“It is therefore ordered that you shall be put to death by electrocution [laughter] in the manner prescribed by law. And that you shall be transferred to the custody of the warden at the Tennessee Prison for Women. And further that on the 12th day of January, 1997, your body shall be subjected to shock by sufficient current of electricity.”
“May God have mercy upon you.”
“Ms. Pike, do you have anything to say before I do the final”
“Can I play that song ‘Momma’ before I go?”
“Ms. Pike, do you have anything to say before I do THE FINAL”
“PLEASE.”
“PLEASE HOLD THE SONG.”
“I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU.”
“I love you.”
The Tennessee Supreme Court has set an execution date for Christa Pike. The court granted the state’s motion after ruling Pike had exhausted her and presented no extenuating circumstances for commutation. Pike was sentenced to the death for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer and remains the only woman in on Tennessee’s death row.
Her execution is scheduled for September 30th, 2026 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, unless a higher court or other authority issues a stay.
A piece of skull, not a weapon, not evidence left behind at a crime scene, a trophy carried in a pocket, shown off to classmates like a souvenir from a vacation.
The girl who took it was 18 years old. The girl she took it from was 19 and had done nothing wrong. What happened in those woods on the night of January 12th, 1995 was so brutal, so calculated, so cold that 30 years later the state of Tennessee is preparing to do something it has not done since 1819, execute a woman.
The date is already set. September 30th, 2026. But here is what makes this case unlike anything you have heard before. The man who held the victim down while she was being killed may walk free the same year she is scheduled to die. Welcome to the last sentence. And today’s case is one that has haunted the Tennessee justice system for three decades. Now, let us get into it.
To understand what happened in those woods outside Knoxville on the night of January 12th, 1995, you need to understand who these two young women were long before they ever set eyes on each other.
Because nothing about this case was random. Nothing was spontaneous. What unfolded that night was the end result of two very different lives. One built on love and stability, the other on damaging chaos, colliding inside a federal program that was supposed to be a second chance for both of them. Let us start with Christa. Christa Gail Pike was born prematurely on March 10th, 1976 in Beckley, West Virginia to a woman named Carissa Hansen and a man named Emil Glenn Pike.
From the very first moments of her life, the odds were against her in ways that went beyond poverty or a difficult household. Court filings and forensic evaluations submitted during her appeals would later confirm that Christa had been exposed to alcohol in the womb. Her mother, Carissa, continued drinking even after being informed that her infant daughter was experiencing severe seizures.
Those seizures were not just a symptom of a troubled home, they were a sign of something deeper. Forensic neurologist who evaluated Christa years later found evidence of an organic brain malformation. Not a difficult personality. Not a bad attitude. Actual, documented physical damage to the area of the brain responsible for regulating impulse and behavior.
Damage she was born with. Damage she never received treatment for. The home she was born into was not a place of safety. Her parents, Krista and Emil, had a volatile relationship. They married, divorced, remarried, and divorced again. Multiple relatives later testified that the household was deeply neglectful and chaotic.
An Krista crawling through piles of dog feces on the floor with no adult intervening. Her father, Emil, was largely absent. Krista later reported that he whipped her with a leather strap five or six times in a single day on at least one occasion. By the time she was a young child, she had already been physically abused by multiple family members and their associates.
Court filings submitted to the United States Supreme Court state that by the time Krista was 18 years old, she had been raped at least twice and physically abused by at least seven different people. Family members, their partners, and acquaintances. There are indications in those filings that sexual abuse began when she was as young as 2 years old.
Her paternal grandmother stepped in when no one else did. And by Krista’s own account, that grandmother was the only person in her life who made her feel genuinely loved. When that grandmother died in 1988, Krista Pike was 12 years old. She attempted suicide shortly after. She received no meaningful support in the aftermath.
Her mother then introduced her to marijuana as a teenager. She began running away from home regularly, sometimes as frequently as once a month. She changed schools 12 times before she eventually obtained her GED in 1993. At 15, she was adjudicated delinquent for breaking and entering after she was caught stealing food while running away.
She spent time at a juvenile detention facility as a result. It was inside that facility, meant to correct, meant to rehabilitate, that Krista first heard about a federal program called Job Corps. In late 1994, at 18 years old, Krista Gail Pike enrolled at the Job Corps center on Dale Avenue in Knoxville, Tennessee, hoping to train as a nursing assistant.
