A federal appeals court halted the execution of Christa Gail Pike around an hour before it was scheduled to start on Sept. 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee.
The scheduled lethal injection would have made Pike, 50, the first woman in Tennessee to be executed in at least 200 years.
But the 10:00 a.m. execution was paused on Wednesday after a federal appeals court requested more time to determine whether Pike’s history of childhood sexual abuse was fully presented when a jury sentenced her to death in 1996.
Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend were convicted of stabbing and beating their 19-year-old classmate, Colleen Slemmer, after luring her from a Knoxville job-training program in 1995.
The gruesome murder gained a lot of media attention because Slemmer was found with a pentagram carved on her body.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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