A Tennessee woman scheduled to be executed Wednesday for a brutal killing she helped carry out as an 18-year-old would become the first woman put to death by the state in more than 200 years.
While multiple courts have upheld Christa Pike’s death sentence, her looming execution date has sparked a push by advocates for women and criminal justice reform to appeal to Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) to spare her life. They argue Pike’s age at the time of the crime and the extensive physical and sexual abuse she suffered as a child and teen should be a factor in the severity of her punishment.
On Monday, Lee extinguished those final pleas, rejecting a 226-page clemency petition filed by her attorneys.
“After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene,” Lee said in a statement to media outlets.
In January 1995, Pike and two other teens — her boyfriend and another girl — lured Colleen Slemmer into the woods in Knoxville, where they tortured and killed her.
The teenagers knew each other through the Knoxville Job Corps, and prosecutors argued that Pike believed Slemmer was interested in her boyfriend.
Of the three teens present for the killing, Pike was the only one to be capitally charged. The boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, was ineligible for a death sentence because he was 17 years old. He was sentenced to life in prison and is now eligible for parole. The other teen girl, Shadolla Peterson, testified against Pike and Shipp and received probation.
If her execution is carried out as scheduled at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Pike will be the first person executed for a crime committed at age 18 in modern death penalty history, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, and the 19th woman executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
Pike has nearly exhausted her legal appeals, with the Tennessee Supreme Court denying her motion for a stay of execution last week. A separate appeal is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Pike’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.
The Washington Post could not reach Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, who has told local media that she and her husband plan to travel from Florida to Tennessee to witness Pike’s execution.
“She’s not with me,” Martinez told Knoxville’s NBC 10 News of her late daughter. “Every day, every hour, every minute, she’s gone.”
Martinez told the TV station that she has nothing to say to Pike.
“My husband, he’ll say something. But I won’t,” she said. “I’ll hold Colleen’s picture up to remind her of what she did.”
In the clemency petition, Pike’s attorneys detail a childhood marked by neglect, sexual abuse and the startling failures of adults and the societal systems intended to protect her from harm.
The trauma Pike suffered included repeated sexual assault at the hands of a family member’s boyfriend between ages 2 and 5, according to the clemency petition. Attorneys detail how later, at age 11, she was raped by a neighbor who was arrested and pleaded no contest to charges related to the case, only to serve no prison time and soon return to his home nearby.
At 17, according to the petition, Pike was again attacked, assaulted, and raped by a stranger in North Carolina. The man was never identified or prosecuted.
Attorneys also detail evidence that Pike’s mother drank heavily during her pregnancy, which they argue contributed to brain damage later linked to Pike’s diagnosis of bipolar disorder. These layers of traumas and mental illness, her attorneys argue, left her unable to “put the brakes on” when she confronted Slemmer behind a University of Tennessee agriculture campus steam plant on Jan. 12, 1995.
According to court documents and trial testimony, Slemmer was forced to strip off her clothes then beaten, tortured and repeatedly slashed with a knife. Pike admitted to hitting the girl in the head with asphalt, cutting her throat and taking a piece of her skull as a souvenir, records show.
Shipp, the boyfriend, later told the court he had carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest.
The state’s case at trial focused on the brutal and premeditated nature of the killing. The jury sentenced her to death after finding that prosecutor’s proved two aggravating factors — that Pike had been part of trying to cover up the murder, and that the killing was “especially heinous, atrocious or cruel in that it involved torture or serious physical abuse beyond that necessary to produce death.”
In the three decades since, Pike’s attorneys and legal advocates with expertise in trauma and sexual violence have argued that the woman’s initial defense team did a subpar job of explaining her actions within the context of her own repeated abuse.
Amicus briefs by the Cornell School of Law on behalf of advocates of sexual trauma survivors were also filed before the Tennessee and U.S. Supreme Courts, writing plainly that they believe the likelihood Pike will “involuntarily relive her rapes during her execution is extremely high.”
“She will likely believe she is being raped to death,” they wrote.
More than 100 organizations and experts in the field, organized by the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence, have also asked Gov. Lee to commute Pike’s sentence to life in prison without parole.
“We do not minimize the seriousness of the crime that Christa committed. Nor does the sexual violence that Christa experienced at such a young age excuse her crime,” the coalition letter reads. “But it does provide an explanation for how she came to commit that crime, a context for trying to understand what otherwise might seem incomprehensible.”
The clemency petition argues that Pike’s status as the only woman set to be executed in centuries is not the only aspect that makes her case unique. Rather, of the more than 200 people sentenced to death in the state’s modern era, only eight were just 18 at the time of their offense. The death sentences of the other seven people – each of them male – have since been vacated.
“Tennessee does not execute teenaged offenders, and for good reason,” the petition states. “Adolescence is a distinct period of development that begins with the onset of puberty (which typically occurs between the ages of 10 and 12) and ends in the mid-20s.”
The petition also includes roughly 100 pages of letters from others – fellow inmates, Pike’s mother, a prison chaplain, family friends, a former co-worker at Pizza Hut, as well as case managers, therapists and psychologists who have interacted with her.
“I understand things now that I didn’t understand when Christa was a child,” her mother, Carissa Hansen, wrote. “I understand the clear signs of sexual abuse that Christa began showing as a kindergartener, the dramatic mood swings throughout her childhood, and her inability to focus at school and home. I understand those things now, but I didn’t understand then. I did not know how to help her then.”
A fellow inmate, Laura Delfino, wrote in a letter dated from 2021 that the Pike of today “is a far cry from the one who walked through the doors from the beginning” as a teenager capable of a brutal murder.
“Christa is a source of light in a dark place. For those of us who have found ourselves housed near Christa, she has offered hope when there should have only been despair,” Delfino wrote.
Earlier this month, a panel of U.N. human rights experts also urged authorities to halt Pike’s execution, arguing that a jury never fully was presented with the extent of severe childhood abuse she suffered or her history of neurological impairments and mental health conditions.
Earlier this year, the Tennessee Supreme Court appointed a special master to weigh questions about Pike’s planned execution, and whether she would be subject to unusual or unlawful suffering. The judge also was to consider whether, given Pike’s history of sexual assault and PTSD diagnosis, moving her to a maximum-security prison where she would be observed by male prison officials for two weeks before the execution, would cause undue suffering.
During a three-day evidentiary hearing in August, Pike’s attorneys challenged the state’s lethal injection protocol, pointing to a botched attempt in May to execute convicted murderer Tony Carruthers.
Pike’s attorneys argued that she faced related, and potentially even greater, risk due to a blood disorder. They said her small veins would create a heightened risk of complications during lethal injection, as well as the possibility of extreme pain and bleeding. She asked to be executed by hanging instead.
Ultimately, Senior Judge W. Mark Ward ruled in the state’s favor, saying Tennessee protocols would not violate Pike’s constitutional rights and allowing the planned execution to proceed.
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