Christa Pike is set to die in Tennessee after the governor refused clemency, yet she claims a “kinship” with Lindsay Clancy over “uniquely female issues” while the torture murder of a teenage girl still defines the case.
Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike is scheduled for execution on Wednesday after Governor Bill Lee denied her clemency petition on Monday. Pike, now 50, has drawn a direct parallel between her case and that of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who faces charges in the deaths of her three children.
Pike says the two share a bond as women who “got into trouble because of uniquely female issues.” She also says she is pleased Clancy is “getting the help she needs.” The record of Pike’s own crime, however, remains the same brutal facts that put her on death row nearly three decades ago.
In March 1996, a jury convicted Pike of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy for the January 12, 1995, killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Jurors at sentencing found the murder especially cruel and involved torture or serious physical abuse beyond what was necessary to kill her. Pike became the youngest woman sentenced to death in the United States. If the sentence is carried out, she will be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Pike was 18 and a Job Corps student when she became convinced Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, 17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp. With another student, Shadolla Peterson, Pike helped hatch a plan to lure Slemmer to an isolated area on the University of Tennessee campus.
There, the group beat and kicked Slemmer, slashed her, and carved a pentagram into her chest while she was still alive. Shipp did the carving. Prosecutors said the attack lasted at least half an hour; other accounts put it at more than an hour. Slemmer was finally bludgeoned in the head with a chunk of asphalt.
The next morning she was found dead, naked from the waist up, her clothes left on branches. Pike returned to the Job Corps center with a fragment of Slemmer’s skull and described what had happened.
Those are the facts that produced a death sentence. Pike’s recent statements try to reframe them through a modern lens of women’s issues and mental health.
Pike has said she feels a “kinship” with Clancy. In comments reported ahead of the execution date, she put it this way:
"We are both females who got into trouble because of uniquely female issues."
She added:
"One thing [that] is different, however, is that times have changed a lot on awareness of women's issues since I was put on trial."
Pike also said she is “pleased” Clancy is “getting the help she needs,” and argued:
"There are so any women who don't get the help they need: me and others."
She believes jurors would have been more sympathetic today “because science about brain development has evolved.” She further claimed she was judged more harshly because of her relationship with Shipp, who is Black, saying racism “has diminished some” even if it “has not gone away.”
Clancy, 36, did not deny strangling her children, Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, an eight-month-old. Her defense has centered on a claim of not guilty by reason of insanity tied to postpartum psychosis. A Massachusetts judge declared a mistrial earlier this month. Clancy was scheduled to return to Plymouth County Superior Court on Tuesday for a status hearing that could point toward a second trial or further defense motions.
Her lawyer has continued fighting on multiple fronts, including arguments over criminal responsibility and juror issues, a dynamic also examined when an attorney described the holdout juror evidence in the case.
Pike’s attorneys asked Governor Lee to commute the sentence to life without parole. Their petition described a childhood of sexual abuse and later mental-health diagnoses that, they said, were not fully presented as mitigating evidence at the original trial.
According to the petition language, Pike was sexually abused by her grandmother’s boyfriend between ages 2 and 5. At 11 she was raped by a 37-year-old neighbor who received a suspended sentence and continued living nearby. At 17, almost exactly a year before the murder, she reported being dragged into the woods and raped by a stranger; a rape kit was performed and the attacker was never identified. The petition also cited physical abuse at home, childhood suicide attempts, and later diagnoses of bipolar disorder and PTSD after she reached death row.
Her lawyers summarized their case in blunt terms:
"Christa was broken, not evil."
They continued:
"She was broken by the people and places that were meant to be safe and supportive."
And:
"She was broken by a mental health system, juvenile system, and a criminal justice system that ignored, misdiagnosed, and mistreated her at every turn."
Lee denied the bid. Pike also requested an all-female lethal injection team and, if that were refused, asked to be hanged instead.
None of the petition claims erased the jury’s 1996 findings about torture and cruelty. None altered the basic sequence: a planned lure, a prolonged attack, a pentagram carved into a living victim, and a killing blow with asphalt.
While Pike prepares for execution, Clancy’s case remains unresolved after the mistrial. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington has signaled plans to argue for a finding of not guilty due to lack of criminal responsibility and to seek dismissal on double-jeopardy grounds. The defense has also pushed for information on a holdout juror, including phone records, courthouse surveillance, and the juror questionnaire. Judge William Sullivan could side with those motions or clear the way for prosecutors to try the case again.
Public and family reaction to the Clancy killings has stayed raw. Coverage has included Patrick Clancy’s decision to forgive his ex-wife even though she never asked, a stance that underscored the personal wreckage left behind.
Other voices have been far less forgiving. After the mistrial, Dakota Meyer told Fox News viewers he hoped Clancy was suffering, an unfiltered measure of how many people view the deaths of three children.
Clancy’s legal team has kept pressing every available angle, including high-profile outreach that drew scrutiny when her lawyer sought a presidential pardon the office cannot grant in a state case. Reports have also described how Clancy continually pleads for her children inside the psychiatric facility where she is held.
Pike’s attempt to line her case up beside Clancy’s rests on the idea that both are women shaped by trauma and failed systems. The comparison stops at the courtroom door. One case produced a death sentence for a calculated torture murder of a fellow teenager. The other is still being litigated around insanity claims after a mother killed her own children. Different facts. Different victims. Different legal postures.
Pike was 18 when she helped lure Slemmer into the woods. She is 50 now. Nearly 30 years on death row, evolving talk about brain science, and a detailed abuse narrative did not persuade Tennessee’s governor to block the sentence the jury imposed.
The state is preparing to carry out that sentence. Slemmer never reached 20. Her final hour was spent being beaten, cut, marked with a satanic symbol, and crushed with asphalt while she begged for it to stop. That is the conduct the jury called torture. That is the conduct that brought a death sentence. And that is the conduct still waiting on the other side of Pike’s claims of kinship and brokenness.
Mercy for the guilty starts with truth about the crime. Colleen Slemmer is entitled to that truth being the last word.