Pike, now 50, was convicted of first-degree murder in the 1995 killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at Knoxville Job Corps. She was 18 at the time of the killing, and her boyfriend, who was 17, was also involved in the crime.
The case drew heavy attention three decades ago because of how brutal the killing was and how young everyone involved was. Investigators found a satanic symbol carved into Slemmer's body, a detail that stuck with the case through the years and kept it in the public eye long after the conviction.
Pike's execution would close out a case that has sat on Tennessee's death row for 30 years. For Slemmer's family, it marks the end of a legal process that stretched across three decades of appeals and clemency requests, all the way up to the governor's desk.