Christa Pike Final Hours | Tennessee Moves Forward With Her Execut!on in 2026 on De@th Row (U.S)

I knew from the beginning that I would be found guilty, and I knew from the beginning well, from the beginning of my trial that I would get the death penalty. I think I deserve to be in here for the rest of my life. I do. I know I do. I know I don’t deserve to be out walking around with everybody else in normal society.

I did something horrible that is unacceptable, and I realize that. But, I don’t deserve to die for the actions of three individuals when I’m only one person. She was 18 years old, 18, not a hardened career criminal, not someone with a long rap sheet, a teenager, a job corps student living in a dormitory studying computer programming, and on a cold, rainy night in January 1995, she led a classmate into the dark woods near the University of Tennessee campus and committed one of the most savage acts of premeditated

torture and murder this state has ever recorded. The victim was 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a young woman whose only sin, if you can even call it that, was talking to the wrong boy. The killer was Christa Gail Pike, and on September 30th, 2026, Tennessee intends to execute her, making her the first woman put to death in this state in over 200 years.

Hit subscribe, turn on the notification bell so you won’t miss our deep dive drops, and this is not a simple story. It is not a story with clean edges or easy answers. It is a story about a brutalized childhood, an act of almost incomprehensible cruelty, 30 years on death row, and a question that Tennessee and the rest of this country is still wrestling with.

 What do we owe a killer who was still, legally, a child? Stay with me because this one goes deep. Christa Gail Pike was born on March 10th, 1976 in Beckley, West Virginia. From the very first pages of her life, the story is is of abandonment, chaos, and neglect. Her mother, Carissa Hansen, struggled with alcoholism and drug dependency.

 By Krista’s own accounts and those of extended family members, Hansen consistently prioritized romantic relationships and substance use over parenting. An aunt later recalled that as an infant, Krista could be found crawling through piles of filth in the family home unsupervised while her mother continued drinking.

 Her parents’ relationship was fractured, marked by infidelity, separation, and a suicide attempt by her mother that ultimately ended the marriage for good. What followed for Krista was years of being shuttled between relatives, never staying in one place long enough to build anything resembling stability. By the age of nine, she was using marijuana.

 By 12, she was drinking heavily. The adults in her life were either absent, ineffective, or, in some cases, actively harmful. Court filings would later reveal that Krista experienced years of physical and sexual abuse during this period, trauma that went unaddressed, undiagnosed, and untreated. Her father eventually kicked her out of his home due to her drug use and failing grades.

 She was placed in a juvenile facility. She dropped out of school in the ninth grade. On paper, Krista Pike was exactly the kind of child that social systems are supposed to catch before the fall becomes fatal. Nobody caught her. What she did find during her time at the juvenile facility was information about Job Corps, a federally funded program designed to help low-income people build vocational skills and chart a path toward independence.

 It was, on its face, exactly the kind of opportunity that could have changed the arc of her life. She applied. She was accepted. In late 1994, at 18 years old, Krista Pike arrived at the Knoxville Job Corps Center in Tennessee. She enrolled in computer programming classes. She moved into campus housing. And for a moment, just a moment, it looked like things might be different. They were not.

The Knoxville Job Corps Center operated as a residential program. Roughly 90% of participants lived on campus, creating a small, insular world where relationships, friendships, rivalries, romances formed quickly and often intensely. On her first day, Krista was quiet, reserved, not particularly social, but sitting beside her in computer programming class was a 17-year-old boy named Tadrall Ship.

 He was the first person to speak to her. Within weeks, they were a couple, and what began as a connection rooted in shared loneliness quickly became something more consuming, more volatile. Both Krista and Tadrall developed an interest in the occult, in devil worship, in dark spiritual rituals. They wore pentagram necklaces.

 They spoke openly about their beliefs to anyone who would listen, and then Colleen Slemmer walked in. Colleen was 19 years old, originally from Orange Park, Florida. Her mother, May Martinez, had enrolled her in Job Corps, hoping the structure and training would help her get her footing after a rocky stretch in high school.

