Tennessee’s only current female death row inmate has now received her execution date 30 years after brutally murdering her fellow classmate.
Christa Pike made her way into prison with a death sentence at just 18 years old for brutally murdering and torturing a fellow pupil on January 12, 1995. Her victim was another young girl named Colleen Slemmer, also 18, and a fellow student at Knoxville Job Corps.
Slemmer was killed on the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus after being stabbed and beaten by Pike, along with her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp. Her counterpart and Memphis native, Shipp, was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.
Together the two teenagers cruelly carved out a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest, and to make the murder all the more sickening, Pike took a piece of her skull as a souvenir, investigators shared. Her antics didn’t end there, as Pike received a secondary conviction after attempting to strangle her inmate in a prison fight – adding 25 years to her sentence.
It has since been revealed that the execution of the 49-year-old will take place on September 30, 2026. If the execution goes ahead as planned, Pike will go down in history as the first woman to be executed in Tennessee in 200 years. She will also become just the 19th woman in modern U.S. history to be killed by execution.
While it is an extremely rare case of a woman being sent on death row, Pike’s planned death comes about at a time when executions are rising across the U.S. as they expand their killing methods. This year alone has seen 34 inmates executed; states have executed another nine still scheduled to go ahead.
Lawyers made attempts to ask the Tennessee high court on behalf of Pike to commute her sentence due to her young age and alleged “severe mental illness” at the time she committed the crime. According to her legal team, she experienced sexual abuse and neglect during her childhood.
At the time of her arrest, she was not yet diagnosed with bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders, which she learnt about years later. The attorneys wrote in a statement published on Wednesday: “With time and treatment, Christa has become a thoughtful woman with deep remorse for her crime.”
Following a three-year pause that resulted in the state of Tennessee not testing lethal injections sufficiently for purity and potency, the state kicked off a new round of executions, beginning in May. It was revealed in an independent review that since 2018, seven executions of inmates took place with none of the drugs fully tested for.
It was later admitted in court by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s Office that two of the staff responsible for overseeing Tennessee’s lethal injection drugs “incorrectly testified” under oath. They had previously claimed that officials were in fact testing the chemicals properly.
Pike wrote a letter to The Tennessean about her experience, confessing, “Think back to the worst mistake you made as a reckless teenager. Well, mine happened to be huge, unforgettable and ruined countless lives.
“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realise 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 that someone as loving and compassionate as myself had the ability to commit such a crime.”