Christa Pike, 50, regained consciousness on Oct. 6 after becoming the first prisoner in the United States to survive a lethal injection attempt.
Pike had been scheduled for execution on Sept. 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, where two doses of pentobarbital failed to kill her. An ambulance rushed her to a hospital while she remained unconscious for nearly a week before waking up at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, formerly known as the Tennessee Prison for Women. Her attorneys said last week she is now speaking in full sentences.
The catastrophic procedure triggered immediate fallout across Tennessee’s criminal justice system. Outgoing Governor Bill Lee halted all remaining executions for the year and ordered an independent review of what went wrong. Frank Strada, the state’s prison boss, resigned in the aftermath, saying it was “in the best interest of Tennesseans.” Pike’s lawyers have since demanded her sentence be commuted, arguing she has “endured punishment greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty.”
The case that put Pike on death row stretches back three decades to a jealous rage that exploded on the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus. In January 1995, Pike was 18 years old when she and her 17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, lured 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer to a remote area. What followed was approximately 30 minutes of beating that left Slemmer with catastrophic injuries. Pike finished the attack by bashing Slemmer’s head with a large chunk of asphalt, then kept a piece of her victim’s skull as a souvenir.
Knox County Forensic Anthropologist Dr. Murray Marks, who testified at Pike’s trial, still carries the case with him. “This case appeared in January of 1995, at the beginning of my career, and the nature of it has stayed with me throughout my entire career,” he said in The Post’s new documentary “No Mercy: Christa Pike Unravelled.”
Dr. Marks recounted the courtroom moment when prosecutors presented the missing bone fragment. “The District Attorney brought forth a little paper bag, and from that, withdrew a piece of bone, and so that was presented to me,” he said.
“I took it and, you know, I took my time and made sure it fit exactly. I looked at the edges, it fit precisely, the edges were a perfect match, and at that point, when the skull was demonstrated by me, the gallery gasped.”
Former Knoxville News-Sentinel reporter Don Jacobs, who covered the original case, revealed Pike’s stunning reaction to her death sentence. She wrote to Shipp complaining about the penalty, apparently unable to comprehend why she received it.
“She did write to Mr. Shipp after she got the death penalty and she was apparently quite mystified why she got the death penalty,” Jacobs said.
“She said, ‘I didn’t deserve that. I showed him a great deal of compassion because I didn’t let her die slowly.'”
Shipp received life in prison with the possibility of parole because he was underage at the time of the crime and ineligible for execution. Pike was handed the death penalty and remained on Tennessee’s death row for nearly three decades before the botched September execution.
The grisly details of the 1995 murder have resurfaced as part of the new documentary examining Pike’s case and its aftermath. The production revisits not only the crime itself but the decades of legal proceedings that followed, culminating in the unprecedented failed execution that has now placed her fate back in question.
Pike’s attorneys continue pressing for commutation of her sentence in light of the botched execution, though no court date has been set for that challenge.