Tennessee's only female death row inmate faces a September 30 execution for the 1995 torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, and her lawyers' last hope rests with a clemency petition to Governor Bill Lee.
A court-appointed Special Master announced on August 21 that he would not block the execution of Christa Pike, 50, after a three-day hearing in a Knoxville courtroom failed to convince him that lethal injection would violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Pike, who has spent nearly three decades on death row, attended the hearing by video from the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, where she watched attorneys and expert witnesses pick apart her childhood, her psychiatric diagnoses, and the mechanics of how the state plans to kill her.
If the execution proceeds, Pike will become the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than 200 years. No court and no governor has yet intervened. Her attorneys have filed a 226-page clemency petition with Governor Bill Lee, calling it their last avenue. The crime she committed, and the life she lived before it, form two competing narratives that Tennessee must now weigh in the weeks ahead.
On the evening of January 12, 1995, Colleen Slemmer tried to reach her mother by phone. The signal was bad. May Martinez called back around 10 or 10:15 p.m. Her daughter was already gone.
Slemmer, 19, was a student at the Knoxville Job Corps, an East Tennessee job training program. She volunteered regularly at Special Olympics events. She worked with handicapped children at her school, helping them eat lunch and get around, Martinez told the Banner.
Pike, then 18, was also enrolled at Knoxville Job Corps. She had become convinced Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, a 17-year-old named Tadaryl Shipp. Pike told police afterward that she had not planned to kill Slemmer, only to fight her. She said she invited Slemmer to a nearby Blockbuster music store, then led her to a wooded area behind the steam plant on the University of Tennessee Agricultural campus, claiming she had hidden marijuana there.
What followed was not a fight. Pike told police she threw Slemmer to the ground, kicked her repeatedly, and slammed her head into concrete. When Slemmer tried to run, Shipp caught her and threw her back down. As Slemmer begged for her life, Pike slashed her body with a box cutter, slit her throat, and beat her over the head with a large chunk of asphalt. Shipp later testified at a post-conviction hearing that he was the one who used the box cutter to carve a pentagram into Slemmer's chest. Pike kept a piece of Slemmer's skull.
A third teenager, Shadolla Peterson, was present. She agreed to testify for the state and avoided prison time altogether. Shipp was sentenced to life in prison but remains eligible for parole. Pike was sentenced to death in March 1996 at age 20, one of the youngest women ever to receive a death sentence in the modern era.
Martinez, who now lives about an hour outside Jacksonville, Florida, told the Banner she left the Knoxville area because the memories were everywhere.
"I couldn't take the area anymore. There's too many memories. The school, the skating rink, the movies, it's just all there."
She does not believe Pike's statements of remorse. A Jacksonville-based victims advocacy organization is raising money to cover Martinez's travel costs so she can be in Tennessee for the execution. What she wants, she said, is simple.
"That I get some peace and I don't have to wake up and dream every night or have to take a sleeping pill to sleep and worry about stuff like this. And that Colleen can always be remembered as the sweet little girl that she was."
Pike's clemency petition and the August hearing laid out a biography that reads like a catalog of institutional failure, every system that was supposed to protect a child stepping aside or looking away.
Dr. Bethany Brand, a clinical psychologist who assessed Pike in 2023, documented a history she called "truly extreme." Pike was exposed to drugs and alcohol in the womb. Before she reached kindergarten, her grandmother's boyfriend began orally raping her. When a teacher asked Pike to draw something in school, she drew what Brand's report described as "a huge penis and demon face." Her parents were called. Law enforcement and child protective services were not.
As a preteen, Pike was raped by a neighbor. She told her mother and sister. They did not believe her. She later reported the abuse to a teacher. The man, 37 years old, was arrested, pleaded guilty to a lesser offense, served a short sentence, and moved back into the neighborhood.
At 12, Pike was hospitalized after swallowing pills in a suicide attempt. By 14, one of her mother's boyfriends, who had sexually assaulted her, exposed her to a large collection of pornography, and abused her physically and verbally, agreed to move out of the family home as part of a legal settlement. At 16, Pike became pregnant and had an abortion after her mother lied to her about the condition of the fetus. At 17, in January 1994, she was sexually assaulted in Carrboro, North Carolina, by an unidentified man. Hospital staff documented abrasions on her breast and leg and bruising on her inner thigh near her genitals. A rape kit was collected. The man was never caught.
Brand wrote in her report that the scope of what Pike endured was difficult to comprehend.
"The level of trauma she was subjected to as a preschooler through her 18th year, when she was arrested, is almost impossible to grasp because it is so severe."
A judge who had represented Pike as an attorney in North Carolina juvenile court proceedings was quoted in the clemency petition describing her as "bright, charming and with a sense of humor." His assessment of the system's role was blunt: "We failed her."
