The first woman sentenced to death in Tennessee in 200 years said she is “at peace” before her rare execution — as the state’s governor declined to get involved in her last-ditch bid for clemency.
“Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace,” convicted murderer Christa Pike wrote in a letter to NBC Newsbefore learning that Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee would not grant the condemned killer clemency.
“I am not afraid to die,” the killer wrote to the outlet. “I’m only nervous about the process.”
Pike, 50, is slated to be executed on Wednesday by lethal injection, the first time the state will put a woman to death in more than two centuries.
She was just 18 when she lured fellow Job Corps student Colleen Slemmer, 19, to an isolated spot on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville and tortured her to death in a jealous rage with the help of her boyfriend on Jan. 12, 1995.
Pike’s attorneys have asked the Supreme Court to halt the execution, citing her struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and the possible “severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror” from being strapped to a gurney to receive the lethal injection, the outlet reported.
Her lawyers have claimed that Pike’s horrific childhood trauma involving sexual and physical abuse, neglect, and domestic violence was never addressed by the institutions and adults she depended on — or considered when the jury was deliberating the death penalty.
She’s also requested an all-female lethal injection team to carry out her execution, claiming she could be traumatized by having men involved in her final moments.
Tennessee corrections officials have said they would try to fulfill some of the killer’s requests, including using female guards to move her from prison in Nashville to a nearby maximum-security institution within a day of her execution, NBC reported.
They may also grant her request for an all-female execution team.
Pike — who was one of the youngest women sentenced to death in the US in March 1996 — was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder later in life.
In her 226-page clemency petition, filed in September, Pike’s attorneys argued that her untreated mental illness and traumatic history made her unable to “put the brakes on.”
“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime,” Pike said in a statement included in her clemency petition.
Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her to death with a large chunk of asphalt. Her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, also carved a Satanic pentagram into her body.
The murder rocked the city of Knoxville due to its brutality and because of the occult symbol — stoking the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.
The victim’s mother, May Martinez, has said she wants Pike’s execution to move forward.
“Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” Martinez told the Associated Press.
“Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst. Colleen’s birthday was last week. She would have been 51,” Martinez said.
Shipp, who was 17 at the time, was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole because of his age and was denied parole last year. A third teen admitted to being an accessory and received probation.
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