CHRISTA PIKE’S NO CLEMENCY FINAL HOURS BEFORE EXECUTION |TRUE CRIME 2026

CHRISTA PIKE’S NO CLEMENCY: FINAL HOURS BEFORE EXECUTION | TRUE CRIME 2026

Clemency denied for Christa Pike, the next person set to be executed in Tennessee. She is set to die on Wednesday for the 1995 killing of Colleen Slemmer. News 2’s Kelly Milin spoke with Colleen’s mother. When May Martinez talks about Colleen, she doesn’t begin with the crime. She begins with her daughter.

“Colleen was a person that enjoyed life. She did all kinds of roller skating. She did work with the handicapped, eating lunch every day in school. She was very, very easygoing and just always smiling, as you can see by her pictures.”

Colleen was 19 when she was killed in Knoxville in January 1995. Prosecutors said Christa Pike and two accomplices lured her into a wooded area. Pike and her then-boyfriend tortured and beat Colleen, eventually cutting her multiple times and killing her. Pike was 18 when she told prosecutors she believed Colleen was trying to steal her boyfriend. After the brutal murder, Pike took a piece of Colleen’s skull back to campus and bragged about it.

Colleen’s mother has spent years fighting to get that fragment back so she could bury her daughter whole. “Because maybe now finally we have justice, and it might not bring my daughter back, but it might save another person from getting killed because she will do it again.”

Pike’s attorneys say her childhood was marked by abuse. They say she was raped as a toddler, and throughout her childhood, she was repeatedly verbally, physically, and sexually abused by men, usually by the boyfriends or husbands of her mother and grandmother. “If anyone would have done anything to help me, to get me psychological help or anything, maybe something would have been different.”

Pike’s attorneys have asked Governor Lee for clemency. The governor said in a statement today, “After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene.”

“And I was listening to the whole thing when they’re protesting, saying that she’ll never get to see her family, and she’ll never get to have a meal and everything, and I guess so he never gets either.”

Christa Pike’s execution is scheduled for 10:00 a.m. Wednesday at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. If it goes forward, Pike would be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. News 2’s Tori Guestner will be a witness to the execution, bringing you coverage all afternoon. Bob and Haley, she asked the police if they had any suspects.

In less than 24 hours, Tennessee plans to carry out a death sentence against a woman for a crime she committed at 18. To some, that is justice 31 years overdue. To others, it is the state ending the life of a girl it failed to protect long before she ever harmed anyone. Both sides agree on one fact: Tennessee has not executed a woman in more than 200 years.

This is the latest in the case of Christa Gail Pike. On Monday, Governor Bill Lee refused to spare her life. The Tennessee Supreme Court has already turned her away. Her attorneys have one move left: an emergency request to the United States Supreme Court. If it fails, the sentence will be carried out Wednesday morning at 10:00 inside Riverbend Prison in Nashville.

Her supporters have taken their case to the world. Human rights experts at the United Nations have called for her sentence to be commuted. Advocacy groups argue she was barely out of childhood when the crime took place. On the other side stands one woman. Her name is May Martinez. She has spent 31 years waiting for this week.

She has driven more than 8 hours from Florida to Nashville, and she intends to be there when the sentence is carried out. She says she will bring a photograph of her daughter. When people argued that Christa Pike will never see her family again, May Martinez answered in a single sentence. She said her daughter never did either.

For 31 years, one name has filled the headlines, and it isn’t the victim’s. Her mother says it feels as though Colleen was never there. We don’t think that’s right. If you believe Colleen Slemmer deserves to be remembered, subscribe to this channel and stay with us to the end. And tell us in the comments where in the world you’re watching from.

The clock is running, and very little stands in its way. The last door inside the Tennessee state government closed on Monday, September 28th. Governor Lee released a statement only a few lines long. He said he had given Christa Pike’s request for clemency deliberate consideration, reviewed the case thoroughly, and would not intervene. There was no press conference and no explanation beyond that. The sentence handed down by a Knox County jury in 1996 would stand.

That clemency request was not a short letter. Pike’s legal team had filed a petition running more than 200 pages. It laid out her life in detail, including records, medical diagnoses, and letters from people who had known her before 1995. None of it moved the governor.

Within hours, her attorneys responded. Steven Ferrell of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, along with Kelly Gleason and Randy Spivey of the State’s Office of the Post-Conviction Defender, issued a joint statement. They said they were heartbroken. They also made clear they were not finished and promised to keep fighting through every avenue still open.

Very few avenues remain. Days earlier, the Tennessee Supreme Court had delivered its own answer. Pike’s lawyers had asked the court to halt the sentence, arguing that the state’s lethal injection process would amount to cruel and unusual punishment in her specific case. They pointed to a blood condition called thrombocytosis. They argued that her history of trauma would turn the procedure itself into a form of suffering the Constitution forbids.

