By GB News (World News) | Created at 2026-10-03 01:01:04 | Updated at 2026-10-03 01:43:43
1 hour ago
The "satanic" killer Christa Pike is critically ill and unconscious in hospital following her botch-job execution attempt on Wednesday, her lawyers have revealed.
They say she is intubated and on a ventilator, with severe burns covering both arms.
On Friday, her legal team filed an emergency motion demanding that the Tennessee Department of Correction preserve all evidence connected to the botched procedure.
Her attorneys said her arms had been left swollen, burned and blistered when she was rushed to hospital, likening the effects of the drug pentobarbital to those of bleach.
Pike, now 50, had spent 30 years on death row after being convicted of murder in 1995.
Medical staff injected the vile killer with at least seven needles while trying to administer two lethal doses of pentobarbital, the court filing says.
"At one point, Ms Pike herself offered guidance on where the IV team could attempt access; one needle was bent at a 90-degree angle when it was removed," the motion said.
Her lawyers believe faulty IV lines meant the drug seeped into her tissue rather than entering her bloodstream.
Christa Pike is critically ill and unconscious in hospital following her botch-job execution attempt
REUTERS
"Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realise that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms Pike's body," her lawyers wrote.
During the procedure, she said her arm felt like it's "about to burst open", and at another point, asked: "Does this happen like that?"
She could be heard crying, whimpering and breathing loudly as workers tried to execute her for her crimes.
Though rather than addressing the failure, the team prepared and administered a second set of syringes.
The killer could be heard crying, whimpering and breathing loudly as workers tried to execute her for her crimes
REUTERS
Pike had previously appealed against her execution, claiming it would amount to cruel and unusual punishment due to her physical characteristics, including thrombocytosis, small veins and post-traumatic stress disorder.
"Her concerns were called 'speculation'; they were laughed off, scoffed at, and dismissed," the killer's lawyers wrote.
"In the words of one media witness: We have a lot of questions, and the Department of Correction has a lot of answers that it needs to provide to the public about what happened here. We agree."
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has suspended all further executions for the remainder of the year and ordered "a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred".
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has suspended all further executions for the remainder of the year
GETTY
Pike and her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp killed her Knoxville Jobs Corp classmate Colleen Slemmer in 1995, stabbing and beating her to death on the University of Tennessee's Agricultural campus.
Investigators said the pair carved a satanic pentagram into Slemmer's chest, and Pike kept a piece of her victim's skull as a trophy.
Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two centuries.
Shipp, who was 17 at the time, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole owing to his age.
