The Whole Christa Pike Story: Colleen Slemmer, Thirty Years on Death Row, and the First Person to Survive a Complete Execution

0:03 Calaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Thursday, October 15th, 2026. Today is different. No three stories. One. For the last two weeks, you've heard pieces of it on this show. A stay of execution an hour before it was set to happen. A Supreme Court order. Two doses of a drug that should have killed her. An ambulance. A ventilator. A woman who woke up when her own lawyers had been told she was brain dead. And on Saturday, a prison van taking her back to the same building she has lived in for 30 years.

0:46 But pieces aren't the story. So today, I'm going to tell you the whole thing from the beginning. And the beginning isn't Krista Pike. It's a 19-year-old from Florida who loved computers and roller skating, and whose mother says the world keeps forgetting her. A warning before we start. This episode discusses a violent killing, the execution process, and childhood sexual abuse. I'll handle all of it with care, and I won't give you more detail than you need. But it's a hard story, all the way through. Let's get into it. Chapter 1. Colleen Colleen Slemmer grew up in Orange Park, Florida, just outside Jacksonville.

1:30 She lived with her mother, May, her stepfather, and her little sister. Her mother describes her as friendly, easygoing, and playful, a kid who loved roller skating and loved playing old games with the family. She remembers Colleen's laugh. She remembers early morning shrimping trips Colleen took with her stepfather. And she remembers that Colleen had a soft spot for kids who needed help. In school, her mother told WBIR, Colleen would give up her own lunch break to feed students with disabilities every day. And she loved computers. Her mother, laughing, calls her a nerd. Her grandfather noticed how good she was with them and suggested she study computer technology. That's what brought her, at 19, to a Job Corps center in Knoxville, Tennessee. If you're not familiar with it, Job Corps is a federal program that gives young people, many of them from low-income families, free housing and job training.

2:28 It's a second chance, or sometimes a first one. Colleen went to Knoxville to learn a trade and build a career. She never came home. Mae Martinez has spent more than 30 years trying to make sure her daughter is remembered as a person, not as the victim in a famous case. In the weeks before the execution, she told WBIR, quote, I'm her voice. She said Colleen's identity has too often been overshadowed by the woman who killed her. And she has a point. Krista Pike's name has been in thousands of headlines. Colleen's has been in a fraction of them. So before we go any further, I want you to hold on to that picture. A 19-year-old who fed kids at lunch, who went shrimping before dawn with her stepdad, who loved computers. That's who this story is about. Chapter 2.

3:21 January 1995. At the Knoxville Job Corps Center, there was another student named Krista Pike. She was 18. She had a boyfriend in the program, a 17-year-old named Tadaryl Shipp. And according to prosecutors, Pike became convinced that Colleen Slemmer was trying. To take him from her. On the night of January 12, 1995, Pike, Shipp, and another student, an 18-year-old named Shadala Peterson, lured Colleen away from the Job Corps Center to a secluded area near the University of Tennessee's Agricultural Campus. What happened there was a prolonged and deliberate attack that, according to the evidence at trial, lasted somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour.

4:05 Colleen begged them to stop. The details of it are among the most notorious in Tennessee history. I'm not going to recount them. You don't need them to understand what this crime was, and Colleen's family doesn't need to hear them again. Here's what you do need to know. Pike told police she had only meant to fight Colleen. Prosecutors said the plan was always to kill her. And after the killing, Pike went back to the dormitory and showed other students evidence of what she'd done. Within days, all three were arrested. Shadala Peterson, who prosecutors said acted as a lookout, testified against the others and received probation. Tadaryl Shipp, who was 17 and therefore not eligible for the death penalty, was convicted and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.

4:54 He's still in prison. Krista Pike was tried in Knox County in March of 1996. The jury convicted her of first-degree murder and sentenced her to death. She was 18 when the crime happened, and with that sentence, she became the youngest woman sentenced to death in the United States in the modern era of the death penalty. She has never claimed she didn't do it. Now I need to tell you who Krista Pike was before January of 1995, not to excuse anything. Her own lawyers say that's not what they're asking for. but because her background is at the center of every legal argument that has followed for 30 years. And you can't understand the end of this story without it. Krista Gail Pike was born in Beckley, West Virginia in March of 1976. Her parents were alcoholics, and her lawyers say she was exposed to alcohol before she was born. She was passed back and forth between her divorced parents, sometimes depending on which one was tired of her at the time, according to how her own trial attorneys described it in 1996. According to her clemency petition, she was sexually abused repeatedly, starting when she was two years old by her grandmother's boyfriend. When she was still a small child, she drew a picture at school that hinted at what was happening to her. Her parents were called in. The petition says no one investigated. She was raped again at 11. The man who did it later pleaded guilty. She was raped again at 17. Her lawyer,

6:27 Randy Spivey, says she attempted suicide at 12. After the murder, mental health experts and later Tennessee's own Department of Correction diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. In her clemency petition, she described herself at the time of the crime as a, quote, mentally ill 18-year-old kid. And here's the part her lawyers have argued about for three decades. According to her clemency petition, The jury that sentenced her to death never heard about the sexual abuse and the rapes. Her trial attorneys did present some of her troubled background, describing her as a cast-off child from a broken home. Her mother, according to news reports at the time, said that she herself should be punished for her daughter's crime.

