JUST IN: Inside Christa Pike’s Execution Scheduled For (09/30/26) — Only Tennessee Woman Death Row
The only woman on Tennesseee’s death row is asking the state supreme court to stop her execution. Christa Pike’s attorneys argue Tennessee cannot constitutionally carry out the execution, citing her medical and mental health conditions, as well as the recent failed execution attempt of Tony Kurthers.
Pike was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Knoxville JobCore student Colleen Slimmer and is set to be executed September 30th. The state has previously said Pike exhausted her appeals and that her death sentence should move forward. >> Christa Gail Pike is alive. As of today, June 22nd, 2026, she is sitting in a cell at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee.
She is 50 years old and she has exactly 100 days left to live. Unless something changes, here’s where it gets complicated. One month ago, the state of Tennessee strapped a man named Tony Kurthers to a gurnie in that exact same building and tried to kill him. For over an hour, the execution team searched for a vein.
They tried his arms, his feet, his hand, his neck. The doctor hired to place a central line hadn’t done one in 13 years. They failed. Tennessee’s governor halted the execution and granted Kurthers a one-year reprieve. Nine days ago, Christa Pike’s attorneys used that failure against the state. They filed an emergency motion telling the Tennessee Supreme Court something extraordinary.
That Tennessee is no longer capable of carrying out an execution without torturing the person strapped to the table, including her. You searched her name because you wanted to know if she was still alive. But the real question, the one that has haunted Knoxville, Tennessee for over 30 years, is what she actually did to a 19-year-old girl named Colleen Surmer on a January night in 1995.
And once I walk you through what happened in those woods, I promise you will never forget Colleen’s name. This case is moving fast. Her execution is 100 days away. Every legal update will be covered on this channel the moment it drops. If you are new here, make sure you hit that subscribe button right now so you never miss a case.
And drop a comment below telling us where in the world you are watching from. We love seeing where our community is. Now, let us get into it. To understand what happened in those woods in January of 1995, you have to go back all the way back before Knoxville, before the Job Core, before any of it. Because Christa Gail Pike did not arrive in Tennessee as a blank slate.
She arrived carrying 18 years of damage that nobody ever stopped to address. She was born premature on March 10th, 1976 in Beckley, West Virginia to Carissa Hansen and Emil Glenn Pike. Her parents’ relationship was a cycle that never broke. Married, divorced after Hansen was caught cheating. Remarried after Hansen attempted suicide.
Through all of it, both parents were frequently absent and frequently negligent. Christa spent almost none of her first three years of life in her mother’s direct care. When she became inconvenient, she was handed off to relatives, most often her paternal grandmother. Her aunt, a woman named Carrie Ross, later testified under oath about what those early years actually looked like.
Ross described a household so neglected that as an infant, Christa would be found crawling through piles of dog feces on the floor. No adult intervened. Her mother kept drinking even after doctors told her that her toddler was experiencing severe seizures. That detail matters more than it sounds like it should.
Years later, courtappointed experts would determine that Christa had been exposed to alcohol in the womb. That exposure caused organic brain damage, specifically in the region that governs impulse control. Dr. Jonathan Pinkinis, a professor of neurology at Georgetown University, examined her and called her upbringing, in his own words, almost unbearably abusive.
None of this was known or tested for at the time of her trial. The jury that sentenced her to death never heard a word of it. Her childhood did not get easier from there. By third grade, around age nine, she had already attempted to overdose on acetaminophen. She received psychiatric treatment and was sent right back into the same home.
In 1988, when Christa was 12, her paternal grandmother died. By every account, including Christa’s own, her grandmother was the only person who had ever loved her unconditionally. Christa attempted suicide. She received almost no support in the aftermath. The abuse compounded. Court records describe her being beaten by her father with enough regularity to leave scars on her back.
She was raped more than once as a child. By age 12, she was already dependent on alcohol and marijuana. When one of her mother’s boyfriends punched her in the face, Christa chased him through the house with a butter knife. Charges were filed and quietly settled. At one point, she went to live with her father’s new family.
