Christa Pike is set to be executed on Wednesday and has reportedly told the people closest to her that she doesn’t want them to witness the execution.
Christa Pike, 50, is due to die by lethal injection on September 30 in Tennessee. Over 30 years have pᴀssed since she was sentenced for killing her classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
She’s made it clear she doesn’t want her loved ones present when the execution happens, says her friend Ashlee Sellars.
The two met while Sellars was serving time for a robbery-murder and talked for years through the meal flaps in their cell doors on the high-security unit.
Sellars now works in justice reform advocacy and has spent a long time trying to square the woman she knows with the crime Pike committed as a teenager. She doesn’t downplay what happened to Slemmer, however.
“People want to know that everyone’s life matters, right? They want to know that Colleen’s life mattered,” she told the BBC.
“Christa, in this moment, I think she is fighting much more for her life to matter than she is to actually live.”
What happened in 1995
Pike was 18 when she, her boyfriend at the time Tadaryl Shipp, and another student, Shadolla Peterson, lured Slemmer to an isolated spot near the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus and stabbed her to death.
Pike got the death sentence, while Shipp, who was 17 at the time, got life with a chance at parole instead, since he couldn’t legally be sentenced to death as a minor. Peterson testified against both of them and got six years’ probation.
Pike will be the first woman executed by the state of Tennessee in over 200 years.
A last legal push to save Pike’s life
Pike’s lawyers tried to fight for her life by filing a 226-page clemency peтιтion with Governor Bill Lee, arguing Pike’s childhood, marked by abuse, rape, neglect and abandonment, was never properly laid out to the jury that sentenced her, which Governor Lee refused.
Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in prison, and her team also raised PTSD as a factor tied to the significant amount of trauma she had to go through.
The legal team has also separately asked for an all-female team to carry out the execution, saying being handled by male officers could retraumatize her given her history. Tennessee has agreed that female officers will transport her and that it will try to keep female staff present, but it hasn’t guaranteed the whole process will be women-only.
The Tennessee Supreme Court has already rejected challenges to the execution. Pike’s team says they’re not done trying.
Just days before this latest request about her loved ones being absent from the execution, Pike spoke on camera for the documentary ᴅᴇᴀᴅ Woman Walking: Pike Vs Tennessee.
In it, she said she still thinks about Slemmer’s mother.
“I’ve always felt bad for her mother, that I took someone’s child, someone’s sister, someone’s friend away,” she said.
“I feel remarkably remorseful for what I did.”
💔 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.
