The Devil on Death Row

On January 12, 1995, nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer was lured into the woods near the University of Tennessee. She believed she was going to make peace with a girl who had been threatening her. Thirty to sixty minutes later, she was dead, tortured beyond recognition. A pentagram was carved into her chest. Her skull was crushed with a piece of asphalt. Her killer, eighteen-year-old Christa Pike, kept a piece of her skull as a trophy.

Pike was sentenced to death. She spent thirty years on death row, the youngest woman ever condemned in Tennessee, and for most of that time, the only woman there. She confessed to the murder, but the jury that sentenced her to die never heard the full story of her childhood, a childhood of horrific abuse, neglect, and brain damage that her own lawyers failed to present.

On September 30, 2026, the state of Tennessee strapped her to a gurney and injected her with a lethal dose of pentobarbital. The drug did not reach her heart. It pooled in her tissue instead, burning her from the inside out. Her lawyers were told she was brain dead. Life support was scheduled to be removed.

Six days later, she woke up.

She could not move her arms. She could not swallow. She believed it was still September. She had no memory of being executed.

She is the only person in American history to survive a lethal injection. There is no protocol for what happens next.

This is the chilling, meticulously researched account of a brutal murder, a flawed trial, and a punishment that went horrifically wrong. It is a story about a victim who deserved to be remembered, a killer who may have changed, and a state that does not know what to do when the machinery of death fails.

What do you do when the state tries to kill someone and fails?

No one has the answer.