NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Nashville Banner) — This story was originally published by the Nashville Banner. Sign up for their newsletter.
At some point on Tuesday, Christa Pike will be moved from the women’s prison in Nashville to the nearby Riverbend Maximum Security Institution where executioners are waiting to receive her. On Wednesday morning, unless a judge or Gov. Bill Lee orders them otherwise, they will carry out the death sentence she received more than 30 years ago.
For decades, Pike’s case has been used as grist for the voracious true crime entertainment mill, from television to books to documentaries. A search of her name on YouTube reveals multiple channels churning out content about the case and using AI to create almost-realistic videos of Pike crying, pleading and eating as she awaits her execution. At times, the characters in the story threaten to obscure the people in it.
Pike was 18, suffering from bipolar disorder and severe post-traumatic stress from childhood rape and abuse, when her life intersected with Colleen Slemmer’s at a job training program in Knoxville in January of 1995. In Pike’s mind at least, she and Slemmer, then 19, had been feuding in part over Pike’s boyfriend, 17-year-old Tadaryll Shipp. She, Shipp and another teen girl, Shadolla Peterson, ambushed Slemmer in a secluded area, tortured her and killed her. Infamously, Pike left the scene with a fragment of Slemmer’s skull in her pocket and Shipp later admitted that he was the one who had used a box cutter to carve a pentagram in Slemmer’s chest. Only Pike was sentenced to death. Peterson avoided prison time after agreeing to testify for the state, and Shipp, ineligible for the death penalty due to his age, was sentenced to life in prison. He came up for parole last year, but was denied.
What the jury at Pike’s trial didn’t hear was the nightmarish details of her formative years — the rapes and physical abuse at the hands of multiple adult men, the neglect by her parents and the resulting damage to a young girl. What they could not have known is anything about the thoughtful, compassionate and remorseful woman Pike’s attorneys and advocates say she has become in the decades since. All of that has been at the center of her recent legal challenges and the clemency petition she submitted to the governor earlier this month.
The Tennessee Supreme Court last week rejected her appeals and declined to stay her execution. The governor is yet to respond publicly to her request for mercy.
Two of Pike’s attorneys, Kelly Gleason and Stephen Ferrell, said they were “deeply disappointed” by the court’s decision but would appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court and continue looking to the governor.
“Now that he is equipped with information and understanding the jury never had, Governor Lee can consider the totality of Christa’s life and circumstances and right these wrongs by commuting her death sentence to life without parole,” they said. “We remain hopeful that he will.”
If the state proceeds with Pike’s lethal injection this week, she will be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years and just the 19th in the death penalty’s so-called “modern era” since 1976. The Tennessee Department of Correction committed to keeping Pike at the women’s prison, Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, until the day before her execution date and to attempting to staff her observation, extraction and transportation with female officers.
But her execution would not just be unusual because of her gender. After her conviction in 1996, she became – at 20 years old – one of the youngest women ever sentenced to death. She is also one of only eight people in Tennessee since 1976 to receive the death penalty for a crime committed when she was 18. The other seven, all men, later had their death sentences vacated.
If Pike is brought to the execution chamber on Wednesday morning, another woman will be there too, on the other side of a window in an adjacent room. May Martinez, Slemmer’s mother, told the Banner that she needs to witness Pike’s death “so I can remember that she is gone and I don’t have to fear that she’s going to pop up somewhere.”
Although a Florida-based victims advocacy organization raised money to cover the cost of Martinez’s trip to Tennessee, it wasn’t enough for plane tickets. She told the Banner she and her husband will be making the 600-mile drive to Nashville so they can be at Riverbend for the execution.
Pike’s attorneys have argued that her past traumas will make the execution — even if it is free of the complications that caused Tony Carruthers’ to be called off in May — particularly torturous. A coalition of experts and organizations focused on sexual violence and trauma said recently in a letter to the governor that she is likely to “feel and believe that she is being raped to death.” Martinez said she hopes that she will be able to find peace after Pike is dead.
But even after years of litigation and legal analysis, whether a story like this one can truly produce peace or justice remains painfully unclear.
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
September 11, 2001 is a day most associate with terror and tragedy. Austin Pollack shares a story from that day about hope and persistence: the effort to save a little girl’s life – with an organ donation. The problem? The young patient was in Houston, and her life-saving liver here in Nashville. With the grounding of all civilian aircraft, how could it be done? “Nobody ever said this isn’t possible.”
- Rhori Johnston