She was carrying an entire lifetime of unaddressed trauma, undiagnosed mental illness, and documented neurological damage. And not one person in authority had ever meaningfully intervened. Now, let us talk about Colleen. Colleen Ann Slemmer was born on September 20th, 1975, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and she grew up in a world that looked nothing like Krista Pike’s.
Colleen was the eldest of two sisters. She was raised in Orange Park, Florida, by her mother, May Martinez, and her stepfather. The household was stable. It was loving. May Martinez has described her daughter as someone with a genuine, natural warmth. A young woman who, from the age of 8 years old, had developed a particular love for helping disabled children.
Not because anyone told her to. Not because it was required of her. Because that was simply who Colleen Slemmer was. Colleen had plans. She wanted to go to college. She had developed a real and focused interest in computers at a time when that skill pointed toward a concrete future. But college requires money, and the family simply did not have it.
So, in September of 1994, Colleen did what she could with what she had. She found Job Corps, the same federally funded vocational training program, the same promise of a practical path forward. The Job Corps center closest to her in Jacksonville, Florida, did not offer computer training. So, she looked further. She found Knoxville.
She packed up, left Orange Park, and moved to Tennessee to pursue something, to build something. She had only been at the center for approximately 3 months when everything was taken from her. Two young women, two completely different starting points. One shaped by documented brain damage, abuse, rape, neglect, and 12 different schools before she was 18.
The other shaped by love, consistency, and a mother who still, 30 years later, as of 2025, has not recovered every piece of her daughter’s remains. May Martinez told reporters in 2020 that she still lacks the one bone fragment that Krista Pike kept as a souvenir that night. She told WBIR:
“Execute her or give her life and give me the rest of Colleen back so I can live.”
That is who Colleen Slemmer was. That is who Krista Pike was. And that is the program that brought them together. Now, we need to talk about the two other people in that dormitory because what happened next did not start in those woods. It started months earlier inside the walls of the Job Corps center on Dale Avenue in a romance that quickly became something far darker than either of them should have been carrying. His name was Tines Ship.
He was 17 years old from Memphis, Tennessee. He had dropped out of high school in the ninth grade, had become involved with gang members, and arrived at the Knoxville Job Corps center at his mother’s urging, enrolled in the culinary arts program. Tines and Krista met on that campus and became inseparable almost immediately.
What began as a romantic relationship between two damaged young people evolved into something more consuming. A shared identity built around the occult, devil worship, and satanic ritual. Tines kept a small shrine in his dormitory room. He had a name for Krista. He called her his little devil. Ship would later testify to Krista’s frequent and violent mood swings, rages that came without warning and escalated without logic.
The fourth person in this circle was a 19-year-old woman named Shidala Peterson from Cleveland, Tennessee. She was close to both Krista and Tatro. She was part of their group. And she was present on the night of January 12th, 1995. Krista Pike became convinced at some point in the fall of 1994 that Colleen Slemmer had her eyes on Tatro’s ship. That Colleen was a threat.
That Colleen was trying to take what was hers. Every person who knew Colleen, every friend, every person who spent time with her at that center, denied it entirely. There was no evidence for it. It was not true. But for a young woman with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, untreated PTSD, organic brain damage, and a history of violence that stretched back to infancy, truth was not the point. The jealousy was real enough.
And it was building towards something none of them would be able to take back. It did not begin on January 12th. It began the day before. On January 11th, 1995, Krista Pike pulled aside her friend and fellow Job Corps student Kim Iloilo and told her plainly that she was going to kill Colleen Slemmer.
When Iloilo asked why, Pike’s answer contained no rage, no specific grievance, no final confrontation that had pushed her over the edge. She said she had just felt mean that day. Iloilo dismissed it. She told herself it was just talk. That decision to do nothing would stay with her for the rest of her life. In the days leading up to that night, Pike had already told Tatro ship what she thought of Slemmer, that the girl had to be taught a lesson.
