Christa Pike has spent nearly 30 years waiting to be executed for a brutal murder she committed at 18. Now, with her death scheduled for Sept. 30, her lawyers have made one deeply personal request about the people who will be in the room when she dies.
On March 30, 1996, Christa Pike, only 20 at the time, stood before a Tennessee judge and cried quietly as she waited to learn her fate.
“It is ordered that you shall be put to death by execution as prescribed by law,” the judge told her.
At the time, Tennessee used the electric chair, and the judge continued by telling Pike she would be “subjected to shock by sufficient current of electricity that you shall die.”
“May God have mercy upon you,” the judge added.
As Pike’s crying intensified, she turned toward her mother sitting behind her in the courtroom and pleaded for one final moment together.
“Can I please hug my mom before I go,” she begged. “Please, just let me have a hug. I love you.”
She was taken away and never had the chance to hug her mom.
Nearly three decades later, Pike is 50 and Tennessee’s only female death-row prisoner, with her execution by lethal injection scheduled for 10 a.m. on Sept. 30.
Murdered at 19
Pike was just 18 when she committed the crime that put her there.
On Jan. 12, 1995, Pike and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, attacked 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer after luring her to a secluded area near the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus in Knoxville.
The teenagers knew each other through the Knoxville Job Corps, where Pike had become convinced that Slemmer was interested in Shipp, according to USA Today.
Slemmer was beaten, cut and killed during a prolonged attack, while another teenager, Shadolla Peterson, was also present. Shipp carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest, and Pike kept a piece of her victim’s skull as a souvenir, later showing it to students.
Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, making her the youngest woman sent to Tennessee’s death row.
Shipp, who was 17 when Slemmer was killed and therefore ineligible for the death penalty, received a life sentence. Peterson testified against the pair and received probation.
If Pike’s execution proceeds, she will become the first woman Tennessee has put to death in more than 200 years. She would also be the only person executed by the state in the modern death-penalty era for a crime committed at 18, 19 or 20.
Yet as the date approaches, Pike’s lawyers are asking to replace her death sentence with life in prison without parole, arguing that the jury responsible for deciding whether she should live or die never heard crucial evidence about the childhood that preceded her crime.
Years of abuse
According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), Sєxual abuse started when she was about 5 years old and continued at different points throughout her childhood.
At 11, she was raped by a neighbor, who “was not given prison time and moved back into his home, just a minute down the block,” leaving the child “to walk by his house every day to get to school.”
And then, at 17, almost exactly one year before Slemmer’s murder, Pike was attacked and raped by a stranger while walking to a store.
Pike was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, conditions her attorneys say went undiagnosed at the time of her trial.
“None of the rapes, none of the Sєxual abuse as a child, were introduced,” clemency lawyer Kelleigh Gleason told the Guardian. “Trial counsel were aware of most of that – it was documented by law enforcement – but they chose not to use it.”
Her legal team has also challenged Tennessee’s lethal-injection protocol, arguing that Pike’s medical conditions create an increased risk of complications and that the circumstances surrounding the execution could severely retraumatize her.
For Pike, those concerns have led to one final request.
Request for women in death chamber
If attempts to stop the execution fail, Pike’s lawyers have asked Tennessee to ensure that only female corrections officers are present in the death chamber, the Guardian reports.
The request is directly connected to her history of Sєxual violence at the hands of men and the fear that being restrained while staff prepare her body for lethal injection could force her to relive that trauma in her final moments.
Tennessee has not guaranteed that her request will be granted.
It leaves Pike facing the terrifying possibility that male corrections officers could be involved as she is restrained and prepared for the lethal injection that will end her life.
For now, that decision remains unresolved, while the execution that Pike first heard a judge pronounce nearly 30 years ago continues to move closer.
“What awaits [Ms. Pike] is not only death…It is, for Christa, a form of dying that is uniquely and needlessly cruel. And it is avoidable,” trauma expert Dr. Bethany Brand, who examined Pike, told DPIC.
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💔 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.
