Twenty-four hours before Christa Gail Pike was scheduled to die, one word had pushed an already extraordinary death-penalty case into even more unsettling territory.

Hanging.

Pike’s attorneys had argued that if Tennessee insisted on executing her, hanging before witnesses—including members of Colleen Slemmer’s family—would be preferable to the lethal-injection procedure they were challenging.

It sounded almost impossible.

Tennessee was preparing a modern lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.

Pike was fighting to stay alive.

Her attorneys had taken an emergency stay request to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Governor Bill Lee had just rejected clemency.

And yet her legal team was discussing a method of execution more closely associated with another century.

Why?

The answer was not that Tennessee had suddenly offered Pike a rope.

It had not.

No court had ordered her to be hanged.

And Pike had not abandoned her effort to stop the execution.

The hanging argument emerged from something much narrower and more complicated: her attorneys’ constitutional challenge to Tennessee’s planned lethal injection and the question of what alternative method could be proposed if they claimed the state’s existing procedure created an unacceptable risk of suffering.

Behind that argument was another Tennessee execution.

One that had already gone wrong.

And behind that was a physician Pike’s attorneys believed could connect the two cases.

By September 29, those issues were no longer theoretical.

Pike’s execution remained scheduled for 10 a.m. Central Time on September 30.

Governor Lee had announced on September 28 that he would not commute her sentence to life without parole.

The Tennessee Supreme Court had denied a stay.

Her attorneys had filed an emergency application with the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Tennessee prison officials continued preparing Riverbend.

The clock was running.

And for Pike’s lawyers, one question loomed over everything else:

What would happen if Tennessee could not establish the IV lines needed to execute her?

That question had a recent precedent.

On May 21, Tennessee attempted to execute Tony Von Carruthers.

Medical personnel established one IV line.

According to the account summarized in the source, they were unable to establish the required backup line.

They kept trying.

A central line was attempted.

That failed too.

More than an hour passed.

The execution could not proceed.

Governor Lee ultimately granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve.

That episode mattered enormously to Pike’s attorneys because their client had already been raising medical concerns of her own.

Her lawyers said Pike had small veins and a blood condition that could complicate vascular access.

Their argument was straightforward.

If Tennessee had recently failed to complete IV preparation for another condemned prisoner, what assurance existed that the same system could safely handle Pike if her veins proved difficult to access?

Carruthers’ experience did not establish that Pike’s execution would fail.

But it made the possibility considerably harder to dismiss.

The connection became more controversial when Pike’s attorneys focused on the physician involved.

According to deposition reporting discussed in the source, the doctor responsible for execution-related IV work acknowledged that he had not placed a central line in approximately thirteen years and did not hold hospital privileges.

He had previous experience with the procedure.

But the admission immediately raised questions.

If ordinary peripheral IV access failed again, would the execution team be prepared for the next step?

Then came the detail that transformed the Carruthers case from background history into part of Pike’s immediate legal argument.

Dr. Mark Fowler reportedly confirmed that he expected to participate as a physician in Pike’s execution as well.

Pike’s lawyers tried to use that information to reopen aspects of their challenge to Tennessee’s lethal-injection protocol.

They did not succeed.

Special Master W. Mark Ward denied the emergency effort in August.

That ruling did not establish that nothing had gone wrong during the Carruthers execution attempt.

It meant Pike had not obtained the legal relief she sought based upon it.

By late September, however, the issue had returned with an execution date only hours away.

And that was where hanging entered the story.

Tennessee’s standard execution method is lethal injection.

Because Pike’s crime occurred before January 1, 1999, state law also allowed her to elect electrocution.

Hanging was not one of the ordinary statutory options she could simply choose.

Her lawyers raised it in litigation challenging lethal injection.

That distinction is crucial.

A prisoner challenging a method of execution can face the legal question of whether a feasible alternative exists.

Pike’s attorneys therefore argued that hanging, with witnesses present, would be preferable to the lethal-injection process they claimed presented particular risks for their client.

It was an alternative-method argument.

Not an announcement that Tennessee had agreed to hang Christa Pike.

Not evidence that Pike had suddenly decided she wanted to die.

And not a replacement for her simultaneous attempt to stop the execution altogether.

That created an unusual legal contrast.

Lethal injection is designed to resemble a controlled medical procedure.

There is a gurney.

Restraints.

IV lines.

Medication.

Hanging immediately evokes something visibly violent.

But Pike’s attorneys were asking the courts to look beyond appearances.

Their position was that the apparently clinical procedure could expose Pike to suffering because of her individual medical and psychological circumstances.

The medical argument was only one part of it.

The other involved trauma.

Pike’s clemency petition and litigation described a childhood marked by repeated sexual abuse, violence and neglect.

Her lawyers argued that those experiences remained relevant not only to whether her death sentence should be commuted, but to the physical procedure Tennessee intended to use.

Who would restrain her?

Who would touch her body?

Who would establish the IVs?

Would male personnel participate?

Would her body have to be exposed if ordinary IV placement failed?

Could invasive physical contact and restraint trigger severe psychological responses associated with her history of abuse?

Pike’s attorneys wanted female personnel used during the execution.