The justices were not persuaded. They agreed with the findings of the court-appointed special master and denied the stay. So on Friday, September 25th, her attorneys went over Tennessee’s head entirely. They filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court of the United States, asking the justices to stop the sentence and hear her case. The filing argued she had been denied the chance to gather the evidence needed to prove her claims.

That request is now the last legal barrier left. The clock is measured in hours, and the justices have not yet ruled. Outside the courtrooms, the pressure has been building for months. Amnesty International issued an urgent appeal asking people around the world to write to the governor. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asked the United States not to carry out the sentence.

In Nashville and Chattanooga, opponents of the death penalty organized marches and rallies. A virtual vigil is scheduled to begin at 9:00 tomorrow morning, one hour before the scheduled time. One protester, Bethany Man, reminded the crowd that Tennessee was about to execute a woman for the first time in over two centuries. If the sentence goes forward, Christa Pike will also become only the 19th woman executed in the United States in the modern era of capital punishment.

And for the first time in years, the woman at the center of it all has been speaking. In the months before her date, Christa Pike gave interviews from prison for a documentary titled Dead Woman Walking: Pike Versus Tennessee. She described waking up every day knowing what was coming. She also spoke about the family of the young woman whose life she took.

She said she had always felt bad for Colleen’s mother. She acknowledged that she had taken away someone’s child, someone’s sister, and someone’s friend. Her attorneys say that remorse is real. They say the woman facing this sentence is not the teenager who walked into that courtroom in 1996.

May Martinez does not see it that way. She has heard the calls for mercy. She has heard the arguments about age, trauma, and second chances. In her view, too much has already been given. In the same documentary, she pointed out that Pike had spent the past year and a half outside her death row cell, living among the general prison population. She said Christa Pike should not be given any kind of privilege.

Getting to Nashville was not simple for her. May Martinez lives outside Jacksonville, Florida. Earlier this month, she reached out to a consumer reporter at First Coast News for help covering the cost of the trip. After her story aired, the community responded. With help from the Justice Coalition of Jacksonville, more than $2,500 was raised so that she and her family could make the drive.

On Monday afternoon, the same day the governor announced his decision, they were already on the road. She arrived in Tennessee carrying 31 years of waiting. When a reporter from WBIR asked what this week meant to her, she did not begin with Christa Pike. She began with Colleen. And she said that maybe now, finally, there would be justice.

Tonight, two women are waiting on the same decision. One is inside a Tennessee prison waiting to learn whether nine justices will give her more time. The other is in Nashville waiting to see the sentence carried out for a daughter who never came home. Tomorrow morning at 10:00, one of them will get the answer she has been waiting for.

To understand how Christa Pike reached this moment, you have to look at a side of her that almost no one saw. For years, one man in New York had a window into her world. He called himself Richie Carlos. He wrote from Yonkers, a city just north of Manhattan. Beginning in the late 1990s, not long after she arrived on death row, he and Christa Pike started exchanging letters. The correspondence continued into the early 2000s.

Pike had no reason to doubt who he was. She should have. His real name was Richard Dickstein. He and his wife Barbara had a hobby few people would understand. They wrote to notorious inmates across the country. Their letters were designed to find whatever an inmate was missing and offer it: company, attention, affection. When it worked, the inmates wrote back, and the Dicksteins kept everything they received.

According to the man who now owns the collection, the name Carlos was believed to be Dickstein’s mother’s maiden name. He used several different names over the years. With Christa Pike, it worked. Her letters grew warmer as the years passed. She sent him photographs of a family member. She pressed lipstick kisses onto the paper. At one point, she mailed him a lock of her long auburn hair. In one note, she apologized for being such a poor pen pal. She was a young woman in her early 20s, writing from a cell to a man who did not exist.

The letters also recorded how she reacted to the world around her. In April of 2000, Tennessee executed Robert Glenn Coe. It was the state’s first execution in four decades. Pike had followed his case closely. Earlier that spring, she told Richie she believed authorities had convicted the wrong man and pressured Coe into a confession. When she learned his final stay had been lifted, she wrote to Richie again. The fate of a man she had never met had shaken her deeply.

Two years later, after her own court date took an unexpected turn, she typed a letter on stationery decorated with a long-stemmed red rose. She admitted her mind was in turmoil. She said she never expected her own date to come so fast. Then came the last item in the collection. It was a Christmas card signed with the word “eternally.” Inside, she had tucked a cartoon, a piece of dark humor aimed at the very punishment she had been sentenced to.

The Dicksteins’ collection did not stay with them. It was acquired by Dr. David Adamovich of Freeport, New York, one of the country’s best-known collectors of what the trade calls “murderabilia”—items tied to notorious crimes. The Pike letters are only a small part of what he owns. This September, as her date approached, he allowed WBIR in Knoxville to publish them.

