‘I married a death row double killer’: London single mother tells the full, incredible story of how she wed a Texas convict, then watched his execution

Dressed in ivory, a simple silver band holding her glossy hair in place in the afternoon breeze, Tiana Krasniqi was the picture of bridal beauty.

Her wedding took place in Dallas Texas just seven weeks ago – but today, back in London, she is contrastingly dressed head-to-toe in black.

Because Tiana, 31, is now a widow.

And instead of a honeymoon, she spent the days that followed her wedding visiting her new husband at the high security prison where he was held before he was finally taken to its execution chamber and given a lethal injection, dying in agony as Tiana looked into his eyes pledging her eternal love.

She had fallen for death row convicted double killer James Broadnax after an internet romance, leaving her young daughter behind in London to fly to the US to marry him – and then watch him die.

This strange scenario sparked global media interest and Tiana was besieged by media offers – finally appearing on ITV’s This Morning alongside Ben Shephard and Cat Deeley last month.

But although her account there – and in other similar short interviews – of her husband’s life and death sparked great interest, the short-form TV format left many questions unanswered and glossed over much of the detail of her bizarre story.

She agreed to share with the Daily Mail the first in-depth account of how she came to be the widow Broadnax, what happened at the execution – and how after the drama of her husband’s execution has now returned to her life in London as a single parent, but one changed forever.

And she remains unrepentant over her extraordinary life choice today, asserting ‘there will always be only one James.’

Her relationship with the 37-year-old death row convict had the most unlikely origin, she reveals immediately: she was simply looking for a case study for a student essay.

Tiana was raising her daughter alone in the south London suburb of Lewisham, worked as a dental nurse to make ends meet but dreamed of a career as a criminal lawyer and began studying part time to achieve this.

Meanwhile she spent her free time watching murder and robbery cases from the public gallery of the Old Bailey – as her interest in true crime deepened.

But her life changed definitively in October 2024, when, while studying for a masters degree in human rights law, she was casting around for a case study for her dissertation on the subject of on racial disparities in American capital punishment sentences.

And this search led her to one of the internet’s stranger sites, ‘writeaprisoner.com’.

The site’s existence has led to a TikTok trend – fans document their relationships with convicts in melodramatic videos shared to the platform, often a soundtrack of the Britney Spears song Criminal (which sees her sing the refrain ‘Mama, I’m in love with a criminal’).

Thanks to this, and no doubt to some strange human need – tens of thousands of mostly female users have lately used the site to connect them to convicts interred – often for very long periods – in the notoriously tough US penal system.

Tiana insists to this day that, unlike most users, a relationship was the last thing on her mind when she started browsing the site – and soon began focusing particularly on death row inmates.

‘You read their profile and usually it says, ‘I’m seeking a female pen pal’,’ she recalls. ‘Well I was looking for something that doesn’t have that, somebody that won’t approach me romantically.

‘I’m trying to tick everything that won’t turn into a romantic relationship.’

For Tiana, the listed user that caused her to ‘swipe right’ – to use the Tinder term for liking another user’s profile – was James Broadnax.

Broadnax, had at this point been on death row for over 15 years, as a convicted double killer.

Police and prosecutors had said that he and a cousin, one Demarius Cummings, while both just 19, had carjacked and attempted to rob a pair of Christian music producers, Stephen Swan and Matthew Butler, outside a recording studio in Dallas.

But, when the two men resisted, the teenaged robbers – who were high on marijuana and the hallucinogen PCP – panicked and both men were shot dead before Broadnax and his cousin fled in their victims’ car.

It was a racially charged crime – the killers were both black, the victims white like most of the jury – in the US South so, perhaps unsurprisingly, despite his DNA not being on the weapon, incriminating remarks made on arrest left Broadax facing execution, while his cousin received the lower tariff of life without parole.

It was this, she says, that drew her in.

‘I said to myself, ‘there’s something wrong with this case,’ Tiana said.

And it seemed to offer everything she was looking for for her essay – so she messaged Broadnax.

From her first message, she says, she made clear she was not interested in a relationship with him – and he agreed.

She recalled ‘James said to me, ‘I don’t have the energy for a girlfriend or a wife, I just need to focus on trying to save my life’. I thought, ‘Fantastic, perfect’.

‘And from that day forward we spoke to each other every single day.’

Emails became phone calls and soon the pair often spoke for six hours a day.

As conversation moved beyond legal research, into ‘normal life stuff, basic day to day, getting to know each other more, laughing a little more’ – they soon realised feelings were becoming involved, she says.

But, as she put it, ‘to make sure this is not just a phone call thing’, Tiana decided to actually meet James – at least from the other side a visitors’ room glass screen – by flying to Texas to visit him in prison early last year.

She came away from that meeting not just in a relationship but committed to helping her new boyfriend get his death sentence overturned.

This saw her prison visit trip morph into a multi-state journey, from California, to Arkansas, to Texas, tracing the many places he had lived throughout what was a ‘very unstable’ pre-prison life in an attempt to build a case for his appeal

‘If I’m going to fight for your life, I need to know who you were before you went to prison,’ she explained.’I spoke to shopkeepers, I spoke to neighbours, I spoke to school friends.

‘He would be on the phone to me, after all these trips, and he would lead me to every home, every school, everywhere.’

Tiana – who was born in Kosovo before moving to Britain as a child of four – had been raised a Muslim but later converted to Christianity, an interest she shared with the man she was beginning to fall in love with.

Tiana said: ‘James and I were very big on Christ. We were big on reading the Bible, very big on praying and fasting. Everything was about God.’

And she came to believe that their intensifying relationship was a result of divine intervention.

Tiana, who had the convict’s name tattooed on her left wrist, explained: ‘Every time, God was just making possibilities for me to fly out to America, for me to be able to do things, and, I don’t know, it was like God was just making a way through every time.’

