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The gang presence in Fayetteville was, as it was in most mid-size southern cities during that era, both a product of local conditions and an import.
Young people who had grown up in cities where the Crips and Bloods were already established moving into new territory and bringing the structure with them.
The Crips had originated in Los Angeles in 1969, founded by Raymond Washington and Stanley Tookie Williams in South Central.
What began as a neighborhood street gang became, over the following decades, one of the largest and most diffuse gang networks in the United States, spreading from Los Angeles across the country through a combination of migration, cultural influence, and the specific dynamics of the prison system, where Crips and Bloods conflicts that began in California were reproduced and amplified in correctional facilities from coast to coast, and then carried back into communities when people were released.
By 1998, the Crips were present in Fayetteville in multiple sets, and Christina Walters was the queen of one of them.
The queen, mentioned in that context, was specific and earned.
In the [ __ ] structure, female leaders held a recognized position of authority within sets that were predominantly but not exclusively male.
The queen was not a ceremonial title.
It was an operational one describing a woman who had demonstrated the qualities the gang valued: toughness, loyalty, willingness to handle business, and crucially, willingness to do violence when the organization required it.
Christina Walters had built that reputation.
She had, according to the evidence presented at trial, a prior record and a prior prison stay.
She was known in her set as someone who led from the front.
She was also 20 years old, a single mother living in a trailer in Fayetteville, North Carolina in a neighborhood where the legitimate economy offered very little to a 20-year-old woman with her background and her history.
The gang was the structure that made sense in her world.
The gang was where her status lived, where her identity lived, where the relationships that mattered to her were built and maintained.
And on the night of August 16th, 1998, the gang needed to do something that would cement his reputation and her place within it.
The nine people who gathered at 1386 Davis Street that Sunday evening were from different [ __ ] sets but operated together under the authority that Christina Walters had established over her corner of the Fayetteville Crips network.
The court record names them: Francisco Torrado, known as Paco, Eric Queen, John Warbi, Ione Black, Tomeka Douglas, Carlos Frank, Carlos Nevils, and Daryl Tucker.
Together with Walters, they left the trailer that night carrying guns loaded with blue-tipped bullets.
The first target was a woman who had nothing to do with gangs, nothing to do with the Crips, nothing to do with anything that had brought those nine people to that street.
Debra Cheeseborough was going about her evening when the gang encountered her.
They abducted her, put her in the trunk of her own car, and drove.
Walters shot her eight times.
Then they left her in the woods near Fort Bragg and drove away in her car.
The court record is precise about what happened next.
Walters personally shot Cheeseborough.
She personally drove away.
She personally decided that the group needed a second car.
And then she, Tucker, Black, and Eric Queen rode through Fayetteville in Cheeseborough’s car looking for one.
They found Susan Moore’s car.
Moore was 21 years old.
Tracy Lambert, 18, >> >> was a passenger.
The gang trapped Moore’s vehicle at the end of a dead-end road.
What happened at that point is where Walters’ role in the second set of murders, as the court found, was demonstrated in full.
She handed a gun to Darrell Tucker and told him to go do what you got to do.
Then she, Frink, and Queen drove away in Cheeseborough’s car leaving Tucker, Black, and Douglas with instructions to be back at the Davis Street trailer within 45 minutes.
Tucker and Douglas forced Moore and Lambert at gunpoint into the trunk of their own car.
During the drive to what would be the last place these two women would ever be alive, the car was stopped so that the gang members could open the trunk and rob Moore and Lambert of their jewelry.
Then they drove to an isolated field.
What happened in that field is in the court record.
Eric Queen, irritated by the noise, told Tracy Lambert to be quiet and then shot her in the head.
Francisco Terrado >> >> shot Susan Moore in the head.
Both women died in that field.
Their bodies were found the next morning.
Deborah Cheeseborough, shot eight times and left for dead in the woods near Fort Bragg, survived.
She later appeared on the Biography Channel’s I Survived describing what happened to her that night in her own words.
>> >> She said she had been shot eight times.
She testified at trial.
She is the reason the full account of the night of August 16th is as documented as it is.
After the killings, Walters and six of her crew fled to Myrtle Beach.
They used Susan Moore’s cell phone, the phone they had taken from the trunk, to make calls back to the Davis Street trailer.
