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American murderer on death row (born 1976)
Christa Gail Pike is an American convicted murderer on death row in Tennessee. In 1995, when she was 18, Pike and her boyfriend lured their 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer into a wooded area in Knoxville where they tortured and killed her. Slemmer was beaten, slashed, and had a pentagram carved in her chest before Pike killed her by crushing her skull. Pike was arrested within two days and sentenced to death in 1996 at the age of 20, making her one of the youngest women to receive a death sentence in the United States during the post-Furman period.
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U.S. state
Texas is a state in the United States. Located in the south-central part of the country, it borders Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. It also borders Mexico along the Rio Grande, and has a coastline on the Gulf of Mexico. Covering 268,596 square miles (695,660 km2) and with an estimated population of over 31.7 million residents in 2025, it is the second-largest state by both area and population.
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Tennessee’s failed execution raises questions about the veil of secrecy execution teams operate under and whether there is a flaw in the protocol that led to things going wrong.
Experts say methods such as lethal injection promise a more humane form of execution but are frequently marred by mishap
The murderer of Colleen Slemmer is said to be walking and talking in limited ways after two doses of lethal injection.