7:13 But the full history of abuse, her lawyers say, never reached the people deciding whether she should live. That's what's called mitigation. Evidence that doesn't change whether someone committed a crime, but can change whether they deserve to die for it. Robin Marr, who leads the Death Penalty Information Center, told NPR that she does not believe a jury today, hearing what we now know about Pike's childhood, would sentence her to death. Now let me give you the other side, fully. Every court that has reviewed Pike's case has upheld her conviction and her sentence. The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, the Tennessee Supreme Court, the state post-conviction court, a federal district court, and the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear her case. Prosecutors have argued for 30 years that this was a planned, cruel killing of an innocent young woman, that Pike was an adult, and that the jury got it right. And many people who have suffered terrible childhoods never hurt anyone. Abuse may explain.

8:13 It doesn't compel. And there's something else the state would want you to know, which I'll get to in the next chapter, about what Krista Pike did after she was already on death row. When we come back, 30 years on death row. After her conviction, Krista Pike was sent to the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville, now called the Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center. For most of the next 30 years, she was the only woman on Tennessee's death row. Her appeals went where most Capitol appeals go, slowly and nowhere. In June of 2001, according to her own clemency petition, she fell into despair and told a judge she wanted to drop her appeals and have an execution date set. That would have meant volunteering to die. Two months later, something happened that changed her case permanently. Early on the morning of August 24, 2001, inmates were evacuated during a fire alarm.

9:21 A fight broke out between two other inmates, and Pike wrapped a heavy boot lace around the neck of one of them, a woman named Patricia Jones, and strangled her. Jones survived. Here, too, there are two accounts. A prison sergeant testified that Pike was proud and unremorseful afterward, and said she would have killed Jones with 30 more seconds. Pike's clemency petition says she was defending another inmate, a friend from Jones, and that Jones later admitted Pike did the right thing. In 2004, a jury convicted Pike of attempted first-degree murder and she received an additional 25-year sentence. She later changed her mind about dropping her appeals and courts allowed them to continue. But that second conviction followed her into every hearing for the next 20 years. For nearly three decades, Pike lived in what her lawyers describe as de facto solitary confinement. A group of United Nations human rights experts called her life a trajectory of severe physical.

10:17 And psychological suffering. Only recently, after a legal settlement, did she get more contact with other people. Her lawyers said she enjoyed being able to work and share some meals with a small group of women. Then the clock started. After Tennessee resumed executions with a new protocol, the Tennessee Supreme Court set an execution date for Krista Pike, September 30, 2026. She would be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. her lawyers filed a 226-page clemency petition with Governor Bill Lee. In it, she wrote that it took years to understand the gravity of what she had done and that it sickens her to think she was capable of it. She has said not a day goes by that she doesn't think about Colleen. May Martinez had a different perspective. She told WBIR she believed her daughter would have supported the execution so that Pike could never hurt anyone else. On September 28th, Two days before the date, Governor Lee denied clemency. He said he had given the request deliberate consideration and would uphold the sentence.

11:25 May Martinez and her husband got in the car in Jacksonville and drove more than eight hours to Nashville to be in the room. Chapter 5. September 30th. The execution was scheduled for 10 o'clock in the morning, Central Time, at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. Pike's lawyers had filed a last-minute challenge, arguing that the evidence of her childhood abuse had never been properly considered. About an hour before 10, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay, two judges to one. Judges Karen Moore and Jane Stranch voted to stop it while they decided a technical but crucial question, whether her filing was a motion to reopen her existing federal case or a brand-new habeas petition that would be almost impossible to bring. Judge Richard Griffin dissented and said the execution should go forward. May Martinez was already at the prison when the news came. She went back outside. Tennessee's Attorney General went straight to the U.S.

