NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The only woman on Tennessee’s death row has exactly 100 days left to live, and her attorneys are racing the clock to stop the state from killing her.
Christa Gail Pike, 50, is scheduled to die by lethal injection or electrocution on September 30, 2026, at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. But her legal team filed an emergency motion with the Tennessee Supreme Court on June 12, arguing the state can no longer constitutionally carry out executions.
The motion comes just weeks after Tennessee’s botched attempt to execute Tony Caruthers in the same facility. For more than an hour, execution team members failed to establish an intravenous line, puncturing Caruthers more than a dozen times before Governor Bill Lee halted the procedure.
Pike’s attorneys argue her medical conditions — including a blood clotting disorder, bipolar disorder, PTSD, and veins notoriously difficult to access — make her a ticking time bomb for a similar catastrophe. They want the state’s highest court to appoint an independent special master to investigate.
The state is not backing down. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti has reminded the public exactly who Pike is: the woman who carried a piece of Colleen Slemmer’s skull in her pocket as a trophy.
Colleen Ann Slemmer was 19 years old when she enrolled in the Knoxville Job Corps Center in September 1994. She traveled from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, chasing a future in computer science that her family otherwise could not afford.
On the night of January 12, 1995, four students signed out of the Job Corps dormitory logbook. Pike, then 18, her boyfriend Taterel Ship, 17, and friend Shadalla Peterson, 18, lured Slemmer into wooded areas behind the University of Tennessee agriculture campus with a lie about smoking marijuana and settling differences.
Slemmer walked into those woods with nothing. Pike carried a box cutter and a miniature meat cleaver. What followed was an assault that court records place between 30 minutes and a full hour.
Pike accused Slemmer of trying to steal Ship away from her. The accusation had no basis in fact, but the obsession had been building for weeks. A full day before the murder, Pike told fellow student Kim Ilo Ilo that she intended to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 Colleen Slemmer.
In her own words, recorded in a 46-page taped confession, Pike said she wanted Colleen dead because she “had just felt mean that day.”
The attack was unspeakable. Pike slashed Slemmer’s throat six separate times. A meat cleaver was used against her back.
A pentagram was carved into her chest. When Slemmer begged for her life and promised to tell no one, Pike’s response was chilling: “Shut up. I don’t want to hear you talking to me.”
Pike admitted on tape that it’s harder to hurt somebody when they’re talking to you. So she kept hitting. She could hear Slemmer breathing blood.
She watched her body jerk on the ground. And then she picked up a large chunk of broken asphalt and brought it down on the 19-year-old’s skull.
The cruelty did not end with Slemmer’s last breath. Pike reached into the open wound, removed a piece of the victim’s skull bone, and put it in her jacket pocket. She and Ship dragged the body to a pile of dirt and debris.
They washed their hands in a mud puddle. Pike returned the borrowed meat cleaver. At a Texaco station on Cumberland Avenue, she discarded Slemmer’s identification cards and black gloves in a trash can.
All three signed back into the dormitory at 10:15 p. m. Slemmer never came back.
The next morning, a University of Tennessee grounds employee found what he first thought was a dead animal. It was Colleen Slemmer, 𝓷𝓾𝓭𝓮 from the waist up, covered in dirt and blood. The medical examiner tried to catalog each wound with letters of the alphabet.
She ran out.
Pike returned to the taped-off crime scene that same day and asked an officer, giggling, what had happened. Back at the dormitory, she told another student the piece of skull in her pocket was real and that she had eaten breakfast with it. She showed off her blood-stained shoes, telling a friend, “That ain’t mud on my shoes.
That’s blood.”
Police arrested all three suspects within 36 hours. Peterson turned on the others immediately. Pike waived her Miranda rights and gave her full confession on January 14, 1995.
At trial, jurors were given headsets and forced to listen to Pike’s own voice describe the murder. On March 22, 1996, they found her guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy. Eight days later, weeks past her 20th birthday, she was sentenced to death by electrocution — the youngest woman sent to death row in modern American history.
Ship was sentenced to life plus 25 years and was denied parole in October 2025. Peterson, the cooperating witness, walked away with six years of probation and never served a day in prison.
Pike’s three decades on death row have been defined by isolation. For more than 25 years, she lived in conditions her attorneys called de facto solitary confinement — the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, alone in a cell roughly the size of a parking space.
Her behavior behind bars has been anything but quiet. In August 2001, during an evacuation at the Tennessee Prison for Women, Pike choked fellow inmate Patricia Jones with a shoestring until a correctional officer pulled her off. Jones survived.
Pike was convicted of attempted first-degree murder and received an additional 25 years.
In a recorded phone call to her mother, Pike said she now understood the difference between premeditated murder and what happened to Colleen Slemmer because she had “premeditated the hell out of this one.” She said if she’d had 30 more seconds, there would have been a chalk outline.
In 2012, a New Jersey personal trainer named Donald Kohut and a prison corrections officer were arrested for plotting Pike’s escape. The plan involved tracing a prison key. Kohut received seven years.
Pike was never charged.
Now, the legal battle has shifted to the method of her death. Tennessee’s Supreme Court issued her death warrant on September 30, 2025 — exactly one year before the scheduled execution. Because her crime predates 1999, she can choose between the electric chair and lethal injection.
Her attorneys argue the single-𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 pentobarbital protocol would cause “bloody froth” in her lungs, amounting to drowning in her own blood. They argue her Buddhist spiritual advisor would be excluded from the execution chamber in violation of her First Amendment rights. They argue there is no contingency plan if something goes wrong.
The failed Caruthers execution has become their most powerful weapon. Attorney Luke Inman wrote in plain language that the state of Tennessee is “not able to constitutionally carry out executions.”
One federal appeals judge has already questioned whether Pike should be executed at all. Judge Jane Stranch of the Sixth Circuit wrote that society’s evolving standards of decency likely do not permit the execution of individuals who were under 21 at the time of their offense. Had Pike been just two months younger, she would have been ineligible for execution entirely.
Behind every legal argument is a mother who has waited 30 years for closure. May Martinez, Colleen’s mother, has attended every hearing and fought every appeal. She told reporters in October 2025 that she wants to see justice finally served so no other parent has to feel her pain.
There is a detail in this case that never made most headlines. When Colleen Slemmer was buried, her family believed they were laying her to rest whole. A year later, through outside sources, May Martinez learned the truth: Colleen had been buried without her head, without the piece of skin where the pentagram had been carved, and without her genitals.
The state had kept them as evidence.
Tennessee has periodically mailed pieces of Colleen back to her family, sometimes with no warning at all. Her mother has opened boxes to find body parts inside. One piece remains missing — the fragment of skull that Christa Pike carried in her jacket pocket on the night of January 12, 1995.
State authorities say that piece of Colleen Slemmer will not be returned to her family until the case is formally closed. In practice, that means it will not come home until after Christa Pike is executed.
The Tennessee Supreme Court has not yet ruled on Pike’s emergency motion. The clock is ticking. September 30, 2026 is 100 days away.
Christa Gail Pike is alive today, sitting in a cell at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. She has 100 days left to live unless something changes. The legal battle over how — or whether — Tennessee kills her is unresolved.
And in Florida, May Martinez is still waiting, the way she has waited for 30 years, for this story to finally have an ending.
Whatever side of the death penalty debate you stand on, remember Colleen’s name. She was 19 years old. She deserved a future in computer science.
She deserved to come home to Bucks County. She deserved better than to be buried without her head and to have her remains mailed back to her mother in boxes.
She deserves at least that much.
