Christa Pike smiled at her spiritual adviser as the second round of pentobarbital failed to kill her. "Does this happen like that?" she asked, watching the IV line in her arm swell. At 8:53 p.m. on October 1, 2026, witnesses at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution were removed from the viewing room, and the 50-year-old convicted killer was loaded into an ambulance.
Colleen Slemmer didn't get an ambulance.
Slemmer was 19 years old in 1995 when Pike — then 18 — tortured and murdered her. Pike slashed Slemmer more than 300 times with a box cutter over 45 minutes. Pike's accomplice carved a pentagram into Slemmer's stomach while she was still alive. Pike crushed her skull with a chunk of asphalt, then removed a fragment of it to show her roommate as a souvenir. Thirty-one years later, the state of Tennessee couldn't manage to return the favor on a sterile gurney with medical professionals and pharmaceutical-grade drugs.
A media witness who had attended five previous Tennessee executions said none of them went like this. The curtains closed at 7:46 p.m. after the initial round of pentobarbital failed. They reopened. A second dose was administered. Pike told her spiritual adviser, "I feel like my arm is about to burst open." She said, "I'm trying." The curtains closed again at 8:00 p.m. By 8:53, it was over — not because Pike was dead, but because the state gave up.
Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in over 200 years. Would have been.
Governor Bill Lee responded by ordering a "comprehensive third-party review" of Tennessee's execution procedures and halting all remaining executions scheduled for 2026. This was the second failure in months — though a different one. Tony Carruthers' execution was abandoned in May when medical workers couldn't establish an IV line. Wednesday's failure was the drug protocol itself. Two executions. Two different problems. Zero results.
Matt Walsh said what a lot of people were thinking: "This is ridiculous. Just shoot her in the head. Or put a rope around her neck and drop her from a platform." The lethal injection protocol was designed to make executions look humane for the benefit of witnesses, not the condemned. It's theater. When the theater breaks down, you get exactly what happened last night — a convicted torturer smiling on a gurney while the state fumbles, and a dead teenager's family watching from behind glass.
The inevitable argument is already forming: this proves the system is broken, capital punishment is cruel, abolish the death penalty entirely. That framing requires you to forget who Christa Pike is and what she did to Colleen Slemmer. It requires you to look at the woman on the gurney and feel something for her while feeling nothing for the 19-year-old she tortured to death three decades ago. What they want is no system at all — one where Pike lives out her days on the taxpayer's dime, smiling.
Governor Lee now has a choice that will define more than his legacy on criminal justice. Every month Pike stays alive past her execution date is a month Colleen Slemmer's family has to live knowing the state couldn't finish what a jury decided thirty-one years ago. A "comprehensive review" is fine. Reviews end. The question is what happens after.
Pike smiled. She asked if this was normal. She told her spiritual adviser she was trying.
Colleen Slemmer was 19.