A younger halfsister accused Christa of molesting her. Her father didn’t investigate. He didn’t ask questions. He put her out of the house. Between the moves, the relatives, and the broken homes, Christa changed schools 12 times before she ever earned her GED in 1993. 12 times. There was no stability anywhere in her life, not for one full year.
In 10th grade, she was sent to a juvenile facility for a year. It was there that she first heard about JobCore, a federal residential program built to give low-income teenagers vocational training and a path toward a career. For Christa, it sounded like an exit. She completed her GED. She told people she wanted to become a nursing assistant.
In late 1994, 18-year-old Christa Gail Pike packed up what little she had and arrived at the JobCore Center on Dale Avenue in Knoxville, Tennessee. She was trying, by every indication, to start over. I want to be clear about something before we go any further. I’m not telling you any of this to make you feel sorry for her. What she did has no excuse. It never will.
But it has a context, and you need that context if you’re going to understand what happened next. Picture it the way the people who live there described it. Not a campus. Not really. A holding pen for teenagers the rest of the system had already given up on. dressed up in a brochure that promised vocational training and a second chance.
Court testimony and later advocacy filings painted a starker picture of the Knoxville Job Core Center on Dale Avenue. Overcrowded dormitories, minimal supervision, and a student population carrying so much unadressed trauma that some of them carried razor blades and box cutters just to feel safe walking the halls.
This was the environment four teenagers were living in in the final weeks of 1994. and it is the environment that produced one of the most disturbing murders in Tennessee history. Before anyone else, you need to know Colleen. Colleen and Slmer was born on September 20th, 1975 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She was raised there with much love by her mother, May Martinez, and a stepfather who was every bit as much apparent to her.
Colleen grew up alongside a younger sister in a home that by every account was stable and supportive. By every account, Colleen was the kind of young woman who did things. She ran. She roller skated most weekends. She loved kids and had spent years babysitting. Her mother would later call her a computer geek. College wasn’t financially possible for her family.
So, in September of 1994, Colleen enrolled in Job course specifically because it offered computer training. The nearest center that taught it wasn’t anywhere close to home. It was in Knoxville, Tennessee. So she packed up and went. She was 19 years old and she was doing everything right. Then there was Tateral D.
Ship, 17 years old at the time of the murder. He wouldn’t turn 18 for another 2 months. He met Christa Pike at Jobcore and the two began dating. Like Pike, Ship had a history of trauma and instability behind him and the two of them bonded in part over a shared fascination with the occult. And there was Shadala R. Peterson, 18 years old, a friend to both Pike and Ship.
Peterson would later become the state’s cooperating witness, the one who turned on the other two and walked away from this case with probation. Court documents would later suggest she was considerably more active on the night of the murder than her plea deal implied. One more name matters here because she’s the one who heard it coming.
Kim Iloilo was a fellow JobCore student and one of Chris Pike’s friends. Iloilo would go on to become the most important witness the prosecution had. By the start of January 1995, Christa Pike had convinced herself of something her own friends couldn’t verify, and Colleen’s friends flatly denied.
She believed Colleen Slmer was trying to steal Tadel’s ship away from her. There was no real evidence behind it. It didn’t matter. The obsession took root anyway, and it grew. On January 11th, 1995, one day before Colleen Slmer would take her last breath, Christa Pike sat down with Kim Elo and told her plainly that she intended to kill Colleen Slur.
Years later, in a federal appeal, Pike’s own legal team would put her reasoning into the court record in her own words. “She wanted Colleen dead,” she said, because she had just felt mean that day. “Let that sit with you for a second. That isn’t someone losing control in the heat of an argument. That isn’t a fight that spiraled.
That is a decision spoken out loud to another human being a full 24 hours before Colleen Slur was lured into the woods and never came back out. This is the part of the story you came for. I’m not going to soften it and I’m not going to dwell on it longer than the truth requires. What follows comes directly from court records, sworn testimony, and Christa Pike’s own tape confession to police.
