Christa Pike, 50, is set to be executed in Tennessee on Wednesday for the torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a crime she committed when she was 18 years old. If the execution proceeds, Pike will be the first woman executed in the state since 1819 and the first woman there to be put to death by lethal injection.
Pike has asked that no family members or friends be present for the execution.
Details of the 1995 murder
On January 12, 1995, Pike, along with her 17-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and 18-year-old friend Shadolla Peterson, brutally tortured and murdered Slemmer. All four were students living at a Job Corps training centre in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Pike believed Slemmer was trying to "steal" her boyfriend and claimed Slemmer had been "running her mouth" about her. Pike and Peterson lured Slemmer into the woods near an abandoned boiler house on the University of Tennessee's agricultural campus, convincing her to sign out of their dormitory under the pretence of "making peace" and offering her cannabis.
Attack and aftermath
Once they reached the remote spot, the pair beat, kicked, and slashed Slemmer using a box cutter and a miniature meat cleaver, with the ordeal lasting between 30 minutes and one hour. Slemmer was taunted as she begged for her life, and during the attack, Shipp carved a pentagram into her chest.
She attempted to escape multiple times but was caught and dragged back down. Pike carried out the fatal blows, smashing Slemmer's head with a block of asphalt. Before leaving, Pike took a piece of Slemmer's skull as a "trophy", showing the fragment and bragging about the incident to another pupil upon her return to the Job Corps centre.
Conviction and appeals
The teens were arrested three days after the incident, with Pike claiming to police that she had only intended to scare Slemmer, not kill her. During the trial, police played a taped confession in which Pike described a 30-to-45-minute "torture session". A jury found her guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, and she was sentenced to death aged 20, making her the youngest woman on death row in the US at the time.
In 2001, while on death row, Pike choked fellow inmate Patricia Jones with a shoestring and was convicted of attempted first-degree murder for the attack three years later.
Tennessee's Supreme Court set an execution date last year, and her legal team has filed appeals to halt the process. Her lawyers argue that lethal injection would violate her constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment, as she suffers from blood clots and obesity. They also said she was a victim of sexual abuse as a child, a claim backed by experts at the UN Human Rights commission, who warned that her execution would break international law.
"Pike’s execution would mark the culmination of a trajectory of severe physical and psychological suffering marked by childhood abuse and nearly three decades of solitary confinement on death row", the panel said in a statement.
Colleen's mother, May Martinez, has been among those urging Tennessee to carry out the death sentence. On September 25, the Tennessee Supreme Court denied Pike's request for a stay of execution after finding that she was not at "substantial risk" of severe pain or needless suffering.
