Christa Pike, the convicted murderer whom Tennessee tried and failed to execute, was in the hospital receiving life-saving care on Thursday, her lawyers revealed.
Pike is the only person ever to survive lethal injection, and is now in critical condition and may have suffered brain damage, attorney Randy Spivey said.
The all-female execution squad injected her two times Wednesday night with the sedative pentobarbital — with each dose meant to be fatal.
Pike, 50, was set to become the first woman executed in Tennessee for over 200 years but was instead rushed to Vanderbilt University Hospital from the Riverbend Maximum Security Insтιтution in Nashville after the botched execution attempt.
“What we have been told is that she is in critical condition, receiving lifesaving care,” her attorney Randy Spivey told a press conference.
It was unclear Thursday whether she could face execution again.
Spivey called for Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) –– who announced a halt on executions and a “comprehensive, third-party review” after the second failed execution in the state this year –– to commute Pike’s sentence for the savage torture murder she committed in a jealous rage in 1995.
“The governor’s call for an independent review does not go far enough,” Spivey said in response.
“After having endured solitary confinement for more than 20 years, and a full attempt to kill her by lethal injection, Christa has endured punishment greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty.
Meanwhile, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who is the GOP nominee to become the Volunteer State’s next governor, called for Tennessee to bring back the electric chair for executions.
“While there should be a thorough review of what happened and why the process failed, the answer is simple: bring back the electric chair and deliver justice for these victims swiftly,” Blackburn wrote on social media.
“As your governor, I will do just that.”
Pike was strapped to the table for an hour as medical staff jabbed her with at least seven needles, one of which was bent when it came out of her arm, according to her attorneys.
In a previous statement on Wednesday, Pike’s legal team blamed the fiasco on “difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy.”
“My arm feels like it’s about to bust. One spot is really throbbing,” Pike said, according to witness Tori Gessner, a reporter with WKRN.
Pike’s legal team claimed she had even tried to help her executioners perform their grim task after expressing fears previously that they would have difficulty with the injection.
“It took an hour despite the fact that Ms. Pike was not just cooperative, but was trying to help instruct the people placing the IV lines where they could find them (her veins),” Stephen Ferrell of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee said.
“She over and over again said ‘Please try up on my shoulder higher. Please try here, I think it will be okay.’”
Ferrell said Pike’s history of Sєxual abuse would have made the ordeal even more horrific.
“That was her biggest fear as the survivor of Sєxual abuse, that she would be pinned down, prodded, poked, cut, for a prolonged period of time” he said.
Pike’s execution had been due to take place at 10 a.m. CDT but with just an hour to go, the Court of Appeals ordered a stay in relation to Pike’s claim that Sєxual abuse and rape she suffered as a child was not properly considered when she was sentenced.
The US Supreme Court lifted the stay on Wednesday evening, clearing the way for her execution.
Tennessee changed from its previous three-drug lethal injection protocol to a single drug, pentobarbital, in 2024.
It came two years after the state admitted it had failed to test its legal injection drugs properly.
In May, the execution of Tony Carruthers –– a death row inmate convicted of a triple kidnapping and murder in Memphis in 1994 –– also had to be halted in Tennessee.
Carruthers’ sister filed a complaint with the Tennessee Department of Health in July against the doctor who attempted to administer the lethal injection.
The complaint claimed Carruthers suffered excruciating pain and been left partially paralyzed due to a stroke.
Pike murdered her 19-year-old Jobs Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer in a fit of jealousy in Jan. 1995 because she believed the victim was trying to steal her boyfriend, prosecutors said.
The then 18-year-old, her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and her friend Shadolla Peterson, also 18, lured Slemmer to an isolated area of the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus to torture and kill her.
Peterson acted as a lookout while Pike and Shipp carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest with a boxcutter, beat her with a meat cleaver and repeatedly slashed her throat while she pleaded in vain for her life.
At the end of the horrific ordeal, which investigators said lasted at least half an hour, Pike murdered Slemmer by bashing her head in with a large chunk of asphalt and then kept a piece of her skull as a souvenir.
Pike was sentenced to death following her trial in 1996, while Shipp was sentenced to life in prison because he was a juvenile at the time and Peterson received probation for being an accessory after testifying against the pair.
While on death row, pike was further convicted of attempting to murder a fellow inmate by strangling her with a shoestring in August 2001 and had 25 years tacked onto her sentence.
Then, in March 2012, a plot to spring her from the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville, involving a corrections officer and a New Jersey personal trainer who Pike was in a relationship with, was thwarted.
The last woman to be executed in Tennessee was Martin Eve, who was charged with being an accessory to murder and executed by hanging in 1820, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
💔 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.
