First Woman to be Executed in TN in 200 Years

Tennessee is scheduled to execute Christa Gail Pike on Wednesday, Sept. 30, at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. If the lethal injection proceeds, she will be the first woman put to death in the state in more than 200 years.

Pike is 50 and the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. She was 18 in 1995 when she, her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, and a friend attacked 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at Knoxville Job Corps. Prosecutors said Pike saw Slemmer as a romantic rival and lured her to a remote stretch of the University of Tennessee agricultural campus.

Court records describe a prolonged assault. Slemmer was beaten and cut with a meat cleaver and a box cutter for as long as an hour. A pentagram was carved into her chest. A piece of her skull was taken. Pike was convicted of first-degree murder in 1996 and sentenced to death. Shipp got life because he was 17. The third teen, Shadolla Peterson, testified and received probation.

Pike became one of the youngest women sent to death row in the modern era. Her lawyers now argue she was a teenager with untreated mental illness and a childhood marked by sexual abuse, including assaults at 11 and 17. They say a male execution team would reopen that trauma. The state agreed to an all-female transport staff and extra privacy. The sentence stayed.

Gov. Bill Lee closed the clemency door on Monday. “After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike’s request for clemency and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene.”

The Tennessee Supreme Court had already refused a stay, finding she had not shown a likely win on the merits. Her lawyers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in. Slemmer’s family has waited three decades. Her mother has said she still thinks about Slemmer trying to get up and run.

Pike does not deny the killing. In audio released by her attorneys she said, “I run through this execution every day in my heart. Whatever happens on Sept. 30, this will not be my hell anymore.”

The last recorded execution of a woman in Tennessee was around 1820. Historical lists name Molly Holcomb in 1807 and later hangings whose records are thin. Pike would be the first woman executed in the state’s modern death-penalty era.

Unless a last-hour order arrives, the state will move her from the women’s prison to Riverbend and carry out a sentence written when she was barely an adult. The crime was savage. The calendar is 200 years long. Both facts are now on the same warrant.