her chest. Krista Pike then lifted a large piece of asphalt from the ground and brought it down on Colleen Slemmer’s skull with enough force to shatter it into multiple pieces.
She struck her again with the fragments. The official cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. Then Krista Pike reached down and took a piece of Colleen Slemmer’s skull. She carried it back to the Job Corps Center in her jacket pocket. When she got back, she went straight to a friend’s room, showed her the bone fragment, and described everything that had happened.
She danced in circles while she talked. She smiled. She was convicted of first-degree premeditated murder in March 1996. On March 30th, 1996, at 20 years old, Krista Pike became the youngest woman sentenced to death in the United States. In prison, her violence continued. In 2001, she used a shoelace to attempt to strangle a fellow inmate, nearly killing her.
For 30 years, she sat in solitary confinement. Then, in September 2024, she reached an agreement with the state that gave her access to programs, shared meals, and time out of her cell, conditions equivalent to the men on Tennessee’s death row. On September 30th, 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued a death warrant.
Christa Pike is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on September 30th, 2026. Exactly 1 year later, if that execution is carried out, she will be the first woman put to death in the state of Tennessee in over 200 years. Her legal team has filed a lawsuit challenging the execution method, citing her blood clotting condition, her bipolar disorder, her PTSD, and her Buddhist faith, arguing that being forced to choose an alternative method makes her a participant in her own death, which violates her religious
beliefs. As of this recording, those legal challenges are ongoing. The execution date stands. Colleen Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has been waiting 30 years for this to end. “Once it’s completely done and everything is over with,” she said, “it will be closed.” The piece of Colleen’s skull that Christa took that night remains in state custody as evidence.
It has never been returned for burial. Authorities say it cannot be released while the case remains open, and the case remains open until the execution is complete. Three women, three death sentences, three very different roads that led to the same concrete walls. Darley Routier, still fighting, still waiting.
DNA evidence still untested after three decades. A woman either guilty of the most calculating murder a mother could commit or the victim of one of the worst wrongful convictions in Texas history. No execution date, no resolution. Brenda Andrew, condemned not by a fingerprint, not by a confession, but by a pair of underwear held up in front of a jury.
The courts keep cycling her case through appeals, and the state of Oklahoma keeps sharpening its pencil, waiting to write the date she dies. And Krista Pike, the only one of the three with a date already on the calendar, September 30th, 2026. The most brutal crime of the three, the youngest offender, and in less than 5 months, potentially the first woman executed in Tennessee in over two centuries.
So, I’ll ask you the question one more time. Who is the most dangerous woman in this story? Is it the one who may have staged the most elaborate crime scene in Dallas County history, or the one the system wrongly condemned? Is it the one whose trial became a referendum on how women are supposed to behave, or the one who actually pulled the trigger? Or is it the 18-year-old who looked a 19-year-old girl in the eyes while she begged for her life, kept cutting, and then pocketed a piece of her skull? Leave your answer in the comments. I want to know where you stand
on all three of these cases. If this video opened something up in you, if it made you think harder about what justice actually means, hit that like button. It helps more true crime families to find this channel. And if you’re new here, subscribe, because we go this deep every single time. This is today’s video, and I’ll see you in the next one.