They checked into the Bon Villa Motel with the room rented in Walters’ name.
Two days later, on August 18th, Warby and Tucker were apprehended in Cheeseborough’s car by Myrtle Beach police.
The next day, August 19th, Walters, Frink, Douglas, Queen, and Terrado were arrested at the Bon Villa.
Walters a statement to Fayetteville police officer >> >> Chris Corsino after her arrest in which she admitted to shooting Cheeseborough and identified Queen as the person who shot Lambert and Torrado as the person who shot Moore.
Later, she gave a second statement to Detective Joe Autry in which she recanted the admission about Cheeseborough saying she had not shot her.
At trial, she testified that the second statement was false and that she had made it because she was scared and wanted to go home.
The jury did not believe the recantation.
The evidence, including Cheeseborough’s own testimony about being shot by the woman who had led the gang that abducted her, was overwhelming.
Walters was indicted on January 4th, 1999 on two counts each of first-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping, and robbery with a dangerous weapon, plus one count each of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit first-degree kidnapping, and conspiracy to commit robbery with a dangerous weapon.
A second multi-count indictment followed on January 25th, >> >> adding attempted first-degree murder and related charges connected to the Cheeseborough attack.
The district attorney charged nine people in total >> >> for the crimes of that night.
Francisco Torrado and Eric Queen went to trial before Walters.
Both were sentenced to death in April 2000.
Christina Walters went to trial in June 2000 in Cumberland County Superior Court.
She was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder.
The jury sentenced her to death on July 6th, 2000.
She became the fifth woman on North Carolina’s death row.
She was 22 years old.
The North Carolina Supreme Court affirmed her death sentence on May 2nd, 2003 in a ruling that addressed multiple legal challenges her attorneys had raised, including claims about jury selection, the admission of photographs, and the sufficiency of the evidence.
The court rejected each challenge in turn.
On the photograph issue, the court found that the images of the victims were not so gruesome as to require exclusion under the state’s evidence rules.
On the sufficiency of the evidence, the court found the record more than adequate to support the verdicts.
That legal affirmation was not the end of the story.
In 2009, North Carolina passed the Racial Justice Act, legislation that allowed death row inmates to challenge their sentences by presenting statistical evidence that race had played a role in jury selection or in the decision to seek the death penalty.
The law was a significant and contested piece of criminal justice reform that reflected years of advocacy by death penalty opponents who had documented racial disparities in how capital punishment law was applied in North Carolina and across the South.
Christina Walters was among the inmates who pursued relief under the act.
The hearing that followed involved Walters, Tillman Goffin, Quintel Augustine, and Jeffrey Myer, all convicted of first-degree murder in Cumberland County.
At the hearing, retired Cumberland County prosecutor Margaret Bunt Ross testified that race had not influenced her jury selection decisions in the Walters trial.
On a cross-examination, she was asked about a judge’s ruling 14 years earlier that she had attempted to dismiss a juror because he was black, and about a separate case that had been overturned on appeal on claims that she had misled a jury.
The hearing also noticed something relevant to Walters’s case specifically.
She was identified in the court proceedings as an American Indian woman, not black, a racial classification that added a dimension to the Racial Justice Act analysis.
The political and legal landscape around the Racial Justice Act shifted during the years the hearing was pending.
The North Carolina General Assembly amended and ultimately repealed the act between 2012 and 2013 under pressure from prosecutors and law and order advocates who argued it was being used to undermine capital punishment rather than address a genuine racial injustice.
The legal battles over the act’s application went through multiple rounds of litigation.
>> >> Ultimately, Christina Walters’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The commutation came through the broader collapse of North Carolina’s death penalty machinery rather than through a specific finding in her individual case, she remains incarcerated in a North Carolina state prison.
The two women who died in that field on the night of August 16th, 1998 are the center of this story, and they deserve more than the supporting role that true crime narratives often assign to victims.
Tracy Rose Lambert was 18 years old.
She was a passenger in Susan Moore’s car, which means she was simply there, simply along for the ride on what should have been an ordinary night in Fayetteville.
She was old enough to vote, barely.
She had a whole life ahead of her in the most literal sense.
Every decision she would ever make, every relationship she would ever have, every morning she would ever wake up to, all of it was still ahead of her, and then none of it was.
She was shot in the head in a field by a man who had been given the gun by Christina Walters.
