If you’ve seen Christa Pike’s name in the headlines this week next to the words “botched execution” and have no idea what actually happened, this is the episode for you. Last week, on the 30th of September 2026, Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike, who had spent 30 years as the only woman on the state’s death row for a murder she committed at 18. The first lethal dose of pentobarbital didn’t kill her. Neither did the second. After two hours behind a closed curtain she left the death chamber in an ambulance, and five days later she woke up in hospital and asked where she was. Her lawyers say she’s the only person known to have survived a completed execution in US history, and nobody, including the Governor of Tennessee, seems to know what happens now.
But in all of this, the victim has been forgotten. Her name was Colleen Slemmer. She was 19, a Florida kid in a ‘Computer Geek’ T-shirt who had left home for the first time to study computers at a Job Corps centre in Knoxville, and who phoned her mum on the night she died to say some girls were bothering her. A few hours later, Christa Pike killed her. Colleen’s mother, May Martinez, put it this way: ‘The criminals get so much attention. Why? Colleen has been lost in this.’
This is Just The Gist of Christa Pike: the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, the Satanic Panic trial, the ‘Death by Gossip with Wendy Williams’ episode, the Governor Bill Lee clemency fight, the pentobarbital her lawyers say went into her arms instead of her veins, and the mother who drove ten hours from Florida to watch it end and is still waiting to bury her daughter whole.
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Christa Pike is awake and speaking after failed execution, lawyers say (NBC News, 2026)
What happened during Christa Pike’s failed execution (NPR, 2026)
I Know Christa Pike’s Medical History. What Tennessee Did Is Unforgivable. (The New York Times, 2026)
‘Being in prison was not justice’: Family of Colleen Slemmer speaks out on botched execution attempt (WSMV, 2026)
Christa Pike: what we know so far about Tennessee woman’s failed execution (The Guardian, 2026)
Remembering Colleen Slemmer, the teenager killed by Christa Pike (The Tennessean, 2026)
Tennessee says child rapists deserve to die. Now it prepares to execute one of their victims (The Guardian, 2026)
Death by Gossip with Wendy Williams: ‘Thrill Kill’, Season 1 Episode 2 (Investigation Discovery, 2015)
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