Christa Pike Faces Execution After She Tortured and Murdered 19-Year-Old Colleen Slemmer at 18….

that you shall be put to death by electrocution, [laughter] in the manner prescribed by law. That you shall be transferred to the custody of the warden at the Tennessee Prison for Women. And further, on the 12th day of January, 1997, your body shall be subjected to shock by sufficient current of electricity.  May God have mercy upon you.

Ms. Pike, we have to stop talking now.  Can I please have a lawyer? Before I go.  Ms. Pike, we have to stop talking to the doctor.  [laughter]  Please. , a woman is scheduled to die inside a small room in Nashville, Tennessee.

 Barring a stay, an injunction, or a governor who suddenly finds his voice, she will be the first woman the state of Tennessee has put to death since 1819. Not since before the Civil War. Not since before Tennessee had a working railroad. 207 years. That woman is Christa Gail Pike. She is 50 years old now.

 She has spent almost 30 of those years locked inside a cell roughly the size of a parking space. And for most of that time, she was the only woman in the entire state under sentence of death, which meant she served her time completely alone. No day room with other women. No shared meals. No one who understood what it meant to wait for a date the way she was waiting.

 As of the day we’re recording this, that date is less than 4 months away. This isn’t a story about whether Christa Pike did what she was convicted of doing. She did it. There’s no ambiguity there. No wrongful conviction angle. No last-minute DNA revelation waiting in the wings. What happened to 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer on a cold night in January 1995 was real and it was horrific.

 And we’re going to walk through what the record actually shows. But this is also a story about three people who did the same thing on the same night and about how one of them is scheduled to die in less than 4 months, while another one just walked into a parole hearing. It’s a story about what happens to a person’s mind after 25 years of near total isolation, about a lethal injection protocol currently being challenged in the state’s highest court, and about a botched execution 2 months ago that may end up deciding whether Krista Pike’s

death sentence gets carried out on schedule at all. If you’re new to this channel, we’re True Crime Matters and we cover cases the way they deserve to be covered, slow, careful, and fair to the people whose names get attached to them forever. Hit subscribe if that’s the kind of channel you want more of.

 Now, let’s get into it. Before anything else, you should know who Colleen Slemmer was because so much of what’s been written about this case treats her as a footnote to somebody else’s story. She was born in September of 1975 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and raised mostly in Orange Park, Florida by her mother, May Martinez, and her stepfather.

 By every account her mother has ever given, Colleen was an easy kid to love. She had a soft spot for children with disabilities, going back to when she herself was 8 years old. Not because a teacher assigned it or a program required it, but because that’s just who she was drawn to helping. She liked routines. She liked being outside.

Family members remember her lacing up roller skates most weekends without fail. She also had a head for computers at a moment in the mid-1990s when that wasn’t yet the universal skill it is now. It was specific. It was technical and it pointed toward something. College was the obvious next step.

 Except college costs money and her family didn’t have much of it sitting around. So, Colleen did what a lot of working-class kids did in that era. She found Job Corps, the federally funded vocational training program that promised a trade and a paycheck in exchange for a couple years of your life. The problem was that her local Job Corps center down in Jacksonville didn’t offer computer training.

 The Knoxville, Tennessee center did. So, in September of 1994, an 18-year-old girl packed up and moved 800 miles from home, alone, chasing a skill that might actually get her somewhere. She lasted about 3 months there before everything was taken from her. Her mother still lives with the aftermath every day.

 In interviews given years later, May Martinez has talked about the piece of her daughter’s body that was never returned to her, a fragment of skull that Krista Pike carried off from the scene as a kind of trophy. It’s still sitting in a state evidence room. It can’t be released while the case is still open and the case won’t be closed until an execution happens or doesn’t.

 So, for three decades, this woman has been unable to fully bury her own child. There’s a detail from later coverage that sticks with me more than most. In 2020, 25 years after the murder, May Martinez was still giving interviews about her daughter, still fighting for something close to closure. She told a Knoxville TV station that she wanted one of two things, either the execution carried out or a life sentence.

 And either way, she wanted the rest of Colleen back so she could finally bury her whole. 25 years, and she was still asking for that. As of this recording, she still hasn’t gotten it. That’s the piece of this story that tends to get lost. Keep her in mind, we’re coming back to her. Now, here’s the part where I have to be careful, because the instinct in true crime content is either to turn the killer into a monster with no history, or to turn her into a victim whose crime somehow makes sense once you hear the backstory. Neither is honest. What the

court record actually shows is a documented, verified history of harm done to Krista Pike before she ever set foot in Knoxville, and it doesn’t cancel out what she did to Colleen Slemmer. Both things are true at once. Krista Gail Pike was born prematurely in March of 1976 in Beckley, West Virginia. Her mother drank through the pregnancy, and kept drinking afterward even once doctors flagged that her infant daughter was having severe seizures.

