Christa Pike during a court appearance. (Screen capture from court video.)
Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.
– Albert Camus
Christa Pike’s heart was meant to stop beating around 10 am on Sept. 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee. It didn’t. Her lungs were meant to stop working a few minutes later. They didn’t. Pike was meant to be dead by 10:15. She wasn’t. Instead, a federal appeals court stayed her execution. The state of Tennessee immediately appealed to the US Supreme Court for the right to kill her.
So, Christa Pike waited, sitting in an austere cell next to the execution room. The hours passed. Pike was consoled by her lawyer and a Buddhist monk. Then this Supreme Court did what it has so often done: vacated the stay without allowing the appeals court to consider the relevant new information before it. Part of the information Pike’s lawyers wanted the court to consider was the fact that Pike was a poor candidate for the method of execution the state wanted to use to put her to death. Her lawyers told the court that she had a blood disorder and that her veins were small, too small perhaps to be accurately punctured by an IV needle or hold an IV catheter. These medical trifles didn’t matter to the court and at 5:45 in the afternoon the Tennessee death machine went back into action, nine hours after the scheduled execution.
Pike was strapped to a gurney and wheeled into the execution chamber. An IV team of negligible experience attempted to insert two catheters in Pike’s arms. The State of Tennessee “execution protocol” states that this should take no more than 10 minutes. It took at least an hour in Ms. Pike’s case. Her left arm was punctured at least seven times. One of the needles was jabbed in so fiercely that it was bent.
Ms. Pike became so agitated by the incompetence of her executioners that she tried to help them successfully puncture her small veins, telling them repeatedly, “Please try up on my shoulder. Higher. Please try here! Please try here!”
At 7:30, an hour and thirty-five minutes after the execution was meant to take place after the Supreme Court lifted the stay, the dark curtains concealing the death chamber parted. Seven journalists and the murder victim’s mother were in a viewing room to watch the execution. For several minutes before the curtains opened, they could hear muffled moaning from the execution room.
When Pike was given the chance to say her last words, she said she wished only love for everyone else, even those who wanted her put to death. “I just want to say that I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life, and that is with love. I’m at peace. I’m ready to go.” And then she began to sing as the poison was pumped into her body, a haunting refrain of “and I love you…”
But those would not be Christa Pike’s last words. The next words people heard her say were: “My arm feels like it’s about to burst open.”
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Christa Pike is not an especially sympathetic character. There was no question that she participated in killing the person she was convicted of murdering. It took years before Pike repented for her actions. But none of that justifies what the state of Tennessee, with the blessing of the US Supreme Court, did to Christa Pike. Christa Pike is not the same person she was in 1996, when she was 18. She’s not the same person she was in 2006.
“I had more than my fair share of trauma growing up, and I realized that so many others have that and didn’t commit violent crimes,” Pike said. “I don’t use that or anything else as an excuse for what I did. There is no excuse for what I did. There are reasons for the way I acted. But nothing excuses the crime and the damage it’s caused to so many lives…. I take full responsibility for my actions, and regret everything that happened that night. If I could take it all back, I would… I’m not even close to being the same person I was over 25 years ago.”
Pike never denied her role in killing 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at the Job Corps training center at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Pike had become convinced that Slemmer was trying to seduce her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, who was 17 at the time and also a student at the Job Corps campus. On the night of January 12, 1995, Pike and Shipp, along with their friend Shadolla Peterson (then 18), went out into the woods to smoke pot. Instead, Shipp and Pike attacked Slemmer, beating her repeatedly and slashing her with a box cutter knife, while Peterson stood lookout. Eventually, they pinned Slemmer to the ground and carved a pentagram on her chest, while she screamed. Then Pike grabbed a piece of asphalt and smashed Slemmer’s skull, killing her. Pike reached into Slemmer’s head wound and pulled out a piece of her skull, which she put in her pocket. It was later revealed that Shipp had been dabbling in Satanic rituals and he admitted to carving the pentagram into Slemmer’s chest. Pike, meanwhile, showed the piece of Slemmer’s skull to her friends. The three assailants were arrested within 36 hours of the murder.
It will come as no surprise that Christa Pike was brutalized as a child. She was born with brain damage, likely caused by her mother’s abuse of alcohol while pregnant. As a young child, she suffered from seizures. She struggled in school, had difficulty following directions and had little or no control over her emotions and impulses. Instead of getting her the help she needed, Christa was abused by her own family, beaten, yelled at and repeatedly raped by her grandmother’s boyfriend, who forced his penis into her mouth on numerous occasions over a period of years, starting when she was only a toddler. Eventually, her school contacted Christa’s parents and informed them they suspected she was being sexually abused. Her parents did nothing. The school didn’t intervene and neither did social services. The police weren’t called. And the abuse continued.
A few years later, when Christa was 11, she was raped by a man in the neighborhood who pulled her into his trailer. Christa told her mother about the rape. But she refused to believe her. When she contracted an infection from her rapist, Christa told a teacher, who contacted her mother and the police. The man was arrested and ultimately pled guilty to a downgraded charge of assault. No protective order was entered and Christa’s rapist continued to live a few blocks away, his presence leaving her feeling haunted and terrified.
