Notorious Killer To Become First Woman Executed By State In 200 Years, Decades After Ghastly Murder

A murderer who brutally tortured and killed a 19-year-old girl is set to be the first woman executed by Tennessee in two hundred years. 

Tennessee will execute 50-year-old Christa Pike after she was sentenced to death for the brutal 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer. Pike tortured and murdered Slemmer, carving a pentagram into her forehead and chest, the Tennessee Supreme Court wrote. 

Pike’s execution will move forward after Republican Governor Bill Lee declined to grant her clemency. Pike’s attorneys argued she should receive a commutation of her sentence to life in prison, citing her experience of sexual assault as a toddler, rape as a young girl, and subsequent mental disorders. 

“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,” Lee said Monday. 

As an 18-year-old attending the Knoxville Job Corps, Pike invited Slemmer into the woods with her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp. Pike cut Slemmer’s throat, struck her with a meat cleaver and with a piece of asphalt before they carved a pentagram into her forehead and chest, according to court documents. Pike also kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull. 

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-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. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime,” Pike said in her clemency petition. 

In past interviews, May Martinez, the mother of Slemmer, said that Pike never apologized for killing her daughter. 

“I’ll hold Colleen’s picture up to remind her of what she did,” Martinez said when asked by WBIR if she would address Pike at the execution. “Saying something to her and talking to her now, after all these years, that she never apologized — never even tried — or her family. What’s the point?”

Martinez was also frustrated with how more attention has been given to Pike than to her daughter. 

“It’s never about the victims,” she said. “It’s like Colleen was never there.”

Pike is being held at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville and is scheduled to be executed Wednesday morning. 

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