YUCCA Harris will never forget one of the final conversations with her best friend of 22 years… a decade on, it still chills her to the core.
Just five days before Jarmecca ‘Nikki’ Whitehead was found dead in her bathtub after being stabbed 80 times, she warned: “If something happens to me… the girls did it.”
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Crime scene photographs made it clear the mum-of-two fought for her life during her final minutes, with the floors smeared with blood, chairs upturned and even her half-broken fingernail lodged in the carpet.
The last people to see Nikki alive at her gated community home in Conyers, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, back in 2010, were her identical twin daughters, Jasmiyah and Tasmiyah.
Initially, the 16-year-olds denied any involvement, appearing vulnerable and innocent in police interviews – but soon their lies unravelled, leaving cops to conclude they were “evil psychopaths” who “fed off each other like piranhas”.
Tonight their case is analysed in new ITV documentary series Twisted Twins and Nikki’s best friend Yucca reveals damning insight about the deadly duo in an exclusive interview with The Sun.
She tells us that the late mum sought an exorcism for her “possessed” daughters, that the “emotionless” twins demanded security for Nikki’s funeral and why her only message for them now is: “Go to hell.”
Yucca says: “In the weeks before her death, things were getting worse and worse. The girls were being rebellious and had changed completely.
“She had to force them to do everything – to get up in the morning, brush their teeth, comb their hair. It got to the point where she felt like there was some sort of spirit when it came to the girls.
“She felt like it was some type of demonic spirit. She felt it and she felt it strong.
“Nikki asked my mum if she knew of any exorcists because she felt there was a demonic spirit possessing the girls.
“Not long after Nikki told me, ‘If something happens to me, the girls did it’. I never in a million years thought anything would happen. I couldn’t believe the girls could do something like that.”
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Black eye and beating
Things had been fractured between Nikki and her daughters for many years before she was killed on January 13, 2010.
The mum had called the police multiple times claiming her daughters were being aggressive towards her and after one allegedly violent attack they were arrested for battery.
It followed Nikki trying to warn daughter Jas against dating a 19-year-old and expressing concern that she was sexually active and smoking cannabis.
Yucca recalled: “There was a terrible fight it was two against one. Nikki told me they trashed her bed, they blackened her eye… She was like, ‘They really beat me bad.’”
The twins were placed in their great-grandmother’s care for 18 months after the attack and forced to undertake mandatory counselling, which Yucca claimed the girls used to spin elaborate lies.
She says: “Nikki went from being the victim to the villain. They were trying to say she had an escort service… and were making her out to be this horrible person because they wanted to do what they wanted.
“Nikki couldn’t understand why no one could see it. She would call me and break down, just cry and cry because those sessions weren’t getting any better.”
Nikki wasn’t stabbed just once, she was stabbed 80-something times throughout her body – 80 times, that’s more push-ups than people can do. Psychopathic
Lieutenant Greg Carson
The judge claimed the family “thrived in chaos” but decided the girls were better returned to their mum – which did not appease the twins, who despised Nikki’s strict rules and issued a clear threat while walking out of court.
“Jas tells her, ‘If I gotta go back home with you, I’m gonna kill you’,” Nikki’s mum Lynda recalled.
“I turned to my daughter and I said, ‘Did you hear what she said?’ She said, ‘Momma, I heard what she said.’”
The sinister warning came just two weeks before Nikki was killed and according to Yucca, “all hell broke loose” because the twins’ behaviour “spiralled and just went downhill” afterward.
In a chilling 911 call made the week before her death, Nikki said: “They’re trying to terrorise the house and now they’re trying to fight me.
“I can’t whup my kids, they [are] 16 years old and they keep on hitting me… I’m trying to prevent something bigger happening.”
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‘I saw the devil’
A day later, after her friend admitted she feared for her life, Yucca visited the salon where Nikki worked and tried to diffuse the situation with the twins.
“They were in the corner, stone-faced, and I felt like these girls were not her girls… If I ever saw the devil, I saw the devil then and it was the girls,” she says.
