Christa Gail Pike had been waiting to die for more than 30 years when she received her first lethal injection.
After the second dose, she was still waiting.
Pike was set to become the first woman executed in the US state of Tennessee in more than 200 years, and the only person executed in the state’s modern death penalty era for a crime committed at just 18 years of age.
But on Wednesday night, local time, having refused her last meal, the 50-year-old received two doses of pentobarbital at a maximum security prison in Nashville and did not die.
Instead, witnesses were ordered to leave the facility, the curtain was drawn on the execution chamber, and Pike was rushed to a nearby hospital for “life-saving” medical care, according to her legal team.
WKRN journalist Tori Gastner, a witness of five Tennessee executions to date, spoke outside the prison shortly after emergency services were called.
“Nothing about today was normal, typical, at all,” Ms Gastner said.
“She was clearly alive, she was clearly still breathing … we could all hear that.”
Media witnesses recounted the moments before the execution of Christa Pike was halted. ( AP: George Walker IV)
Pike’s legal team has since called for an emergency stay of execution.
Previously, they had argued Pike’s “small veins” and other medical conditions made lethal injection a more risky procedure.
“I’ve felt more love in the last two weeks than I have my entire life,” she wrote in a letter sent to NBC News earlier this week.
“I’m not afraid to die. I’m only nervous about the process.”
Two teens at a Tennessee training program
In January of 1995, Pike and Colleen Slemmer were students at the Job Corps Center in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Ms Slemmer was 19, originally from Florida.
She was sweet and helpful, volunteering to paint her school and at Special Olympics compeтιтions, her mother, May Martinez, said.
This undated pH๏τo provided by May Martinez shows her daughter, Colleen Slemmer. (AP: May Martinez)
“She worked with the handicapped children at lunch and … made sure they could get around,” she told local outlet The Nashville Banner.
She could take a computer apart and put it back together, and often wore a “Computer Geek” T-shirt.
That apтιтude for technology prompted her grandfather to suggest she start taking computer courses at Job Corps.
Job Corps was marketed as a “government-run residential program designed to help troubled teens gain job skills”, according to court documents.
Pike, then 18, was enrolled in a nursing course at the same centre.
By that time, she had already experienced a lifetime of abuse.
Court filings noted she had been exposed to alcohol in utero, something which left her with severe brain damage and limited impulse control.
Christa Pike, seen in a pH๏τo released by Cornell Law School. (Supplied)
More records showed severe neglect, alleged repeated Sєxual abuse, and drug use from as young as nine years old.
“The Job Corps was an opportunity for Christa to ‘make something’ of herself and to make her parents proud,” a court peтιтion said.
Instead, the program allegedly “tolerated violence and neglected” its residents.
“Students routinely carried razor blades or box cutters for protection,” documents said.
“The administrators at Job Corps created an environment in which Christa was forced to rely upon her family’s earlier teachings.
“Violence is always the answer.”
Pike ‘just felt mean that day’
On January 11, 1995, Pike told another student, Kim Iloilo, she wanted to kill Ms Slemmer.
She “just felt mean that day”, she said.
Pike believed Ms Slemmer had been “trying to get [her] boyfriend”, a 17-year-old called Tadaryl Shipp.
Witnesses later said Shipp, another Job Corps student, and Pike had a tumultuous, controlling and physically abusive relationship.
Tensions had been building for some time between Pike and Ms Slemmer.
At 8pm the next day, the pair were seen walking away from the Job Corps building, along with Shipp and another student, Shadolla Peterson.
Pike had asked Ms Slemmer to come with her to a music store.
She added they were also going to get drugs, which Pike said were hidden in nearby Tyson Park, just minutes away from the University of Tennessee campus.
At 10:15pm, Pike, Shipp and Peterson returned without Ms Slemmer.
Christa Pike talked investigators through what had happened. (Reuters: IMAGN Images)
“Later that night, Pike went to Iloilo’s room and told [her] she had just killed Slemmer,” Supreme Court documents said.
“[She said] she had brought back a piece of the victim’s skull as a souvenir.
“Pike showed Iloilo the piece of skull and told her that she had cut the victim’s throat six times, beaten her, and thrown asphalt at the victim’s head.
“Pike told Iloilo that the victim had begged … but Pike did not stop because the victim continued to talk.”
The next morning, she told Ms Iloilo the piece of Ms Slemmer’s skull was still in her pocket.
At a class later that day, she pointed to brown spots on her shoes, saying, “that ain’t mud on my shoes, that’s blood”.
She described the killing again to another student, showing off the skull fragment again.
At the same time, a University of Tennessee Grounds Department employee had discovered Ms Slemmer’s body.
The employee later said her body was “so badly beaten that he had first mistaken it for the corpse of an animal”.
By January 14, police had identified and interviewed Pike.
