A lot of times busy servers will have this issue and you cannot even force kill -9 the apachectl or httpd process:
[root@apachebox stats]# ps aux|grep httpd
root 1547 0.0 0.2 495452 32396 ? Ds Sep08 3:23 /usr/sbin/httpd
root 3543 0.0 0.0 6448 724 pts/1 S+ 13:11&nbs........