Women Behind Bars Tuesdays at 10p|9c

Natasha Cornett


Inmate Name: Natasha Cornett Charge: Felony murder Sentence: 3 consecutive life sentences Prison: Tennessee Prison for Women, Tennessee Natasha Cornett was born in 1979, and grew up in the small, religious mining town of Pikeville, Kentucky. Her mother divorced her husband when Natasha was young, and raised her daughter as a single mother. As a young student, Natasha earned top grades in her class but she awoke one morning to discover that her mother had attempted suicide by swallowing pills. Her mother recovered but Natasha says it affected her, and she began a downward spiral of anti-social behavior. Her mother says Natasha dropped 30 pounds in one month. To make matters worse, her relationship with her mother became strained, and Natasha continued to act out. On the advice of a doctor, she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for 11 days and diagnosed as bi-polar. Although she did see a counselor after her release, Natasha does not feel that she received the attention she needed from adults. In the seventh grade, Natasha began dressing differently than the other students, wearing, for example, baggy clothes and boots, and began to feel like an outcast. She would drink, smoke, and associate with people who were, as Natasha tells it, weird. After changing high schools three times, she dropped out in the ninth grade. On her 17th birthday, she married her friend Steve Cornett, but after several months, he left her. Natasha says she was devastated. After a brief trip to New Orleans, where she claims she was raped, Natasha sought the company of a widening circle of friends. Karen Howell, who was 17 years old, and Natasha, now 18, had a special bond. The young women depended on one another to deal with their problems and engaged in self-destructive behavior, including cutting. They spent time with fellow outcasts, 18-year-old Crystal Sturgill, 19-year-old Edward ‘Dean’ Mullins, and 20-year-old, Joe Risner. Natasha and another friend met 14-year-old Jason Bryant walking on the streets of Pikeville and he was the most recent addition. Natasha and her fellow outcasts would spend time at her mother’s trailer, drinking, getting high, playing with a ouija board, and allegedly dabbling in occult activities. Natasha says Pikeville was a suffocating place to live, and she had a desire to leave town.. On April 4, 1997, she and her friends spent the night at a local motel and left the motel room in disrepair. Hoping to escape the consequences for the damage to the motel room, and following her yearning to leave Pikeville, she and the above named group left for New Orleans in Joe’s mother’s small hatchback with $500 in cash and two handguns. The group stopped at a highway rest stop in Tennessee. There they began a conversation with a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Vidar and Delfina Lillielid and their two children, 6-year-old Tabitha and 2-year-old Peter. What happened next has been the source of enormous controversy as each of the defendants has given a different version of events. Natasha claims that two of the male defendants further engaged the family in a dialogue, then forced the family into their van at gunpoint. Natasha, Karen and the two males with the guns also got into the van with the family, and the two remaining defendants followed the van down a dead end road off the interstate in Joe’s mother’s car. Once they stopped on the deserted road, either one or all of the defendants, depending on whose testimony one is to believe, shot the family at close range. Natasha claims that before the shooting started, she put herself in the line of fire, begging for the lives of the children to be spared. When she moved, the family was shot repeatedly. The District Attorney’s office believes that all the members of the group participated in the shooting. His parents and sister died, leaving little Peter the sole survivor of the family. Making their getaway in the Lillielid van, the group headed to Mexico but were turned back at the border and apprehended in Arizona. They were charged with felony murder and those defendants who were over 18 were informed that the state of Tennessee would seek the death penalty. They were returned to the county where the murders took place. Right before the trial, however, the prosecution offered the defendants a plea bargain, which they each accepted. A sentencing hearing was held for all of the defendants together. All six defendants received three consecutive life sentences. In prison, Natasha, who is now 30 years old, has earned her cosmetology degree and her high school equivalency diploma. Although she claims that she did not participate in the shooting, she feels remorse for the events of the crime. She has a message for young girls who have similar problems: You don’t have to resort to negative things like cutting. If no one is helping you, go on a website, reach out to people. Peter, now a teenager, lives with relatives.