The plan had been taking shape. On the evening of January 12th, before leaving the dormitory, Pike pocketed a box cutter and borrowed a small meat cleaver. All four of them, Krista Pike, Tatro ship, Shidala Peterson, and Colleen Slemmer signed out of the dormitory log together. Pike told Slemmer she wanted to make peace.
She offered marijuana. Colleen agreed to walk. They moved north from the Job Corps Center on Dale Avenue, through the Cumberland Avenue strip, down toward Tyson Park, and then along a dark and Greenway pathway that wound up onto the University of Tennessee Agricultural campus. Remote, wooded, isolated. No streetlights. No witnesses.
Nowhere for anyone to run. At approximately 8:00 p.m., Kim Eiloilo watched all four of them disappear into the darkness heading toward 17th Street. At approximately 10:15 p.m., she watched three of them return. Colleen Slemmer was not among them. What happened in those woods lasted approximately 30 minutes. Pike threw the first blow, knocking Slemmer in the face with her knee.
Then came the fist. She slammed Colleen’s head against her knee repeatedly, kicked her in the face and torso, and drove her head down onto the concrete ground. Tatro Ship held Slemmer down and struck her with a rock. Shidala Peterson stood watch. The box cutter came out. Pike slashed Slemmer’s stomach, her back, and her throat.
Six separate incisions to the throat alone. The meat cleaver opened her back further. Then Pike carved a pentagram into Colleen Slemmer’s chest and into her forehead. Colleen was still alive. She was begging them to stop. She kept talking, kept pleading. Pike later told Eiloilo that the more Slemmer talked, the more she cut her.
The more Slemmer begged, the harder Pike kicked. In her taped confession to Knoxville Police Department investigators, Pike would say:
“She wouldn’t shut up. She kept talking and talking. I didn’t want to hear her talking.”
When Slemmer still would not die, Pike reached down, picked up a large chunk of asphalt from the ground, and began bludgeoning her skull.
The blows fractured it in at least four places, driving bone fragments directly into her brain. That was what finally killed her. Then Pike reached into the open gash in Colleen Slemmer’s skull with her hand, pulled out a bone fragment, and slipped it into her jacket pocket.
The three walked back to the Job Corps Center on Dale Avenue. That same night, Pike went directly to Kim Eloise’s room. She told Eloise she had just killed Slemmer. She pulled out the piece of skull and showed it to her. She described cutting the throat six times. She described the asphalt. She showed no distress. She showed no remorse.
She bragged. Within 36 hours, all three were arrested. The dormitory log showed four people left. Three came back. Detectives found the skull fragment exactly where Pike had put it, in her jacket pocket. When questioned, Pike waived her Miranda rights and gave a taped confession. She insisted at first that they had only meant to scare Slemmer and that it had gotten out of control.
The injuries to Colleen Slemmer’s body told investigators something different entirely. Tateroship would later tell lead investigator Detective Randy York of the Knoxville Police Department that Colleen Slemmer had been a sacrifice to Satan. At approximately 8:05 in the morning on January 13th, 1995, a University of Tennessee grounds department employee was making his way through the agricultural campus near the greenhouses when he came across something in the debris at the edge of the tree line.
His first instinct was that it was an animal. A dead animal discarded in the woods. He moved closer. He saw clothing. He saw an exposed breast. And he understood in that moment that what he was looking at was a human being. He later testified in federal court that the body had been so badly beaten, so thoroughly disfigured, that he could not immediately identify it as a person.
He called the police. Officers from the Knoxville Police Department arrived on the University of Tennessee Agricultural Campus to find Colleen Slemmer’s body lying face down in a pile of dirt and debris, nude from the waist up, her jeans still on, her clothing scattered in the surrounding bushes. A pool of blood had collected on the ground approximately 30 ft from where her body had come to rest.
Her skull had been bludgeoned. Her throat had been slashed. When investigators cleaned the body and examined it fully, they found the pentagram carved into her chest. The medical examiner cataloged the slash and stab wounds across her body. The damage was extensive. The brutality was unmistakable. This was not a crime that had spiraled out of control.