Days later, Nikki’s body was discovered after Tas raced out of their home and flagged down police captain Jackie Dunn, who said she was “very frantic” and claimed not to know what happened to her mother.
He recalled “a very strong smell of blood” inside the property and said he had “never seen anything like that before” – noting the blood stains throughout, including dark red drag marks leading to the bathroom.
“I felt bad for the girls because they had just found their mother murdered,” retired Captain Dunn said.
That soon changed during police interviews – as family and friends made it clear there were tensions between the mum and daughters and revealed their suspicions.
‘They killed as one,’ says twin pyschologist
By Josh Saunders
A LEADING psychologist who specialises in twins claims the Whitehouse sisters were a ‘combustible powder keg’ and acted ‘as one mind’ to kill their mother.
Joan A Friedman, PHD, who appears in Twisted Twins episode two, believes their anger could have become “contagious” due to them being twins and that could have influenced the killing.
She explains that Tas, who was born 11 minutes earlier than Jas, was likely the leader of the pair and suspects they were angered by mum Nikki’s strict rules.
Describing them as “like a combustible powder keg” and “like caged animals”, Friedman says: “I do think they intended to kill her.
“I believe they had no other choice in their minds this is what they had to do and they did it.
“I don’t think it could have happened if one had said, ‘I want to kill mum’ and the other said ‘We can’t do that’. But in that situation, there wasn’t either stopping anyone.
“They both were seemingly engaged in stabbing her, they were of one mind. If they weren’t such meshed identical twins, perhaps, speculatively, it’s very possible that Nikki might still be alive today.”
Friedman suspects the twins may have thought there were double standards when Nikki told them they couldn’t go out partying or date older men, as she had done the same in her younger years.
This could have led to Nikki becoming a “common enemy” and due to having such an “unhealthy twin bond” instead of rebelling against their mum in a normal way, they resorted to violence.
She says: “This kind of situation to the twin bond makes them more united because now they are fighting against a common enemy and because they are identical they have a shared experience and closeness their anger about the situation is contagious.
“If one feels it, the other one feels it, so the anger comes double time and they did not know what to do with all this anger.
She added: “The twin bond can really be a superpower but in the case of the Whitehead twins, something has gone wrong.
“For twins to kill, this is not a common experience. I know of cases where one is much more apt to want to do something antisocial and the other one stopped them but in this case, there wasn’t anyone stopping anyone.”
“The only person I could think of was those two girls,” one said.
A second insisted they “just believe they did it”, while another added: “Nikki’s got no control over them, they’re so evil.”
Multiple lies
Police would discover the twins had lied about attending school at 8.30 in the morning after CCTV revealed they arrived two hours later – putting them in the frame for the killing.
Noticing Tas kept answering for Jas, they were split up to ensure their stories aligned and it’s then that Lieutenant Greg Carson spotted something more that was amiss.
“I’m sitting across from Jas and I’m noticing it’s a little odd that she’s wearing gloves and a jacket. It’s warm in the building,” the retiree told the documentary.
After instructing her to remove them he sees scratches, lots of them, on her hands and a bite mark on her arm that would match a mould of Nikki’s mouth.
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They then discovered a journal, which both the twins wrote in, that appeared to show the killing was premeditated and after being confronted with it, Tas said: “Yeah, I wrote I hated her. I wrote that I loved her too.”
But the extract makes clear their motive. She penned: “It hit me hard last night too, we’ve got to get rid of her (Dr A might ruin our chances of getting back with/g-ma).”
The girls continued to deny their guilt and refused to answer questions that conflicted with the web of lies they had spun – Lieutenant Carson concluded they “were fake from the first time I saw them”.
He struggled to see “evil” in the girls, who often cried and pleaded innocence, until one interview with Tas during a thunderstorm that killed the power in the building.
When he turned his phone light on everything changed. “All of a sudden there was light on her (Tas’s) face,” he recalled.
I’ll never forget it. The girls actually requested an escort service and they wanted security. Excuse my language, but hell! They thought they needed security?
Yucca Harris
“She went from sweet 16-year-old girl to the evil girl that everyone accused her of being, like she was a cold-blooded killer. It was one of the most frightening times of my career.”
