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A woman who has spent more than three decades on death row in Tennessee is scheduled to be killed by lethal injection on Wednesday, 30 September, in a case that has become a flashpoint in the debate over capital punishment, gender and the conduct of criminal trials. Christa Pike, 50, is the only woman on Tennessee's death row, and if the execution goes ahead she will be the first woman put to death in the state in more than 200 years.
Pike herself appears to have made peace, of a kind, with what is coming. Ashlee Sellars, a friend, last heard from her earlier in the week, when Pike texted her from her cell. "She doesn't want us to experience that," Sellars says. The message was simply that she does not want any of her loved ones present when she is executed. Sellars struggles to reconcile the friend she has known as kind and protective with the teenager convicted of one of Tennessee's most notorious murders.
That murder took place in 1995, when Pike was 18. She and her boyfriend at the time, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and murdered Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old they had met at a job training camp for troubled teenagers. The crime sent shockwaves through Knoxville after Slemmer's body was found with a pentagram — a symbol associated with Satanic ritual — carved into her chest, sparking intense media interest and public horror.
According to the case against her, Pike had accused Slemmer of insulting her and of trying to take her boyfriend away from her. Two other residents at the camp later testified that Pike bragged about the killing both before and after it happened, and that she showed them a piece of the victim's skull. A year after the arrest she was sentenced to death. Shipp, who was 17 at the time of the offence, received life imprisonment with the possibility of parole.
The disparity in sentencing between the two defendants is now among the issues drawing attention, but the broader statistical picture is starker still. Only 18 women have been executed in the United States since the 1970s, compared with 1,663 men — a gap that scholars of gender and capital punishment say says as much about who is charged, who is sentenced and who is ultimately selected for death as it does about the crimes themselves.
For the family of Colleen Slemmer, however, the case is not a philosophical exercise. Her mother has said publicly that she wants the execution to proceed so that her daughter can "finally be resting", a view that puts her in open opposition to the defence team.
Pike's lawyers are fighting a last-minute reprieve. They have filed a 226-page clemency petition setting out her history, and United Nations human rights experts have also called for the execution to be halted. Their central argument is not that Pike is innocent — she does not claim to be — but that she was tried in a way that fell far short of what a fair proceeding requires, and that a person so damaged by childhood trauma should not be executed for it.
Much of that trauma is now documented. In 1995, forensic psychologist Dr Diana McCoy was hired by Pike's defence team and concluded that she had been severely neglected by both parents. McCoy found that Pike was physically and sexually abused by several of her mother's husbands and boyfriends, and was raped repeatedly, including at the age of 11 and again at 17. It emerged later that she had also been repeatedly raped as a toddler by her grandmother's boyfriend. McCoy recorded that Pike's mother did not believe her when she reported the assaults.
Crucially, Pike's trial lawyer neither called McCoy to the stand nor summoned many of the witnesses she recommended. The full extent of Pike's abuse history became public evidence only more than a decade later, in a post-conviction hearing, when a new team of lawyers argued that the original representation had been ineffective — a claim the judge rejected.
Her mental health has since become another central plank of the case. Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in prison in 2021 and has been medicated ever since. Dr Bethany Brand, a forensic psychologist who assessed her for the defence in 2023, described the case as extraordinarily unusual because of the number of people who abused her who should have protected her. "Her childhood was replete with physical, sexual, and emotional abuse," Brand says, adding that she was sexually violated by multiple men from before she was school age.
Brand also concluded that untreated manic episodes associated with bipolar disorder, alongside untreated post-traumatic stress disorder, shaped both how threatened Pike felt by the girl she killed and her lack of emotional control during the offence. It is an argument that a jury weighing culpability in 1995 never had the opportunity to hear.
Sandra Babcock, an expert on gender and the death penalty at Cornell Law School who has worked with Pike's defence, calls it baffling that the abuse and rape were not presented at trial even though the defence team knew about them. "Her case is so uniquely compelling," she says, "not just because of her really incomprehensible history of sexual violence but the combination of that with her youth and her mental illness."
Babcock's wider point is about the system rather than the defendant. "If they let her be executed, then what it tells us is that the death penalty in this country is just a joke," she says. "It's not for the worst of the worst. It is for the people who receive the worst legal representation and who are the most damaged and vulnerable."
As Wednesday approaches, the case will be watched as a test of whether clemency petitions founded on trial deficiencies and a long-hidden history of abuse can still halt a sentence in its final days. Pike's lawyers were still seeking a last-minute reprieve, while the family of the 19-year-old student she was convicted of murdering continues to press for closure. The 1995 slaying of Colleen Slemmer became infamous for the pentagram carved into her chest; almost three decades on, the argument over how it should end is being fought almost entirely on behalf of the woman convicted.
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