This was deliberate. Lead investigator Detective Randy York of the Knoxville Police Department took charge of the case. The dormitory log at the Job Corps Center on Dale Avenue told investigators everything they needed to begin. Four people had signed out together on the night of January 12th. Three had come back at approximately 10:15 p.m. One had not. The logbook placed Krista Pike, Tatro Ship, and Shadalla Peterson with Colleen Slemmer at the exact time she disappeared. Within hours, detectives had identified their primary suspect. On January 14th, 1995, 2 days after the murder, Knoxville Police Department officers located Krista Pike and brought her in for questioning.
She waived her Miranda rights without hesitation and gave investigators a full taped confession. She described the walk from Dale Avenue. She described what she had done in those woods. She said they had only meant to scare Slemmer and that it had gotten out of control. The physical evidence told a different story. Slemmer’s DNA was found on Pike and Ship’s clothing.
Detectives found the skull fragment exactly where Pike had put it, in her jacket pocket. And 2 days after the murder, Pike and Ship had been seen on campus wearing pentagram necklaces. Peterson, who had stood watch while the attack was carried out, cooperated fully with investigators from the beginning.
Her cooperation gave the prosecution a witness who had been present that night and who could speak to everything that happened. Hike and Ship were both charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. Ship, who had turned 17 just 2 months before the murder, was tried as an adult. The trial of Christa Gail Pike opened in Knox County Criminal Court in March 1996.
The prosecution was handled by Assistant District Attorneys General William H. Crabtree and Sally J. Helm. The case they presented was overwhelming. The tape confession, the skull fragment recovered from her jacket, the dormitory lock, the DNA evidence, the testimony of Kim Mee Lo Ee Lo, who told the court that Pike had told her the day before the murder that she intended to kill Colleen Slemmer because she had just felt mean that day, and who then described Pike returning that same night to show her the skull and describe the killing in detail.
The defense presented testimony from psychologist Dr. Eric Engum, who told the jury that Pike suffered from severe borderline personality disorder and had acted from a loss of control rather than deliberation. The jury heard all of it. On March 22nd, 1996, after 2 and 1/2 hours of deliberation, the jury found Christa Gail Pike guilty on both counts, premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.
Eight days later, on March 30th, 1996, Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz sentenced Christa Pike to death by electrocution for the murder charge and an additional 25 years in prison for the conspiracy charge. She was 20 years old. The jury had found two statutory aggravating circumstances. First, that the murder was especially heinous, atrocious, and cruel in that it involved torture and serious physical abuse beyond what was necessary to cause death.
Second, that the murder had been committed for the purpose of avoiding, interfering with, or preventing a lawful arrest or prosecution. The aggravating circumstances, the jury determined, outweighed anything the defense had offered. The sentence was death. At the time of sentencing, Christa Gail Pike became the youngest woman sentenced to death in the United States.
In January 1997, Tatro Ship stood trial separately and was also convicted of first-degree murder on both counts. The jury could not unanimously agree on whether he should spend the rest of his natural life in prison without parole. Because Ship had been 17 at the time of the murder, a juvenile under the law, he was not eligible for the death penalty.
The judge described Ship as a dangerous individual and sentenced him to life in prison with parole eligibility, plus a consecutive 25-year sentence for the conspiracy conviction, which meant he would not become eligible for parole until he was in his late 40s or early 50s. Shadala Peterson, who had agreed to testify for the prosecution, pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact and received a six-year probationary sentence.
She walked out of court that day without serving a single day in prison. Three people entered those woods with Colleen Slemmer on the night of January 12th, 1995. One was sentenced to death. One received life with eventual parole eligibility. One went home. On March 30th, 1996, the same day she was sentenced, Christa Pike was transferred to the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center northwest of downtown Nashville.
She was 20 years old. She was the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. And because the state housed death row inmates separately from the general population, and because there were no other women in her situation, that designation meant something specific and suffocating.
It meant she was alone. Not metaphorically. Structurally. While the men on death row could eat together, work jobs, and move around with good behavior, Pike had none of that. For the next 25 years, Christa Pike lived in what her attorneys would later describe in a federal lawsuit as de facto solitary confinement.
Not as a disciplinary measure, but because she was the only woman sentenced to death in the state of Tennessee. The arbitrary fact of her gender had placed her in isolation that no one else on death row experienced. The legal battles began almost immediately. Pike launched an appeal of her conviction, then canceled it, then relaunched it.
