Less than 24 hours before Tennessee planned to execute Christa Gail Pike, two women were waiting for the same clock to reach 10 a.m.

One was inside the Tennessee prison system.

The other had traveled from Florida.

For Christa Pike, September 30, 2026 was supposed to be the final day of a life shaped by a murder committed when she was 18, a death sentence imposed when she was 20, and three decades of appeals.

For May Martinez, it was supposed to be the end of 31 years of waiting for justice for her daughter.

Her daughter’s name was Colleen Slemmer.

And when May talked about Colleen, she did not begin with the murder.

She talked about the person who existed before it.

Colleen loved roller skating.

She worked with people with disabilities.

Her mother remembered her as easygoing and almost always smiling.

She was 19 years old when she was killed in Knoxville in January 1995.

Prosecutors said Pike and two accomplices lured Colleen into a wooded area.

The attack that followed became the foundation of one of Tennessee’s most notorious death-penalty cases.

Pike was 18.

She told prosecutors she believed Colleen was trying to take her boyfriend.

Afterward, according to the account in the source, Pike took a fragment of Colleen’s skull back to campus and bragged about what had happened.

That fragment would remain important to May decades later.

She wanted it back.

Not as evidence.

Not as a symbol.

She wanted to bury the rest of her daughter.

That detail helps explain why the final days before Pike’s scheduled execution were never simply about whether Tennessee should kill a condemned prisoner.

For May, they were about everything that had remained unfinished since 1995.

She knew an execution could not bring Colleen back.

She said so herself.

But she believed carrying out the sentence could finally represent justice.

And when opponents of Pike’s execution talked about everything Pike would lose—her family, meals, ordinary human experiences—May had a brutally simple response.

Colleen never got those things either.

That was the divide surrounding Tennessee as September 30 approached.

One side looked at the crime.

The other looked at the person who committed it.

And both believed the most important part of the story was being ignored by the other.

Pike’s attorneys had spent months asking Governor Bill Lee to intervene.

Their clemency petition was not a brief plea.

According to the source, it ran more than 200 pages.

It described Pike’s childhood.

Her mental-health history.

Medical diagnoses.

Records.

Statements from people who knew her before the murder.

Her attorneys argued that the 50-year-old woman awaiting execution was not psychologically the same person who entered a Knox County courtroom three decades earlier.

Lee was not persuaded.

On Monday, September 28, he announced that he would not intervene.

His statement was brief.

After deliberate consideration and a thorough review, he said, he would uphold the sentence.

For Pike’s attorneys, the decision was devastating.

They said they were heartbroken.

But they were not finished.

By then, however, the available legal avenues had narrowed dramatically.

The Tennessee Supreme Court had already rejected an effort to stop the execution.

Pike’s attorneys had argued that Tennessee’s lethal-injection procedure created a specific unconstitutional risk for her.

One concern involved thrombocytosis, a blood condition.

Another involved her veins.

Another centered on her history of psychological trauma and what being physically restrained during the execution might do to her.

The court was not convinced.

A court-appointed special master had examined many of those questions.

His findings largely favored Tennessee.

That left Pike’s lawyers looking to Washington.

They filed an emergency application with the United States Supreme Court.

As September 30 approached, that request represented one of the last remaining barriers between Pike and the execution chamber.

Outside the courts, the pressure campaign was international.

Amnesty International called for intervention.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights urged the United States not to carry out the execution.

United Nations experts called for commutation.

Opponents of capital punishment organized vigils and demonstrations.

They emphasized Pike’s age at the time of the crime.

Eighteen.

Legally an adult.

But, her supporters argued, only barely.

They pointed to modern research concerning adolescent and young-adult brain development.

They pointed to the abuse Pike’s attorneys say defined her childhood.

They pointed to mental illness.

They pointed to decades of isolation.

And they argued that executing her now would punish a profoundly different person from the teenager sentenced in 1996.

May Martinez heard all of it.

Her answer remained focused on Colleen.

While activists described what Pike would lose, May thought about everything her daughter had already lost.

Birthdays.

Family.

Adulthood.

A future.

Even the simple opportunity to grow older.

Colleen would have turned 51 shortly before Pike’s scheduled execution.

Instead, she remained 19 in her family’s memories.

May had carried that absence for more than three decades.

Then she got in a car and headed for Nashville.

The trip itself had become part of the story.

May lived near Jacksonville, Florida.

