Christa Pike was convicted of another heinous crime while in prison that most people don’t know about
While already on Tennessee’s death row for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, Christa Pike was involved in a second serious act of violence.
According to the Tennessee Department of Correction, while incarcerated, Pike was convicted of attempted first degree murder in the ᴀssault on inmate Patricia Jones in 2001.
Court docs from the Court of Criminal Appeals state that the incident took place at the Tennessee Prison for Women, now known as the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center.
Because of a fire in the prison’s maximum-security unit, several inmates were evacuated from their cells.
After Pike, Patricia Jones and another prisoner, Natasha Cornett, were placed together in a recreation cage, an argument developed between Jones and Cornett.
Jones testified that Cornett attempted to strike her but missed. As Jones prepared to fight Cornett, Pike came up behind Jones and began choking her. Jones eventually lost consciousness.
Christa Pike, 50, survived a botched execution attempt on Wednesday (Tennessee Department of Corrections)
The evidence presented at Pike’s later trial indicated that Pike used a heavy shoe or boot lace to strangle Jones.
Prosecutors argued that the attack amounted to a premeditated attempt to kill her, as Pike disputed that interpretation, maintaining that she had intervened to protect Cornett from Jones.
Court records discussed recorded telephone conversations made after the attack, and in one conversation with her mother, Pike said that she had ‘premeditated the hell out of this’.
Evidence also indicated that Pike believed Jones would have died had the strangulation continued for approximately another thirty seconds.
These statements supported the prosecution’s argument that Pike intended to kill Jones rather than merely stop a fight.
Jones survived the attack and Pike was convicted of attempted first-degree premeditated murder, receiving an additional 25-year prison sentence.
Pike’s legal team argued that her death sentence was disproportionate due to her severe childhood trauma (Knox County Sheriff’s Department)
The death row inmate, now 50, survived two rounds of lethal injection drugs of pentobarbital on Wednesday (30 September), and was subsequently hospitalised for life-saving medical care.
But any second execution attempt could face significant consтιтutional challenges, according to Charley Dugdale, ᴀssociate Head of Law and ᴀssociate Professor at St Mary’s University Twickenham.
“If she survives and becomes medically stable, she would remain under her existing death sentence unless it was overturned or commuted. At the time of writing, her precise medical condition has not been publicly confirmed,” she tells LADbible.
“The execution date set by the Tennessee Supreme Court has now pᴀssed. Tennessee could not simply return Pike to the execution chamber whenever it chose.
“A new execution date would need to be lawfully set by the Tennessee Supreme Court before the state could make another attempt, and it would be difficult to seek another date before the comprehensive third-party review was completed. Given the unusual circumstances, the precise procedure may itself become the subject of legal argument.”
Why Pike is on death row
Pike was sentenced to death for the murder of Colleen Slemmer (Find a Grave)
At the age of 18, she carried out what a judge called the ‘horrific’ and ‘brutal’ murder of Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville in 1995.
Pike and two friends lured the 19-year-old into the woods, where they beat, tortured, and killed her. Pike was sentenced to death when she was 20 a year later.
Tennessee Supreme Court docs obtained by news.com.au state that Pike ‘told her friend Kim Iloilo, who was also a student at the facility, that she intended to kill another student, Colleen Slemmer, because she ‘had just felt mean that day’.
“Pike went to Iloilo’s room and told Iloilo that she had just killed Slemmer and that she had brought back a piece of the victim’s skull as a souvenir,” the documents state.
“Pike said that a pentagram had been carved onto the victim’s forehead and chest. Iloilo said that Pike was dancing in a circle, smiling, and singing ‘la, la, la’ while she related these details about the murder.
“When Iloilo saw Pike at breakfast the next morning she asked Pike what she had done with the piece of the victim’s skull. Pike replied that it was in her pocket and then said, ‘And, yes, I’m eating breakfast with it’.”
Pike’s legal team argued that her death sentence was disproportionate due to her severe childhood trauma.
Featured Image Credit: Tennessee Department of Corrections
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