Pike's attorneys have argued that her youth, undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder, none of which were identified until years after her conviction, should have been weighed differently. Her legal team has said they "remain steadfast that Christa's death sentence should be commuted given her youth and severe mental illness at the time of the crime," adding that "with time and treatment for bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders, which were not diagnosed until years later, Christa has become a thoughtful woman with deep remorse for her crime."
After Gail Owens, the only other woman on Tennessee's death row, was released in 2010, Pike spent more than two decades in what amounted to solitary confinement, the sole female inmate in a system designed around condemned men. She had no cellmates, limited time outside her cell, no job, and ate meals alone.
Angela Bergman, a veteran attorney at Bass, Berry & Sims, first met Pike in 2021. In 2022, Bergman's team filed a lawsuit challenging Pike's conditions of incarceration. The case settled in 2024, granting Pike the same opportunities available to condemned men: time outside her cell, a chance to work, and meals with other incarcerated women. Stories of individuals suffering at the hands of broken systems draw public attention, but Pike's case unfolded largely out of sight for years.
Bergman told the Banner that meeting Pike in person defied her expectations.
"I had a sense of what she looked like on paper. What I was not necessarily prepared for was her softness in that moment. Seeing someone who, despite all of the things that had happened to her, all of the isolation, how deeply human she was in those moments."
Pike's record in prison is not spotless. Roughly five years after her death sentence, she was convicted of attempted murder in a prison altercation. But Patricia Jones, the incarcerated woman involved, later testified that Pike had actually intervened in a fight between Jones and another inmate and likely saved the other woman's life.
The three-day August hearing before Special Master Judge Mark Ward focused on whether Pike's specific medical and psychological conditions would make lethal injection amount to torture in her case. The Tennessee Supreme Court had appointed Ward to examine the question.
Pike's attorneys raised practical concerns: Pike has small veins and a history of difficult blood draws. They pointed to the case of Tony Carruthers, a death row inmate whose attempted execution was aborted in May after medical staff could not successfully place an IV line. Hanging was discussed as an alternative method during the hearing.
A clinical psychologist testified that the lethal injection process, being strapped to a gurney, potentially by male guards, would not merely trigger memories of Pike's sexual trauma but would cause her to experience "fully reliving them." A coalition of experts and organizations focused on sexual violence urged the governor to halt the execution, arguing it would cause Pike to "feel and believe that she is being raped to death."
Ward was not persuaded. On August 21, he announced that Pike's attorneys had not proven the execution would violate the Eighth Amendment. AP News reported that Pike's legal team has continued to argue for clemency based on her youth, mental illness, and history of abuse.
Pike is one of only eight people in the modern era of Tennessee's death penalty to receive a death sentence for a crime committed at age 18. The other seven, all men, have since had their death sentences vacated. No 18-year-old offender has received a death sentence in Tennessee since Pike. If the state carries out the execution on September 30, she will be the first woman executed in Tennessee since the early 1800s. Fox News reported the last such execution occurred around 1820.
The clemency petition describes Pike's relationship with Shipp, her co-defendant, as "marked by violence and toxicity." It includes statements of remorse from Pike. The petition also notes that grief does not follow a schedule, Martinez has carried hers for more than 30 years, and Pike's attorneys argue their client has carried a different kind of damage for just as long.
In 2024, Tennessee enacted a law making the rape of a child punishable by death. The irony is hard to miss: the state now considers the kind of crime committed against Pike as a child severe enough to warrant the ultimate penalty, even as it prepares to carry out that penalty against her.
Days after the murder in 1995, the Knoxville News-Sentinel published a story citing police sources about the skull fragment and satanist imagery. The New York Post reported that Pike's lawyers submitted a 226-page clemency petition arguing that her history of sexual abuse, bipolar disorder, and three decades in solitary confinement warrant mercy. Martinez told WBIR earlier this month that the skull fragment Pike had taken was never returned to the family and has since been lost. Pike's legal team pushed back, emailing media on a Sunday evening to say they had "confirmed numerous times with the State that all evidence from the trial associated with Colleen's remains, including all pieces of skull retained as evidence, was returned to Colleen's mother."
That dispute, over a piece of bone from a murdered teenager, captures something about this case that no clemency petition or court filing can resolve. Thirty years later, death arrives on its own terms, and the people left behind are still arguing over what was taken and what was returned.
Governor Lee now holds the only remaining power to stop the September 30 execution. The courts have spoken. The question left is whether a childhood of unrelenting abuse, decades of isolation, and late-arriving diagnoses add up to something the state should weigh against the savagery of what happened behind that steam plant in Knoxville, or whether justice for Colleen Slemmer means the sentence stands as delivered.
A society that cannot protect a child from serial predators and then executes her for what she became ought to ask itself harder questions than a clemency petition can answer.