 Forensic evaluations submitted decades later during her appeals identified an actual structural abnormality in Pike’s brain. Not a personality quirk, not a bad attitude, but physical, documented damage in the region tied to impulse control. She was born with it. She was never treated for it. Home wasn’t a refuge.

 Her parents married, split, remarried, split again. Relatives who testified at trial and in later proceedings described a household so neglected that as a small child she was found crawling through animal waste on the floor with no adult stepping in. Her father was mostly absent, and when he was around, court filings describe him whipping her with a belt hard enough and often enough that it left a pattern, according to filings her legal team later submitted to federal courts.

By the time she turned 18, Krista Pike had been raped at least twice and physically abused by at least seven different people. Family, their partners, people who drifted through the house. Some of those filings suggest the abuse started when she was as young as 2 years old. The one person who seems to have actually loved her without complication was her paternal grandmother.

 When that grandmother died in 1988, Krista was 12. She tried to kill herself not long after. Nobody around her did much of anything about it. Her mother introduced her to marijuana as a young teenager. She ran away from home repeatedly, sometimes monthly, and cycled through 12 different schools before finally getting her GED in 1993. At 15, she was picked up for breaking into a place to steal food while she was on the run, and she did a stint in juvenile detention because of it.

It was in that juvenile facility, oddly enough, that she first heard about Job Corps. In late 1994, 18 years old, she enrolled at the center on Dale Avenue in Knoxville, hoping to train as a nursing assistant. She showed up carrying an entire childhood’s worth of untreated trauma and undiagnosed illness.

 The psychologist who evaluated her for trial, Dr. Eric Engum, would later testify that she suffered from severe borderline personality disorder. Bipolar disorder and PTSD diagnoses came even later. None of it had been named or addressed by anyone in a position to help before she arrived in Knoxville. That’s simply what the record shows.

It’s worth sitting with that for a second because it explains something about how the case would later be argued without excusing anything about what happened. Advocacy groups who’ve since taken up her cause have pointed to the fact that Pike’s jury in 1996 never heard the full picture. Not the documented brain damage, not the years of sexual abuse, not the childhood diagnoses that hadn’t been made yet because no one had ever bothered to look.

 Her trial attorney has been described by her later legal team as unprepared to make that case to a jury deciding whether she lived or died. Whether that would have changed the outcome is something nobody can answer now. What’s not in dispute is that the information existed and the 12 people who sentenced her to death never got to weigh it.

 None of that erases what she did in those woods. It’s simply the other half of a record that for 30 years most retellings of this case have left out entirely. At Job Corps, Pike met a 17-year-old from Memphis named Tederrel Ship. He dropped out of school in ninth grade, had some history with gang involvement back home, and had come to Knoxville on his mother’s urging to study culinary arts.

 He and Pike became a couple almost immediately and what they built together went beyond typical teenage romance. They shared a fascination with the occult and Satanism that by multiple accounts Ship had been into since he was around 10 years old. He kept a small shrine in his dorm room. He gave Pike a nickname, his little devil.

 The fourth person in this circle and the one whose role gets overlooked most often was 18-year-old Shadolla Peterson who’d come up from Cleveland, Tennessee. She ran with both of them. Sometime that fall Pike became convinced that a fellow student, Colleen Slemmer, had her sights set on Ship. There was no actual basis for this.

 Everyone who knew Colleen, every single person who spent real time with her has said the same thing. It wasn’t true. There was no relationship, no flirtation, nothing. But for a teenager carrying untreated bipolar disorder, unaddressed trauma, documented brain damage, and a history of violence stretching back to early childhood, the truth of the accusation mattered less than the feeling behind it. That jealousy built for weeks.

 On January 11th, 1995, 1 day before the murder, Pike told a friend named Kim Illoilo plainly that she planned to kill Colleen Slemmer. When Illoilo asked why, Pike didn’t cite the jealousy, didn’t cite a specific fight or confrontation. She said she just felt mean that day. Illoilo brushed it off as talk. She would carry that decision for the rest of her life.