‘Psychopathic’ stabbing
As the web closed in on the dark, they changed their story about what “really happened” that day – claiming Tas accidentally killed Nikki in self-defence after she attacked them with a knife.
Jas claimed they had told their mum that they had been raped when they were younger and in response, she branded them “liars” before calling them “wh***s and sl**s” and a fight broke out.
She explained: “Somehow, someway, my momma, she had a knife. She’s choking Tas… I pick a vase and I hit her with the vase. I got on top of my mom, she bit me. Tas grabbed the knife, I think Tas stabbed her. Tas was always the one to protect me.”
Lieutenant Carson doubted their claim insisting: “If you’re stabbing somebody, you’ve got to physically go back and forth, my hand has to touch you. There’s a lot of intention.
“Nikki wasn’t stabbed just once, she was stabbed 80-something times throughout her body – 80 times, that’s more push-ups than people can do. Psychopathic.”
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Yucca doubted their story too – telling The Sun that they “painted this false picture that Nikki was a monster” and claims their behaviour after their mum’s death proved their self-defence claim was bogus.
Yucca, who had known Nikki since she was 12, sorted out the funeral and while preparing her for an open-casket ceremony saw the state of her body.
She tells The Sun: “I couldn’t even put her hands in a prayer position because she had so many defensive wounds all over her hands. I had to cover them with gloves.
“It was clear that my girlfriend fought for her life, so to say it was some type of self-defence and then try to paint her like she was this horrible, terrible mother and person was awful.”
Yucca says the twins’ “cold-blooded” behaviour at the funeral pointed to their guilt – and she also reveals a shocking demand they made.
Outrageous demand
The service took place before the twins were formally charged and, while Nikki’s death remained “a murder mystery”, her friend says “everybody knew it all pointed to the girls”.
They took a life and not any life, they took their mother’s life. They weren’t sincere back then and I don’t think they will be sincere now.
Yucca Harris
She adds: “I’ll never forget it. The girls actually requested an escort service and they wanted security. Excuse my language, but hell! They thought they needed security?”
Yucca describes the atmosphere as difficult due to suspicions about Jas and Tas, with “a lot of whispers”, “many questions” and “all eyes on them”.
She says: “It became a mess and it got ugly at the burial site due to everyone’s eyes being on the girls as they sat there emotionless, without sympathy or empathy. No remorse, nothing, they didn’t give away any emotion.
“A lot of people were looking at them and they felt it. They asked for security but I denied it because everyone felt they were the last ones to see Nikki alive.”
Later that year, both twins were charged with murder but they maintained their innocence.
In 2014, they accepted a plea deal for the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter and were sentenced to 30 years imprisonment in separate jails.
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A decade has passed since they were incarcerated and soon, Jas and Tas, now 30, could be considered for parole.
Some believe the girls expressed remorse before sentencing – with Tas telling the court: “I wish it never happened” and Jas saying: “I’m sorry and I miss her.”
‘Go to hell’
But Yucca isn’t convinced. In the documentary, she said her only message for the twins would be “go to hell”, which she stands by while talking to The Sun.
She says: “I knew the family very well and considered the twins like my own kids… but now I have no feelings when it comes to them.
“They took a life and not any life, they took their mother’s life. They weren’t sincere back then and I don’t think they will be sincere now.
“I felt like the courts failed Nikki before. I’ll never know why the twins were sent back to her when they didn’t want to live with her and Nikki told the court they had terrorised her.
“Now they are going to fail Nikki again if they release the twins. I think they should serve their whole sentence plus some more.”
Every year Yucca remembers her late friend by raising a glass with pals in memory of the many celebrations they enjoyed together before her life came to a brutal end at 34.
Clearly choked up, she tells us: “Nikki always yearned for a close-knit family. She did the best she could and if the kids wanted anything she made sure they got it.
“She was an ‘It girl’. She was beautiful inside and out and wanted the best for the girls. She was my best friend, the yin to my yang, and someone with a good spirit, heart and soul.”
The second episode of Twisted Twins airs 9pm tonight on ITV and is available to stream on ITVX.
