Documentary maker Steve Payne has spoken out against a second execution attempt for Christa Pike, nearly three decades after filming her on Tennessee’s death row.
Payne, who interviewed Pike at Nashville’s Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in 1998, described the convicted killer on the Crime World podcast as “a scared young girl who, if you met her normally, she wouldn’t come across as being evil.”
“She just was like a normal girl. How she got wrapped up into all this, I don’t know,” Payne said. “She didn’t come across as an evil person at all. She also seemed very remorseful. She was just: ‘I didn’t mean to kill anybody.’ She has always said that she understands what she did. She’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve always been prepared to accept my punishment. I just don’t think I should have ended up on death row.'”
The filmmaker’s intervention comes after Tennessee’s unprecedented botched execution attempt on September 30, when lethal injection drugs failed to kill Pike after two doses of pentobarbital. She was rushed to an off-site hospital, discharged, and returned to prison on October 10, with legal battles now mounting over whether a second attempt would constitute cruel and unusual punishment.
Payne argued that Pike’s original defense counsel failed to present extensive mitigation regarding her upbringing. “She had a terrible defence lawyer. He was a nice person, but he was a bad lawyer, and he didn’t bring up any of her childhood,” Payne said. “She had the most horrendous childhood. Everyone she came into contact with in her family just beat her.”
Pike was 18 at the time of the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer and 20 when sentenced, becoming the youngest woman sent to death row in the United States. Prior to the killing, Pike, her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, and friend Shadolla Peterson lured Slemmer to an isolated area under false pretenses, then subjected the teenager to a 30-to-60-minute assault—beating, slashing, and torturing her before carving a pentagram into her chest. Pike ultimately crushed Slemmer’s skull with a piece of asphalt, later keeping a fragment of the bone as a trophy and bragging about the murder to classmates.
Despite the brutality of the crime, which was fueled by jealousy and a mistaken belief that Slemmer was trying to “steal” Shipp, Payne insisted Pike has already served an effective life sentence. “I don’t think she should be executed. I don’t think she’s a threat to society. I think she’s paid her penalty,” he explained. “Not only was she put in jail for 30 years, which is a life sentence as far as I’m concerned, she was in solitary confinement for 20 of those years.”
Payne also addressed capital punishment more broadly, dismissing execution as an effective deterrent against violent crime. “There’s this strange kind of dumb attitude that people won’t commit murder if they think they’re going to be executed and that’s just not true,” he said. “I mean, I’ve been on death row. I’ve talked to people. None of them expected to get caught, you know? It’s not a deterrent.”
Pike’s lawyers have made emergency demands following the botched execution, while Tennessee officials have canceled upcoming executions as the state reviews its lethal injection protocols.