The US state of Tennessee may soon carry out its first execution of a woman in over 200 years after its Supreme Court gave the green light to carry out the sentence handed down to Christa Gail Pike.
Pike – currently the sole female on Tennessee’s death row – was 18 years old when she lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer into a wooded area close to the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus in Knoxville on January 12, 1995.
According to Fox News, Pike and Slemmer were both involved in the Knoxville Job Corps, a career-training program. Pike allegedly convinced herself that Slemmer was interested in her boyfriend, 17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp, and in a fit of jealously became the ringleader of a shocking plan.
Having contrived to get Slemmer into the aforementioned wooded area with the help of Shipp and a third accomplice, Shadolla Peterson, Pike slashed her fellow teenager’s throat with a box cutter, attacked her with a meat cleaver, carved a pentagram into her chest, and ultimately crushed her skull with a piece of asphalt.
Claiming a piece of Slemmer’s broken skull as a grisly trophy, Pike reportedly showed flaunted it to classmates before her arrest.
Retired detective Randy York, who worked the case, said: “During the interview, she was very giddy, laughed, very cooperative. She wanted to tell us all about it.”
He added: “She had a piece of the skull wrapped up in a napkin in her coat pocket. That’s a trophy. It showed that that piece she had fit exactly as a piece of puzzle in the skull.”
Pike was convicted of first-degree murder in 1996 and sentenced to death. Shipp received a life sentence without the possibility of parole (earlier this year a parole board denied his bid for freedom), while Peterson, who testified against Pike and Shipp, was handed probation.
In 2004 Pike had an additional 25 years added to her sentence after being convicted of trying to strangle an inmate in prison.
For the better part of thirty years, Pike’s case has been mired in the appeals process, but according to court documents filed on September 30, the State of Tennessee has requested an execution date for Pike, now 49. That date has been set for September 30, 2026.
Pike’s legal team continue to fight her sentence, arguing that her age at the time of the crime should be taken into account, as well as her history of childhood trauma, abuse, and an untreated mental illness. Psychological evaluations made after her horrific crime diagnosed Pike with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Christa’s childhood was fraught with years of physical and sexual abuse and neglect,” the 49-year-old’s defense team said, via CBS News.
“With time and treatment, she has become a thoughtful woman with deep remorse for her crime.”
If and when her sentence is carried out, Pike will become the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1820, and only the fourth in the state’s history.
According to The Death Penalty Information Center, the last recorded execution involving a woman in Tennessee was carried out in 1820, when Martin Eve was hanged for being an accessory to murder.
In May 2022 Tennessee paused the death penalty after Governor Bill Lee called for an independent review into the proper testing of lethal injection drugs. A revised lethal injection protocol was implemented, with executions resuming in May 2025.