The abuse followed Christa home, as a series of her mother’s boyfriends inflicted violence and systematic harassment against the distraught young girl. One of the men punched her in the face and forced her to “wrestle” with him. He pinched and twisted her nipples as he rolled her around on the floor. Another man used to viciously beat her with a wooden paddle, which he hung ominously from a hook on the wall outside the door to her room.
Even though Christa Pike suffered from congenital brain damage and PTSD, she still showed promise in school and was considered a bright, if nervous, student with a creative “spark.” She scored highly on standardized tests, but like many kids with developmental issues and childhood trauma, she suffered nightmares, depression and insomnia, which often made it difficult for her to perform well in the classroom. As a consequence, she failed seventh grade. She was later diagnosed with both obsessive-compulsive disorder and bipolar disorder, even though neither of those psychological issues was raised by her lawyers at trial.
Still, Christa wanted to make something of herself. She told her teachers and friends she wanted to become a nurse. In an attempt to get her life on a new track, she signed up to attend the Job Corps in Knoxville, Tennessee. She hoped to get the vocational training she needed to support herself and escape the abusive environment she’d lived in for most of her life. Instead, she entered a chaotic and poorly run facility, where violence and harassment were common among other poor, neglected and often abused young people. Many carried knives and box cutters to defend themselves.
Perhaps to seek protection in this new and hostile setting, Christa entered into a romantic relationship with another troubled teen, Taduryl Shipp. Shipp, who was a few months younger than Christa, had his own psychological issues. He was possessive, paranoid and prone to sudden eruptions of violence, often directed at Christa, whom he brutally hit and kicked with little or no provocation. Yet, as in many situations of domestic abuse, these acts of violence and intimidation only seemed to draw Christa closer to him. Eventually, she began to worry that he might leave her for Colleen Slemmer. These fears led almost inevitably to the dreadful murder of Slemmon’s on January 12, 1995.
Pike, Shipp, and Peterson were arrested within three days of the murder. Initially, all three were charged with first-degree murder. Eventually, Peter turned into a witness for the state, pled guilty to reduced charges and walked away with probation. Shipp, who was only 17 at the time of the killing, was tried as an adult and convicted at trial. He was sentenced to life in prison with eligibility for parole. Pike, however, was charged with capital murder and conspiracy to commit murder, essentially a prosecutorial trick to hit the defendant with two charges for the same crime to ensure the longest sentence possible. At trial, the State hyped the Satanic abuse angle, even though there’s no evidence Pike had shown any interest in the darker arts. In a superstitious region still reeling from the West Memphis 3 case, where three teens were wrongly convicted of multiple murders in 1993, which supposedly involved Satanic rituals. They spent 18 years in prison before being released.
Christa was indigent and relied on public defenders at trial. Her lawyers put on what can only be described as a perfunctory defense at best, declining to put on evidence of Christa’s traumatic upbringing, psychological infirmities and her being raped as a pre-teen as mitigating factors. They also failed to argue that an 18-year-old girl was too young to be put to death by any civilized society. In fact, Christa was the young woman to face the death penalty in the last 150 years of the Republic. Even Tennessee, a state with a draconian history of criminal justice, hadn’t executed a woman since 1819, when the state hanged an unnamed black woman. The jury, likely inflamed by the Satanic Ritual allegations, quickly returned with guilty verdicts on both counts and, in the penalty phase of the trial, voted to condemn Christa to death by electrocution.
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As Christa Pike lay strapped to the execution gurney with IV tubes in both arms, someone wearing a purple latex glove placed a stone on a ledge in the death chamber, a sign that the lethal drugs, pentobarbital, had begun to flow into her veins. According to the execution plan, Christa’s heart should have stopped beating within five minutes. The clock on the wall read 7:41. Several minutes passed. Christa’s mouth opened wide, then closed. Her Buddhist spiritual advisor, Mikey Nochel, was escorted out of the room. The curtains closed. At this point, a physician was supposed to declare the condemned prisoner dead. But Christa wasn’t dead. Her heart was still beating. She was still breathing. She was making gagging noises.
According to Tennessee’s execution protocols, if the first dose doesn’t kill the prisoner, a second dose is supposed to be administered.
The curtains parted. Christa’s Buddhist friend returned. The stone was once again placed on the ledge by the gloved hand. The execution clock read 8:01. Christa’s ragged breathing continued. She made moaning noises and grunting sounds. Her body spasmed and lifted briefly from the death table. Another five minutes passed. The curtains closed again and remained closed. No one appeared to declare the execution over and Christa Pike dead.
At 8:53, the witnesses were ordered to leave the viewing room. Not even the staff in the viewing room knew what had happened.
What had happened was that the execution had failed again. Christa Pike was still breathing. Her heart was still beating. She was unconscious, but still alive.
Christa’s lawyer Randy Spivey had been separated from his client before the execution began. He’d been stripped of his cell phone and made to watch the execution in the viewing room. He didn’t know what had happened to his client after the state had tried to kill her twice and failed. He had to scramble through several prison corridors to find a phone. It took him seven minutes to reach the other members of his legal team to tell them what he thought had happened and to try to make sure Christa got medical attention. They called the governor’s office and got no response. They called the emergency number for the State Supreme Court and got an answering machine. They filed emergency motions and finally got a hearing to ensure that an ambulance was dispatched to give Christa medical treatment.
