Her Final Words Before Death: “I Am at Peace”

The clock was supposed to run out.

After nearly three decades on Tennessee’s death row, Christa Pike was facing the final hours of a sentence that began with a brutal 1995 murder—and ended with a scheduled execution that would have made her the first woman Tennessee had put to death in more than 200 years.

But just before the state could complete the execution, everything changed.

Pike had already written what sounded like a farewell. In a letter shared before her scheduled execution, she wrote that she was “at peace.” She said she was not afraid to die—only nervous about the process itself.

Behind those quiet words is one of Tennessee’s most disturbing and controversial death-penalty cases.

In 1995, Pike was 18 when she and two others lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer to a secluded wooded area near their Job Corps campus in Knoxville. Slemmer was beaten and stabbed, and prosecutors described the killing as extraordinarily brutal. Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy and sentenced to death.

For almost 30 years, Pike remained imprisoned while appeals and legal challenges continued.

Her attorneys later argued that the jury never fully heard the story of her childhood—one marked by severe abuse, neglect, and repeated sexual violence. They also raised questions about her mental health, her age at the time of the crime, and whether those circumstances should have affected her sentence.

But the courts did not erase the death sentence.

Then came September 30, 2026.

Pike was taken to the execution chamber as Tennessee prepared to carry out the sentence. Yet the procedure did not end as planned. After officials administered two doses of pentobarbital, witnesses reported that Pike appeared to be snoring, and the process was ultimately halted amid medical and legal concerns.

So the words “I am at peace” now carry a different weight.

They were written by a woman who had spent decades waiting for an ending she believed could come at any moment.

A woman convicted of a horrific crime.

A woman whose childhood trauma became central to later appeals.

A woman who said she was not afraid of death—but was nervous about how death would come.

And on the day Tennessee prepared to make history, the execution itself became another chapter in a case that still refuses to end.