Christa Pike

Christa Pike
Born	Christa Gail Pike (1976-03-10) March 10, 1976 Beckley, West Virginia, U.S.
Criminal status	Incarcerated on death row
Motive	Jealousy
Conviction(s)	3 counts
Criminal penalty	Death by lethal injection
Details
Date	January 12, 1995 (Slemmer) August 24, 2001 (Jones)
Country	United States
State(s)	Tennessee
Location(s)	1995: Knoxville 2001: Nashville
Killed	Colleen Slemmer
Injured	Patricia Jones
Weapons	1995: Box cutter, meat cleaver and chunk of asphalt 2001: shoe-string
Date apprehended	January 14, 1995 (1995-01-14)

Christa Gail Pike (born March 10, 1976) is an American convicted murderer who is on death row in Tennessee. She was sentenced to the death penalty for the murder of 19-year-old Job Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer in 1996. She is one of the youngest women to receive a death sentence in the United States.

Pike was scheduled to be executed on September 30, 2026 after the U.S. Supreme Court said the state was able to go forward with it. However, Pike survived two doses of lethal injection, and was later hospitalized in critical condition.

Pike's sentence remains controversial: some experts have said that her legal defense failed to present evidence at the trial: The defense did not talk about the effect of her youth and childhood trauma on her decision-making abilities. Pike's lawyers said that this evidence would have been relevant for the jury to decide whether she should have been sentenced to death.

Childhood

Christa Pike had a difficult childhood. Christa's parents were married, but later divorced. After her mother had made a suicide attempt , they married again. They often did not care enough about their child. Pike was raised by her grandparents. She was twelve at the time. Reporting by Liliana Segura of The Intercept found that a neighbor raped her when she was eleven. She tried to kill herself when she was twelve. In 1991 she was sent to a Juvenile Evaluation Center in Swannanoa, North Carolina after being placed on probation for breaking into a community center to steal candy. In her teenage years she often came in contact with violence: sometimes people were violent against her, at other times she was violent towards people.

Murder of Colleen Slemmer

In 1995, when she was 18, Pike murdered her 19-year-old Job Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville. Pike and two friends led Slemmer into the woods where they tortured and killed her.

In 1996, at the age of 20, Pike was sentenced to the death penalty. She is one of the youngest women to receive a death sentence in the United States. If the execution is successfully carried out, she will be the 19th woman executed nationwide since 1976 and the first woman executed in Tennessee in 206 years.

2001 attack

On August 24, 2001, Pike was accused of attacking and attempting to strangle fellow inmate Patricia Jones with a shoestring. Jones had been serving a life sentence for the 1994 murder of 84-year-old Alberta Coker in Knoxville at the time of the attack. Pike claimed she was trying to protect another inmate. Pike was convicted of attempted first degree murder on August 12, 2004.

Attempted prison escape

In March 2012, it was revealed Pike had made escape plans involving corrections officer Justin Heflin as well as Donald Kohut of New Jersey. Kohut, a personal trainer in his 30s, began writing letters to Pike around the beginning of 2011. By July of that year, Kohut was making the nearly 1,700 mi (2,700 km) round trip from Flemington, New Jersey, to Nashville, Tennessee, to visit Pike in person once or twice a month. Eventually, Kohut wrote an escape plan to Pike and had the help of corrections officer Heflin, who agreed to participate in return for cash and gifts.

Failed execution

She was scheduled to be executed on September 30, 2026. The execution went wrong and Pike survived two doses of the lethal injection. As of October 1, two of Pike's attorneys state that she is in critical condition. On October 2, Pike's lawyers said that she was unconscious and connected to a ventilator and that both of her arms were swollen, blistered and burned. On October 4, she had not woken up. About a week after the execution, Pike's lawyers said she was awake again, but that her treatment had to continue.

President Donald Trump talks about the failed execution during a speech on October 1, 2026

National consequences

After hearing that the execution had gone wrong, the governor of the state, Bill Lee ordered that there should be no more executions in the state, in 2026. He also ordered an independent investigation, to find out what went wrong.

On October 3, 2026, three days after the failed execution, Lee announced that Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada had submitted his resignation and would leave office later that month. Strada was the head of the state's prison system. He had headed the department since January 2023 and had overseen both unsuccessful execution attempts in Tennessee during 2026.

International reactions

The failed execution led to international reactions. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk called for the cancellation of Pike's execution, saying that "the death penalty has no place in any society". Amnesty International called on Lee to commute the death sentences of Pike and all other prisoners on death row in Tennessee.