Susan Ray Moore was 21 years old.
She was driving her own car on an ordinary night and ended up at the end of a dead-end road with gang members blocking her exit >> >> and a gun at her window.
She was forced into the trunk of her own vehicle.
She was robbed of her jewelry while she was in that trunk.
She was driven to a field.
She was shot in the head.
Neither of these women had any connection to the Crips.
Neither of them had any history with Christina Walters or any member of her set.
They were targets of opportunity.
They were chosen because they were there.
The gang needed a second car, and Susan Moore had one, and Tracy Lambert happened to be in it.
>> >> That randomness is the most disturbing element of the night of August 16th, and it is also the element that makes it most representative of a particular category of gang violence that operates on a logic completely disconnected from any dispute, any debt, any grievance, any conflict between people who know each other.
The Boobie Boys killed people who were in the wrong place during a targeted attack.
The Seven Mile Bloods killed people who were rivals in a documented gang war.
What happened to Tracy Lambert and Susan Moore was different.
They were killed because Christina Walters’ gang needed to demonstrate his willingness to kill, and they were the people available for that demonstration.
Deborah Cheeseborough survived eight gunshot wounds and went on to tell her story.
>> >> She appeared on television.
She testified in court.
She is a person who carries in her body the physical record of what happened on the night that Christina Walters decided her gang needed to prove something.
The testimony Cheeseborough gave, the account she offered on I Survived, the role she played in the prosecution of the people who shot her and killed her car partner’s companions that night is the reason the full account is as well documented as it is.
Walters’ own statement to Officer Courson confirming that she had shot Cheeseborough, the co-defendants’ testimony about who was where and who gave which orders, all of that built the evidentiary record.
But Cheeseborough is the person who was there and lived through it and chose to speak.
Eight gunshot wounds is not an abstract number.
That is eight separate impacts on a human body, each one representing a moment when Christina Walters fired at a stranger she had just met and intended to kill.
Cheeseborough did not die in those woods near Fort Bragg that night.
But the fact that she did not die was not for lack of effort from the woman who left her there.
Understanding who Christina Walters was at 20 years old requires understanding what Fayetteville and its gang world were offering a young woman with her specific history.
She had a prior record.
She had served time in prison before August 1998.
She was a single mother.
She was living in a trailer in a part of Fayetteville where, according to the people who describe her upbringing in the various accounts that emerged after her arrest and conviction, her mother was largely absent due to health issues and her father was not present.
She had been living with her grandparents who, according to the Daily Women account, tried to warn her away from the Crips.
She did not listen.
The gang gave her what her circumstances did not otherwise provide, a structure, a community, a status, and a role that her limited options in Fayetteville’s legitimate economy could not have produced for her.
The title of queen, the authority it carried, the respect it generated among her peers, all of that was real inside the world the gang created.
And inside that world, the way you maintain that status, the way you prove your commitment and your worthiness to lead, was through demonstrated willingness to do what the gang required.
Gang expert Candice DeLong, who has discussed the case in documentary formats, noted that a gang family gave Christina the opportunity to be a leader in a way that her outside circumstances did not offer.
That is not a defense of what she did.
Two women are dead.
That fact does not change in light of any contextual explanation.
But, it is necessary to understanding how a 20-year-old woman ends up standing in a parking lot in Fayetteville, North Carolina, loading blue tip bullets into a gun, and driving out into the night looking for strangers to shoot.
The structure that produced that decision is the same structure that has produced similar decisions >> >> in similar neighborhoods and similar cities across the country since street gangs began organizing around violence as a form of social capital.
The specific details of Fayetteville in 1998 are different from the details of Detroit in 2014 or Miami in 1995 or Los Angeles in 1988.
The underlying logic is the same.
The gang provides what the legitimate world withholds.
The price of membership is your willingness to do what the gang requires.
And sometimes what the gang requires is an act of violence against a stranger in a field.
Tracy Lambert and Susan Moore paid the price that Christina Walters’ gang charged for her status.
Christina Walters is currently serving life in prison without the possibility of parole in North Carolina.
She was 20 years old when she organized and participated in the events of August 16th, 1998.
She was 22 when she was sentenced to death.
She spent years on death row before her sentence was commuted through the long legal aftermath of the Racial Justice Act proceedings.
She will not be released.