‘It came to a point that I was so convinced, because of the way God was making so much for us, people were helping us financially – God was just making a way somehow for James and I to be able to see each other, to be there for each other. It was just incredible.’

Broadnax proposed to her one Saturday evening last spring. She accepted joyfully.

She received what she saw as further divine assurance when her husband’s cousin suddenly confessed to sole responsibility for the two murders.

Coming just weeks before Broadnax’s execution date, this seemed to her a God-sent miracle that would surely save him. But this was Texas. The appeal was turned down in March despite this late twist.

Despite this macabre setback they decided to go ahead with their plans and were formally married on April 14.

The necessarily simple 20 minute ceremony took place at the Allan B Polunsky Unit, a prison in Livingston, Texas.

Two prison guards served as witnesses as the bride and groom were separated by reinforced glass, giving their vows by an internal telephone.

Just two weeks later, on April 30, at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, around 70 miles north of Houston, Broadnax was executed.

He had nominated his new wife as his official witness.

So Tiana duly looked on from the other side of the execution chamber window as he was given a lethal injection of pentobarbital.

She screamed, cried and shouted ‘I love you’ for the 21 agonising minutes it took for the drug to fully take effect before her husband was formally pronounced dead at 6.47pm.

She then spread her arms against the window – the closest she could get to an embrace – and had to be helped out of the room.

She recorded her own reaction immediately afterwards: ‘My husband suffered so bad from the lethal injection that he had a nose bleed and bruising on his neck,’ she raged.

‘I’m going to expose everyone [responsible]. The fight didn’t end here, it got worse. You killed Mr Broadnax, but you ain’t killed Mrs Broadnax.’

Tiana said: ‘I watched his lips go blue, his face go blue and then his veins on his forehead appeared.

‘We spoke to each other the whole time he was strapped in the gurney. His head jerked back and he couldn’t finish his last word and his head fell looking at me and he closed his eyes.

‘I screamed ‘open your eyes’ and told him I loved him and I was sorry I failed him. I dropped to the ground and they picked me up and told me I had to wait for 20 minutes until he died.

‘We had promised that we would look at each other and talk to each other whilst it was happening.

‘He suffered. His body struggled…His last words to me were ‘don’t give up’ and ‘I love you’.

She only finally got to physically kiss her husband for the first and last time as she was allowed to see the corpse in the chapel of rest it had been removed to.

She recalled: ‘I dreamed of walking down the aisle to marry James but when I did see him in church it wasn’t to get married but to see his lifeless body.’

Broadnax himself had issued a final statement in which he addressed the families of his victims – ‘I pray to God for your forgiveness’ – while also reasserting his innocence.

And this is something Tiana, who still wears her wedding ring, continues to assert ferociously too – and continues to promote.

But she did after his death move back to London – which brings us to the aspect of her story which is perhaps the most troubling.

Because, as we briefly mentioned earlier, Tiana has an eight-year-old daughter, from a previous relationship, whom she had left behind in London when she felt her compulsion to involve herself in the Texan convict’s legal case.

That daughter, whom we are not naming (and whom Tiana has kept out of the spotlight throughout), was left behind in the UK, where her biological father looked after her from Tiana’s flat for the long periods during which she was away in the US.

And during the periods when she was with her daughter, Tiana not only introduced her to the idea that she was engaged to marry a new boyfriend but encouraged the girl to see James Broadnax as her new father.

But she did not tell her about his situation or the fate hanging over him.

Her daughter then, she says, talked to Broadnax on the phone every day – having been told only that he lived in the US but not his circumstances there.

And she discussed how to manage all this with Broadnax.

She said: ‘James did not want her to think that it was OK, where he was. He was super protective over her, hence why she never met him [in person] because he did not want her to see him in that place. ‘

Broadnax remotely helped the child, who is mixed race, with her homework, for example celebrating Black History Month together and even discussing issues like feminism, Tiana says.

The girl even began to call him ‘Dad’.

After the child was told that Broadnax had died – but not how – mother and daughter together built a memorial to him in their London home.

Today Tiana insists she and her daughter remain as close as ever.

‘Tonight we’re buying popcorn and buying loads of chocolate and we’re going to sit and watch a movie together, that’s the plan for later,’ Tiana said, to illustrate this.

But, she says, privately she remains very much in mourning and such activities are her putting on a brave face: ‘The only thing I know is: protect your daughter from it. Don’t let her see you grieving. Just make every day special for her and that’s who I’m living for right now.’

The experience of coming what seemed so close to 11th hour redemption – a successful appeal – only for it to fail, costing Broadnax his life, did cause her to lose her faith in God however.

‘My faith has been super, super shaken,’ she said. I can’t even pray, I can’t even read the Bible… I need to figure out what I’m doing. I don’t even know who I am right now.’

But if she has lost faith in the divine she retains it for her husband and his cause.

She reflects: ‘We both had ambitions. We both had dreams. James was an intelligent person. He was into law, he was into politics, he was into quantum physics. That man was a genius.

‘But we never wanted to glamourise our relationship. We never wanted to make it like ‘Hey guys, go and find yourself a Death Row inmate!’ We both hated that.

‘And that was not a dream that we both wanted or ever to encourage other people.’

Tiana plans to keep fighting to clear her husband’s name and to campaign more generally for justice.

‘I just want to do what my purpose is,’ she said. ‘Which is to continue fighting against oppression and racism and for human rights.’

She goes on: ‘Did I ever think I would pursue anything on Death Row, let alone have a romantic relationship in there? Never.

‘And I would never do it again. Because the first time, I didn’t do it intentionally. If I was to do it the second time, I’m intentionally putting myself through stress, through responsibility that I no longer want.’

*Tiana has not been paid for this interview