Christa Gail Pike, 50, is set to be executed later today, September 30, after spending three decades on Tennessee’s death row.
And he has already made one striking decision about her final hours.
Executions involving women are extremely rare in the United States. Since the death penalty returned in 1976, just 18 women have been executed out of more than 1,600 people put to death across the country.
That alone has put plenty of attention on Christa Pike’s case.
Pike, 50, is set to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. The state has carried out 17 executions in the modern era, but none of them involved a woman.
The West Virginia native was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of fellow student Colleen Slemmer, who was 19 at the time. Pike was just 20 when she was convicted of the killing.
Pike was convicted of killing Slemmer after becoming jealous over her boyfriend at the time, Tadaryl Shipp, who was 17. Prosecutors said Pike believed Slemmer was interested in him.
The killing involved a box cutter, a cleaver and a piece of asphalt. Pike also cut Slemmer’s throat and carved satanic symbols into her body before reportedly keeping part of her skull.
For years, her attorneys have fought to stop the execution, raising arguments about her mental health and religious beliefs as they made repeated attempts to spare her life.
Those efforts continued right up until the final hours. Governor Bill Lee rejected Pike’s request for clemency after reviewing her case, while the U.S. Supreme Court also declined to step in and halt the execution less than a day before it was due to take place.
With those final appeals exhausted, Pike is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at 10 a.m. CDT at Riverbend Maximum Security Insтιтution in Nashville
Christa Pike refuses a final meal
According to the Tennessee Department of Correction, Pike has chosen not to have a final meal following the governor’s decision.
Tennessee is among the states where death row inmates can request a special final meal, although their choices are subject to certain restrictions.
In Tennessee, a death row inmate’s final meal is served at midnight on the night before the scheduled execution.
According to a redacted version of the Tennessee Department of Correction’s lethal injection protocol released in 2025, the meal is served at 12:00 a.m., with all utensils and any leftover food then removed from the inmate’s cell.
That means if Pike had accepted a final meal, she would have eaten it just hours before her scheduled 10 a.m. execution.
But Pike is far from the only death row inmate to reject the traditional final meal.
Another death row inmate refused his final meal
Wesley Ira Purkey was 68 when he was executed by lethal injection in 2020, after spending 16 years on death row.
Purkey had been sentenced to death for the kidnapping, rape and murder of 16-year-old Jennifer Long in 1998.
Before his execution, Purkey reportedly requested pecan pie for his final meal — but asked prison officials to save it for later.
There would, of course, be no later meal.
Purkey had reportedly approached Long outside a grocery store before forcing her into his pickup truck and taking her to his home, where she was raped and killed.
He later used a chainsaw to dismember her body and partially burned the remains before burying them in a septic pond in Clearwater, Kansas. Her remains have never been recovered, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Purkey was also convicted of killing 80-year-old Mary Bales, whom he had gone to visit under the pretense of repairing a kitchen faucet. He beat her to death with a claw hammer, and neighbors later reported seeing him trying to burn her body.
He was sentenced to death in January 2004.
But details surrounding Purkey’s own death later drew attention.
An autopsy found that he had suffered severe bilateral acute pulmonary edema, with fluid present in his trachea and main airways.
Medical experts said the condition would have caused fluid to rapidly build up in his lungs, producing a sensation similar to drowning. One expert described the experience as potentially among the most painful sensations a person can endure.
The findings raised renewed questions about what some prisoners may physically experience during lethal-injection executions.
💔 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.
