Christa Pike says she is “at peace” ahead of her lethal injection for a 1995 torture murder, after Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee refused her last-ditch clemency bid.

Pike, 50, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on September 30, 2026, as the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. If the state carries out the sentence, she will become the first woman executed there in more than two centuries.

The New York Post reported that Lee declined to intervene in her final push for mercy, clearing the path for a rare female execution tied to one of Knoxville’s most savage campus killings.

The Washington Examiner reported Lee’s decision in plain terms. “After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene,” the governor said.

That ends the political escape hatch. What remains is the record a jury already judged: an 18-year-old Job Corps student who helped lure, torture, and kill another teenager, then spent three decades fighting the death sentence that followed.

Colleen Slemmer never got a second chance

On Jan. 12, 1995, Pike and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer to an isolated spot on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville. A third teen acted as an accessory.

They cut Slemmer with a box cutter. They beat her with a chunk of asphalt. Shipp carved a Satanic pentagram into her body. The brutality shocked the city and left a mother without her daughter.

Pike was sentenced to death in March 1996, among the youngest women then condemned in the United States. Shipp, 17 at the time of the murder, drew life with a chance at parole and was denied parole last year. The third teen got probation after admitting accessory status.

May Martinez, Slemmer’s mother, has said she wants the execution to move forward. Her words strip away the courtroom abstractions.

Martinez told the Associated Press: “Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run.”

“Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst. Colleen’s birthday was last week. She would have been 51.”

That is the cost side of the ledger the clemency campaign prefers not to center.

Lee keeps the jury’s sentence intact

Fox News reported that Pike’s execution date is set for September 30, 2026, and that she would be the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1820 if the sentence is carried out. She remains the only woman on the state’s death row.

Her lawyers filed a 226-page clemency petition in September and pressed claims of untreated mental illness, childhood trauma, bipolar disorder, and PTSD. They argued those conditions left her unable to “put the brakes on” at 18. They also asked the Supreme Court to halt the execution, citing the psychological terror of being strapped to a gurney for lethal injection.

Lee reviewed the bid and refused to revise the outcome. Capital cases often end in last-minute litigation and political pressure; this one met a governor willing to leave a lawful sentence in place, much as other states have continued to move forward with lethal injection executions after late legal fights.

Breitbart reported that Pike’s attorneys remained opposed to the date, saying they were “steadfast that Christa’s death sentence should be commuted given her youth and severe mental illness at the time of the crime.” They also noted she was sentenced for a crime committed with two others when she was 18.

Youth and illness are arguments juries and courts already weigh. They do not erase a completed torture murder, and they do not obligate a governor to substitute his judgment for the one reached at trial.

Pike’s letter talks peace while the victim’s family waits

Before learning of Lee’s decision, Pike sent a letter saying she had accepted the outcome. “Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace,” she wrote. “I am not afraid to die.” She added, “I’m only nervous about the process.”

In the clemency petition she described a delayed reckoning with the crime:

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”

She has also cast her case in gendered terms, writing, “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old girl who committed a crime with two other individuals and I was the only one to receive this sentence,” and “There are so many women who don’t get the help they need: me and others.” On the Monday before the clemency news broke, she claimed a “kinship” with Lindsay Clancy, whose case ended in a mistrial, and said she was “pleased” with that result. “We are both females who got into trouble because of uniquely female issues,” Pike said.

Remorse after decades on death row is not the same thing as undoing what happened to Colleen Slemmer in 1995. Tennessee’s system already sorted degrees of guilt among the three teens. A jury reserved death for Pike. Lee left that judgment alone.

Final logistics still run through corrections

Tennessee corrections officials said they would try to fulfill some of Pike’s requests, including using female guards to move her from a Nashville prison to a nearby maximum-security institution within a day of the execution. They may also grant her request for an all-female lethal injection team, a demand tracked as Pike pressed for an all-female execution team in the final stretch.

Her attorneys have described a childhood of physical and sexual abuse and neglect, and they say treatment behind bars produced deep remorse. Those claims belong in the mitigation record. They do not convert a sustained death sentence into an optional political favor.

Death-penalty cases stay hard news for a reason. When courts keep capital punishment available in other high-profile prosecutions, as when a Utah judge kept the death penalty in play at a preliminary stage, the public sees the same core fight: whether the worst murders still draw the worst lawful penalty.

Pike’s path ran through trial, sentencing in 1996, years of appeals, a thick clemency file, and a governor’s refusal. The state set a date. The victim’s mother is still counting birthdays that never come.

Crime stories this grim also pull readers toward other accountability fights, including wrongful-death claims tested against immunity rules after public killings. Different facts. Same demand that institutions finish the job the law assigns them.

Martinez does not get her daughter back. She does get a state that, at long last, is prepared to enforce the sentence written for the woman who helped take Colleen Slemmer’s life.

Justice delayed for thirty years is still justice owed. Tennessee is right to collect it.