The Last Plea of CHRISTA PIKE: Inside Tennessee's Most Controversial Execution

Christa Pike, Tennessee's only woman on death row, is scheduled to be executed on September 30, 2026, for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Pike was just 18 when she and two other Job Corps students took Slemmer to an isolated area in Knoxville, where she was brutally attacked and killed.

Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in 1996. Thirty years later, her attorneys are asking Governor Bill Lee to commute that sentence to life without parole, citing extensive childhood abuse, trauma, mental illness and mitigating evidence they say her original jury never fully heard.

Colleen's family has lived with the murder for more than three decades. Now, with Pike's execution days away, Tennessee faces the final question of whether her death sentence will actually be carried out.