Nothing here is exaggerated. If anything, the real record is harder to sit with than any dramatization could be. At approximately 8:00 in the evening on January 12th, 1995, four students signed their names out of the dormatory log book at the Knoxville Job Course Center. Christa Pike, Tadel Ship, Shadala Peterson, and Colleen Surmer.
They walked off campus together toward 17th Street with Colleen believing this was an act of peace. The story she’d been told was simple. They wanted to smoke marijuana together and put their differences behind them. She had no idea that Christa Pike had armed herself before they ever left the building.
Carrying a box cutter and a miniature meat cleaver she’d borrowed from another student. Tadel ship was armed as well. Colleen Slmer walked into those woods with nothing. They led her to an isolated wooded area behind the agriculture campus steam plant at the University of Tennessee. It was dark. It was far enough from the dormatory that no one would hear a thing.
Once they were deep enough into the woods, Pike turned on her. She accused Colleen of trying to steal Tadel’s ship. Colleen denied it. According to the trial record, Pike’s response was to knee her in the face. That was the beginning of an assault that the court record places at somewhere between 30 minutes and a full hour.
What the record shows is this. Pike and ship attacked Colleen together while Peterson, far from simply standing watch, took part directly, cutting at the victim with the box cutter. Colleen’s throat was slashed by Pike’s own admission in her taped confession six separate times. A meat cleaver was used against her back. When Colleen tried to run, she was struck in the head with a thrown rock and dragged back.
At some point during the assault, she was stripped down to her bra and then out of it entirely, an act the court found was meant to keep her from being able to flee. Pike admitted she pulled a rag from her own hair and tied it around Colleen’s mouth to stop her from talking. A pentagram was carved into her chest. Colleen begged them to stop.
According to the trial record, she promised she would tell no one that she only wanted to be allowed to walk away. Pike’s own words captured on tape two days later describe her response. Shut up, she told her. I don’t want to hear you talking to me. Pike would go on to say in that same statement that it’s harder to hurt somebody when they’re talking to you.
She kept hitting her anyway. By Pike’s own account, she could hear Colleen breathing blood in and out, could see her body jerking on the ground beneath her, and she kept hitting her and hitting her and hitting her. At one point with Colleen convulsing in front of her, Pike leaned down and asked her, “Cholen, do you know who’s doing this to you?” Colleen could no longer form words. She could only moan.
Finally, Christa Pike picked up a large chunk of broken asphalt and brought it down on Colleen Slmer’s skull, ending her life. Then, in the dark, kneeling over the body of a 19-year-old girl she had known for three months, Pike reached into the wound, removed a piece of Colleen’s skull bone, and put it in her jacket pocket.
What happened next is, in some ways, just as disturbing as the murder itself. Pike and her accomplice each took hold of one of Colleen’s feet and dragged her body to a pile of dirt and debris near the trees. They left her clothing scattered in the surrounding bushes. They washed their hands and the tops of their shoes in a mud puddle. Pike discarded the box cutter and calmly returned the borrowed meat cleaver to the student she’d taken it from.
On the walk back, the group stopped at a Texico station on Cumberland Avenue where Pike threw away two of Colleen’s identification cards and a pair of her black gloves and a trash can. At approximately 10:15 that night, the three of them signed back into the job core dormatory. Colleen did not come with them.
She was not reported missing that night because no one outside of three teenagers yet knew she was gone. The next morning around 8:00, an employee of the University of Tennessee’s grounds department came across what he believed at first glance was the body of a dead animal near the green houses on the agriculture campus was Colleen.
She was found nude from the waist up, her body covered in dirt and twigs, blood pulled around her. The autopsy was performed by Dr. Sandra Elkins, the Knox County Medical Examiner. Dr. Elkins later testified that she tried to catalog every individual slash and stab wound on Colleen’s torso using letters of the alphabet, the way medical examiners often do. She ran out.