 Colleen arrived at the Knoxville Center about 3 months before Krista and had already built a small circle of friends, including Tadrall Ship. They were classmates. They were friendly. By all accounts, nothing more. But Krista saw something else entirely. In her mind, Colleen Slemmer was a threat. Every conversation Colleen had with Tadrall was evidence of betrayal.

 Every moment they shared was, in Krista’s interpretation, an act of deliberate provocation. Friends of Colleen’s later insisted to investigators that there was nothing romantic between them, that Colleen had no designs on Tadrall whatsoever. Krista would not accept that. The jealousy metastasized. It stopped being an emotion and started being a plan.

On January 5th, 1995, Krista confided in her friend Shadala Peterson, also 18, also connected to their occult circle, that she intended to kill Colleen Slemmer. She then told Tatro that their shared beliefs required them to escalate, that they needed to commit a human sacrifice, that Colleen would be the offering.

 Both Peterson and Shipp were reportedly hesitant, but both would ultimately agree to participate. What followed 1 week later would shock even the most seasoned investigators in Knox County. The night was cold and wet. At approximately 8:00 in the evening, Krista put her plan into motion. She had borrowed a box cutter from the job core center.

 She also carried a small utility knife. The method of luring Colleen out was almost cruel in its simplicity. They would offer her marijuana as a peace offering, a gesture of reconciliation. Colleen accepted. She believed they wanted to make peace. By every account, she was genuinely relieved that the tension might be ending.

 She left the dormitory willingly, walking alongside Krista, Tatro, and Shidala, heading down 17th Street toward the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus. Only three of them would walk back. The group arrived at a desolate stretch of land near an abandoned steam plant on the agricultural campus, far from the main university buildings, far from lights, far from anyone who might hear what was about to happen. Then Krista struck.

Without warning, she attacked Colleen, physically slamming her, using her as a punching bag while Colleen tried desperately to understand what was happening. When Colleen attempted to run, Tatro and Shipp chased her down and dragged her back. What followed lasted between 30 minutes and an hour. Colleen Slemmer was not simply killed that night, she was tortured.

 Krista and Tatro used the box cutter to slash her throat at least six times, deep wounds that cut through fat and muscle. They cut into her back with the utility knife. They forced her to remove her blouse and bra. They stuffed cloth into her mouth so she couldn’t scream. Forensic evidence would later confirm numerous defensive wounds on Colleen’s hands and arms.

 She fought back throughout the entire ordeal, right up until the end. At some point during the assault, Christa and Tinesha carved a pentagram, a five-pointed star, approximately 3 in in diameter, into Colleen’s chest. Colleen begged them to stop. Repeatedly, she begged for her life. They did not stop.

 Finally, Christa Pike reached down and picked up a large chunk of asphalt from the ground. She raised it and brought it down onto Colleen Slemmer’s head with enough force that the asphalt shattered into multiple pieces. She then used those pieces to continue the assault on the dying girl’s skull. Knox County Medical Examiner Dr. Sandra Elkins would later determine that the official cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.

 The groundskeeper who found Colleen’s body the following morning told investigators that she was so severely beaten he initially mistook her remains for the carcass of an animal. Before leaving the scene, Christa Pike reached down and broke off a fragment of Colleen Slemmer’s skull. She kept it in her jacket pocket. The group returned to the Job Corps Center at approximately 10:15 that night.

 Christa went directly to a classmate’s room, a young woman named Kim Iloilo. She told her she had just killed Colleen Slemmer. She pulled the piece of skull from her pocket and showed it around. As she described what had happened, she danced in circles. She smiled. She sang. The following morning, January 13th, 1995, two University of Tennessee grounds department employees discovered Colleen’s body near the campus greenhouses.

