A federal appeals court halted Christa Gail Pike’s execution Wednesday morning, about an hour before Tennessee was scheduled to put her to death for torturing and murdering a 19-year-old classmate in 1995.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit granted Pike, 50, a stay “until further order” shortly before she was due to receive a lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Insтιтution in Nashville, according to a court order obtained by PEOPLE.
The 2-1 majority said it needed time to consider whether Pike’s latest filing should return to federal district court as a motion to reopen her earlier habeas proceedings or be treated as a second habeas peтιтion subject to strict legal limits.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(749x0:751x2)/christa-pike-093026-8626d70f4a344768827ba5a8f02adee2.jpg "Execution Paused at Last Moment for Christa Pike, Tennessee’s Only Woman on Death Row")
Pike’s attorneys argue that Tennessee recently reversed its previous position that she fabricated her Sєxual abuse. They contend that the state’s acknowledgment of her history of child Sєxual abuse and rape “erodes the foundation” of earlier state-court proceedings and raises questions about the integrity of the subsequent federal proceedings, the order states.
The state argues that Pike is attempting to relitigate an ineffective-ᴀssistance-of-counsel claim based on her trial attorneys’ alleged failure to investigate or present evidence of her abuse.
Tennessee quickly asked the U.S. Supreme Court ro vacate the stay and allow Pike’s execution to proceed, according to The New York Times.
The Tennessee Attorney General’s Office called the dispute a “technical issue” and vowed to “advoate for the lawfully-imposed sentence,” the Times reported. In its filing, the state argued that its “strong interest in finality and the surviving victims’ right to closure” required the stay to be rejected.
“The interests of justice and the finality of Pike’s impending execution compel the entry of a short stay of execution in order to properly analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments and resolve the issues on the merits,” Circuit Judge Jane Stranch wrote in the majority order. Judge Karen Nelson Moore concurred.
Circuit Judge Richard Griffin dissented, calling Pike’s filing “another last-ditch meritless effort to delay a lawful execution” and arguing that it should be dismissed as a successive habeas peтιтion.
Pike had been scheduled to die at 10 a.m. CDT, or 11 a.m. EDT. Execution witnesses had already gathered at the prison when the order was issued around 9 a.m. local time, according to the ᴀssociated Press.
It was not immediately clear when the Sixth Circuit would decide the underlying motion.
If executed, Pike would be the first woman put to death by Tennessee in at least 200 years. She would also be the only person executed by Tennessee in the modern death-penalty era for a crime committed at age 18, according to court documents previously obtained by PEOPLE.
The last-minute reprieve came after the U.S. Supreme Court denied Pike’s request for a stay Tuesday evening. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee had denied her clemency peтιтion Monday, saying he would uphold her death sentence “after deliberate consideration,” according to NBC News.
Before Lee announced his decision, Pike wrote in a letter shared with the outlet that she had accepted either outcome.
“Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace,” Pike wrote. “I am not afraid to die. I’m only nervous about the process.”
Pike was sentenced to death for the January 1995 murder of fellow Knoxville Job Corps student Colleen Slemmer.
Pike was 18 and Slemmer was 19 when Pike, her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and their friend Shadolla Peterson lured Slemmer to a wooded area of the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus on Jan. 12, 1995, PEOPLE previously reported.
Pike believed Slemmer was trying to “steal” Shipp, although people who knew Slemmer denied that she was interested in him, per earlier PEOPLE coverage.
Before leaving the Job Corps campus, Pike armed herself with a box cutter and small meat cleaver. Pike and Shipp attacked Slemmer while Peterson acted as a lookout. Slemmer was tortured, cut with the box cutter and beaten with a large piece of asphalt. Shipp later acknowledged that he carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest, the AP reported.
Pike took a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a souvenir and later showed it to other students, according to court documents.
Pike was convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder in 1996. Shipp, who was 17 when Slemmer was killed, received life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only defendant sentenced to death.
Peterson received six years of probation after pleading guilty to being an accessory after the fact, per earlier PEOPLE coverage.
Pike does not deny killing Slemmer, but her attorneys have argued that she should instead spend the remainder of her life in prison because of her age at the time of the murder, mental illness and history of severe Sєxual abuse.
Pike was Sєxually ᴀssaulted by her grandmother’s boyfriend before she entered preschool, raped by a neighbor when she was 11 and raped by a stranger at 17, according to court records obtained by USA Today. She was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Pike’s current lawyers say jurors who sentenced her to death did not hear the full extent of her history of abuse and neglect, according to NBC.
The Tennessee Attorney General’s Office has not disputed that Pike experienced abuse. However, the office argued that a judge had already found it speculative whether the state’s lethal-injection protocol would cause her greater psychological harm, according to NBC News.
“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid,” Pike said in a statement included in her clemency peтιтion, according to the AP. “It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected.”
“I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend,” she continued. “It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”
Slemmer’s mother, May Slemmer Martinez, supports Pike’s execution. She and her husband traveled from Florida to witness it, the AP reported.
💔 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.