There were so many wounds that finishing the count properly would have meant working through the entire alphabet a second time and staying in the morg for three more days. Eventually, by her own account, she simply gave up trying to count them individually and noted instead that there were innumerable additional superficial/wounds across the back, arms, and chest.
Christa Pike did not stay away from what she had done. According to testimony, she returned to the taped off crime scene that same day and asked an officer giggling what had happened. Back at the dormatory, she told another student that the piece of skull in her pocket was real and that yes, she was eating breakfast with it.
She showed a friend the brown stains on her shoes and told her plainly that it wasn’t mud, it was blood. Within 36 hours, all three of them were in police custody. I want to say her name one more time before we move forward in this story because it’s easy in a case this disturbing for the victim to disappear behind the horror of what was done to her.
Colleen and SLMur was 19 years old. She came from Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She traveled hundreds of miles from home away from her mother and her little sister, chasing a future in computer science that her family couldn’t otherwise afford to give her. She deserves to be remembered as more than a detail in someone else’s story.
It took the Knoxville Police Department less than 36 hours to put this case together, and it started with a single line in a dormatory log book. Four names had signed out of the job course center on the night of January 12th. Only three had signed back in. Investigators didn’t have to dig far for their next break. Students started coming forward almost immediately reporting that Christa Pike had spent the morning after the murder showing off a piece of bone and bragging about what she’d done.
One of those students, a young woman named Stephanie Wilson, later testified that Pike pointed down at her own shoes where brown stains were visible and told her plainly, “That ain’t mud on my shoes. That’s blood.” Pike then pulled a napkin from her pocket, unfolded it, and showed Wilson a fragment of bone. She said it belonged to Colleen.
Within 36 hours of Colleen’s body being discovered, all three of them, Christa Pike, Tadel Ship, and Shadala Peterson were in police custody. When officers searched Pike’s jacket, they found the piece of skull exactly where she’d been keeping it. Her room produced a pair of bloodstained jeans. When investigators searched Ship’s room at the Jobcore Center, they found a satanic Bible and an altar.
Both Pike and Ship were photographed on the day of their arrest wearing matching pentagram necklaces. Ship was also wearing a hexag earring and a matching hat pin. Shadala Peterson didn’t wait to see how the evidence would fall. She agreed almost immediately to cooperate with the state as a witness against the other two.
That cooperation changed everything for Christa Pike. When investigator Randy York told her that Peterson had turned, Pike waved her Miranda rights and gave a full tape recorded confession on January 14th, 1995, the same day she was arrested. The statement ran 46 pages once it was transcribed. At trial, the jury didn’t just read it.
They were given individual headsets and made to listen to Pike’s own voice describe what she had done. In that confession, Pike maintained that the plan had only ever been to scare Colleen and that things had spiraled out of her control. The physical evidence told a different story. So did her own actions in the hours and days that followed the murder, none of which looked like panic and most of which looked like someone trying to cover her tracks.
Some of that evidence came from a Texico station on Cumberland Avenue. Officer Mark Wagner of the Knoxville Police Department recovered a pair of black gloves and two of Colleen’s identification cards. >> State of Tennessee plans to execute her walk back to the door. If this happens, she’ll be the first woman executed in the state in over 200 years.
But what really makes this case stand out isn’t just the execution date. It’s the fact that Christa was only 18 years old when she committed the crime. At 20, she became the youngest woman sent to death row in United States history. >> And when you hear what she actually did and how she reacted after she did it, you’ll understand why a jury decided she could never be allowed to walk free.
Overwhelming. What happened here doesn’t even feel real. It sounds like a horror movie. It’s real. It happened. I had the testimony of Kimmy friend Pike had told a full day in advance that she intended to kill Colleen SL and the same friend Pike had bragged to within hours of actually doing it.
