Christa Pike survived two lethal doses of pentobarbital in Tennessee after courts cleared her path to death, leaving the 1995 killer hospitalized and the governor pausing executions.
Christa Pike, the lone woman on Tennessee’s death row, remains alive after a lethal-injection attempt that failed to kill her. State officials said she received two doses of the execution drug, did not die, and was moved to an off-site medical facility.
Pike, 50, had been cleared to die for the 1995 torture killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville. The U.S. Supreme Court denied her last-minute petition Tuesday evening. Tennessee then tried to carry out the sentence. The procedure did not work.
By early Thursday she was still in a hospital. Her lawyers said her condition was unknown late Wednesday night. The Washington Examiner reported she was confirmed alive the next morning and transported by the Tennessee Department of Correction.
Gov. Bill Lee ordered a halt and a third-party review of what went wrong. He also paused the state’s remaining executions for the year. A lawful death sentence sat unfinished while the state sorted out its own protocol failure.
Department of Correction officials said Pike was injected twice with a lethal drug and still lived. She was then transferred for medical care. That bare sequence is not in dispute.
Just The News reported her attorneys said she remained alive and snoring, had not lost consciousness, still had a heartbeat, and that the death-chamber curtains went down twice. Lee answered with a blunt standard for the job the state claimed it was ready to do.
"Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the State’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective."
Fox News reported media witnesses and defense filings described Pike remaining conscious and vocal, with breathing trouble, and snoring loudly for more than 40 minutes after the doses. Staff also had trouble establishing IV access before the hospital transfer.
A separate defense filing described a different picture of the same night. Breitbart cited her legal team’s emergency motion saying she had lost consciousness, still had a heartbeat, and was audibly snoring. One of her attorneys said she was receiving life-saving measures.
Those accounts conflict on consciousness. They agree on the outcome that matters for the victim’s family and for the law: two lethal doses did not produce death, and the state stopped.
Dr. Mark Walton Fowler, a physician tied to an earlier failed execution of Tony Carruthers this year, had said he intended to take part in Pike’s procedure. He declined to comment after Wednesday night.
Before the injection attempt, Pike’s lawyers pressed every available door. They asked the Supreme Court to halt the execution, citing PTSD and arguing that being held down and strapped to a gurney under Tennessee’s protocol would create severe mental suffering. The high court denied the petition Tuesday evening.
The attorney general’s office had filed a response Monday. It pointed to a judge’s conclusion last month that it was “speculative whether Pike would suffer” greater mental harm from how the protocol is carried out. Gov. Lee denied clemency and said he was upholding the death sentence “after deliberate consideration.”
Her lawyers said they were “saddened and heartbroken” the governor would not grant relief. The legal fight did not erase the jury’s verdict or the facts of the crime. It delayed a sentence that had stood for three decades, a pattern familiar to readers following other high-profile murder cases and last-minute challenges, including coverage of Pike’s September 30 date after a judge rejected an Eighth Amendment challenge.
Tennessee had planned to move Pike from the women’s prison in Nashville to Riverbend Maximum Security Institution within 24 hours of the scheduled execution. Officials discussed female guards for the transfer and a possible all-female execution team, with a male physician as the expected exception. None of that planning produced a completed sentence.
Pike does not dispute her role in killing Colleen Slemmer. Knoxville police said Pike and two teenage accomplices tortured, slashed, and fatally beat the 19-year-old after luring her to an abandoned steam plant at the University of Tennessee in 1995. Investigators said the case was tied to the occult. Testimony described a pentagram carved into Slemmer’s chest. A skull fragment was claimed as a “souvenir.”
Pike was 18. Her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, was 17 and later sentenced to life because he was a juvenile. He remains eligible for parole. He testified he carved the pentagram. Shadolla Peterson, then 18, acted as lookout and received probation in exchange for cooperation. Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
At the 1996 trial, University of Tennessee forensic anthropologist Murray Marks testified about wounds to Slemmer’s skull. The jury returned a guilty verdict and a death sentence. The judge told Pike she would die by electrocution, then the state’s only method. After the verdict, Pike asked, “Can I please hug my mom?”
She later told police she “wasn’t even thinking” during the assault and had been jealous over Shipp’s attention. That explanation does not soften the method: a planned lure, prolonged violence, and a body left so damaged that evidence practices of the era compounded the family’s grief.
