CHRISTA PIKE SURVIVED TENNESSEE’S ATTEMPT TO EXECUTE HER
Christa Pike, 50, who was sentenced to death for the 1995 killing of fellow Knoxville Job Corps student Colleen Slemmer, survived Tennessee’s attempt to execute her on September 30, 2026, The Tennessean reported. Investigators said she helped kill the 19-year-old out of jealousy, because she believed Slemmer was interested in her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp.
Pike survived two doses of pentobarbital and was taken to a hospital. Had the execution gone as planned, she would have been the first woman Tennessee had put to death since 1819.
The case goes back to January 1995. Pike and two other teenagers from the Knoxville Job Corps Center, a federal job-training program for troubled youth, lured Slemmer to a secluded area and beat and stabbed her to death. A pentagram was carved into her chest, and the media labeled the killing “Satanic.” Prosecutors said Pike did the carving, while her attorneys point to court records in which Shipp admitted doing it. Pike also kept a fragment of Slemmer’s skull.
On March 30, 1996, an 18-year-old Pike sobbed and called out for her mother as a judge sentenced her to death. She became the youngest woman sentenced to death in the modern era.
Shipp was 17, and Tennessee law bars the death penalty for anyone under 18, so he got life in prison and is now eligible for parole. Pike is the last person in Tennessee sent to death row for a crime committed at 18. In 2004 she was also convicted of attempted first-degree murder for strangling another inmate with a shoestring in 2001.
Her attorneys asked Governor Bill Lee to commute her sentence to life without parole. They describe severe childhood abuse, including sexual abuse that began when she was a toddler and rapes at ages 11 and 17, along with untreated bipolar disorder, PTSD and brain damage they link to her mother’s drinking during pregnancy. They say the jury heard almost none of it. Pike has said she takes responsibility, telling supporters, “There is no excuse for what I did.”
Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, planned to drive from Jacksonville, Florida, to Nashville to witness the execution. She remembers her daughter as someone who loved roller skating, computers and old games with her family. “I’m her voice,” she said. She told the Nashville Banner she needed to see it so she would no longer fear Pike might reappear.
Opponents included UN human rights experts and the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, who argued that brain science shows little difference between 17- and 18-year-olds. Supporters said a jury lawfully imposed the sentence for an exceptionally brutal crime.
A stay in one morning, then a failed injection
Lee said on September 28 that he would not intervene. The Tennessee Supreme Court had declined to stay the execution, which was set for 10 a.m. CDT on September 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
At 8:17 a.m., less than two hours before that, a Sixth Circuit panel voted 2-1 to issue a “short stay of execution,” WZTV reported. The judges wanted time to consider her claim that evidence of childhood sexual abuse was not adequately weighed at sentencing, Reuters reported.
Tennessee’s attorney general asked the U.S. Supreme Court to vacate the stay, and the court did, in a brief order that did not explain its reasoning. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, MPR News reported. Sotomayor wrote that Pike should not be executed “before her still-pending legal challenges to her conviction can be properly considered.”
The Tennessee Department of Correction told Reuters it would “move forward with the execution today.” Then the attempt failed. Pike’s attorneys said in a statement, “Christa is being treated at a nearby hospital,” adding, “We have not been informed as to her condition.”
At an October 1 news conference, attorney Randy Spivey said, “Christa is alive.” He added, “We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment, but we do know that she is alive right now and receiving lifesaving medical care.”
A filing on October 2 described Pike as unconscious, intubated and on a ventilator, with arms that were swollen, burned and blistered. Her lawyers filed an emergency motion to preserve evidence from the attempt, and a status conference was set for October 7. The Department of Correction said it followed every step of the state’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the Attorney General’s Office.
By October 6, Pike was awake and speaking. Lee ordered an independent review and paused Tennessee’s remaining executions for 2026, according to The Tennessean.