 I’m going to walk through this part carefully because the details matter for understanding the legal case, but I’m not going to linger on it longer than necessary. On the evening of January 12th, 1995, before leaving the dormitory, Pike pocketed a box cutter and borrowed a small meat cleaver. Four people signed out of the dorm log together that night.

Pike, Ship, Peterson, and Colleen Slemmer. Pike told Colleen she wanted to make peace between them and offered to share some marijuana. Colleen agreed to come along. The group walked from the Dale Avenue dormitory, through the Cumberland Avenue strip, past Tyson Park, and onto a wooded unlit stretch of the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus near an abandoned steam plant.

 No street lights, no witnesses, nowhere to run to. Once they arrived, Pike turned on Colleen. Ship joined in. Peterson stood watch. For roughly 30 minutes, Colleen was beaten and cut. She tried to run at one point and was dragged back. She begged them to stop, promised she’d tell no one, offered to just go home to Florida. By Pike’s own recorded statement to police, the more Colleen talked, the angrier it made her.

 “It’s harder to hurt somebody when they’re talking to you,” she’d say later, describing her own thinking in the moment. Both Pike and Ship carved a pentagram, one into her chest, one into her forehead. When Colleen still hadn’t died, Pike picked up a piece of broken asphalt from the ground and struck her skull with it until the bone gave way.

That was what finally killed her. Pike then reached into the wound, took a fragment of bone, and put it in her jacket pocket. The three walked back to the dorm. That same night, Pike went straight to Kim Iloilo’s room, pulled [clears throat] the bone fragment out of her pocket, and described what she’d done. She showed no distress.

 Over the following day, she carried the fragment around campus and showed it to other students like it was something to be proud of. At around 8:00 in the morning on January 13th, a University of Tennessee grounds employee was walking the agricultural campus near the greenhouses when he came across what he first assumed was a dead animal in the underbrush.

 He got closer and realized it was a person. He would later testify that the injuries were severe enough that he genuinely could not tell at first glance that he was looking at a human being. Officers found Colleen Slemmer’s body face down in dirt and debris, her clothing torn away and scattered nearby. A pool of blood collected about 30 ft off.

 The pentagram carving was discovered once the body [music] was cleaned for examination. This was not a fight that spiraled. The medical examiner’s catalog of wounds made that clear on its own. Detective Randy York of the Knoxville Police Department caught the case, and the dormitory sign-out log did most of the early work for him.

 Four names out, three names back, at roughly 10:15 that night. Within 2 days, investigators picked up Krista Pike. She waived her rights without hesitation and gave a full taped confession. Though in that first version, she claimed the plan had only been to scare Colleen and that things had gotten out of control. The wound pattern on Colleen’s body told a different story and so did the skull fragment detectives recovered exactly where witnesses said it would be.

 In Pike’s jacket pocket. Shadola Peterson cooperated with investigators from the start. Her account gave prosecutors an eyewitness who’d been present the entire time. Both Pike and Ship were charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy. Ship, only 2 months past his 17th birthday on the night of the crime, was tried as an adult.

 Pike’s trial opened in Knox County Criminal Court in March of 1996. The prosecution had the confession, the skull fragment, the sign-out log, DNA evidence, and testimony from Kim Eilo describing both the warning the day before and the bragging the night of. The defense leaned on Dr. Engum’s testimony about Pike’s severe borderline personality disorder, arguing she’d acted out of a break in control rather than calculated planning.

 The jury took 2 and 1/2 hours to convict her on both counts. Eight days later, Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz sentenced her to death by electrocution plus 25 years for the conspiracy charge. She was 20 years old at that point, the youngest woman ever sentenced to death in the United States. The jury had found the murder especially heinous and had found it was committed in part to prevent arrest or prosecution and decided those factors outweighed anything the defense had offered.

There’s a detail from that sentencing that later became its own small piece of evidence in the ongoing debate over her case. On the day she was sentenced, Pike wrote a note to Tattersall Ship. It survives in the case file. In it, by most accounts, she wasn’t remorseful. She was almost boastful about what had happened.

 Prosecutors would point to that note for years afterward as proof of exactly who they believed they’d convicted. Someone who understood precisely what she’d done and felt nothing about it. Her current legal team doesn’t dispute that the note exists. They argue instead that a 20-year-old writing something like that in 1996, deep in an abusive relationship and years away from any mental health treatment, isn’t the same person sitting in a cell in Nashville three decades later. The state disagrees.

 That disagreement, in one form or another, is what’s been argued in courtrooms ever since. Ship went to trial separately in January of 1997 and was also convicted of first-degree murder. But because he was 17 at the time, a juvenile under the law, the death penalty was off the table, no matter what a jury decided.

