Christa Gail Pike’s botched execution: Horror accounts emerge of how Satanist killer survived lethal injection

Satanist murderer Christa Gail Pike told her executioners that her arm felt like it was “about to burst open” after receiving the lethal injection that failed to kill her as horrifying new details of her botched execution emerged.

Two doses of a lethal drug were administered to Pike, who survived the procedure which a death penalty expert described as an unpredecented failure as the mother of the 50-year-old woman’s murder victim dubbed the situation “a mess”.

Tennessee officials aborted the Wednesday execution after journalists and witnesses saw Pike remain alive and snoring loudly after the attempted lethal injection before she was taken by ambulance from the prison.

Her lawyers said she was being treated at a hospital, but they said they had not been told about her condition.

Journalists described the unsettling scene centring on Pike, who was scheduled to be the first woman executed in the state in more than 200 years for a Satanic-style killing she committed at the age of 18.

Onlookers attending said they heard Pike speak what was supposed to be her last words at 10am, Wednesday, local time: “I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life - with love.”

But instead they subsequently heard several complaints from the killer after she received two doses of pentobarbital and witnessed her repeatedly kicking her feet so hard that a sheet which had been laid on her fell off.

At times, a curtain in front of Pike was closed and journalists could only hear sounds.

At one point, she told her executioners: “My arm feels like it’s about to burst open. Does this happen like that?”

The botched death penalty has prompted a state investigation and Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has halted all further executions for 2026.

It also came after an appeals court stopped the lethal injection just an hour before it was to start. Hours later the US Supreme Court overturned that stay.

Governor Bill Lee said he had ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” and that the remaining scheduled execution would not take place in 2026.

“Carrying out a lawfully imposed sentence is among the state’s most serious responsibilities, and the people of Tennessee expect it to be done in a manner that is not only legal and constitutional, but is effective,” he said in a statement.

The Tennessee Department of Correction said it had “followed every step” of the state’s execution protocol.

Robin M Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said what Pike experienced was “singular and unparalleled”.

May Martinez, the mother of Colleen Slemmer, the teen classmate who Pike murdered 31 years ago, was more blunt in a phone interview with NBC News early Thursday.

“It was a mess,” she told the network.

Seven other people had survived medical problems due to an execution team’s failure to access a vein to administer lethal injection drugs, but no one had stayed alive after receiving the drugs used in such executions, she said.

It was the second time in 2026 that Tennessee has been unable to carry out an execution: in May state officials called off the lethal injection of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing three people in 1994, after executioners tried and failed for more than an hour to place an IV to administer pentobarbital.

Pike and her boyfriend were convicted of the fatal stabbing and beating in 1995 of 19-year-old Slemmer, their classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville.

The case garnered widespread attention in part because of a pentagram that was carved on Slemmer’s body and other elements of the crime stoked fears of Satan worship during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.

Pike was initially scheduled to be put to death in the morning, and witnesses had gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville when the 6th Circuit US Court of Appeals issued a stay.

That court said a delay was needed to consider whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sexual abuse were fully considered at her sentencing.

The attorney-general’s office appealed to the Supreme Court, saying that halting the execution at the last moment traumatised Slemmer’s family and rewarded “abusive delay tactics” by Pike’s lawyers.

The high court later cleared the way for the execution to proceed.

Pike did not deny committing the killing, but her supporters argued that the state should consider her age at the time, her mental illness and her allegations of severe sexual abuse.

Slemmer’s mother had travelled to Nashville in the hopes of witnessing the execution of her daughter’s killer, telling The Associated Press on Saturday that she had waited decades to see it carried out.

“Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” Martinez said in a telephone interview.