She was chaotic and unpredictable even in her own defense. Then, in June of 2002, against the explicit advice of her lawyers, she asked the court to drop the appeal entirely and requested to be executed by electrocution. The presiding judge granted the request. An execution date was set, August 19, 2002. Christa Pike had a date with the execution chamber.
Then she changed her mind. On July 8, 2002, defense lawyers filed a motion to allow the appeal process to continue. That motion was denied. With the execution date 17 days away, a three-judge appeals court panel stepped in on August 2, 2002, and ruled the proceedings should continue. The execution did not happen.
But what happened inside those walls while the legal process churned forward was something the courts could not have anticipated. On August 24, 2001, before the execution date drama had even fully played out, Pike attacked a fellow inmate. Her name was Patricia Jones. According to court records, Pike had developed an ongoing and escalating feud with Jones, whom she accused of crossing her and informing on her to prison staff.
The Tennessee Department of Corrections later stated that Pike had an accomplice in the attack, a fellow inmate named Natasha Cornett. Pike and Cornett, according to the department’s position, approached Jones together. Pike used a shoestring. She wrapped it around Patricia Jones’s throat and pulled. Jones survived, but only just. The attack nearly killed her.
What Pike did afterward was equally chilling. Prison officials had recorded telephone calls between Pike and her mother. In those calls, Pike laughed about the attack. She showed no remorse. She told her mother directly:
“I bet you if she gets near me, I’m going to do it again.”
The Tennessee Department of Corrections concluded that Natasha Cornett had assisted in the attack, but there was insufficient evidence to formally charge her.
Pike faced the full weight of the charge alone. On August 12th, 2004, Christa Pike was convicted of attempted first-degree murder for the attack on Patricia Jones. The conviction added 25 years to her sentence. In December 2008, Pike’s attorneys filed a request for a new trial. It was denied. That denial was considered the final permissible challenge within the Tennessee state court system.
With state options exhausted, the case moved into the federal system. In May 2014, federal appeals began. In August 2019, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously denied relief, affirming that the state court’s findings were not an unreasonable application of federal law. The appeals were failing. The conviction was holding.
And somewhere in that isolation, something else was taking shape. In early 2011, a man named Donald Kohut, 34 years old from Flemington, New Jersey, began writing letters to Christa Pike in prison. By July of 2011, he was making regular trips from New Jersey to Nashville to visit her in person. Inside the Tennessee Prison for Women, Kohut met a corrections officer named Justin Heflin, 23 years old from Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The three of them, according to investigators, developed a plan. Kohut and Heflin would get Pike out. Kohut would supply money and gifts to Heflin in exchange for his cooperation. The plan was discovered before it could be executed. In March 2012, a joint investigation involving the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the Tennessee Department of Corrections, and the New Jersey State Police dismantled the escape plot entirely.
Justin Heflin was indicted by a Davidson County Grand Jury on four counts: bribery, official misconduct, conspiracy to commit escape, and facilitation to commit escape. He had been terminated from his position as a correctional officer at the Tennessee Prison for Women on March 5th, 2012. He was booked into Davidson County Jail on a $75,000 bond.
Donald Kohut was arrested at his residence in Flemington, New Jersey by the New Jersey State Police on charges of bribery and conspiracy to commit escape. Both men were behind bars within days of each other. Christa Pike remained exactly where she was. The legal war continued. In August 2023, Pike’s attorneys filed a motion to reopen her post-conviction case, arguing that a 2022 Tennessee Supreme Court decision in the case of Tennessee versus Booker had established that age must be considered in sentencing, and that the brain of an 18-year-old was not meaningfully different from the brain of a 17-year-old.
Knox County Criminal Court Judge Scott Green denied the motion in November 2023. His reasoning was straightforward. The Booker decision applied to juveniles. Christa Pike was 18 at the time of the crime, a legal adult. The Tennessee Supreme Court denied permission to appeal in September 2024.
Every door had closed, but one thing did change. In September 2024, after decades of litigation over her conditions of confinement, Pike’s attorneys finalized the settlement with state officials. The agreement was reached on September 16th, 2024. It brought an end to 25 years of de facto solitary confinement.
