Greater than 30 years after she brutally murdered a classmate over a romantic rivalry, Christa Gail Pike, the one girl on Tennessee’s demise row, is scheduled to be executed on September 30 subsequent yr.
If carried out, Pike would change into the primary girl to be executed within the state in over 200 years, and solely the nineteenth girl to face this destiny in the US since 1976.
What did Christa Gail Pike do?
Pike’s crime dates again to January 1995, when she was a scholar on the Knoxville Job Corps, a career-training program.
Aged 18 on the time, Pike started courting a 17-year-old boy in the identical program, and ultimately got here to worry that her 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer would pry him away from her.
In a wicked try to pre-empt a romantic coup, Pike, together with a good friend and her boyfriend, lured Slemmer into the Knoxville woods on January 12, and proceeded to torture and homicide her.
The sheer brutality of the crime—Slemmer was stabbed, overwhelmed, bludgeoned for practically an hour, and had a pentagram carved into her chest—made nationwide headlines within the US.
If that weren’t all, after smashing Slemmer’s head in with a big piece of asphalt, Pike went on to maintain a chunk of her cranium, and commenced to indicate it across the campus.
Three days after the crime, she was arrested and charged with first-degree homicide and conspiracy to commit first-degree homicide, was discovered responsible on each counts in March 1996, and sentenced to demise.
Nevertheless, Pike’s two accomplices—boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and good friend Shadolla Peterson—escaped the demise penalty, with Shipp slated to change into eligible for parole in November this yr.
In the meantime, Peterson, who prosecutors say stored a lookout throughout the brutal homicide, testified in opposition to Pike throughout the courtroom proceedings and was sentenced to probation.
What did Pike need to say in regards to the crime?
Though her attorneys have tried to get her off demise row, Pike, in a letter to The Tennessean in 2023, stated she took accountability for the homicide, however added that she had “modified drastically” within the 30+ years for the reason that brutal crime.
“I used to be a mentally ailing 18 yr. outdated child. It took me quite a few years to even notice the gravity of what I might achieved. Much more to just accept what number of lives I effected (sic). I took the life of somebody’s little one, sister, good friend. It sickens me now to suppose that somebody as loving and compassionate as myself had the power to commit such a criminal offense,” Pike wrote within the letter.
Having spent 27 years in what her attorneys say was successfully solitary confinement, on condition that she was the one girl within the state on demise row, Pike’s attorneys have argued that had she been on trial as we speak, she would by no means have been awarded a demise sentence, given her younger age and psychological well being struggles on the time when the crime was dedicated.
“Christa’s childhood was fraught with years of bodily and sexual abuse and neglect. With time and remedy for bipolar and post-traumatic stress problems, which weren’t identified till years later, Christa has change into a considerate girl with deep regret for her crime,” USA TODAY quoted Pike’s attorneys as saying.
The 49-year-old’s attorneys are anticipated to problem the sentence, believing she deserves life in jail with out the opportunity of parole, as a substitute of capital punishment.
