Christa Pike is scheduled to be put to death Wednesday at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, an execution that would make her the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Pike, now 49, was 18 when she and two teenage acquaintances lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at a Knoxville Job Corps center, to an abandoned steam plant in January 1995. According to trial records summarized in her case history, the group beat and slashed Slemmer over roughly 30 minutes before Pike killed her with a piece of asphalt, in an attack investigators said was fueled by jealousy over a shared boyfriend. Pike was convicted of first-degree murder in March 1996 and sentenced to death; her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, then 17, received a life sentence with parole eligibility, and the third participant, who testified against them, was given probation.
Youth, abuse and 29 years in isolation cited in clemency bid
Pike's lawyers and outside advocates have pressed Tennessee's governor and courts for clemency, arguing that her age at the time of the crime, an extensively documented history of childhood abuse, and nearly three decades in solitary confinement should weigh against execution. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, a federal appeals judge wrote in a 2019 opinion that Pike's sentence "likely" violates the Eighth Amendment, noting that had she been 17 rather than 18 — like Shipp — she would not have been eligible for the death penalty at all. Pike would also be the only person executed in Tennessee for a crime committed at age 18 to 20 in the state's modern death penalty era.
A separate 2001 attack on a fellow inmate added 25 years to her sentence and has been cited by prosecutors opposing clemency as evidence she remains dangerous. Pike's attorneys this year also challenged the state's execution protocol on religious and medical grounds, citing a blood disorder and the trauma of decades on death row, but a court-appointed special master declined to intervene in August, clearing the way for the execution to proceed.
Amnesty International and United Nations special rapporteurs have called for the execution to be halted, pointing to what they describe as inadequate legal representation at Pike's original trial and a 2020 finding by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the proceedings violated her fair-trial rights. Only 18 women have been executed in the United States since capital punishment resumed nationally in 1976, roughly 1 percent of all executions, and Tennessee has not executed a woman since 1820. Absent intervention from Gov. Bill Lee or the courts, Pike is set to die by her choice of lethal injection or electrocution on September 30.