Under the new terms, Pike was granted the behavior-dependent privileges afforded to the men on Tennessee’s death row. Time outside her cell, the ability to work a job, and shared meals with a small group of other incarcerated women. Her attorneys released a statement saying that after nearly three decades of isolation, Christa was adapting to her new terms of confinement and that she enjoys being able to work and share some meals with others.
They were careful to add that she remains very isolated as the only woman on death row in Tennessee. She was 50 years old. She had been in that building for nearly three decades. And on September 30th, 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued a death warrant scheduling her execution for September 30th, 2026 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The clock was now running.
Three people walked into those woods with Colleen Slemmer on the night of January 12th, 1995. What happened to each of them afterward is something this case has never been able to fully escape. And as the execution date for Christa Pike moves closer, that disparity has never felt more visible or more difficult to reconcile. Start with Shidalia Peterson.
Peterson was 19 years old at the time of the murder. She was there that night. She stood watch while Colleen Slemmer was beaten, slashed, and bludgeoned to death on the University of Tennessee Agricultural Campus. She was present for all of it. She did not intervene. When investigators closed in, Peterson cooperated.
She turned informant, testifying against both Pike and Ship. In exchange, she pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact and received a six-year probationary sentence. She did not serve a single day in prison. She walked out of court and went home. That was the last time the justice system had any meaningful contact with Shidalia Peterson. Now consider Tinesha Ship.
Ship was 17 years old the night Colleen Slemmer died. He was the one who held her down. He was the one who struck her with a rock. He was the one who later told Detective Randy York of the Knoxville Police Department that Slammer had been a sacrifice to Satan. He was convicted of first-degree murder in January 1997.
Because he was 17, a juvenile under the law, he was ineligible for the death penalty. He received life in prison with parole eligibility plus a consecutive 25-year sentence for conspiracy. The Tennessee Department of Correction lists his parole eligibility date as December 8th, 2026. The same year Christa Pike is scheduled to die.
The difference between Ship’s sentence and Pike’s sentence comes down to 1 year of age. Christa Pike was 18. Tatro Ship was 17. That single year, that single calendar distinction, is what separated a death sentence from a parole hearing. Pike’s own attorneys have argued in court filings that Ship was a leader in the offense and that Pike was in an abusive relationship with him at the time of the crime.
They have argued that there is no meaningful neurological difference between the brain of an 18-year-old and the brain of a 17-year-old. The courts have consistently ruled that the line is the line. On October 8th, 2025, just 1 week after the Tennessee Supreme Court issued Pike’s execution date, Tatro Ship appeared before the Tennessee Board of Parole for the first time.
He had been in custody continuously since January 1995. The hearing was held at Northwest Correctional Complex in Tiptonville, in far west Tennessee. Ship participated remotely. He told board member Tim Gobble that he had met Christa Pike when she arrived at Job Corps and that he had stopped to comfort her when he saw her crying.
He acknowledged his fascination with Satanism at the time. He called his judgment idiotic. He said he had never denied what he did and that he was wrong. Board member Tim Gobble was not moved. In the audio recording of the hearing, Gobble told Ship directly:
“This may be one of the most horrendous cases I have read or learned about. The torture that the victim endured shocks the conscience.”
Gobble voted to deny parole, recommending the case be reviewed again in 5 years. The full seven-member board took up the case in the weeks that followed. On October 20th, 2025, the board issued its final decision. Parole denied. The board modified Gobble’s recommendation and set the next review date for October 2031. Colleen Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, who has lived in Florida for decades and has spent 30 years fighting for her daughter’s memory, opposed Ship’s release.
She was unable to travel to Tiptonville for the hearing. She told reporters in October 2025 that the details of her daughter’s death are with her every single day. She described Colleen as someone who ran marathons, roller skated every weekend, and was what she called a computer geek. She said there is something you never want to face, your daughter’s skull being passed around like it was a piece of meat.
May Martinez has also said she hopes to attend Christa Pike’s execution in September 2026. She told WBIR that she will fight to her last breath to get everything back and to get what Colleen deserved. The one bone fragment that Christa Pike pocketed in those woods on January 12th, 1995 remains in state custody to this day. It has not been returned to May Martinez.