According to the source, she had sought assistance with the cost of traveling to Tennessee.

After local coverage of her situation, the community responded.

With help from the Justice Coalition of Jacksonville, more than $2,500 was raised so May and her family could make the trip.

On the same Monday that Lee rejected clemency, they were already traveling.

May was bringing a photograph of Colleen.

That image represented the person she believed had disappeared beneath three decades of headlines about Christa Pike.

Pike had become famous.

Colleen had become “the victim.”

May wanted people to remember that those words represented a real young woman.

While May traveled north, another side of Pike’s story was receiving attention.

For the first time in years, Pike had been speaking publicly through interviews associated with a documentary.

She expressed remorse.

According to the source, she said she felt for Colleen’s mother.

She acknowledged taking away someone’s child.

Someone’s sister.

Someone’s friend.

Her attorneys presented those statements as evidence of change.

May did not accept that transformation as a reason for mercy.

From her perspective, Pike had already received decades Colleen never had.

But the clemency debate was only one part of the approaching execution.

There was another problem.

A medical one.

And Tennessee had already received a warning about it months earlier.

Tony Kurthers.

In May 2026, Tennessee prepared to execute Kurthers at Riverbend.

The state needed to establish the IV access required under its protocol.

A primary line was established.

The backup line was not.

Personnel kept trying.

Eventually, a physician attempted a central line, a more invasive vascular-access procedure.

That attempt also failed.

More than an hour passed.

Then the execution was called off.

Governor Lee granted Kurthers a one-year reprieve.

The failed attempt immediately attracted legal scrutiny.

According to court filings cited by the source, Kurthers’ attorneys alleged that the physician involved had not placed a central line in approximately 13 years and did not hold hospital privileges.

Those were claims in litigation, not findings that should automatically be treated as established fact.

But for Pike’s lawyers, the Kurthers case transformed an abstract concern into an urgent one.

They had already worried about Pike’s veins.

Now Tennessee had demonstrated that vascular access could derail an execution.

So Pike’s attorneys asked the Tennessee Supreme Court for additional review.

The court appointed senior Judge Mark Ward as a special master.

The August hearing lasted three days.

Pike watched by video from prison.

Her lawyers focused heavily on two issues.

The first was physical.

They argued that Pike’s veins made ordinary IV placement difficult and risky.

They wanted a qualified medical professional to establish more secure access.

They also proposed an alternative execution method.

The second argument was psychological.

Pike’s attorneys said the execution procedure itself could force her to relive childhood trauma.

A clinical psychologist testified about what physical restraint could mean for someone with Pike’s history.

The state rejected those arguments.

Its lawyers pointed to successful blood draws as evidence that Pike’s veins were accessible.

They maintained that pentobarbital would render her unconscious before she experienced serious pain.

They also argued that Tennessee was not equipped or legally authorized to use the alternative method proposed by Pike’s attorneys.

On August 21, Judge Ward issued his findings.

According to the source, he accepted that Pike suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder connected to repeated childhood abuse.

But he found insufficient proof that her veins were too small or damaged for ordinary IV access.

He also rejected the proposed alternative execution method.

Of the five issues before him, the source says Ward sided with Tennessee on four and dismissed the fifth.

There were some concessions.

Female officers would transport Pike.

Female personnel would supervise her.

She would be moved to Riverbend no earlier than 24 hours before the execution.

And she would be housed alone in the unit.

Pike had wanted an entirely female execution team.

But another development worried her attorneys even more.

According to the source, the state’s execution physician indicated that he would place the central line Pike’s lawyers had requested.

The source identifies him as the same physician involved in the failed Kurthers procedure.

Pike’s attorneys publicly challenged his qualifications.

That brought the case into its final hours with an extraordinary contradiction.

The courts had largely accepted Tennessee’s position that Pike’s vascular access did not present an unconstitutional risk.

Her lawyers believed the opposite.

And only months earlier, Tennessee had already abandoned another execution because of difficulty establishing the required access.

At the time this source was prepared, nobody knew what would happen on September 30.

That point is crucial.

This material captures the case before the execution attempt.

It therefore should not be rewritten as though its predictions were hindsight.

The source itself contains multiple alternative endings prepared for different possible outcomes.

One imagines Tennessee completing Pike’s execution.

Another imagines a Supreme Court stay.

Those endings demonstrate that the material was built while the outcome remained unresolved.

