Tennessee is about to exercise the gravest power any government claims — the power to kill — and for the first time in two centuries, it will direct that power at a woman. Christa Pike, 50, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Wednesday for a murder she committed at 18, unless the Supreme Court intervenes. Gov. Bill Lee denied clemency Monday, clearing the path for an execution that forces a question every citizen — and every Christian — must reckon with: when the state takes a life, is it justice, or is it something else entirely?
The crime was savage. In 1995, Pike, then 18, lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at Knoxville Job Corps, to a secluded area on the University of Tennessee campus. Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a chunk of asphalt. Her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, then 17, carved a satanic pentagram into the victim's body. Pike later bragged about keeping a fragment of Slemmer's skull as a souvenir, according to NBC News. The killing stunned Knoxville and fueled the satanic panic of the era.
Pike does not deny her guilt. "I took the life of someone's child, sister, friend," she said in her clemency petition. "It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime."
But Pike's attorneys argue the jury that sentenced her to death never heard the full story of who she was at 18 — a girl sexually abused from toddlerhood, raped at 11 and 17, shuttled through institutions that failed her, and later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and PTSD. Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said trial lawyers presented none of this to the jury during the penalty phase. "I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid," Pike wrote. "It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I'd done."
The sentence also stands out for its disparity. Shipp, who was 17 at the time of the killing and participated in the attack, received life with the possibility of parole because of his age — a sentence that tracks with what is now understood about adolescent brain development. Pike was 18, just months older, and caught the death penalty. A third teen got probation. The Death Penalty Information Center says death sentences for 18-to-20-year-olds have become increasingly rare, and 275 people nationwide have been executed for crimes committed at those ages in the modern death penalty era.
The victim's mother, May Martinez, wants the execution carried out. "Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run," she told the Associated Press. "Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen."
Pike's attorneys have asked the Supreme Court for a stay, arguing her PTSD will cause "severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror" when she is strapped to a gurney. The state's attorney general countered that any such harm is "speculative." Pike, for her part, wrote to NBC News before Lee's decision: "Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace. I am not afraid to die. I'm only nervous about the process."
The framing across outlets tells its own story. NPR and The Guardian leaned heavily into Pike's trauma and the brain-development argument, with The Guardian noting civil rights groups like the ACLU and Amnesty International pressed Lee for clemency. The New York Post called her a "killer" and a "convicted murderer" in every reference. NBC provided the most complete account, including the skull-souvenir detail the others omitted.
One fact all four outlets buried: another woman, Gaile Owens, sat on Tennessee's death row alongside Pike until 2010, when Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen commuted her sentence to life. The state has been here before and chose differently.
The state will kill Christa Pike unless the Supreme Court steps in. A brutal crime demands accountability. But when the government claims the authority to end a life — especially a life shaped by horrors the jury never weighed — the burden is on the state, not the condemned, to prove that justice, not mere vengeance, is being served.