It cannot be returned while the case remains open, while Pike’s execution has not yet been carried out. That is the state of this case 30 years later. One co-defendant went home on probation the day of her sentencing. One co-defendant goes before the parole board in December 2026. And one is scheduled to be executed on September 30th, 2026, having spent the last three decades on death row for a crime all three of them were present for.
On September 30th, 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued its death warrant. The language was direct. Christa Gail Pike would be executed on September 30th, 2026 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The court noted that Pike had exhausted the standard three-tier appeals process and that no basis existed to prevent the sentence from being carried out.
Her request for commutation had been denied. If the execution proceeds, it will be the first time the state of Tennessee has put a woman to death since 1819. It will also make Pike the only person executed in Tennessee for a crime committed at the age of 18 in the modern death penalty era. She is 50 years old.
She has been in custody since January 1995. The response from her legal team was immediate. Attorney Stephen Ferrell and Luke Innman from Federal Defender Services of East Tennessee filed a lawsuit on January 8th, 2026 in Davidson County Chancery Court. The defendants named were Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada, Riverbend Maximum Security Institution Warden Kenneth Nelson, and Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center Warden Jordan Clark.
The lawsuit challenged the state’s revised lethal injection protocol, a single drug pentobarbital method that went into effect in December 2024, replacing the three-drug cocktail previously used between 2018 and 2020. The challenge rested on three distinct arguments. The first was medical.
Pike’s attorneys disclosed that she suffers from thrombocytopenia, a blood clotting disorder causing dangerously low platelet levels. Medical expert Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist retained for the case, stated in a written opinion that the pentobarbital protocol would very likely produce bloody froth in Pike’s lungs.
Her attorneys described this plainly, she would drown in her own blood. The lawsuit further disclosed that Pike has small veins that make intravenous needle insertion particularly difficult. Combined with the blood disorder, her attorneys argued the state had no contingency plan to prevent a catastrophic and torturous death.
The second argument was constitutional. Tennessee’s protocol requires a prisoner to choose electrocution as an alternative method in order to avoid the mandatory 14-day isolation period before execution. Pike’s attorneys argued that forcing any to actively elect their own method of death or face weeks of additional isolation as punishment for not doing so places an unconstitutional burden on the condemned.
They pointed out that Pike had already been subjected to more than 25 years of de facto solitary confinement. Requiring her to participate in selecting the method of her own death, they argued, violated her rights under the Eighth Amendment. The third argument was religious. During her decades on death row, Christa Pike converted to Buddhism.
The lawsuit argued that Tennessee’s protocol excludes her Buddhist spiritual advisor from the execution chamber entirely and imposes a 12-hour blackout period before the execution during which she is cut off from all contact with that advisor. Pike’s attorneys highlighted that three other death row inmates executed in Tennessee in 2025, Oscar Smith in May, Byron Black in August, and Harold Nichols in December, had all been granted specific exceptions to that 12-hour blackout, permitting them contact with their spiritual advisors before they died.
Pike had been granted no such exception. Her attorney stated clearly that it was their belief her Buddhist spiritual advisor would not be permitted in the execution chamber. The Byron Black case loomed over Pike’s challenge in more ways than one. Before his execution on August 5th, 2025, Black had also challenged the lethal injection protocol and earned a temporary injunction from a Davidson County Chancery Court trial judge.
The Tennessee Supreme Court reversed that ruling entirely and publicly reprimanded the trial judge, Chancellor Russell T. Perkins, stating that he had exceeded his authority by effectively modifying the Supreme Court’s unconditional execution order. Black was executed on August 5th, 2025. Witnesses reported he groaned during the procedure.
He had been documented saying it was hurting so bad while on the gurney. Experts had warned prior to the execution that Black’s heart implant could repeatedly shock him during lethal injection, and the state had proceeded without deactivating it. On March 19th, 2026, the state filed its response to Pike’s lawsuit. Tennessee’s Attorney General’s office argued that Pike had not sufficiently demonstrated that the lethal injection protocol would violate her constitutional rights and sought to have the case dismissed.
The presiding judge, Chancellor I’Ashea Myles, rejected the state’s dismissal bid. On May 7th, 2026, Chancellor Myles transferred Pike’s legal challenge from Davidson County Chancery Court directly to the Tennessee Supreme Court. The transfer followed an amended court rule enacted in the aftermath of the Byron Black litigation, requiring all collateral challenges related to the method or timing of an execution to be filed with the Tennessee Supreme Court rather than lower courts.