The case she is part of is now one of the most famous gang cases in American history.
It did not generate the sustained national attention of the Boobie Boys prosecution or the Seven Mile Bloods RICO trial.
Fayetteville is not Los Angeles or Detroit or Miami.
The story of two women killed in a field in Cumberland County during a gang initiation does not have the scale or the organizational complexity of the drug trafficking empires that dominate the narrative of American gang history.
What it has is the simplest and most devastating version of what gang violence can become when status is built on the willingness to harm people who have done nothing to deserve it.
There was no drug war on those streets that night.
There was no turf dispute.
There was no debt, no grievance, no history between the nine people at 1386 Davis Street and the women they killed and wounded over the course of several hours in August 1998.
There was a gang that needed to prove itself.
There was a leader who needed to demonstrate her credentials.
And there were two women who happened to be in the wrong place when those needs were looking for a target.
That is the most honest description of what happened in Fayetteville in 1998.
Not a story about an organized criminal enterprise or sophisticated drug trafficking network or turf war with documented history on both sides.
A story about a 20-year-old woman who decided that the best way to prove her leadership was to have people killed and two women who paid for that decision with their lives on a night in August when they had no idea that any of this was coming.
The bullets had blue tips.
They had been painted that color in Christina Walters’ bedroom with her nail polish by Francisco Tirado before they went out.
That detail from the court record is the one that stays with you.
The deliberateness of it, the preparation, the care taken to make the violence properly symbolic.
That is what it looks like when a gang turns killing into ceremony and it is what Tracy Lambert and Susan Moore encountered at the end of that dead end road in Fayetteville, North Carolina on the night that Christina Walters decided she needed to prove something.
She proved it.
Two counts of first-degree murder, life without parole, a record in the North Carolina Supreme Court that will outlast everyone who was in that trailer on August 16th, 1998.
Tracy Lambert and Susan Moore are buried in Cumberland County.
They were 18 and 21 years old.
They did not know each other’s last names before the night they died, and they did not know Christina Walters, and they did not know any of the nine people who drove out of 1386 Davis Street that evening with blue-tipped bullets and a plan.
That is all they needed not to know.
In the world Christina Walters was operating in, that was enough.
The Crips in Fayetteville did not arrive fully formed from Los Angeles.
They arrived the way gangs arrive in most mid-size southern cities that are not their points of origin, through migration, through the prison system, through the cultural spread of a gang identity that had become by the 1990s genuinely national in reach.
Young people who grew up in cities where the Crips were already established moved to Fayetteville and brought the structure with them.
People who went into North Carolina’s prison system and encountered the gang there came out affiliated.
The military presence at Fort Bragg created a transient population that included veterans of gang-affiliated neighborhoods in other cities who settled in Fayetteville after their service and brought their prior affiliations with them.
By the mid-1990s, Fayetteville law enforcement was documenting a Crips and Bloods presence that was organized enough to have recognizable leadership structures, recognized territory, and the kind of internal hierarchy that made cases like the one against Christina Walters legally prosecutable as something more organized than a collection of individuals who happened to know each other.
The district attorney’s office charged nine people in connection with the events of August 16th and 17th, 1998.
That number reflects the organizational reality of what the gang had become by that point, a structured group with a recognized leader, recognized members with recognized roles, and a shared purpose that on the night in question involved planning and executing a series of crimes that included car jacking, kidnapping, robbery, attempted murder, and murder.
The fact that Walters was a woman leading this organization is significant in ways that go beyond the surface level novelty of a female gang leader.
In the culture of the Crips, as it had developed by the late 1990s, the role of queen was a recognized position, but one that still required a woman to demonstrate her credentials in the same terms that male leaders were judged by: toughness, willingness to use violence, ability to command loyalty, and willingness to lead from the front rather than directing others from a safe distance.
Christina Walters met those criteria in the most extreme possible way.
She did not send someone else to shoot Deborah Cheeseborough while she waited at the trailer.
She was there.
She pulled the trigger.
She shot a stranger eight times and left her in the woods.
That willingness to personally participate in the violence rather than merely directing it is what distinguished Walters’ role in the night’s events from the role of figurehead might have played.
The court record makes her personal participation in the Cheeseborough attack clear.
