NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The US Supreme Court is allowing the execution of Christa Gail Pike to go forward in Tennessee, overturning a last-minute stay that was issued by an appeals court hours earlier Wednesday.

Pike, 50, was scheduled to die by lethal injection Wednesday, and witnesses had gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville when the 6th Circuit US Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to issue a stay. That court said a delay was needed to consider whether Pike’s allegations of childhood sex abuse were fully considered.

The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.

Pike, who was 18 at the time, and her boyfriend were convicted of the 1995 stabbing and beating of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, their classmate at a job training facility in Knoxville. The case garnered widespread attention back then in part because a pentagram that was carved on Slemmer’s body and other elements of the crime stoked fears of Satan worship.

ASSOCIATED PRESS