For the better part of three decades, Christa Pike has waited alone on Tennessee’s death row.
She tortured and murdered a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, with her boyfriend and a friend. They slashed at Colleen with a box cutter, carved a pentagram into her chest and removed a piece of her skull. Only Ms. Pike received the death penalty. She was 18 at the time of the killing.
If her execution goes as planned on Wednesday, she will be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
“I run through this execution every day in my heart,” Ms. Pike said in an unedited audio recording, shared by her lawyers in response to questions from The New York Times. “Whatever happens on Sept. 30, this will not be my hell anymore.”
Americans have increasingly opposed the death penalty and have shown particular reluctance toward sentencing women and teenagers. Women account for about 2 percent of new death sentences issued since the modern era of capital punishment began in 1973; Missouri was the last state to execute a woman, in 2023.
Ms. Pike, now 50, does not deny her guilt. Still, some experts question whether she would be sentenced this way today. Her abusive childhood never came up at trial, something defenders now ask judges and juries to consider in sentencing. In isolation, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, which her lawyers say contributed to her mental state during the murder.
Her age is another factor; she was just above the legal threshold to be considered for the death penalty.
“Christa Pike would likely not be sentenced to death if she were tried today,” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “A lot has changed.”
But the death sentence for Ms. Pike was never a question for Colleen’s mother, May Martinez. She clings to her daughter’s memory, condemning a lack of support and scrambling to piece together the funds to travel to the execution in Nashville.
“Nobody,” she said, “remembers Colleen.”
A Gruesome Crime
On the night of her murder, Colleen tried to call her mother.
Colleen, 19, lived hundreds of miles from the family home in Florida, having enrolled in a Job Corps educational program in Knoxville, Tenn., that would allow her to pursue an interest in computers. The call quickly ended because of a shaky phone signal.
When Ms. Martinez called back, her daughter “was already gone,” she said.
The grisly details of what happened that night in January 1995 gripped eastern Tennessee.
Three students from the program — including Ms. Pike and her boyfriend at the time, Tadaryl Shipp — had lured Colleen into the woods on the University of Tennessee campus. They tortured her, slamming her head with chunks of asphalt. Mr. Shipp later described carving a pentagram in Colleen’s body, inflaming fears of Satan worship.
Ms. Pike confessed two days later, after the body was found. She had taken a piece of the skull, showing it to at least one person.
During her trial, prosecutors displayed the broken skull and the missing piece.
“That was the hardest thing in the world — to watch your daughter’s skull be passed around,” Ms. Martinez said. Over a decade would pass before a court ordered the return of the skull to her family.
“I’m not the same person I used to be,” Ms. Martinez said.
She remembers her daughter as a vibrant, generous presence, who volunteered at the Special Olympics and loved bowling and computer games. Her world collapsed after Colleen died.
She has held onto every memento of her daughter’s life, from the books Colleen read to a teddy bear she fashioned out of Colleen’s old T-shirt. Every year, she hangs the Christmas tree ornaments her daughter made, with purple lights for Colleen’s favorite color.
Her fury at Ms. Pike — and the lengthy appeals process — has burned since the trial. In 1996, she told The Knoxville News-Sentinel that “they should kill her right away.”
Ms. Pike was the only student to receive the death penalty. Mr. Shipp, then 17 and shielded by Tennessee law from capital punishment, was sentenced to life in prison.
Ms. Martinez does not remember receiving a direct apology in court.
“I’m very remorseful now; I wasn’t in the beginning when I first caught this charge,” Ms. Pike said. “I didn’t care what I had done.”
She added, “I didn’t care about anyone but myself and my co-defendants and maybe our families.”
Isolation in Prison
When Ms. Pike was moved to prison in Nashville, her world shrank. She was confined to her cell for 23 hours a day. Only one other woman, Gaile Owens, was ever on death row in Tennessee at the same time. Before her sentence was commuted in 2010, Ms. Owens spent three years in a cell near Ms. Pike, but the two did not have physical contact.
Ms. Pike compared her experience to being locked in a bathroom with a meal tray, a television and a radio. “The biggest punishment was taking me away from people and human contact,” she said.
In 2001, Ms. Pike and two other women were evacuated to another part of the prison because of a fire. The two women, who had a history of confrontation, began to argue, and Ms. Pike used a shoelace to choke one of them until she was unconscious.
Ms. Pike was found guilty of attempted first-degree premeditated murder.
Shortly after the attack, doctors diagnosed Ms. Pike with bipolar disorder. Her lawyers attribute the violence to her mental health and her past. According to court records and psychological assessments, Ms. Pike was physically and mentally abused by immediate family as a child. As early as kindergarten, she endured repeated rape and assault, first by men she knew and then by a stranger.
Her lawyers said that since being medicated and attending therapy, Ms. Pike has not been disciplined for violence. Practicing Buddhist meditation in recent years, Ms. Pike said, has also been a way to “train my chaotic mind.”
In statements and interviews, women imprisoned alongside Ms. Pike said she was welcoming from afar, despite the restriction on her physical interactions. She dispatched hygiene items from the prison commissary, cooked food over a lamp and called out greetings on her shackled walks to shower. (In 2024, a settlement with Tennessee allowed her to physically interact with other women in the prison.)
“I’ve always seen her show kindness,” said Ashlee Sellars, 48. “I’ve seen her be protective.”
Marcy Graves Wilson, 60, recalled her fear in 2017 when she learned that her daughter, Teddy, would be housed nearby. But Ms. Pike sent the new girl shower shoes when she didn’t have any, a gesture that deepened into a heartfelt relationship until Teddy died from an overdose.
“Knowing Christa has changed my feelings about the death penalty,” Ms. Wilson added. “I feel like she has so much that she could offer.”
Supporting other incarcerated women, Ms. Pike said, is an attempt to atone for the harm she caused.
“Over years of sitting in here with deep contemplation and reflection, I know and understand the life that I have taken and how much it matters, how much it means, how many effects she could have had on the world, just like the effects I could have on the world,” Ms. Pike said.
The Final Days
Ms. Pike’s lawyers have spent the final weeks trying to stop the execution. Her last chance lies with Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, who is weighing whether to allow her to serve the remainder of her life in prison.
Her lawyers have argued that she could help other women in prison and that her crime cannot be separated from a traumatic childhood.
They have also questioned whether medical staff can administer the lethal drugs without causing excessive pain. And they have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to pause the execution, questioning whether “the mental suffering and psychological terror she will experience” under the protocol qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.
“I don’t think that someone should kill me to teach me that killing someone is wrong,” Ms. Pike said. “I’m not going to be the one here left to suffer anymore after they do this.”
Two weeks before her execution, Ms. Pike was isolated again, part of Tennessee’s new pre-execution protocol. She had been moved, and her things were in garbage bags. She had given up unpacking.
In Florida, Ms. Martinez and her husband have struggled with a surge of grief, scrounging for money to fund the drive to Nashville. Ms. Martinez has been enraged by the attention on Ms. Pike. To her, even in isolation, Ms. Pike has had access to comfort and support denied to her daughter.
“Nobody could ever, ever convince me she’s changed,” Ms. Martinez said.
Ten days before Ms. Pike’s scheduled execution, they celebrated what would have been Colleen’s 51st birthday.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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