As of this recording, Pike’s challenge is pending before the Tennessee Supreme Court. It has not been resolved. The atmosphere surrounding Pike’s case changed dramatically on May 21st, 2026, when the state attempted to execute another death row inmate, Tony Carruthers, at the same facility where Pike’s execution is scheduled to take place.
Carruthers had been convicted in Memphis for the 1994 kidnapping and murder of three people. His execution was scheduled for 10:00 in the morning. What followed inside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution over the next hour and a half was documented by witnesses present in the execution chamber. The execution team attempted to establish an intravenous line and failed.
They tried one arm, then the other. They tried his hands. They tried his feet. They attempted his jugular vein in his neck. They attempted to insert a central line into his chest. Over the course of more than an hour, Tony Carruthers was punctured more than a dozen times. He could be heard groaning in pain from the viewing room.
His attorney, Maria De Liberato of the ACLU, was inside the chamber. She told reporters afterward that what she witnessed was a tortured, botched execution. Riverbend Maximum Security Institution Warden Kenneth Nelson, the same warden named as a defendant in Christa Pike’s pending lawsuit, was present in the room throughout.
At approximately 1:00 in the afternoon, Governor Bill Lee issued a 1-year reprieve for Carruthers. The execution had failed. The relevance to Pike’s case could not be stated more plainly. Her lawsuit had argued precisely that the state had no contingency plan for when things go wrong, that its personnel were untrained and unlicensed for the medical procedures execution requires, and that her own blood disorder and difficult veins made the risk of catastrophic failure specific and foreseeable.
What happened to Tony Carruthers on May 21st, 2026 was exactly the scenario her attorneys had described in writing 4 months earlier. Throughout all of this, a public campaign called Mercy for Christa has been petitioning Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to commute Pike’s sentence to life in prison.
The Tennessee Constitution grants the governor sole authority to do so. The petition argues that Pike was in an abusive relationship with Tatro Ship at the time of the crime, that Ship was a leader in the offense, that the jury was never presented with the full picture of Pike’s documented brain damage and childhood trauma, and that executing her while Ship remains eligible for parole is not proportionate justice.
As of June 2026, no formal clemency petition has been filed through official channels. Pike’s attorneys note the governor typically does not engage with clemency until after an execution date is formally set, which it now has been. Governor Lee has made no public statement in response to the campaign. Meanwhile, a parallel fight over transparency has been playing out in the courts.
The Nashville Banner and several other media organizations filed a lawsuit seeking greater public access to Tennessee executions. In January 2026, Chancellor I’Ashea Myles granted a temporary injunction ordering the state to allow media witnesses to observe the condemned person entering the execution chamber and being prepared for execution.
The Tennessee Supreme Court blocked that order in April 2026, restoring previous protocols while the litigation continues. The secrecy that Pike’s attorneys described in their lawsuit, secrecy, intentional omission, inattention to detail, remains in place as her execution date approaches. September 30th, 2026 is now less than 4 months away.
The execution chamber is at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, the same facility where Tony Carruthers was punctured more than a dozen times and left groaning on a gurney before the state called off the attempt. The same facility whose warden is named in Christa Pike’s pending Supreme Court challenge.
The same state that executed Byron Black in August 2025 while his heart implant went undeactivated. Colleen Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has said she wants to be there when it happens. She has fought for 30 years. She wants it over. And somewhere inside the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, Christa Gail Pike, who walked out of those woods on the night of January 12th, 1995 with a piece of someone’s skull in her jacket pocket is now 50 years old.
She has been in that building for nearly three decades and the Tennessee Supreme Court is deciding whether she will die in that execution chamber on September 30th, 2026 or whether something will stop it. Tater-O Chip held Colleen Slemmer down while she was killed. He stood before the parole board in October 2025 and called himself idiotic.
His next review is October 2031. His parole eligibility date is December 8th, 2026. The same year the state of Tennessee plans to put his former girlfriend to death. Shedalla Peterson stood watch that night, turned informant, and walked out of court on probation. Is that justice? Or is something broken in how this case was decided?
