The clock is running out. A tortured victim, a shattered skull, a grieving mother who has waited 31 years, and now a condemned woman begging to choose how she dies. Tennessee is preparing to execute Christa Pike, but her final requests are ripping open old wounds, forcing everyone to ask what justice really meaning
In a Nashville death chamber, Tennessee is poised to execute Christa Pike, the state’s only female death-row prisoner, for the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. For Colleen’s mother, who once watched her daughter’s broken skull passed around a courtroom, the looming execution feels less like closure than a brutal, necessary ending.
She plans to sit front row, insisting Pike deserves no special treatment, no gentle accommodations that Colleen never had.
Pike’s attorneys paint a different picture: a girl raped, abused, and discarded by every system meant to protect her, left with bipolar disorder, PTSD, and no meaningful mental-health evaluation before being sentenced to die. Her plea to be hanged, or at least handled only by women, is less about spectacle than control over a final, terrifying memory. Between a grieving family demanding justice and a broken woman facing a needle she dreads, Tennessee now carries the unbearable weight of deciding whose suffering matters most.