On March 22nd, 1996, after only a few hours of deliberation, the jury found Christa Pike guilty on both counts, first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit firstdegree murder. Eight days later on March 30th, 1996, Pike was sentenced to death by electrocution for the murder and 25 years for the conspiracy charge. As the sentence was read aloud in the courtroom, Christa Pike, her face still marked with the last traces of adolescent acne, only weeks past her 20th birthday, broke down sobbing and called out for her mother.
She had just become the youngest woman sentenced to death in the United States in the modern era of capital punishment. Tateral ship went to trial separately in January of 1997. He too was found guilty. Because he had been 17 years old at the time of the murder, the death penalty was never on the table for him.
He was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole plus a consecutive 25-year sentence for conspiracy, a combination that meant he would not be eligible for release until his late 40s or early 50s. He was denied parole in October of 2025. Shadala Peterson, the one who turned on the other two, walked away with 6 years of probation.
She never served a single day in prison. Since the day she was sentenced in March of 1996, Christa Pike has held a title no one would want. She has been Tennessee’s only woman on death row every single year for 30 years running. For more than 25 of those years, that isolation extended far beyond simply being the only one. She lived in conditions her own attorneys would later describe as de facto solitary confinement, alone in a cell roughly the size of a parking space with almost no meaningful human contact.
Because the state had no other female death row inmate to house alongside her, her path through the appeal system was anything but a straight line. Between 1996 and 2008, Pike launched her appeal, canceled it, and then relaunched it more than once. In June of 2001 and again in June of 2002, against the direct advice of her own attorneys, she asked the courts to drop her appeal altogether and requested that her execution proceeded by electrocution.
A criminal court judge, Mary Beth Lieovitz, granted that request and set an execution date of August 19th, 2002. Then Pike changed her mind. On July 8th, 2002, her defense team filed a motion asking the court to let the appeals process continue. That motion was denied. But less than a month later, on August 2nd, a three judge state appeals panel ruled that the proceeding should continue after all, and the execution scheduled for that August never happened.
Her last shot at a new trial was denied in December of 2008. And at that point, every appeal available to her under Tennessee’s standard procedures had been exhausted. But the appeals process is not the only thing that has defined Pikees three decades behind bars. On August 24th, 2001, the Tennessee Prison for Women was evacuated during a fire.
In the confusion, prison staff placed three women together without restraints in a recreation cage. Pike, Natasha Cornet, a woman serving three consecutive life sentences for her role in the notorious 1997 murders of the Lilid family, and Patricia and Jones, who was serving life for stabbing an 84year-old Knoxville woman to death during a 1995 robbery.
According to court records, Jones had a long-running grudge against Cornet and a reputation for fighting other inmates inside the prison. When Jones reared back as if to strike Cornet, Pike moved first. She looped a shoestring around Jones’s neck, pulled her to the ground, flipped her onto her stomach, sat on top of her, and kept choking her until a correctional officer physically pulled her off.
When that officer tried, Pike told her calmly, “The way you’re pulling my hands, you’re just helping me choke the bitch.” At trial, Pike’s defense was that she had only been protecting Cornet. Her own words destroyed that argument. In a recorded phone call to her mother just days later, Pike described what Jones looked like when she let go.
Passed out on the ground, twitching, foaming at the mouth. Her eyes bulged out so far her eyelids had flipped up. Pike told her mother she now understood the difference between premeditated murder and what had happened to Colleen SLR because, in her words, she had premeditated the hell out of this one. She said that if she’d had 30 more seconds, there would have been a chalk outline in the recreation pen instead of a living witness.
When asked directly in another statement what her intention toward Jones had been, Pike said she wouldn’t claim she meant to kill her, only that she didn’t care if she died and wouldn’t have lost any sleep over it. Jones survived. Pike was convicted of attempted first-degree murder on August 12th, 2004 and received an additional 25 years on top of her existing sentence.
Investigators believed Natasha Cornet had assisted in the attack as well, but there wasn’t enough evidence to charge her. Nearly a decade later, Pike was at the center of an entirely different kind of incident. Sometime around the start of 2011, a 30-something personal trainer from Flemington, New Jersey named Donald Cut began writing letters to her.