According to Adamovich, Pike followed a pattern he had seen in letters from many women behind bars. She fell hard for the man writing to her and wrote about a future together that could never happen. The letters show a young woman who was lonely, affectionate, and desperate for connection. The court record describes someone very different. Somewhere between the two lies the question this case has never fully answered: Who exactly is Tennessee about to execute?

On September 30th, 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued an order. It set Christa Pike’s execution date for September 30th, 2026, exactly one year away. The date arrived at a turbulent time for capital punishment in Tennessee. The state had paused executions in 2022 after problems with how its lethal injection drugs were tested. A new protocol was adopted in late 2024, built around a single drug: pentobarbital. Executions resumed in 2025.

Pike’s attorneys moved quickly. In January 2026, lawyers Luke Enan and Steven Ferrell of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee filed suit against the state. They named the Attorney General, the Corrections Commissioner, the Warden of Riverbend, and the Warden of the women’s prison where Pike is held. They argued that her medical conditions made the state’s plan unconstitutionally cruel. They also raised a religious objection to the protocol.

At the same time, another legal fight was underway. This one was about who gets to watch. In October 2025, a group of news organizations sued Tennessee officials. They argued that the state’s rules kept official witnesses from seeing most of the process. Under the existing procedure, a curtain stayed closed while the prisoner was prepared and the IV lines were placed. Witnesses saw only a short window, roughly 10 to 15 minutes.

In March 2026, a Nashville chancellor sided with the media. The order required the curtain to stay open for the entire process. Staff would wear protective coveralls and masks to keep their identities private. The state appealed. In April, the Tennessee Supreme Court temporarily blocked the order. The old rules would stay in place while the appeal continued.

The expanded access was never used. Six weeks later, those old rules were put to the test. On May 21st, 2026, Tennessee prepared to carry out the sentence of Tony Carruthers, convicted in the deaths of three people in Memphis in 1994. The media witnesses sat in a darkened viewing room. The curtain in front of them was closed.

On the other side, the procedure was going wrong. According to the Department of Correction, the medical team quickly placed a primary IV line, but Tennessee’s protocol requires a second backup line. The team could not find a suitable vein. A doctor then attempted a central line, a deeper IV placed near the chest. That attempt failed as well. The effort went on for more than an hour. Then the warden received a phone call, and the execution was called off. Governor Lee granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve.

The fallout came fast. In a federal court filing the next day, Carruthers’ lawyers revealed that the doctor responsible for placing IV lines in Tennessee executions had not placed a central line in about 13 years. The doctor also did not hold hospital privileges.

For Christa Pike’s legal team, this was the warning they had been waiting for. For years, they had pointed to her small veins and a history of difficult blood draws. After Carruthers, they argued the same failure could happen again, and that for Pike, it would be even worse. They asked the Tennessee Supreme Court to appoint a special master, an independent judge who would hear evidence and report back.

The court agreed. In July, it appointed Senior Judge Mark Ward. It was the first case to proceed under a newly amended court rule allowing this kind of review. In August, the hearing opened in a Knoxville courtroom. It lasted three days. Christa Pike watched by video from the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville.

Her attorneys made two main arguments. First, her veins would make a standard IV difficult and risky if the state insisted on lethal injection. They said a qualified medical professional should place a central line. They also proposed an alternative method entirely. Second, they argued the process itself would reopen the deepest wounds of her past. A clinical psychologist testified that being restrained during the procedure, possibly by male officers, would do more than remind Pike of the trauma she suffered as a child. She would relive it.

The state pushed back on every point. Its lawyers said Pike’s veins were reliably accessible, pointing to her successful blood draws. They said pentobarbital would render her unconscious before she could register serious pain. And they said Tennessee was neither equipped nor legally authorized to use the alternative method her lawyers had proposed.

On August 21st, Judge Ward issued his findings. He found that Christa Pike does suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder, the result of repeated abuse she endured in childhood. But he found she had offered little proof that her veins were too small or damaged for a normal IV. He ruled the alternative method was not feasible and would not reduce the risk of pain. Of the five issues before him, he sided with the state on four and dismissed the fifth.

The state did make concessions. Female officers would transport Pike to Riverbend and supervise her there. She would be moved no earlier than 24 hours before the scheduled time, and she would be the only inmate held in the unit. Pike had also asked that the execution team be made up entirely of women.

Then came one more development that alarmed her lawyers. Shortly after the hearing, the state’s execution physician said he would place the central line Pike’s attorneys had requested. It was the same physician involved in the Carruthers case. Her legal team said publicly that he was not qualified to perform the procedure.