She told them everything.
Decades in a cell ‘smaller than a parking space’
Pike was the only offender capitally charged in the murder of Ms Slemmer.
Her boyfriend, Shipp, just a few months younger than her and therefore a minor at the time of the crime, received a life sentence.
The other teen, then-19-year-old Peterson, received probation in exchange for testifying against Pike and Shipp.
Peterson testified she had not participated in the killing, but had acted as a lookout.
A Supreme Court judge stated Pike showed “a total disregard for human life and human suffering”.
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As the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, Pike has spent “22 to 23 hours a day in a room smaller than a parking space”.
Her cell inside a Nashville women’s prison has a small window in the door for light, a narrow bed, a desk, a bookcase and a toilet.
“Ms Pike’s cell has one outward-facing slit in the wall, three to four feet tall and three to four inches wide,” a court filing said.
“If she tilts her head slightly, Ms Pike can see the outside world.”
A last-ditch plea for ‘mercy’ before execution given green light
After years of attempted appeals and last-ditch efforts, Pike’s final request for clemency was denied on September 28.
Her lawyers had filed a 226-page plea earlier this year, detailing Pike’s early abuse, her actions behind bars, and pleading for “mercy”.
This pH๏τo of a young Christa Pike was shared by her legal team as part of a final clemency request. (Supplied)
“There is a picture of Christa as a child I think often about,” her ᴀssistant post-conviction defender, Randall Spivey, wrote.
“She is outside, her curly red hair is slightly blown by the wind. She has big brown eyes, and her mouth is drawn тιԍнт in a straight line.
“[I] think of this picture because I know it was taken about the time Christa was first Sєxually abused.”
More than 100 organisations and experts had also called on Governor Bill Lee to commute Pike’s sentence to prison without parole.
A last-minute reprieve was granted by an appeals court just an hour before the execution was set to go ahead.
This was later overturned by the US Supreme Court at 6pm, local time, without an explanation.
Botched execution attempt and ’emergency’ medical care
Shortly before 7pm, local time, media witnesses reported Pike said her last words, stating she was ready to be “free”.
“At 7:34 she said, ‘my arm feels like it’s about to burst open,'” journalist Tori Gastner told waiting media, flipping through pages of notes.
“Then she smiles really big … her [spiritual] advisor says ‘relax’, she says ‘I’m trying’.
“The curtains closed first at 7:46, and she was clearly still alive … breathing and snoring.
“The curtains opened again three minutes later, she was snoring very loudly at that point. The curtains close again at 8.05.”
Emergency vehicles left Riverbend Maximum Security Insтιтution after the execution was halted. (AP: George Walker IV)
The curtains remained closed despite repeated requests from media for them to be reopened.
“[That was] because we could still audibly hear her snoring, and we were looked at like, ‘uh, we don’t know,'” Ms Gastner said.
Media were escorted out at 8:53pm while Pike was still making noises out of sight.
Pike’s execution is now at least the second botched attempt in Tennessee this year, following an hours-long lethal injection attempt in May.
In that attempt, death row inmate Tony Carruthers was given a one-year reprieve after the execution team was unable to complete a back-up IV line or a central line.
According to Carruthers’s legal team the execution team punctured him more than a dozen times while trying to complete the attempt.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center lethal injection has the highest rate of being botched of any execution method.
Will Pucket, a journalist from Knoxville outlet WVLT, said the execution seemed “very out of sorts” from early on.
“Her lip quivered at one point, it sounded like she was choking,” he said, adding Pike lifted herself up multiple times after the drug was administered.
The Tennessee Department of Corrections later issued a statement saying it stood by the “consistently effective” lethal injection protocol followed.
But on Thursday, Governor Bill Lee suspended all scheduled executions in Tennessee and ordered an independent review of the second failed attempt to execute Pike.
“This is a tragedy,” he said. “There is no-one who wanted last night to happen.”
Pike remained in a critical condition on Thursday, Mr Spivey told reporters
“We don’t have a sense of her prognosis or much update on her health at the moment,” he said.
“But we do know that she is alive right now and receiving life-saving medical care.”
‘Every day, every hour, every minute, she’s gone’
Ms Slemmer’s mother, Ms Martinez, travelled from Florida to Nashville to attend the execution.
“I’ll hold Colleen’s picture up to remind her of what she did,” Ms Martinez told local outlet WBIR earlier this week.
“Saying something and talking to her now, after all these years, that she never apologised … what’s the point?”
September 20, 10 days before the execution was set to go ahead, would have been Ms Slemmer’s 51st birthday.
“[Colleen’s] not with me,” Ms Martinez said.
“Every day, every hour, every minute, she’s gone.”
Ms Martinez did not speak to media after leaving the facility. Neither did Department of Corrections officials.
💔 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.
