The execution of Christa Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, was halted by a federal appeals court roughly an hour before it was scheduled to take place.
Pike, 50, had spent nearly 30 years in prison for the brutal killing of Colleen Slemmer. She was scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection on Sept. 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee.
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit issued a last-minute stay as it considers Pike’s legal challenges to her death sentence.
According to the New York Times, the court approved “a short stay of execution in order to properly analyze the parties’ fully briefed arguments.”
Pike has challenged her sentence through appeals and lawsuits since her 1996 conviction. Her requests for intervention from Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and the U.S. Supreme Court were both rejected in September.
In a clemency petition filed in September and reviewed by Oxygen, Pike’s attorneys argued that jurors and courts had failed to properly account for her age at the time of the crime, her mental illness and her history of childhood sexual abuse.
Her lawyers also contended that lethal injection, which requires the prisoner to be strapped down, could bring back memories of being restrained during sexual assaults she experienced as a child.
“She will relive the sounds, the smells, and the pain,” advocacy organizations wrote in a Sept. 10 filing cited by USA TODAY. “She will feel it now as she did then. And it will be as horrific for her now as it was then. … (We) have very little doubt that Christa Pike will go to her death believing and feeling that she is being raped yet again.”
Pike’s attorney, Stephen Ferrell, told the outlet that the stay reflected “the serious concerns about Christa’s scheduled execution.”
Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in nearly 200 years. In a previous letter to NBC News, she wrote, “I am not afraid to die. I’m only nervous about the process.”
What Crime Did Christa Pike Commit?
The severity of Pike’s crime drew widespread attention.
On Jan. 12, 1995, Pike, then 18, lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer into a wooded area on the University of Tennessee campus. Prosecutors said the attack was planned and targeted Slemmer as a suspected romantic rival.
Slemmer was beaten and mutilated so severely that, according to an opinion by the Tennessee Supreme Court, a university employee initially believed her remains belonged to an animal.
Pike pleaded not guilty. Her defense argued that a serious mental health disorder had caused her to lose control of her actions. In 1996, however, she was convicted of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.
The court opinion said the plot began at least a day before the killing. Pike told another student at the Knoxville Job Corps Center, where she and Slemmer were enrolled, that she wanted to kill Slemmer because she “had just felt mean that day.”
The following evening, Pike brought a box cutter and a small meat cleaver and invited Slemmer to go for a walk with two other people. Pike initially declined to identify them in a detailed confession given to police days after the murder. They were later identified as Pike’s 17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and her 18-year-old friend, Shadolla Peterson.
Pike told police that, during the walk, she and another person forced Slemmer to remove her clothing from the waist up before beating and stabbing her. She said the attack lasted between 30 minutes and an hour.
When Slemmer cried out, “Why are you doing this to me?”, Pike said she told her to “shut up” because “it was harder to hurt somebody when they’re talking to you.”
Pike eventually said Slemmer was “breathing blood in and out.”
The group dragged Slemmer’s body to a dirt pile, washed their hands and shoes in a mud puddle, and then returned to the Job Corps center.
Pike told police that Slemmer had been “running her mouth” and that she had wanted Pike’s boyfriend. Pike claimed she didn’t mean to kill Slemmer, only to fight her so she would “leave me the hell alone.”
Pike said that during the attack, she heard voices saying she had to stop Slemmer from reporting her and sending her to prison.
Slemmer’s injuries were so extensive, according to the court opinion, that Knox County Medical Examiner Sandra Elkins said she “basically threw up [her] hands” and documented only the most severe.
Slemmer’s cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head, and according to a Tennessee criminal court of appeals opinion, “she essentially drowned in her own blood.”
Portions of Slemmer’s skull had been dislodged and were embedded in her brain, with one piece missing. After the killing, Pike showed a classmate a portion of Slemmer’s skull, which she called a “souvenir.”
A pentagram design—which some associate with Satanism—had been carved into Slemmer’s chest and while Pike denied doing it, she and Shipp were wearing necklaces of the symbol when they were arrested.
Shipp later told police he was unaware of plans to kill Slemmer and claimed Pike was “pretty deep” into Satanism, which he also admitted to having practiced since age 10, according to the appeals opinion. He also confessed to carving the pentagram into Slemmer’s chest.
He was convicted of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Peterson pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact and received six years of probation.
Christa Pike Is Tried for Colleen Slemmer’s Murder
During Pike’s 1996 trial, her lawyers acknowledged that she killed Slemmer but denied that it was premeditated.
According to the court opinion, a psychologist testifying for the defense called Pike an “extremely bright young woman” who had severe borderline personality disorder. He speculated that Pike took Slemmer’s skull fragment as a “distorted” attempt at earning recognition.
Another medical expert testified that while Pike’s actions contained satanic “elements,” they constituted “adolescent dabbling” in Satanism. In her clemency petition, Pike denied having a fascination with “satanic imagery.”
Pike was convicted and sentenced to death in March 1996.
“Your body shall be subjected to shock by sufficient current of electricity until you are dead,” a judge told Pike in courtroom footage. “May God have mercy upon you.”
“Can I please hug my mom before I go?” Pike, sobbing, asked the judge. “Please, let me just hug my mom.”
Christa Pike’s Life on Death Row After Murder Conviction
Pike has expressed remorse about killing Slemmer.
“Think back to the worst mistake you made as a reckless teenager. Well, mine happened to be huge, unforgettable and ruined countless lives,” she wrote in a letter to The Tennessean in 2023. “I was a mentally ill 18 yr. old kid.”
“It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected,” she wrote. “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.”
But Pike’s legal troubles grew in prison.
In 2001, she strangled inmate Patricia Jones with a shoelace, for which she was convicted of attempted first-degree premeditated murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Pike said in her clemency petition that she attacked Jones to defend a fellow cellmate.
“Ms. Jones would later admit that Christa did the right thing by pulling her away from her friend,” Pike clemency petition. “Ms. Jones made it clear that she would have killed Natasha and still would if given the chance.
Pike recently said the anticipation of death had given her “horrible nightmares.”
“But I think what has been worse is that they told me a year ahead of time,” she said in the September documentary Dead Woman Walking: Pike vs. Tennessee. “And so, every day, I’ve woken up and lived that thought. All day, every day, every waking moment.”
Pike’s attorneys did not respond to requests for comment from Oxygen.
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