Christa Pike’s closest friend reveals what death row inmate planned to do ‘when she got to heaven’
A friend of Christa Pike said the death row inmate was 'ready to go' during her execution and told her that when she got to heaven she'd find her daughter.
Pike was last month administered a lethal injection but she survived the two doses of chemicals, and since Tennessee has no protocol for what to do if someone is injected with two doses but does not die she was taken to hospital for life saving measures.
She has since woken up and is communicating, with Dr Bill Kimberlin saying that at 12:14am on 10 October a message was sent from Pike to someone else by a tablet saying: "Im at the prison. I love you so much!"
The 50-year-old is back in prison now after being released from hospital, and her friend Marcy Wilson told the Daily Mail that Pike woke up last Tuesday (6 October) asking 'where am I' and 'who are you'.
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Wilson met Pike after her daughter Teddy was transferred to a maximum security prison and was sent shower shoes by Pike because she didn't have any.
Wilson sent the death row inmate a letter of thanks for helping her daughter and they first met in 2017, becoming friends and continuing to meet even after Wilson's daughter had died of a fentanyl overdose in 2023.
They met for three-and-a-half hours before Pike's execution, with Wilson saying the death row inmate told her: "I don’t want you to worry about me. I’m ready. I’m good. Everything’s going to be ok."
They spoke again the day before the execution, Wilson told the Mail that they discussed what Pike would do in heaven after her execution.
"We talked about how when she got to heaven she was going to find my daughter and they were going to ride horses," Wilson said.
"She told me and my husband to take care of each other and that she loved us."
During their friendship Wilson had shown Pike pictures of animals she kept on her farm, and the death row inmate would make up names for them and ask how they were doing.
She'd also said that Pike had told her she was going to 'come back and haunt me, but in a good way'.
Wilson added that at one point during their last face-to-face meeting there was a point where Pike 'crumbled' and asked her friend if she'd like some of her ashes and a lock of her hair.
While Pike expected to die during her execution and is now back on death row, but following her botched execution all death sentences in Tennessee have been suspended while an investigation goes ahead.
What happens to her next is uncertain, but Associate Head of Law and Associate Professor at St Mary’s University Twickenham Charley Dugdale says 'existing US precedent suggests that a state may be permitted to make a second attempt'.
It wouldn't be the first time someone in the US survived their execution and was sent back for a second attempt, though Pike's lawyers could make arguments that the pain and suffering from the first attempt and the botched nature of it means there shouldn't be a second attempt.
Pike has been on death row for 30 years after committing murder when she was 18.
She and two friends lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer into woods in Knoxville in 1995 where they beat, tortured and murdered her.
Slemmer's mother May Martinez says the state of Tennessee owes her an apology, saying that if she'd been allowed into the execution chamber she 'would have taken the box-cutter and cut her up like she did Colleen'.
Joe Harker