 He was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, plus 25 years consecutive for conspiracy. Peterson pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact and received 6 years of probation. She served no prison time at all. Same night. Same woods. Same victim. One death sentence. One life sentence with eventual parole.

 And one clean walk out the courtroom doors. The entire disparity comes down to a single fact that had nothing to do with what any of them actually did that night. Christa Pike was 18 years old and Tattersall Ship was 17. On the day she was sentenced, Pike was moved to what’s now the Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center outside Nashville.

Because Tennessee doesn’t house condemned women with the general population and because for most of the next three decades she was the only condemned woman in the entire state, that placement meant something specific. She was structurally isolated. Male death row inmates in Tennessee could eat together, hold jobs, move around the unit with good behavior.

 Pike had none of that. Her legal team would later describe her living conditions in a federal lawsuit as de facto solitary confinement. Not handed down as punishment for anything she’d done inside, but simply because there was no one else like her to house her with. That isolation lasted a little over 25 years and it did not pass quietly.

 One of her attorneys, describing the physical space years later, called it a cell roughly the size of a parking space and said Pike had nearly no meaningful human contact for the better part of three decades. However you feel about what she did to earn a death sentence, it’s worth understanding what that kind of isolation actually does to a person over time.

 The researchers who study long-term solitary confinement consistently describe a specific and predictable deterioration, paranoia, memory problems, a loosening grip on ordinary reality, sometimes psychosis. Whether any of that shaped the decisions she made inside prison over the following decades is something her attorneys have raised in litigation more than once.

 Her appeals process was, by her own lawyers’ description, chaotic. Filed, dropped, refiled. In 2002, against her attorneys’ advice, she asked the court to drop her appeal altogether and requested execution by electrocution. A date was set for August of that year. Then she changed her mind. Her lawyers fought to keep the appeal alive, lost that motion, and then 17 days before she was set to die, a state appeals panel intervened, and the execution didn’t happen.

 In 2001, she was involved in the attempted strangulation of a fellow inmate, Patricia Jones, using a shoestring. Jones survived, barely. Prison phone recordings later captured Pike telling her mother she’d do it again if the woman came near her. She was convicted of attempted first-degree murder in 2004, adding 25 years onto a sentence that, by definition, she was never going to serve in full.

 Her state appeals ran out for good by 2008. The case moved into federal court, dragged through years of review, and in 2019, the Sixth Circuit unanimously found nothing unreasonable in how Tennessee’s courts had handled it. In 2011 and 2012, a man who’d been writing to her from New Jersey and a corrections officer he’d bribed were caught planning to help her escape. Both were arrested and charged.

Pike stayed exactly where she was. The one thing that actually changed came in September of 2024. After years of litigation over her living conditions, a settlement was reached that finally gave her the same behavior-based privileges the men on death row had. Time out of her cell, a work assignment, meals shared with a small group of other women.

 Her attorney said at the time that she was adjusting to no longer being completely alone, while noting she remained deeply isolated as the only woman under a death sentence in the state. 12 days later, that changed, too, in a different and far more permanent way. On September 30th, 2025, 1 year to the day before her scheduled execution, the Tennessee Supreme Court signed the order.

 Pike had exhausted the standard three-tier appeals process, the court found, and nothing remained to stop the sentence from being carried out. Her request to have the sentence commuted had already been denied. If it happens, Christa Pike becomes the first woman executed in Tennessee in over 200 years, and the only person executed in that state for a crime committed at 18 since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970s.

Here’s where the timeline gets strange, and where the disparity from 1996 comes roaring back into relevance. Exactly 1 week after that order was signed, on October 8th, 2025, Tater Rell Ship, the man who held Colleen Slemmer down while she was killed, sat before the Tennessee Board of Parole for the very first time.

30 years into his sentence, it was his first shot at freedom. He appeared remotely from Northwest Correctional Complex in Tiptonville. He told the board he’d met Pike when she first arrived at Job Corps, that he’d comforted her the first time he saw her crying, that he’d been drawn into Satanism as a teenager, and now called that whole period of his life idiotic.

He said he’d never denied what he did. Board member Tim Gobble wasn’t moved. In the recorded hearing, he told Ship directly that this was one of the more horrendous cases he’d ever reviewed, and that the torture involved shocked the conscience. He voted no. The full board upheld that decision on October 20th, 2025, and set his next review for 2031.

