In 1995, 18-year-old Christa Pike was convicted of murdering her Job Corps classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in Knoxville, Tennessee. Pike received a death sentence and spent decades awaiting execution, as appeals and legal challenges kept her case in the courts and her name on Tennessee’s death row.But after nearly three decades, the case reached a moment unlike anything that had come before. On the night Tennessee attempted to carry out Pike’s execution, the procedure failed, transforming a decades-old death-row case into a startling new chapter. What happened inside the execution chamber? And what does the failed attempt reveal about the extraordinary journey from a 1995 murder to a sentence that remained unresolved for more than thirty years?Christa Pike follows the case from the Job Corps murder and courtroom proceedings through Pike’s extraordinary years on death row and the dramatic events surrounding Tennessee’s attempt to execute her. Turn the page, revisit the evidence, trace the decades-long legal battle, and discover the story behind one of Tennessee’s most closely followed death-row cases—and the night the state could not carry out its sentence.
In 1995, 18-year-old Christa Pike was convicted of murdering her Job Corps classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in Knoxville, Tennessee. Pike received a death sentence and spent decades awaiting execution, as appeals and legal challenges kept her case in the courts and her name on Tennessee’s death row.Bu...