 36 hours after the murder, all three, Christa Pike, Tinesha Ship, and Shadalla Peterson, were arrested. Christa waived her Miranda rights almost immediately. She gave a recorded, detailed confession to criminal investigator Randy York, a document that ran to approximately 46 pages. In it, she acknowledged her role in the attack. Though she attempted to frame it as something that escalated beyond their original intentions, she claimed she and Tinesha had only meant to scare Colleen.

She claimed she heard voices. She described dissociative episodes. Those claims would be measured against everything else investigators had in front of them, the planning, the borrowed weapons, the explicit statements made to friends in the days before the murder, the piece of skull taken as a trophy, the dancing afterward.

 The evidence told a very different story. Subsequent DNA analysis confirmed that blood found on Tatro Ship’s clothing matched Colleen Slemmer’s genetic profile. The case against all three was overwhelming. Krista Pike’s trial took place in Knox County in March 1996. After only a few hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict on March 22nd, 1996.

Guilty on both counts, premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. Eight days later, on March 30th, 1996, Krista Gail Pike was sentenced to death by electrocution at 20 years old, 18 at the time of the crime. She became the youngest woman sentenced to death in the United States during the modern death penalty era.

 When the sentence was read, she collapsed. She cried uncontrollably. Tatro Ship was tried separately in January 1997. He was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy. Because he was 17 at the time of the crime, Tennessee law prohibited the death sentence for him, and he received a life sentence. His most recent parole review was denied with his next review scheduled for 2030.

Shadalla Peterson, who served as a lookout and ultimately cooperated with prosecutors as a witness, pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact. She received 6 years of probation. Three participants, three wildly different outcomes. For the next 30 years, Krista Pike lived in what her attorney Angela Berman described as a space the size of a parking space, a solitary confinement cell at the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville.

 She was the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. The isolation was, by any measure, total. For decades, she had virtually no interaction with the general population, no shared meals, no job, no sense of community or belonging. She was a category of one, isolated from other death row inmates because she was a woman, isolated from the general population because she was on death row.

During those years, her appeals moved slowly through the court system, each one ultimately failing. In 2001 and again in 2002, against the advice of her own lawyers, Pike actually asked the courts to stop her appeals and execute her via electrocution. An execution date was set for August 19th, 2002.

 She then changed her mind. Her lawyers fought to continue the appeals process, and a three-judge state panel ultimately allowed it to proceed. That temporary reprieve bought her more time, but the outcome never changed. In December 2008, her request for a new trial was denied. In 2016, a federal district judge rejected every remaining ground for appeal in a 61-page ruling.

In 2019, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld that decision. In 2022, a glimmer of hope emerged when the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life sentences for juvenile offenders could be unconstitutional. Pike’s lawyers used this to attempt to reopen her case in August 2023, arguing that her age and mental health history warranted reconsideration.

 In October 2023, Knox County Criminal Court Judge Scott Green denied the request, noting that the ruling applied specifically to juveniles, and Christa Pike, at 18, had been legally an adult. One year later, in September 2024, Pike reached an agreement with the state that finally granted her conditions comparable to male death row inmates, a job, shared meals with other incarcerated women, more time outside her cell.

 It was 30 years too late, depending on who you ask. Also, during those years, Christa Pike underwent what her attorneys characterized as a genuine transformation. She was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, conditions that went unrecognized for years. She converted to Buddhism and has maintained that faith through her remaining time on death row.

 In a 2023 letter, she wrote that she has changed drastically and that it sickens her now to think that someone as loving and compassionate as she has become had the capacity to commit such a crime. She also wrote, in her own words, “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. 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, someone’s sister, someone’s friend.” Whether that transformation matters, whether it changes anything, is the question Tennessee is still answering. The journey toward that transformation was not clean or linear. On August 24th, 2001, 6 years into her sentence, Christa Pike, allegedly with assistance from fellow inmate Natasha Cornett, attacked a fellow prisoner named Patricia Jones using a shoestring, nearly strangling her to death. Jones survived.