The strongest value of this source is therefore not what it says happened afterward.

It is what it shows Tennessee knew beforehand.

Pike’s attorneys had raised concerns about her veins.

Kurthers’ execution attempt had already failed after vascular-access problems.

A special master had heard evidence.

The state maintained Pike’s veins were sufficiently accessible.

Her lawyers disagreed.

The execution date remained.

And that medical dispute sat directly beneath the larger moral debate.

The case for clemency centered heavily on Pike’s age and history.

Her attorneys described a childhood filled with abuse.

According to their account, she had been sexually abused beginning at an extremely young age and repeatedly subjected to physical, verbal and sexual abuse by men connected to her mother and grandmother.

Pike herself expressed the belief that psychological help earlier in life might have changed something.

Her supporters argued that the jury that sentenced her never received the full picture.

They also emphasized her age.

Pike was 18.

Her co-defendant Tadaryl Shipp was 17.

That one-year legal distinction produced radically different sentencing possibilities.

Shipp could not receive death.

Pike could.

Her current lawyers also challenged the traditional narrative about their relative roles in the crime.

They argued that Pike was in an abusive relationship with Shipp and that he played a larger leadership role than the prosecution’s case suggested.

According to the source, Shipp’s former attorney later acknowledged in writing that his trial strategy had involved shifting as much blame as possible onto Pike.

Those claims form part of the modern defense narrative.

They do not erase Pike’s conviction.

They do not erase her own role in Colleen’s death.

And they do not establish that the jury would have reached a different sentence if it had heard every piece of mitigation now presented.

They explain why her attorneys believed clemency remained justified.

The opposing argument begins somewhere entirely different.

With the verdict.

A Knox County jury heard the case in 1996.

It sentenced Pike to death.

Over the following three decades, courts repeatedly reviewed challenges to that judgment.

The sentence remained intact.

May Martinez therefore saw the final days not as an opportunity to reconsider Pike’s life, but as the point when a lawful sentence should finally be carried out.

For her, the debate over Pike’s childhood could never become more important than Colleen’s lost future.

That does not mean Pike’s childhood is legally or morally irrelevant.

It means the two sides were answering different questions.

Pike’s supporters asked:

What happened to an abused 18-year-old that contributed to her becoming capable of this crime, and what has changed during three decades in prison?

May asked:

What about the 19-year-old who never received three more decades?

Those questions do not produce an easy answer.

That is why the final hours before September 30 were so charged.

Inside prison, Pike waited.

In Nashville, May waited.

One side hoped nine Supreme Court justices would stop the execution.

The other hoped no court would intervene again.

One side carried a clemency petition describing trauma, mental illness and rehabilitation.

The other carried a photograph of Colleen.

And behind the moral arguments sat a medical dispute that would prove impossible to ignore.

Pike’s attorneys had warned about her veins.

Tennessee said the risk was manageable.

The courts allowed the process to move forward.

At the time captured by this source, the country did not yet know which side of that dispute would ultimately matter most.

But there was one thing May Martinez wanted people to understand regardless of what happened next.

Christa Pike was not the beginning of this story.

Colleen Slemmer was.

Colleen was 19.

She came to Tennessee through Job Corps looking for an opportunity.

Her mother remembered a smiling young woman who enjoyed roller skating and helping others.

She should have had decades ahead of her.

Instead, her family spent those decades attending hearings, following appeals and watching another person’s name become inseparable from Colleen’s death.

May described herself as her daughter’s voice.

During Pike’s 1996 trial, she said she spent weeks in Knoxville largely alone.

She believed the system had never given her the support she needed.

Thirty-one years later, she was still showing up.

Still talking about Colleen.

Still insisting that the victim not disappear beneath arguments about the person sentenced for killing her.

That may be the most important contribution this pre-execution source makes to the larger story.

Later events would inevitably shift attention toward the execution chamber.

Toward Tennessee.

Toward the IVs.

Toward pentobarbital.

Toward Pike’s medical condition.

Toward constitutional questions.

But before any of that happened, there was a mother driving from Florida with a photograph of the daughter she lost in 1995.

And there was a condemned woman whose lawyers were still asking the courts to consider everything they believed the jury never fully understood.

Two women waiting.

Two completely different ideas of justice.

One clock moving toward 10 a.m.

And beneath all of it, a warning about the execution itself that Tennessee believed it could manage.