Execution would be state’s first of a woman since 1820
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee announced Monday that he would not grant clemency to Christa Pike, clearing the way for the state’s first execution of a woman in 200 years. Pike, 50, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection Wednesday for the 1995 killing of a classmate in Knoxville. Her attorneys have asked the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay.
If carried out, the execution would be Tennessee’s first of a female inmate since 1820, according to Maher. Nationally, women account for about 1% of all executions since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, with 18 women put to death, according to a center tracking U.S. executions.
Pike does not deny her role in the killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Prosecutors said Pike feared Slemmer was a romantic rival and lured her to a secluded area where Pike and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, then 17, tortured and killed Slemmer, including by cutting her with a box-cutter and beating her with a large chunk of asphalt. Shipp has admitted that he carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s body. A third teen admitted to being an accessory and received probation.
The case attracted widespread attention because of the brutality of the crime, the ages of those involved, and the satanic symbolism at a time of heightened public fears about Satan worship during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.
Pike’s attorneys argue that the death sentence is inappropriate for a crime committed at age 18 by someone with untreated mental illness and a history of severe abuse. Assistant federal defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike was sexually abused starting as a toddler and was raped at ages 11 and 17. He said Pike’s lawyers at the penalty phase of her trial did not present the jury with critical information about her background or argue that her age should be a consideration.
Pike was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Pike told police she initially only wanted to fight Slemmer but ended up killing her in a frenzied attack. In her clemency petition, Pike’s attorneys said her untreated mental illness and background made 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 her clemency petition.
Ferrell noted that Pike’s death sentence is an outlier. He noted that Pike’s boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, who was 17 at the time, was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole because of his age; he was denied parole last year. The third teen received probation.
Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, said she wants the execution to proceed. Martinez has waited decades to see Pike’s sentence carried out. Speaking by telephone from Florida, Martinez said her daughter volunteered with the Special Olympics, loved roller skating and wanted a career in computers. “She trusted everybody, and that was her downfall,” Martinez said.
Recent executions of women in the U.S. include Amber McLaughlin, a transgender woman executed by Missouri in 2023 for a 2003 killing — in what is believed to be the first execution of a transgender woman in the U.S. — as well as Lisa Montgomery, executed by the federal government in 2021, marking the first time in nearly seven decades that the U.S. government has put a female inmate to death. Georgia executed a woman in 2015.