Tennessee set to execute 1st woman in 200 years

Tennessee will execute Christa Gail Pike on Wednesday, making her the first woman in 200 years to be put to death in the state.

Pike, 50, who was sentenced to death at the age of 20 for the 1995 murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer, will receive the lethal injection on Wednesday morning at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tenn.

Pike and her boyfriend were convicted of stabbing and beating 19-year-old Slemmer at a job training facility in Knoxville when Pike was 18.

Pike, who testified that she feared Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, was found guilty of luring the 19-year-old to a wooded area on Jan. 12, 1995 and slashing her with a box cutter before beating her with a slab of asphalt.

Tadaryl Shipp, Pike’s boyfriend, has admitted that he was the one who carved a pentagram, a star-shaped symbol associated with satanism, into her body.

Shipp, who was 17 at the time of the crime, is currently serving a life sentence for his role in the murder. The Tennessee Board of Parole denied his request for parole in October 2o25, 30 years into his sentence.

He was deemed ineligible for the death penalty because of his age when Slemmer was killed.

The case gained attention at the time in part because of a pentagram that was carved on Slemmer’s body and other elements of the crime that stoked fears of Satan worship during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.

Pike does not deny committing the murder, but her supporters have argued that state lawmakers should consider her age at the time of the killing, her history of mental illness and that she endured severe sexual abuse, including being raped as a toddler.

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike said in a statement in her clemency petition.

“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.”

Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said her punishment is an anomaly because other 18-year-olds sentenced to death in Tennessee have had their sentences vacated.

Pike’s lawyers have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the execution. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has denied Pike clemency.

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, told the Associated Press in an interview that she wants Pike to receive the death penalty as planned.

“Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” she said, adding that a group had raised funds so she and her husband could travel from Florida to watch the execution.

Tennessee has not executed a woman since 1820, according to Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

Since 1976, 18 women have been put to death in the U.S., equating to about 1 percent of all executions, according to the centre.