Pike was taken to a Nashville hospital, where she remained in critical condition, unconscious and on a ventilator for several days as her doctors tried to wash the poison from her system. Just to ensure she didn’t use this opportunity to escape, Tennessee prison guards handcuffed Pike and shackled to her hospital bed over the objections of her medical team.
The skin around the injection sites in Pike’s arms was burnt and blistered, indicating that the prison’s execution team had failed after seven attempts to fully puncture one of her veins, allowing the killing poison to leak into her muscle tissue instead of her bloodstream. This is exactly the scenario that her legal team had warned the courts might happen. Christa had small veins, shrunken by a blood disorder. But the courts took no notice, even though what happened to Christa Pike has happened before. Tennessee had botched an execution earlier this year. It’s called IV infiltration and has been one of the chief culprits in botched executions, where the condemned prisoner has been inflicted with intense pain and burns by lethal drugs that are improperly administered. One doctor described the sensation of IV infiltration with pentobarbital as feeling like being injected with bleach.
Most medical doctors refuse to perform lethal injection killings, saying it violates their oath as healers, so executions are often performed by prison staff with no or little medical training. How does one train for an execution, in any event? Most drug companies refuse to sell the lethal drugs used in state-sponsored killings to prisons, so the prisons often acquire the drugs on the black market or use doses that have been sitting on the shelves long past their expiration dates.
But none of this seems to deter the new class of hard-ass politicians who treat executions as political thrill kills to boost their poll numbers or to an increasingly malicious Supreme Court that has sanctified the nation’s execution industry as a form of “cruel and usual” punishment. At one point, Pike’s lawyers had even urged the courts to order that Christa be executed by hanging because they feared an attempt to kill her by lethal injection would go painfully wrong.
Lethal injection has a documented failure rate of at least 7.2%, according to an analysis by the Death Penalty Information Center. Out of 1,054 attempted executions by lethal injection in the last 40 years, at least 75 have failed, including the May 2026 attempted execution of Tony Carruthers in Tennessee. The execution team attempted to establish an IV line in Carruthers for more than an hour without success, jabbing him at least a dozen times, as he was strapped to the death gurney “wincing and groaning,” as one witness described the scene. They can’t say they didn’t know that the same bumbling outfit was likely to turn the execution of Christa Pike into an hour-long torture session.
While in the hospital, Pike developed a blood clot in her arm and contracted pneumonia. On the night of October 5th, her defense team was led to believe Pike was brain dead and that life support should be removed. Then she regained consciousness and began speaking the following day. She didn’t know where she was or what had happened to her: “Where am I and who are you?” Pike asked. Her attorney, Randy Spivey, said she was “angry and confused about everything.” Her doctors say it is too soon to tell if Pike is out of the woods or how much permanent damage the failed attempt to kill her inflicted on her body and brain.
Christa Pike has spent her entire adult life in a maximum-security prison, awaiting the day when the state of Tennessee would haul her into an execution chamber and put her to death. Much of that time she spent in solitary confinement, left alone with her thoughts, knowing there was nothing she could do to change her fate. She could and did express remorse, contrition and responsibility for the wretched act she committed on one mad night of her youth. She could do good works in prison, including mentoring other inmates and saving the life of a woman in a prison brawl. She could find religion and she did in a serious way. She became a Buddhist and not just for show, because converting to Buddhism in the Scopes-trial state was likely to be seen by many, including those capable of granting clemency in the governor’s office and parole board, as the equivalent of declaring yourself a priestess of Baal. No, the rest of Christa Pike’s life was reduced to waiting for the state to take what was left of it, again and again.
Even after the horrendous scene in the death chamber, the family of Colleen Slemmons says they feel cheated, that justice hasn’t been served. But how much is one person meant to endure? How much pain will ever satisfy the family of victims seeking vengeance for the deaths of their loved ones?
This was the second botched execution in Tennessee this year. The state’s prison director has resigned. The state’s governor, Bill Lee, has placed a temporary moratorium on new executions in the state. But other politicians want the killing machine to start up again and soon. Senator Marsha Blackburn, the former high school beauty pageant contestant (fourth runner up!) now running for governor, is eager to see Christa Pike sent back into the execution chamber and killed. Blackburn suggests that Christa be strapped to a chair this time and electrocuted. (Speaking of state-sponsored sadism, Pete Hegseth wants to livestream the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, who was convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in the 2009. It’s been 90 years since there was a public execution in the US. Didn’t Paddy Chayesky envision televised executions as the ultimate form of American entertainment?)
Dr. Bethany Brand, a clinical psychologist who evaluated Price, said that as a child Christa had suffered “extraordinarily severe extreme trauma…and experienced more severe adverse events than 99% of the US population.” But imagine the kind of trauma she has experienced now, as an adult, not from an alcoholic mother, violent and misogynistic men or rapists, but from the state and the supreme arbiters of justice in the nation.
