The clock is running out.
Thirty-one years after a teenage murder shocked Tennessee, the woman convicted of carrying it out is now facing the final hours of her own life. A tortured victim. A shattered skull. A mother who has carried unimaginable grief for decades. And a condemned woman making one last, unsettling request about how she should die.
Tennessee is preparing to execute Christa Pike, the state’s only woman on death row, for the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. But as the execution approaches, the case is reopening wounds that never truly healed—and raising painful questions about punishment, trauma, and what justice is supposed to look like after 31 years.
For Colleen’s mother, there is no room for sympathy.
She remembers the horror of her daughter’s death and the devastating evidence presented in court. Now, she plans to sit in the front row as Pike faces execution, believing her daughter never received mercy and that Pike should not receive special treatment in death.
But Pike’s attorneys tell a very different story.
They argue that Pike was herself a deeply traumatized young woman who had allegedly suffered rape, abuse, and years of neglect by systems that were supposed to protect her. Her lawyers have pointed to diagnoses including bipolar disorder and PTSD and argued that her mental health was not adequately evaluated before she was sentenced to death.
Now, with the execution approaching, Pike has made an extraordinary request: she has asked to be hanged rather than die by lethal injection, or, if that is not possible, to have only women involved in her final preparations.
To some, the request may seem shocking.
To her attorneys, it represents something else—a desperate attempt to regain control over the final moments of a life marked by violence and trauma.
And that is what makes this case so difficult to look away from.
One mother has spent three decades carrying the unbearable weight of losing her daughter. Another woman is approaching the end of her life after years on death row.
Both stories are filled with suffering.
Both have left permanent scars.
And as Tennessee prepares for the final chapter, the question is no longer simply what happened in 1995.
It is what justice means after 31 years—and whether an execution can ever truly bring an ending to a tragedy that began with a life being taken.