By the summer of that year, Koh was making the trip from New Jersey to the prison in Nashville in person. A round trip of nearly 1,700 m once or twice a month just to sit across from her on visiting days. At some point, that relationship turned into something else. Kohut put together a plan to help Pike escape, and he recruited a 23-year-old corrections officer at the prison, Justin Heflin, who agreed to help in exchange for cash and gifts.
According to the indictment that was eventually unsealed, the plan involved tracing a prison key and having a duplicate made. Prison officials caught wind of the plot before it ever got close to happening. On January 27th, 2012, Tennessee’s Department of Correction asked the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation for help, and by March 21st, both men were under arrest.
Kohut was picked up by New Jersey State Police at his home and held on a quarter million bond. He was booked into the Davidson County Jail, fired from his job, and held on a $75,000 bond. On May 31st, 2012, Kohut was sentenced to 7 years in prison. He cooperated with investigators and served no time at all. Pike herself was never criminally charged in connection with the plot.
Investigators were never able to determine whether she was an active participant in planning it or simply someone who knew it was happening. Decades into her time on death row, Pike has at points attempted to reckon publicly with what she did at 18. In one letter later made public, she wrote that her crime had been the worst mistake of a reckless teenager, magnified into something huge, unforgettable, and liferuining for countless people.
She described herself as a mentally ill 18-year-old kid who took years to even grasp the full weight of what she had done. She wrote that she had taken the life of someone’s child, someone’s sister, someone’s friend, and that it sickened her. Now, whether that reckoning is sincere is something you watching this will have to decide for yourself.
Everything you’ve heard so far happened decades ago. What I’m about to walk you through is happening right now in real time while you’re watching this. On September 30th, 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued a death warrant for Christa Pike, scheduling her execution for exactly one year later, September 30th, 2026. under Tennessee law.
Because her crime was committed before 1999, she has a choice the state’s newer death row inmates don’t get. She can choose between the electric chair and lethal injection. If this execution actually happens, Christa Pike will become the first woman executed in the state of Tennessee since 1820. Only the fourth woman in Tennessee’s entire history, the 19th woman executed anywhere in the United States in the modern era of capital punishment.
There’s a legal argument running underneath all of this that’s worth understanding because it shapes everything that’s happened since. Back in 2019, a federal appeals judge on the Sixth Circuit, Jane Stranch, wrote a concurring opinion in Pike’s case that’s been quoted by her defense team ever since.
Judge Stranch wrote that because Pike was 18 at the time of the crime, her death sentence likely violates the ETH amendment. In her own words, she wrote that society’s evolving standards of decency likely do not permit the execution of individuals who were under 21 at the time of their offense. She pointed out something that should sound familiar by now.
Had Pike been 17 instead of 18, like her codefendant, Tadel Ship, born only 2 months after her, she would not be eligible for execution at all. 2 months, that’s the entire legal distance between a death sentence and a parole hearing. As of this year, nearly 200 women have been convicted of first-degree murder in Tennessee since 1978.
Christa Pike is the only one the state has ever sentenced to death. The most active front in this fight right now is over how exactly Tennessee plans to kill her. On January 8th, 2026, Pike’s attorneys, Steven Ferrell and Luke Inan of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, filed a lawsuit in Davidson County Chancery Court challenging the state’s lethal injection protocol directly.
Their argument rests on a few specific points. Pike, they say, has thrombocytoenia, a blood clotting disorder on top of bipolar disorder, PTSD, and veins that are notoriously difficult to access with a needle. They argue that pentobarbatital, the single drug Tennessee now uses for lethal injection, would cause what one medical expert called bloody froth in her lungs, a description that amounts to drowning in her own blood while strapped to a gurnie.
They argue Tennessee’s restrictions on clergy access in the execution chamber would exclude her Buddhist spiritual adviser, a violation, they say, of her first amendment rights. and they argue the state’s protocol has no real contingency plan if something goes wrong during the procedure. Tennessee’s attorney general, Jonathan Skirmedi, didn’t mince words in response.