 So, the man who held her down gets to try again for parole. The woman is scheduled to die. Same crime, same night, different birth years by a matter of months. It’s also worth remembering what happened to the third person in those woods. Shadola Peterson, who [clears throat] stood watch while Colleen was killed, has had almost no contact with the justice system since the day she walked out of court on probation back in 1996.

No follow-up hearings, no parole boards, no public reckoning. She served her 6 years, presumably completed them, and by every indication has lived the last three decades as a private citizen. Whatever she’s built for herself since then, the record simply doesn’t show it because there was never a reason for the state to keep looking.

 Set the three of them side by side and you get something that’s hard to square with the idea of proportional justice. One woman scheduled to be strapped to a gurney, one man who gets another shot at freedom every few years for the rest of his natural life, and one woman who was never really punished in any lasting sense at all.

 Pike’s attorneys have made exactly this argument in court filings. Not that she’s innocent, not that what she did wasn’t monstrous, but that the size of the gap between her sentence and her co-defendant’s sentences has nothing to do with what any of them actually did in those woods, and everything to do with circumstances of birth, timing, and who agreed to testify against whom.

Since that execution date was set, Pike’s legal team hasn’t stopped filing. In January 2026, her attorneys brought a lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s current lethal injection protocol, a single drug, pentobarbital, replacing the three-drug method the state used between 2018 and 2020.

 There are three separate arguments in that filing, and each one is worth understanding on its own. The first is medical. Pike has a documented blood clotting disorder called thrombocytopenia, along with veins her attorneys describe as unusually difficult to access. An anesthesiologist retained for the case has stated in writing that the pentobarbital protocol would very likely cause pulmonary edema, fluid and blood collecting in the lungs during the drug’s effect.

 Her lawyers have put it bluntly, this would mean she drowns in her own blood while it happens. The second argument is about the state’s isolation policy in the run-up to an execution. Tennessee’s protocol imposes a mandatory 14-day isolation period before a lethal injection unless the condemned person actively chooses electrocution instead.

 Pike’s team argues that forcing someone to select their own method of death just to avoid two extra weeks of solitary confinement after she’s already spent 25 years in de facto isolation amounts to cruel and unconstitutional pressure. The third argument is about religion. Over her decades on death row, Pike converted to Buddhism.

 Tennessee’s protocol reportedly bars her Buddhist spiritual advisor from the execution chamber and cuts off all contact with him during a 12-hour blackout window before the execution. Her attorneys have pointed out that three men executed in Tennessee during 2025, Oscar Smith, Byron Black, and Harold Nichols, were each granted exceptions to exactly that blackout, allowing contact with their own spiritual advisors.

 Pike has been offered no such exception. The Byron Black case hangs over all of this. Before his execution in August of 2025, Black brought a nearly identical challenge and briefly won a temporary injunction at the trial court level. The Tennessee Supreme Court reversed it and publicly reprimanded the judge who’d granted it, saying he’d overstepped his authority.

 Black was executed days later. Witnesses reported he groaned during the procedure and was heard saying it hurt badly while a heart device implanted in his chest had reportedly not been deactivated beforehand, despite warnings from experts that it could repeatedly shock him during the injection. That reversal is part of why Pike’s case is no longer sitting in a local courtroom.

 In May 2026, following a rule change adopted in the wake of the Black litigation, her challenge was transferred directly to the Tennessee Supreme Court, the only venue now permitted to hear disputes over the timing or method of an execution. As of this recording, that challenge is still unresolved. There’s a second, smaller legal fight running in parallel that’s worth mentioning, because it says something about how much of this process the public is actually allowed to see.

 A group of Tennessee news organizations sued the state separately, arguing that media witnesses should be allowed to observe the condemned person from the moment they enter the execution chamber, rather than being brought in only once the person is already strapped down. A judge granted a temporary order in their favor at the start of this year.

 The State Supreme Court blocked it a few months later, and the older, more limited protocol is still what governs witness access today. Whatever happens on September 30th, the earliest and most difficult minutes of it are not something the public will be allowed to see. On May 21st, 2026, at the very same facility where Pike is scheduled to die, the state attempted to execute a different death row inmate named Tony Carruthers, convicted in a 1994 triple homicide out of Memphis.

Executioners established a first IV line without much trouble. The backup line, required under the state’s own protocol, was another matter entirely. Over more than an hour, the execution team tried his arms, his hands, his feet, his neck, and attempted a central line into his chest.

