Christa Pike, 50, has broken her long silence through prison letters that trace her emotional collapse and unlikely romance with a New York pen pal.
Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, wrote to a man known only as Richie of Yonkers from the late 1990s into the early 2000s, correspondences that have now surfaced through a collector who purchased them. David Adamovich, who owns what he calls the largest murderabilia collection in the world, acquired the letters and shared them with WBIR.
Adamovich, who holds roughly 9,000 inmate letters, noted that Pike’s collection was minimal compared to others. Still, the documents reveal a stark arc. Her first letter to Richie closed with “your new found friend,” a formality that soon melted into “all my love.” By Valentine’s Day, she was pressing lipstick kisses onto the paper, outlines of the marks still visible decades later. Pike was about 20 years old at the time.
“I see she did the same thing many of the other females did in the letters to Richard, which were to madly fall in love with him, and want to marry him once they got out of prison,” Adamovich said.
He added that the women “were all love-starved” and “extremely excited to have a male take interest.”
The relationship deepened as Pike faced her darkest moments. In 2002, when she asked to drop her appeals and accept an execution date, Richie was the one she told. She confessed to him that she was “so broken” and “couldn’t quit crying.”
The final obtained piece in the collection is a Christmas card bearing a cartoon of a man strapped to an electric chair, a grim holiday greeting from a woman who had once been the youngest female sentenced to death in American history.
Pike was 18 when she killed fellow student Colleen Slemmer, 19, a crime for which she was convicted and sentenced to death in 1996. Her boyfriend at the time, Tadaryl Shipp, was also convicted, but because he was 17, he was ineligible for capital punishment and received a life sentence with parole eligibility instead.
Now her execution by lethal injection is scheduled for September 30, which would make her the first woman executed in Tennessee in over 200 years. Her legal team has mounted a multi-pronged defense, filing a 226-page clemency request with Governor Bill Lee.
On Wednesday, September 23, the Tennessee Supreme Court denied a motion to stay the execution. Stephen Ferrell of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee and Kelly Gleason of the Tennessee Office of the Post-Conviction Defender responded in a joint statement: “We are deeply disappointed in the Tennessee Supreme Court’s decision, but we will press forward, seeking relief from the U.S. Supreme Court while also continuing our request that Governor Lee grant Christa clemency.”
The clemency request remains pending as the execution date approaches.
Pike’s lawyers are expected to continue pressing both the governor’s office and federal courts in the days remaining before the scheduled lethal injection.