Organizations working in sexual-violence, trafficking and women’s legal advocacy also sought to present arguments concerning the possible effects of restraint, invasive procedures and loss of bodily control.

The Tennessee Supreme Court permitted an amicus filing on September 22.

But allowing the arguments to be presented was not the same thing as accepting them.

The next day, the court denied Pike’s request for a stay.

Tennessee disputed that its execution protocol would subject Pike to unconstitutional suffering.

Pike’s history of trauma did not itself establish that every feared consequence would occur.

Her medical concerns did not prove IV placement would fail.

Carruthers’ failed execution attempt did not prove Pike’s would fail in the same way.

Those were risks her lawyers were asking the courts to consider.

They were not established predictions.

That distinction became increasingly important as dramatic headlines began focusing on an “all-female execution team” or Pike supposedly “choosing hanging.”

Neither description captured the actual legal posture.

Tennessee had not agreed to an all-female execution team.

Pike had not simply selected hanging from a menu of available methods.

Her lawyers were challenging how the state planned to kill her while simultaneously asking that she not be executed at all.

The second argument had already reached Governor Bill Lee.

On September 3, Pike’s attorneys submitted a clemency petition seeking commutation of her death sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

The request did not seek Pike’s release.

It did not challenge her murder conviction.

If Lee granted it, Pike would remain imprisoned for the rest of her life.

The difference was whether Tennessee would execute her.

Her attorneys focused heavily on who Pike had been when Colleen Slemmer was murdered.

She was 18.

They described severe childhood abuse.

Trauma.

Mental-health problems.

Developmental immaturity.

They argued that the jury that sentenced Pike to death did not receive a complete picture of those circumstances.

They also invoked modern understanding of adolescent and young-adult brain development.

One comparison featured prominently.

According to Pike’s advocates, eight Tennessee defendants had received death sentences for crimes committed when they were 18.

They said Pike was the only person in that comparison group whose death sentence had not ultimately been reduced.

Their argument was not that turning 18 eliminated responsibility.

It was that the governor should consider whether life without parole could provide permanent punishment without leaving Pike as the sole executed member of that particular group.

Lee had authority to make that decision even after Pike had failed in court.

Then September 28 arrived.

The governor declined clemency.

He announced that after reviewing the case and Pike’s request, he would allow Tennessee’s sentence to stand.

One of Pike’s last major routes to life without parole had closed.

And it closed only two days before the scheduled execution.

The legal battle therefore shifted almost entirely toward the courts.

On September 23, the Tennessee Supreme Court denied Pike’s request for a stay.

On September 25, her attorneys filed an emergency stay application with the U.S. Supreme Court.

But filing an application did not itself stop the execution.

Unless a court granted relief, Tennessee remained authorized to proceed.

That created two processes moving simultaneously toward the same deadline.

Pike’s lawyers were filing papers asking judges to stop the execution.

Tennessee officials were preparing Riverbend to carry it out.

Media witnesses had already been selected.

Journalists received instructions to begin checking in at 7:30 on the morning of September 30.

Pike was housed at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, but the execution was scheduled to take place at Riverbend.

If carried out, it would make Pike the first woman executed by Tennessee in more than two centuries, according to the source.

But while the country debated Pike’s veins, childhood, lawyers and possible execution methods, Colleen Slemmer’s family was asking a different question.

Where was Colleen in all of this?

Her mother, May Martinez, had spent more than thirty years watching the case return to public attention.

Each new appeal created another set of headlines.

Pike’s childhood.

Pike’s mental health.

Pike’s medical condition.

Pike’s trauma.

Pike’s execution method.

Pike’s final legal filings.

Martinez believed her daughter was repeatedly pushed into the background.

To understand that frustration, the story has to return to January 1995.

Colleen was 19.

Pike was 18.

They knew each other through the Job Corps program in Knoxville.

According to facts recounted in the Tennessee Supreme Court record summarized by the source, Pike told another student the day before the killing that she intended to kill Colleen.

On January 12, Pike, Colleen, Pike’s boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and Shadolla Peterson left the Job Corps center together.

Only three returned.

The group had traveled to an isolated area near the University of Tennessee Agricultural Campus.

There, Colleen was attacked.

The court record describes violence lasting approximately thirty minutes to an hour.

She was beaten.

Cut.

Kicked.

Struck in the head with pieces of asphalt.

The autopsy documented numerous injuries, including wounds consistent with attempts to defend herself.

Medical evidence indicated she remained alive and conscious during much of the attack.

She pleaded for the violence to stop.

It did not.

Blunt-force injuries to her head ultimately caused her death.

According to the court record, Pike later told another student she had killed Colleen.

She also possessed a fragment of Colleen’s skull.

Those facts formed part of the case that resulted in Pike’s murder conviction and death sentence in 1996.

That history explains why Martinez objected to seeing the final public discussion revolve around whether Pike might suffer during execution.

From the victim family’s perspective, the comparison was painful.

The legal system was carefully examining the possibility that a needle, restraint or execution procedure might inflict unconstitutional suffering on the woman convicted of participating in Colleen’s prolonged murder.

Colleen had no comparable protection once the attack began.

