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American murderer (born 1976)
Christa Gail Pike is an American convicted murderer. In 1995, when she was 18, Pike murdered her 19-year-old Job Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville, Tennessee. Pike and her boyfriend lured Slemmer into the woods where they tortured and killed her. In 1996, at the age of 20, Pike was sentenced to death, making her one of the youngest women to receive a death sentence in the United States during the post-Furman period. As of 2026, 18 women have been executed nationwide since 1976, and a woman has not been executed in Tennessee in over 200 years.
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U.S. state
Tennessee, officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. It borders Kentucky to the north, Virginia to the northeast, North Carolina to the east, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to the south, Arkansas to the southwest, and Missouri to the northwest. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. According to the United States Census Bureau, the state's estimated population as of 2024 is 7.22 million.
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The state's governor said Frank Strada would step down as an independent review examines what went wrong.
Lawyers for Christa Pike said she's unconscious and on a ventilator after a botched execution attempt. Pike is believed to be the first person to have survived the administration of lethal drugs in the modern era.
Pike was placed on a ventilator and remained unconscious in a hospital, her attorneys said in a court filing Friday.