He reminded the public pointedly that this is the same woman who carried around a piece of Colleen SLM’s shattered skull in her pocket and showed it to her friends as a trophy after luring her into the woods to torture and kill her. On May 7th, 2026, this case took a procedural turn. Chancellor Aayashia Miles transferred Pike’s lawsuit out of Davidson County Chancery Court and into the Tennessee Supreme Court directly.
That wasn’t a decision made on the merits of Pike’s claims. It came down to a rule change the state’s high court had put in place after a separate contentious legal battle over the execution of another death row inmate named Byron Black in which the Supreme Court had overruled and publicly reprimanded a lower court judge for what it called overstepping his authority.
Under the new rule, any legal challenge tied to the method or timing of an execution now has to go straight to the state’s highest court. Pike’s case became one of the first to be governed by it. And then 2 weeks later, everything changed. On May 21st, 2026, the state of Tennessee attempted to execute a man named Tony Kurthers at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, the exact same facility where Chris Pike is scheduled to die.
For more than an hour, the execution team tried and failed to establish an introvenous line. According to court filings, Kurthers was punctured more than a dozen times. Attorney Maria Deliberado, who witnessed the attempt from inside the chamber, described watching him wincing and groaning and called the entire process horrible.
Governor Bill Lee ultimately granted Kurthers a one-year reprieve. Just 9 days ago on June 12th, 2026, Pike’s attorneys filed a new motion with the Tennessee Supreme Court. And this time, they cited the Kurther’s execution by name. Attorney Luke Inan wrote in plain language that the state of Tennessee is not able to constitutionally carry out executions.
The motion asks the court to appoint a special master, an independent investigator with the authority to examine exactly how the state’s lethal injection protocol would actually function in Pike’s specific case, given everything her legal team has already laid out about her medical conditions. As of right now, the Tennessee Supreme Court has not ruled on that motion.
The clock, as they say, is still ticking. And whatever happens next, it’s happening in real time. For 30 years, one woman has shown up to every hearing, every appeal, every parole board update for a man she never wanted released. May Martinez, Colleen’s mother, has carried this case in a way most of us will never have to understand.
In October of 2025, after the execution date was finally set, she told reporters she would keep fighting, that she wanted to see justice finally served so that no other parent would have to feel the pain she carries every single day. There’s a part of this story that doesn’t make it into most headlines, and it deserves to be said plainly because it’s one of the crulest details in a case full of them.
When Colleen Slur was finally laid to rest, her family believed they were burying her whole. They weren’t told otherwise. It was only a year later through outside sources and not through the state that May Martinez learned the truth. Colleen had been buried without her head, without the piece of skin from her chest where the pentagram had been carved, and without her genitals.
The state had kept them as evidence, and no one had thought to tell her mother. In the years since, Tennessee has periodically mailed pieces of Colleen back to her family, sometimes with little to no warning at all. Her mother has described opening boxes to find body parts inside with no explanation accompanying them.
To this day, one piece remains missing. The fragment of skull that Christa Pike carried in her jacket pocket on the night of January 12th, 1995, the one she fished out of an open wound and later bragged about over breakfast, is still sitting in a Tennessee evidence locker. State authorities have said it will not be returned to Colleen’s family until the case is formally closed.
In practice, that means it won’t come home until after Christa Pike is executed. Colleen and Slmer was born on September 20th, 1975 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She died on January 12th, 1995 in Knoxville, Tennessee. She was 19 years old. So, is Christy Gail Pike still alive? Yes, as of right now, she is September 30th, 2026 is 101 days away.
The legal battle over how or whether that execution happens is still unresolved. The Tennessee Supreme Court has not ruled. And in Florida, May Martinez is still waiting. The way she has been waiting for 30 years for this story to finally have an ending. Whatever you believe about the death penalty, whatever side of this you land on, remember Colleen’s name.
She deserves that much at minimum.