Her direction of the second set of murders, >> >> handing Tucker the gun, and telling him to go do what you got to do before driving away, reflects a leadership style that delegated execution while maintaining command authority.
>> >> Both the hands-on violence against Cheeseborough and the directive violence against Lambert and Moore were within her authority and under her control.
The question of the death penalty as applied to Christina Walters is one that the North Carolina legal system wrestled with for over a decade after her conviction.
And it is worth engaging with directly because it reflects something important about how the justice system processes cases like hers.
She was sentenced to death in July 2000 becoming the fifth woman on North Carolina’s death row.
Francisco Tirado and Eric Queen, two of her co-defendants who were more directly involved in the field executions of Lambert and Moore, had already received death sentences in April 2000.
All three sentences reflected the jury’s assessment of the deliberateness of the killings, the multiple victims, the kidnapping, and the absence of any mitigating factor that might justify a lesser punishment.
The Racial Justice Act challenge that Walters pursued alongside three other Cumberland County death row inmates after 2009 raised a legitimate and documented concern about how the death penalty has historically been applied in North Carolina and throughout the South.
>> >> Statistical studies of capital sentencing patterns in North Carolina, which were the evidentiary basis for Racial Justice Act claims, had documented disparities in the race of defendants and victims that correlated with death penalty decisions in ways that prosecutors challenged but that research has found significant.
Whether those statistical patterns applied to the specific facts of Walters’ prosecution was the question the hearing was designed to address and that question was never fully resolved before the legal landscape shifted under the Racial Justice Act’s amendment and repeal.
What is clear is that the commutation of her sentence to life without parole, however it was accomplished legally, means that the state of North Carolina will not execute Christina Walters.
She will spend the rest of her life in a North Carolina state prison.
At the time of her sentencing, she was 22 years old.
The commutation does not change the underlying facts.
Two women are dead because of decisions she made.
The legal outcome represents a different institutional judgment about what the appropriate response to those facts should be.
The nine people who left the trailer at 1386 Davis Street on the evening of August 16th, 1998 each carried some portion of what happened that night.
The court charged nine of them.
Multiple received death sentences or long prison terms.
The organizational structure of the case, the fact that the district attorney could identify a leadership hierarchy, specific roles, shared planning, and shared execution was what made it possible to charge so many people on the so many counts for what unfolded over several hours in Fayetteville.
That structure, the gang as an organization with recognized authority and direction, is also what makes the case relevant beyond its specific facts.
The night of August 16th was not the product of spontaneous violence between strangers who encountered each other by chance and escalated toward murder.
It was a product of a planned evening organized from a specific address by a recognized leader using resources that had been prepared in advance, blue tip bullets painted in her bedroom, and a group of people who operated within a structure that she commanded.
The randomness of the victims does not make the violence random.
The selection of specific strangers was deliberate.
The decision to use violence was deliberate.
The direction given to Tucker, go do what you got to do, was deliberate.
Every step from the Walmart trip to the field where Lambert and Moore were found the next morning was deliberate.
That is the most important thing the court record establishes.
Not that Christina Walters was a monster or that she was uniquely evil among the human beings who have ever led street gangs in American cities, but that on that specific night she made a series of specific deliberate choices that resulted in the deaths of two young women who were not involved in any of it.
And that those choices, documented in the North Carolina Supreme Court record and the testimony of a woman who survived eight gunshot wounds, and in the photographs that the trial court found to be admissible evidence of the truth of what happened, constitute the factual basis for the rest of her life being spent in a North Carolina prison.
Tracy Lambert was 18.
Susan Moore was 21.
Their names are on the court record of State versus Walters.
They’re in the case captions.
They’re in the photographs that were argued over at trial and upheld on appeal.
They are the reason the case exists and the reason it will continue to exist in the legal record long after everyone who was in that trailer has died.
A gang needed to prove itself.
A leader needed to demonstrate her authority.
Two women who were driving through Fayetteville on an ordinary Sunday evening paid for both of those needs with their lives.
That is the full sentence of the Christina Walters story.
Not the death sentence and not the life without parole that replaced it.
The sentence that was handed down to Tracy Lambert and Susan Moore the moment they ended up at the end of a dead end road with a gang blocking their way out.
That sentence had no appeal, no commutation, and no racial justice act hearing.
It was final on August 17th, 1998 in a field in Fayetteville, North Carolina before the sun came up.