May Martinez, Slemmer’s mother, has lived with the aftermath in concrete terms. She recalled an incomplete burial because body parts were retained as evidence. “We had her buried in a Catholic cemetery,” she said. “And she had to be dug up every time they mailed me body parts.” A medical examiner’s office later described that retention practice as common roughly 30 years ago and not the current approach.
Martinez refused recent direct communication with Pike. She stated she would sit with her daughter’s picture and watch the execution. “I will sit there with her picture in my hand,” she said, “and as she gets hooked up to a needle to go to sleep, she can look at the picture.”
That is the justice the state promised and failed to deliver on the night of the injections. Readers who follow violent-crime cases know how long families can wait while process, appeals, and institutional errors stack up, the same frustration that surfaces when courts remove prosecutors from murder cases and refer them for investigation, as in recent reporting on a federal judge booting Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner from a murder case.
Pike’s legal team built its late case on childhood abuse, mental illness, and claimed change in prison. Psychologist Bethany Brand, who specializes in trauma, assessed Pike three years ago. Brand told NBC News the level of trauma Pike faced “is almost impossible to grasp because it is so severe.” Brand said adults in Pike’s life failed her, that a bipolar diagnosis came only years after she entered prison, and that medications helped. Brand also said Pike now shows “empathy and great regret,” and that “In Christa’s case, nobody was trying to get her help.”
The state has not denied Pike suffered abuse. One of her lawyers, Randall Spivey, put the defense frame this way:
"Stepping into the chaos of Christa’s life that led her to that moment will not justify her actions that night. But the chaos will show you that Christa was broken, not evil."
In a clemency petition, Pike wrote, “It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done.” Through Rev. Mikey Noechel, her Buddhist spiritual adviser, she sent a letter saying people have seen a “limited public persona that has been the only narrative” about her. She wrote she was “humbled beyond words” and had felt “more love in the last two weeks than I have my entire life.” The letter was written before she learned Lee denied clemency.
Noechel planned to be in the chamber, bless the space, and chant or meditate. He said she did something terrible and awful, that he hates that it happened, and that he feels deep compassion for Slemmer’s family. He also called Pike “proof that redemption and change are possible.” Those claims belong to the defense and her adviser. They do not revise the jury’s findings or the physical facts of Slemmer’s death.
Prison life, as described in the same reporting, included long stretches in solitary confinement up to 23 hours a day and a Prozac prescription for OCD. Pike had lived in West Virginia and North Carolina with family. At 17, a year before the murder, she reported to North Carolina police that she was raped; no one was arrested. Defense filings treated that history as mitigation. Prosecutors and the courts treated the murder as first-degree and death-eligible.
Similar last-chapter narratives surface often around condemned killers seeking public sympathy in the final stretch, including earlier coverage of Pike claiming kinship with Lindsay Clancy ahead of her execution date. The legal standard is still the crime, the verdict, and the sentence the state is sworn to carry out.
Pike was set to become the first woman put to death by Tennessee in more than 200 years, per historical records. She had shared death row with Gaile Owens until 2010, when then-Gov. Phil Bredesen changed Owens’ sentence to life. Pike remained the only woman left under a death judgment in the state.
That rarity does not change the statute or the jury’s work. It does raise the cost of a failed procedure. When an execution collapses into hospital transfer, snoring, disputed consciousness, and emergency filings, the state advertises its own unreadiness. Other states have moved forward with multiple death sentences in a single night; Tennessee could not finish one after two doses, a contrast not lost on readers of recent Florida’s rare double execution.
Lee’s order for a comprehensive third-party review and a pause on remaining executions this year is an admission that effectiveness failed. The people of Tennessee, and Slemmer’s mother, were entitled to a lawful sentence carried out cleanly. They received a medical crisis and a bureaucratic halt instead.
Open questions remain. Pike’s precise medical condition past “in hospital” has not been detailed in the reporting. Exact clock times for the injections sit behind relative labels, Monday filings, Tuesday denial, Wednesday night attempt, early Thursday hospital status, tied to article timestamps of Sept. 28, 2026, and an Oct. 1 update. The full drug protocol steps beyond two pentobarbital doses are not laid out. Whether any further court or executive action follows the review is not yet answered.
What is answered is simpler. A jury convicted Pike of a savage murder. Courts and the governor refused to block the sentence. The state then failed to complete it. Colleen Slemmer is still dead. Her killer is still alive. And Tennessee’s death-penalty machinery is under investigation for not doing the job the law assigned it.
Justice delayed by appeals is one kind of test. Justice undone by a protocol the state cannot execute is another, and victims’ families should not have to absorb either failure.