But legally, those two realities are not mutually exclusive.

The brutality of Slemmer’s murder does not remove Pike’s constitutional protections.

And Pike’s constitutional protections do not reduce what happened to Slemmer.

That distinction is easy to lose in the emotional final days of a capital case.

There was another fact complicating the clemency narrative.

The murder of Colleen was not Pike’s final conviction for serious violence.

In 2001, while already incarcerated on death row, Pike became involved in an attack on fellow prisoner Patricia Jones.

According to the case history summarized in the source, prosecutors said Pike used a heavy shoelace or bootlace to choke Jones until she lost consciousness.

Pike was convicted of attempted first-degree premeditated murder.

She received a concurrent 25-year sentence.

That conviction was upheld.

For officials considering clemency, that later conviction could not simply be removed from Pike’s institutional history.

Neither could evidence of her subsequent behavior and claimed rehabilitation.

A clemency decision can consider a broader range of information than the narrow constitutional questions confronting a court.

That is precisely why Lee’s September 28 decision mattered.

The governor had the authority to examine Pike’s entire story and still replace death with life without parole.

He chose not to do so.

After that decision, the hanging argument remained only one component of a much larger and rapidly shrinking legal battlefield.

The key question was not whether hanging sounded more brutal than lethal injection.

It was whether Tennessee’s planned method satisfied constitutional requirements as applied to Pike.

Tennessee uses a single-drug pentobarbital protocol.

Its intended progression involves unconsciousness followed by death.

Critics of pentobarbital executions have argued that pulmonary edema can create sensations resembling suffocation or drowning under certain circumstances.

Tennessee has disputed claims that its protocol creates unconstitutional suffering.

Pike’s lawyers added her own alleged medical difficulties to that broader dispute.

Small veins.

A blood disorder.

Potential difficulty establishing IV access.

Trauma associated with restraint and invasive physical contact.

Then they pointed to Carruthers.

Tennessee had already demonstrated that IV access could become more than a hypothetical problem.

Medical personnel had tried.

The required access could not be completed.

The execution was stopped.

That did not tell anyone what would happen to Pike.

It demonstrated what could happen when an execution protocol collided with the practical difficulty of gaining vascular access.

And it created the most unsettling unanswered question hanging over September 30.

What if the same thing happened again?

Suppose Pike entered Riverbend.

Suppose she was placed on the gurney.

Suppose ordinary IV access proved difficult.

Suppose repeated attempts failed.

Suppose a central line became necessary.

What happened then?

Carruthers received a reprieve after his execution attempt was halted.

Pike’s lawyers pointed to a physician expected to participate in both cases.

But nothing in Carruthers’ experience guaranteed the same outcome for Pike.

Nor did the hanging proposal solve that problem.

It was part of litigation.

It was not an approved replacement procedure waiting in the next room.

The actual execution plan remained lethal injection.

That fact is what made the final 24 hours so tense.

By 10 a.m. Central Time on September 29, Pike was exactly one day from her scheduled execution.

Clemency had been denied.

The Tennessee Supreme Court had denied a stay.

The U.S. Supreme Court had received an emergency request.

Riverbend was preparing for witnesses.

And the state’s planned execution method remained unchanged.

Pike’s lawyers were still fighting.

But every remaining legal argument now existed against a physical countdown.

Twenty-four hours.

Then twenty-three.

Then twenty-two.

A court could still intervene.

But unless one did, Tennessee intended to proceed.

The case therefore entered its final stage with two very different images competing for attention.

One was Christa Pike on an execution gurney.

Would female personnel restrain her?

Would the IV lines work?

Would pentobarbital produce the death Tennessee expected?

Would her trauma affect the procedure?

Would the Supreme Court intervene?

The other image was Colleen Slemmer in January 1995.

Nineteen years old.

Leaving Job Corps with people she knew.

Walking toward an isolated location.

Never returning.

For May Martinez, that second image was the one she believed the public could not afford to lose.

Pike had spent almost thirty years challenging the punishment imposed for Colleen’s murder.

Martinez had spent those same years without her daughter.

Now the legal system was scrutinizing every detail of how Pike might die.

Who would touch her.

Where a needle would enter.

Whether the person placing it possessed sufficient experience.

What drug would be used.

Whether another method would cause less suffering.

Those questions mattered because the Constitution still applied inside the execution chamber.

But Colleen’s family was asking that the scrutiny not erase the reason the chamber had entered the story at all.

That tension defined the final 24 hours.

Christa Pike remained entitled to challenge whether Tennessee could lawfully execute her.

Tennessee remained responsible for carrying out any execution within constitutional limits.

The courts remained capable of intervening.

And Colleen Slemmer remained the 19-year-old whose murder produced the sentence everyone was now fighting over.

Hanging may have generated the most startling headline.

But it was never the central question.

The real question was whether, after thirty years of litigation, Tennessee would be permitted to carry out Pike’s death sentence at 10 a.m. on September 30—and whether the state’s lethal-injection system could actually perform the execution its courts had authorized.

With clemency denied and the emergency request before the U.S. Supreme Court, those questions were no longer months or weeks away.

They were measured in hours.