Christa Pike was sexually abused as a toddler and raped twice
Christa Pike was 18 when she was convicted of killing her 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer in 1995. Now 50, Pike is scheduled to be executed in Tennessee on Wednesday, in what would be the state’s first execution of a woman in 200 years. However, her lawyers and supporters argue that she should not be executed for a crime committed when she was 18, citing her untreated mental illness and a childhood marked by severe abuse and neglect. Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said she was sexually abused from toddlerhood and raped at ages 11 and 17. “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. Ferrell said other people in Tennessee who were sentenced to death for crimes committed at 18 have since had their sentences reduced. The Death Penalty Information Center says 275 people have been executed in the US during the modern death penalty era for crimes committed at ages 18, 19 or 20. If Pike’s execution goes ahead, it would be Tennessee’s first execution of a woman since 1820, according to Maher. Since 1976, 18 women have been executed in the country, accounting for about 1% of all executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Missouri executed Amber McLaughlin in 2023 for a 2003 killing. The federal government executed Lisa Montgomery in 2021, marking the first federal execution of a woman in nearly seven decades. Georgia executed a female inmate in 2015.
Because of his age, shipp, who was 17 when Slemmer was killed, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.
Prosecutors said Pike believed Slemmer was a romantic rival and lured her to an isolated area, where she and Shipp tortured and killed her. She told police that she had initially intended only to fight Slemmer but that the confrontation escalated into a frenzied attack. In her clemency petition, her lawyers said her untreated mental illness and traumatic upbringing left her unable to “put the brakes on. 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 said research into adolescent brain development has advanced since Pike’s trial and argued that her death sentence is an outlier. It also says death sentences for people in that age group have become increasingly uncommon. “If Christa Pike was tried today, I do not believe a jury that knew about the documented sexual abuse and neglect she experienced as a child would sentence her to death,” Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said. Prosecutors said Pike attacked Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large piece of asphalt. The presence of the pentagram became part of the wider attention surrounding the case during the period of widespread fears about Satanism known as the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.
Pike and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, were students at Knoxville Job Corps when Slemmer was killed. Pike has never denied that she killed Slemmer. Her lawyers have now asked the US Supreme Court to stop the execution. Pike’s lawyers say she suffered years of sexual abuse and neglect as a child. Pike was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. 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. A third teenager who admitted to being an accessory received probation. Executions of women are also uncommon across the US. McLaughlin, a transgender woman, is believed to have been the first transgender woman executed in the US. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.
He was denied parole last year. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee announced on Monday that he would not grant Pike clemency.
She would have been 51,” Martinez said. Because of the brutality of the killing and the ages of those involved, the case drew national attention. Because of poor reception, and by the time Martinez called back, Slemmer had already left, the call kept dropping.
Shipp later admitted that he carved a pentagram, a star-shaped symbol associated with Satanism, into Slemmer’s body. Martinez recalled speaking to her daughter by telephone from Job Corps on the night of the killing. “Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst. Colleen’s birthday was last week.
She supports Pike’s execution and has said her daughter never had the opportunity to grow up. “Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” Martinez said. Martinez said Slemmer volunteered with the Special Olympics, enjoyed roller skating and hoped to work in computers. She and my husband would build and tear apart the computers constantly,” Martinez said. “She trusted everybody, and that was her downfall.”
He also argued that lawyers who represented Pike during the sentencing phase of her trial failed to present the jury with important details about her childhood or make her age a significant part of their case. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has spent decades waiting for her daughter’s case to reach this point. “She was easygoing. She was a computer geek to begin with.