Fact-Checked & Verified Editorial

Christa Pike

Christa Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 killing of Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville. Her lethal injection failed on September 30, 2026.

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•Verified Editorial

The Job Corps Center in Knoxville

Christa Gail Pike had a broken schooling. The Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, which has advocated for her, says she failed seventh grade. NBC News reports that she did poorly in school and lived with relatives in West Virginia and North Carolina. She enrolled at the Job Corps Center in Knoxville, Tennessee, where Cornell says she hoped to train as a nurse. The Tennessee Supreme Court's 1998 opinion in her case describes her the same way: a student at the Job Corps Center.

Her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, was also enrolled there. So were Shadolla Peterson and Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old from the same program. Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, told the Associated Press that her daughter volunteered with the Special Olympics and wanted a career in computers.

January 12, 1995

The Tennessee Supreme Court's opinion lays out the timeline from the trial record. On January 11, 1995, Pike told a Job Corps friend, Kim Iloilo, that she meant to kill Slemmer, because she "had just felt mean that day." The next evening, at about 8 p.m., Iloilo saw Pike, Slemmer, Peterson, and Shipp walking toward 17th Street. At about 10:15 p.m., three of them came back without Slemmer.

Slemmer was killed on the University of Tennessee's agricultural campus. Her body was found the next day, January 13. The court record describes a pentagram cut into her chest, which Shipp admitted carving. Pike was 18. Shipp was 17. Police interviewed Pike on January 14, and her statement ran to 46 transcribed pages.

A Death Sentence in March 1996

A jury convicted Pike of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. At the penalty phase it found two aggravating circumstances: that the killing was heinous, atrocious, or cruel, and that it was committed to avoid arrest or prosecution. It sentenced her to death by electrocution, and the court added a consecutive 25-year term for the conspiracy. Cornell gives the date of the death sentence as March 30, 1996.

Pike was the only one of the three to face the death penalty. Shipp, a juvenile at the time, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. He was denied parole in 2025. Peterson testified for the state. The Nashville Banner reports that she avoided jail time, and the AP reports that she received probation. In a 2025 letter included in Pike's clemency petition, Shipp's trial lawyer, M. Christopher Coffey, wrote that the gap between their sentences came from their "slight age difference, rather than their respective role."

Appeals From Nashville to the Sixth Circuit

The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction. On October 5, 1998, the Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed both the convictions and the death sentence, and it denied rehearing on November 23 of that year. Her federal habeas case lasted another two decades. On August 22, 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed the denial of her petition in Pike v. Gross, holding that she could not show she was prejudiced by her lawyers' work at the penalty phase. Rehearing by the full court was denied on September 26, 2019.

Three Decades on Death Row

Pike spent three decades as the only woman on Tennessee's death row. During that time she was convicted of attempted murder after an assault on another inmate, which added 25 years to her sentence. The sources disagree on the year: ABC News, citing the Tennessee Department of Correction, gives 2001, while an AP report carried by NBC News gives 2004.

In 2012, NBC News reported that a New Jersey man, Donald Kohut Jr., and a prison guard, Justin Heflin, were charged in a plot to help her escape. Heflin was indicted on bribery, official misconduct, and conspiracy charges, and Kohut on bribery and conspiracy to commit escape. Pike herself was not charged.

The Abuse Her First Lawyers Never Raised

Her later lawyers built their case around her childhood. According to the clemency petition, as summarized by the Death Penalty Information Center, the AP, and the Nashville Banner, Pike was abused from the time she was a toddler by her grandmother's boyfriend and was raped at 11 and again at 17. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder years after her sentencing. Her penalty-phase lawyers did not present the abuse to the jury or argue her age. The state told a special master in 2026 that it did not dispute the abuse.

On October 2, 2025, the AP reported that the Tennessee Supreme Court had set execution dates in 2026 for four prisoners. Pike's was September 30. Her lawyers filed a 226-page clemency petition asking Governor Bill Lee to commute the sentence to life without parole. "I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid," Pike wrote in it. "It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I'd done." Lee announced on September 28, 2026, that he would not grant clemency.

The execution would have been the first of a woman in Tennessee in more than 200 years. The Death Penalty Information Center's Robin Maher put the last one in 1820. Cornell gives 1819.

September 30, 2026

The last legal challenges ran out on the day itself. On August 13, Special Master Mark Ward had heard her challenge to the state's lethal injection method and did not block the execution. The U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay on September 29. On the morning of September 30, about an hour before the 10 a.m. execution time, a divided Sixth Circuit panel stayed it 2-1. The U.S. Supreme Court vacated that stay 6-3 at around 5:50 p.m., with Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissenting.

That evening, at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Pike was given two doses of pentobarbital. NPR's AP report gives her last words as including "I'm going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life and that is in love." She did not die. Witnesses heard her snoring. Media witnesses were escorted out at 8:53 p.m., a time the AP, ABC News, and the Banner all report. The Banner reports that an ambulance left the prison at 9:28 p.m. The Department of Correction said it had followed every step of its protocol and that the protocol does not allow additional procedures.

Governor Lee's Pause

On October 1, Lee ordered a "comprehensive, third-party review" of what happened and halted the one execution remaining on Tennessee's 2026 calendar, that of Gary Wayne Sutton, set for December 3. "It shouldn't have happened," Lee said. It was the state's second failed attempt of the year: in May, Tennessee had called off the execution of Tony Carruthers after staff could not place an IV line. Maher called the Pike case "singular and unparalleled."

The same day, Pike's lawyers said she was alive and in critical condition at a hospital, "receiving life-saving medical care," and asked Lee to commute her sentence. That was the most recent report available when this article was published on October 2, 2026.

Sources

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#Tennessee#Death Penalty#Criminal Case#Knoxville