12:26 Supreme Court. And just before six that evening, the Supreme Court lifted the stay. The execution was back on. At 26 minutes past seven, the curtain to the execution chamber opened. Krista Pike sang a song with her spiritual advisor. In her final statement, according to witnesses, She said she was at peace and that she would leave this world in love. Then the state of Tennessee began administering pentobarbital, a single drug that is supposed to cause unconsciousness and then death. A few minutes in, according to media witnesses, Pike lifted her head and said her arm hurt, that it felt like it was about to burst open. Witnesses said she kicked her feet. At some point, she appeared to lose consciousness, but she kept breathing. heavily, loud enough for the witnesses to hear. Officials closed the curtain on the media witnesses.

13:18 Roughly an hour and a half after it began, reporters were escorted out. Over the course of the procedure, the state administered a second dose, the maximum its protocol allows. Krista Pike still did not die. More than two hours after it started, she was taken out of the prison by ambulance to a hospital. Here is what her lawyers say happened, based on what they've learned since. In a court filing, they wrote that the IV lines had not been placed correctly and her veins had blown, so the drug went into the tissue of her arms instead of her bloodstream. And, they wrote, it appears no one on the execution team realized it. Instead of fixing the problem, the team pushed a second set of syringes through the same failed lines. Her arms were left swollen, burned, and blistered.

14:06 NBC News reported there was no emergency oxygen available in the chamber. Here is what the state says. Frank Strada, the corrections commissioner, has maintained that his department followed its established protocol. State officials have not offered their own explanation of what went wrong. It was not the first time. In May, Tennessee had failed to execute another man, Tony Carruthers, under the same protocol. Fox 17 in Nashville confirmed before the Pike execution that the same doctor who oversaw the Carruthers procedure would oversee hers. Pike's lawyers had warned the state in August that her veins could make IV access difficult. And there's one more gap I want you to understand.

14:48 Tennessee's protocol says what to do if the first dose doesn't work. Give a second. It says nothing about what to do if the second doesn't work either. There was no plan for a person who survived because nobody planned for that. The next day, May Martinez told the Associated Press, quote,' I didn't get justice for my daughter,' When we come back, the hospital, and the question Tennessee now has to answer. Chapter 6. The Hospital Bed In the days after September 30th, everything moved fast. Governor Lee paused all the remaining executions scheduled in Tennessee this year and ordered a third-party review.

15:40 He named former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton to lead it, the same man who, in 2022, led a review that found Tennessee had not followed its own lethal injection process. Commissioner Strada, who had come to Tennessee after overseeing three troubled executions in Arizona, announced he would step down. A U.S. Senator from Tennessee called for the electric chair, and the Death Penalty Information Center called it the worst botched execution in modern American history. Meanwhile, Krista Pike lay unconscious in a Nashville hospital on a ventilator under armed guard, shackled to the bed. For days, her lawyers could say little about her condition. On Monday night, October 5th, her lawyer Randy Spivey said they were told she was brain dead and that life support would be removed the next day.

16:28 On Tuesday, October 6th, she woke up. Her first words, her lawyers were told, were questions. Where am I and who are you? Over the following days, her lawyers described what they called a medically unprecedented recovery. She came off the ventilator. She had pneumonia and a blood clot in one arm. At first, she couldn't use either arm. By Wednesday, she was walking around her room. One of her lawyers described her mind as foggy and said she was angry and confused about what had happened to her. On October 7th, a judge in Nashville ordered the state to preserve every piece of evidence from the execution. The IV lines, the needles, the drugs, the records, the recordings. The state's lawyer told the court there was no execution order pending for Pike, but he said he couldn't rule out another one in the future. And on Saturday, October 10th, 10 days after the state tried to end her life, Krista Pike was discharged and taken back to the Deborah K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, back to death row. Her lawyers say she's walking with some help, her arms are regaining strength, and her lungs are clear, but she's having cognitive problems that could take months to understand. In their statement, they said she's grateful to the first responders and the medical team who saved her life. At a news conference, her lawyer Randy Spivey said, quote, Krista is a survivor. Survivor of abuse, of rape, of a suicide attempt, and now of the state's attempt to

17:58 execute her. May Martinez told WBIR she had expected Pike to survive and that she doesn't believe Tennessee will try again. When she was asked what she wants now, she said it doesn't matter what she thinks. They're going to do what they're going to do. Chapter 7, What Now? So here's where we are. The state of Tennessee sentenced Krista Pike to death in 1996. It carried out that sentence, every step of it, on September 30th. And she's alive. Can it try again? There is almost no modern law on this. The closest precedent is from 1946 in Louisiana. A 17-year-old named Willie Francis was put in the electric chair, and it failed.

18:41 The chair had been set up wrong. He survived. His lawyers took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that a second attempt would be cruel and unusual punishment. In 1947, the court ruled 5-4 that the state could try again because the first failure was an accident, not intentional cruelty. A year after the first attempt, Willie Francis was executed. There's a more recent case, too. In 2009, Ohio spent about two hours trying and failing to find a usable vein on a man named Rommel Broom. The execution was called off before any drug was given. Years later, Ohio Supreme Court ruled the state could try again.