 Witnesses in the room described him groaning in pain. His attorney, present for the whole thing, called it a tortured and botched execution. The physician contracted by the state to attempt that central line later admitted under oath he hadn’t performed the procedure in over a decade. Just after 1:00 that afternoon, Governor Bill Lee granted a one-year reprieve.

 The execution had failed outright. What came out in the days afterward made it worse, not better. The physician the state had contracted to attempt the central line admitted under oath that he hadn’t performed that specific procedure on a living patient in 13 years. Caruthers’ attorneys alleged he was punctured more than a dozen separate times over the course of the attempt before anyone in the room called it off.

 The ACLU, which had been representing him, called the whole event botched and torturous in a public statement and used it to renew a years-old demand for DNA testing they say could clear him entirely of the original 1994 murders. An independent review that followed reportedly found the state hadn’t fully tested its own medical staff’s qualifications before putting them in that room.

 Weeks later, a group of Republican state senators, not exactly a constituency known for sympathy toward death row inmates, publicly called on Governor Lee to investigate what they described as the incompetent administration behind the failure. Pike’s attorneys had filed their motion warning of exactly this outcome months earlier, that the state lacked properly trained and licensed personnel to carry out lethal injection safely, and that her own medical conditions made a catastrophic failure not just possible, but foreseeable. What

happened to Tony Caruthers on that gurney was, almost word for word, the scenario they’d already put in writing. In [clears throat] June 2026, her legal team went back to the Tennessee Supreme Court and asked for something new, the appointment of an independent special master to actually investigate whether the state’s current protocol could be carried out on Pike without producing the same result.

 Reporting since then suggests state officials still haven’t answered basic questions about the physician involved in the Caruthers attempt and that the governor’s office has stayed largely silent on what happens next for the remaining scheduled executions this year, Pike’s among them. A public effort called Mercy for Krista has spent the past several months petitioning Governor Lee directly, asking him to use his sole constitutional authority to commute her sentence to life without parole.

 The argument isn’t that she’s innocent, it’s that she was a documented abuse survivor with an untreated brain injury and mental illness the original jury never heard about in full, that she was in an abusive relationship with the co-defendant who is still alive and still eligible for release and that executing her while he remains on a path to parole isn’t proportionate to what either of them actually did.

 As of the most recent reporting, no formal clemency petition has moved through the governor’s office and his team has made no public statement on the case. His attorneys have noted that Tennessee governors typically don’t engage with clemency requests until an execution date is locked in, which for Pike it now has been for months.

 Governor Lee’s public posture is a strange thing to watch unfold in real time. He’s spoken openly on multiple occasions about his Christian faith shaping how he approaches his job. People close to the process have suggested privately that he’s uncomfortable presiding over executions at all and yet aside from the reprieve he granted within hours of watching Tony Caruthers punctured more than a dozen times on a gurney, he has said almost nothing publicly about the three executions still scheduled to take place in Tennessee before the year is

out. One in August, Pike’s in September, and a third scheduled for December. His office hasn’t responded to repeated media requests asking whether those dates still stand, whether the state has fixed whatever allowed the Carruthers failure to happen, or whether he intends to weigh in on Pike’s case at all before the clock runs out.

 So, that’s where this stands as we’re recording. September [clears throat] 30th, 2026, is closing in. It’s the same execution chamber where a man was strapped down for over an hour 2 months ago while a team searched unsuccessfully for a vein. It’s [clears throat] a lethal injection protocol currently sitting in front of the state’s highest court with no ruling yet.

 It’s a governor who granted a reprieve within hours for one inmate and has said nothing at all about another. And on the other side of the state, in a different prison, Tater Rell Ship, who held Colleen Slemmer down while Christa Pike killed her, is currently serving a sentence with another shot at freedom sitting on the calendar for 2031.

He’ll have outlived his own conviction’s harshest possible outcome. She may not get the chance to. Colleen Slemmer never got to finish that computer training. She never got to go back to Florida. Never got to help another kid the way she’d been helping kids since she was 8 years old.

 Her mother has spent 30 years without a piece of her daughter’s remains sitting in a state evidence locker unreachable until this case is finally closed one way or another. Whatever happens on September 30th, that’s the part of this story that shouldn’t get lost underneath the legal filings and the protocol challenges and the countdown clock.

 A 19-year-old girl went for a walk in the woods because she was told it was a chance to make peace. She never came back. If you want to see how this ends, whether the execution happens on schedule, whether the Tennessee Supreme Court intervenes, whether the governor ever says a word, subscribe because we’ll be covering it as it happens all the way to September 30th and whatever comes after it.