 Pike faced additional charges. Pike later claimed that Jones had spent years taunting and threatening her, making remarks about the electric chair, calling her degrading names. It does not excuse the act, but it adds texture to the environment Pike occupied, a world of constant psychological pressure with nowhere to go and no one equipped to help her process it.

This is also the attack that most complicates the narrative of transformation. Can a person who nearly strangled a woman to death in 2001 credibly claim to be a different person in 2026? Her attorneys say yes. Colleen Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has a different view. Martinez has followed every appeal, every hearing, every ruling.

 In an interview, she said simply, “For Christa to keep on having appeals and keep going back and forth with the court, it is hard. It really is. Once it’s completely done and everything is over with, it will be closed.” Colleen Slemmer’s skull fragment, by the way, was never returned to her mother for burial.

 Tennessee authorities kept it as evidence, stating it would remain in state custody until the case was fully resolved, until Christa Pike’s execution. On September 30th, 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued a death warrant for Christa Gail Pike. The execution was scheduled for exactly 1 year later, September 30th, 2026, at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, where Tennessee houses its execution chamber.

The court concluded that no legal reason existed to delay the sentence. Pike’s petition asking for a certificate of commutation based on the circumstances of her case was denied, an amicus brief filed by international human rights scholars in opposition to the execution was acknowledged and set aside. In January 2026, Pike filed a new legal challenge, this time targeting the execution method itself.

Tennessee updated its lethal injection protocol in December 2024, switching to a single-drug method using pentobarbital. Pike’s attorneys argued that given her documented medical conditions, including thrombocytopenia, a blood disorder, as well as her small veins, bipolar disorder, and PTSD, the method could cause a torturous death, potentially resulting in what the lawsuit described as bloody froth in her lungs.

 Her attorneys also raised a First Amendment argument. Tennessee’s protocol limits clergy access in the final 12 hours before an execution. That restriction, they argued, directly violates Pike’s Buddhist faith and her constitutional right to religious practice. Three men executed in Tennessee in 2025, Oscar Smith, Byron Black, and Harold Nichols, received exceptions to that blackout rule, Pike’s legal team argued she deserves the same.

The state responded in March 2026, contending that Pike had not adequately demonstrated that lethal injection presented a substantial risk of serious harm under the applicable legal standard. As of today, that legal challenge remains active. The clock is running. If Christa Pike is executed on September 30th, 2026, she will become the first woman put to death in Tennessee since 1820, more than 200 years ago.

She will be the 19th woman executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, and she will be executed for a crime she committed at the age of 18. Her co-defendant, who was 17 years and 8 months old at the time, will not be executed. Her other co-defendant spent 6 years on probation.

 Christa Pike will be put to death. This case does not offer easy comfort. Colleen Slemmer was tortured to death over the course of an hour by someone she had tried to befriend. She begged for her life. She was 19 years old. Her mother has waited 30 years for this to end. Christa Pike was an 18-year-old with documented mental illness, a lifetime of abuse, and a brain that neuroscience now tells us was not yet fully developed when she committed this act.

 She spent 30 years in conditions that a federal judge’s own appellate colleagues called into question. She is a Buddhist woman now, diagnosed and treated, by all accounts genuinely remorseful. None of that gives Colleen Slemmer back to her mother. None of it erases what happened in those woods on the night of January 12th, 1995.

 What it does is force all of us, the courts, the governor, the public, to sit with the full weight of what capital punishment actually means when it is applied to a case like this, not the clean theoretical version, the real one. Tennessee has a date, September 30th, 2026. Whether Christa Pike is alive on October 1st, 2026, may still be an open question, but the people who matter most, the lawyers, the courts, the governor, and above all, a mother in Florida named May Martinez, are watching every second between now and then.

That’s the full story of Christa Pike, one of the most complex and disturbing capital cases in Tennessee’s history. The execution date is set, the legal challenges are still live, and this case is not over yet. If you’re new here, welcome.