Christa Pike says she is “at peace” as Tennessee prepares to execute its only female death row inmate.
The 50-year-old convicted murderer wrote to NBC News before learning that Gov. Bill Lee had denied her clemency request, making clear she had accepted her fate. “Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace,” she wrote in her letter to the outlet. “I am not afraid to die. I’m only nervous about the process.”
Pike is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Wednesday, marking the first time in more than two centuries that Tennessee has put a woman to death. Her attorneys have taken a final appeal to the Supreme Court, arguing that strapping her to a gurney would cause “severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror” given her diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder.
Her legal team has emphasized that Pike’s horrific childhood trauma — sexual and physical abuse, neglect, and domestic violence — was never properly addressed by the adults and institutions responsible for her care, nor was it presented to the jury during her 1996 sentencing. In her 226-page clemency petition filed in September, her attorneys argued this untreated mental illness left 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 that petition.
The victim’s mother, May Martinez, has pushed for the execution to proceed. “Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” Martinez said. “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.”
Pike has also drawn an unexpected parallel to another high-profile case, telling the Times of London on Monday that she feels a “kinship” with Lindsay Clancy, whose triple murder case recently ended in a hung jury. “We are both females who got into trouble because of uniquely female issues,” Pike told the outlet. She added that she was “pleased” Clancy received a mistrial, noting, “There are so many women who don’t get the help they need: me and others.”
Pike was only 18 when she lured fellow Job Corps student Colleen Slemmer, 19, to a secluded spot on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville on January 12, 1995. In a jealous rage, Pike tortured and killed the teenager with help from her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, then 17, who carved a Satanic pentagram into Slemmer’s body. Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her to death with a large chunk of asphalt. The murder’s brutality and occult overtones fueled the “satanic panic” sweeping the 1980s and 1990s, rocking Knoxville at the time.
Shipp received life with possibility of parole due to his age and was denied parole last year. A third teen involved admitted to being an accessory and received probation. Pike, sentenced to death in March 1996, became one of the youngest women ever sent to death row in the United States.
In her final days, Pike has requested an all-female lethal injection team, expressing fear that male involvement in her final moments could traumatize her further. Tennessee corrections officials have indicated they will try to accommodate some requests, including using female guards to transport her from the Nashville prison to a nearby maximum-security facility within a day of the execution, and they may grant the all-female execution team request as well.
“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old girl who committed a crime with two other individuals and I was the only one to receive this sentence,” Pike said, reflecting on the disparity in punishment among the three teenagers involved.