That is where this case stands. It has been reviewed for three decades. It now rests on a disputed medical plan, and it has divided people everywhere it has been reported. Before we hear from both sides, we want to know where you stand. Should Tennessee carry out this sentence, or should Christa Pike’s life be spared? Share your view in the comments. And if this case has kept you watching, tap the like button and subscribe so you’re here for how it ends.

Few cases divide people as sharply as this one. Here is the strongest argument from each side. Christa Pike’s defenders begin with age. She was 18 at the time of the crime, only months past the legal line. Her co-defendant, Tadaryl Shipp, was 17, too young to face the death penalty. He received life with the possibility of parole, and her attorneys say he will soon be eligible for release.

Pike is now the last person in Tennessee sentenced to death for a crime committed at 18, the youngest age the law allows. Her lawyers argue that a few months on a calendar should not decide who lives and who dies. They point to brain science, showing that the parts of the mind responsible for impulse control and judgment keep developing well past 18.

They also challenged the version of events presented at trial. According to her current legal team, Pike was in an abusive relationship with Shipp, and he was a leader in the crime, not a follower. Years later, the lawyer who represented Shipp at his 1997 trial admitted in writing that his strategy had been to shift as much blame as possible onto Christa.

Then there is the trial itself. Amnesty International says her court-appointed lawyers presented little evidence of her childhood trauma or its psychological effects. Her supporters argue that this was exactly what a jury needed to hear before deciding whether she should live.

Experts at the United Nations raised a further concern. They said nearly three decades of isolation on death row, combined with her trauma and years of knowing this day was coming, already amounts to cruel and inhuman treatment. And her attorneys say the woman she is today is not the woman she was. Kelly Gleason of Tennessee’s Office of the Post-Conviction Defender says that after Pike finally received proper treatment for bipolar disorder and PTSD, she came to feel deep remorse for what she did.

The other side begins with a verdict. In 1996, a Knox County jury heard the evidence and decided the sentence. Since then, that decision has been tested again and again. There was her 2002 withdrawal of her appeals and the long legal fight that followed. A request for a new trial was denied in 2008. A later motion to reopen her case was rejected by Knox County Judge Scott Green, and there were this year’s hearings.

Through three decades of review, no court has overturned her death sentence. When Pike raised religious objections to the execution protocol, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti responded sharply. He said the state wished her respect for the sanctity of life had come in time to save Colleen Slemmer.

For May Martinez, the argument is not legal. It is personal. She describes herself as her daughter’s voice because someone has to speak for Colleen. During the trial in 1996, she spent weeks in Knoxville largely on her own, staying in a hotel with no one beside her. She says the system never gave her the support she needed.

The loss has not faded with time. This month, she said her daughter is gone every day, every hour, and every minute. Colleen’s birthday is September 20th, just 10 days before the scheduled date. This year, she would have turned 51. May Martinez believes her daughter would support the sentence being carried out so that Christa Pike can never harm anyone else. She knows how many voices are asking for mercy. She has made it clear hers is not one of them.

If the sentence is carried out on the morning of Wednesday, September 30th, 2026, the waiting ended inside Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The State of Tennessee carried out the sentence imposed on Christa Gail Pike three decades earlier. Officials confirmed the sentence was complete at [time]. She was 50 years old. She became the first woman executed by the State of Tennessee in more than 200 years. Outside the prison, the official media witnesses stepped before the cameras, as the law requires, to tell the public what they had seen. Supporters gathered for the vigil stood in silence. And inside that building, a mother from Florida had reached the end of something she had carried since 1995.

On the morning of Wednesday, September 30th, 2026, the chamber at Riverbend stayed empty. Hours before the scheduled time, the Supreme Court of the United States granted Christa Pike a stay. Her sentence has not been overturned. The justices have paused it while they decide whether to take up her case. If the court declines to hear it, the stay ends, and the Tennessee Supreme Court can set a new date. If the court agrees to hear it, the case of the only woman on Tennessee’s death row could take months more to resolve, possibly longer.

For Christa Pike, it means more time. For May Martinez, it means more waiting after 31 years of it. After Colleen Slemmer’s death, the Knoxville Job Corps Center was shut down. The program that brought her to Tennessee in search of a better start no longer exists there.

What remains is a name that too often comes second. For 31 years, the headlines have followed the woman responsible for her death. The trials, the appeals, the letters, the documentaries, the protests—all of it began with a 19-year-old from Florida who left with people she trusted one January night and never came back.

Her name was Colleen Slemmer. She is the reason this story matters. This case raises hard questions about justice, mercy, age, and what we owe to victims and their families. If you share your thoughts below, please keep them respectful because real families on both sides may be reading. If you want more documentaries that go beyond the headlines to the full story, subscribe and turn on notifications. Our next case involves a trail investigators say should never have gone cold. Make sure you’re here for it.