The state of Tennessee spent three decades and millions of dollars trying to end the life of Christa Pike, the only woman on its death row, and on the night of September 30th, 2026, the machinery of death ground to a horrifying halt, leaving the condemned woman snoring on a gurney while witnesses listened in disbelief before she was rushed to a hospital to be saved.
The execution, which was supposed to be a clinical culmination of a 1996 murder conviction, instead became one of the most botched and disturbing procedures in modern American penal history. What was meant to be a swift administration of lethal drugs turned into a nearly two-hour ordeal that ended not with a death certificate, but with an ambulance call and a gubernatorial moratorium on all further executions in the state.
Witnesses who had been seated since 10:00 AM that morning watched the legal 𝒹𝓇𝒶𝓂𝒶 unfold in real-time, seeing a federal appeals court grant a temporary stay only hours before the scheduled procedure, only to have the Supreme Court of the United States wipe that reprieve away by evening. At 7:27 PM, the curtain was raised, and the witnesses saw Pike, 49, strapped to the gurney, her final words having been a declaration of peace and love just moments earlier.
The execution team, working under the supervision of the same doctor who had presided over the failed execution of Tony Kurthers months prior, administered the first dose of pentobarbital. They administered a second dose. Then, they waited for the drugs to stop her heart.
The drugs did not work as intended. Instead of slipping into unconsciousness and death, Pike began to snore, a guttural, choking sound that was audible through the glass partition to the assembled witnesses.
One witness described the sound as if she were choking, a terrifying echo of the medical complications that had plagued the Kurthers execution. At one point, Pike reportedly spoke, complaining that it felt like the vein in her arm was about to burst. The witnesses watched as her chest continued to rise and fall, a clear sign that the lethal dose had failed to achieve its purpose.
The snoring continued, a macabre soundtrack to a procedure that was spiraling out of control.
At 8:53 PM, the microphone was cut off, and the curtain was pulled shut, shielding the witnesses from the frantic efforts happening behind it. They were told to leave. The state of Tennessee, in a move almost unprecedented in the modern era of capital punishment, had to admit defeat.
They could not finish the job. An ambulance was summoned, and Christa Pike, the woman they had spent thirty years trying to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁, was transported to a nearby hospital to receive life-saving medical care.
The failure has thrown the state’s entire capital punishment system into chaos. Governor [Name] immediately halted all executions scheduled for the remainder of the year and ordered an outside investigation into the catastrophic failure. The question now hangs in the air: what happens to a death sentence when the state proves it cannot carry it out?
And what happens to the family of the victim, who have waited three decades for closure?
To understand the weight of that night, one must return to the crime that put Pike on death row. In January 1995, Pike was an 18-year-old student at the Job Corps program in Knoxville, Tennessee. She met Tadaryl Shipp, a 17-year-old with an interest in the occult, and the two began a volatile relationship.
Pike became convinced that another student, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, was interested in Shipp, a rumor that Slemmer’s friends vehemently denied.
On January 11, 1995, Pike told a friend she was going to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 Slemmer, citing a vague feeling of meanness. The next night, armed with a box cutter and a meat cleaver, Pike lured Slemmer to an isolated area near a steam plant on the University of Tennessee agricultural campus, promising marijuana. Shipp and another student, Shadolla Peterson, accompanied them.
What followed was a prolonged, brutal attack that lasted nearly an hour.
Pike beat Slemmer, slammed her head into concrete, and cut her stomach open with the box cutter. As Slemmer begged for her life, promising to walk back to Florida barefoot if they would let her live, Pike kicked her in the face to silence her pleas. In a chilling detail from her own confession, Pike admitted she paused mid-attack to check for witnesses, ensuring they were alone before returning to finish the job.
She carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest and cut her throat six times.
When Slemmer was still alive, Pike picked up a chunk of asphalt and crushed her skull. The medical examiner testified that Slemmer had been alive and conscious for the entirety of the attack, suffering wounds so numerous that the examiner ran out of letters in the alphabet to label them. After the murder, Pike and her accomplices rinsed blood from their shoes, disposed of Slemmer’s ID, and returned to the dorm.
Pike then went to a friend’s room and pulled out a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a souvenir.
She danced and sang while describing the murder, and the next morning, she ate breakfast with the skull fragment in her pocket, passing it around to classmates. She pointed to bloodstains on her shoes, telling another student it wasn’t mud. The brutality of the crime, coupled with Pike’s complete lack of remorse, shocked even hardened investigators.
In a letter intercepted by corrections officers after her sentencing, Pike expressed no regret for Slemmer, only anger at her own fate, calling the murder an act of mercy to spare Slemmer a slower death.
The jury took just two and a half hours to sentence her to death. Her accomplices faced far lighter fates. Shipp, being a minor, received life with the possibility of parole.
Peterson, who testified for the state, received probation. Only Pike was sentenced to die. In her final years, Pike’s legal team fought for a less painful method of execution, citing her blood disorder and the trauma of her childhood, which included being raped at age 11 and 17.
They even requested a firing squad or hanging, arguing it would be more instantaneous than lethal injection. The courts rejected these pleas, citing a lack of evidence and the state’s lack of equipment or training for such methods. The clemency petition to the governor, which painted Pike as a changed, empathetic woman, was denied.
The only person waiting with a different kind of patience was Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, who had waited 16 years just to get her daughter’s skull fragment back from evidence so she could bury her child whole.
Now, Martinez and the rest of the state are left to grapple with the aftermath of the botched execution. The irony is bitter and inescapable: Colleen Slemmer spent the last hour of her life conscious, in agony, begging for it to stop, with no one coming to her aid. Christa Pike, the woman who inflicted that suffering, was given every comfort in her final days, was granted a stay, and when the state failed to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her, was rushed to a hospital to be saved.
The question of whether the state should try again now hangs over Tennessee, as does the ghost of a young woman who ran marathons and roller-skated, whose life was ended with a rock and a box cutter, and whose killer now breathes air in a hospital bed, her fate uncertain.
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