19:24 It never did. Broom died in prison in 2020. Krista Pike's case is different from both. Unlike Broom, she actually received the drugs, the full dose, twice. Unlike Frances, her lawyers will argue this wasn't a one-time accident, but the second failure under the same protocol in the same year, after the state had been warned. Her lawyers say she's the only person known to have survived a complete execution attempt in this country. So let me give you both sides of what should happen next. The case for carrying out the sentence goes like this. A jury sentenced her to death for a horrific crime. Every court has upheld that sentence. The failure on September 30th was the state's mistake, not a new legal judgment about whether she deserves to die. Colleen Slemmer's family has waited more than 30 years for that sentence to be carried out. If a botched procedure meant the sentence disappeared, the outcome of a capital case would depend on luck or on incompetence. And some Tennessee lawmakers are already proposing other methods, including the firing squad. The case against goes like this. The Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment, and her lawyers will argue that strapping a woman back to a gurney after what she went through, after the state put her through one execution.

20:42 Already, is exactly that. They'll argue she has already suffered something no other person in this country has suffered. They point to her age at the time of the crime, her childhood, and her mental illness, evidence her jury never fully heard. And they'll point out that the state can't promise it won't happen again. because it hasn't explained what went wrong the first time. They're asking Governor Lee to commute her sentence to life without parole. He's term limited and leaves office in January. He hasn't said what he'll do. Here's where I land, and you've heard me say this before. I don't argue the death penalty on this show. What I argue about is competence and honesty and whether the state does what it says it will do. On September 30th, Tennessee failed at the one thing it had said for 30 years that it would do. It failed in a way it had already failed once this year. It failed after it was warned. And it still hasn't told the public why.

21:40 Before anyone in Nashville talks about a second attempt, the state owes an honest, independent public accounting of the first one. If it can't give that, it has no business trying again. And whatever Tennessee decides, I hope it decides it with May Martinez. In the room. She's been told for 30 years that the system would deliver an ending. It hasn't. She deserves more than to read about the next decision in the paper. Colleen Slemmer was 19 years old, a computer nerd from Orange Park, Florida, who loved roller skating, who went shrimping before dawn with her stepdad, who gave up her lunch to feed kids who needed help. She went to Knoxville to learn a trade. She should be 50 now. Her mother is still her voice. Someone has to say her name. That's the whole Krista Pike story so far. We'll keep following it every step, including whatever the governor and the Independent Review decide. Here's my question for the Spotify crowd, and I'm genuinely curious where you land.

22:39 If a state tries to execute someone and fails, should it be allowed to try again? If you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment and tell me why. If this episode meant something to you, please send it to someone. One-case episodes like this take a lot of work, and the best way to help us keep making them is to tell a friend. And on Apple Podcasts, look at the top of your screen for Listen Uninterrupted. $ 5 a month gets you this show without ads, plus thousands of shows across Calaroga Media, with a 30-day free trial. To all of you who already subscribe, thank you. You're the reason we can do an episode like this one. Coming up, this afternoon, Brian Koberger's lawyers ask Judge Stephen Hippler to step aside from his case, and we'll have the result for you tomorrow. And in London, Russell Brand's trial continues.

23:29 He denies all charges. I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. This episode of Daily Crime and Justice is produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and is intended for news and commentary purposes only. It is not legal advice. Krista Pike was convicted of first-degree murder in 1996 and of attempted first-degree murder in 2004. Those convictions stand. Details of Krista Pike's childhood come primarily from her clemency petition and from statements by her attorneys. Some of those details have been disputed or were not presented at trial, and the state's position on them has varied over time. Descriptions of the 2001 attack on Patricia Jones include accounts from prison staff testimony, and from Pike's clemency petition, which differ.

24:19 Descriptions of what. Happened on September 30th come from media witnesses and from court filings by Pike's attorneys. The state has not offered its own explanation and has said it followed its protocol. Accounts differ on the exact timing of events inside the execution chamber. Information about Pike's medical condition comes from her attorneys and may have changed. An independent review is ongoing. Recollections of Colleen Slemmer come from interviews her mother, Mae Martinez, gave to WBIR, WVLT, and other outlets. Historical cases, including Louisiana X-Real, Francis vs. Reese Weber, and the case of Romuald Broom, are summarized for general context. If anything in this episode affected you, help is available. If you or someone you know has experienced sexual violence, you can call RAINN at 800-656-4673. If a child is being abused, you can call the Child Help National Child Abuse Hotline at 800-422-4453.

25:18 And if you are struggling, you can call or text 988.