Christa Pike is scheduled to be executed on September 30, the youngest woman ever sentenced to death row in the modern era of Tennessee’s death penalty. She was 18 years old on January 12, 1995, when she killed her Job Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer outside Knoxville, and 20 years old when a judge handed down her death sentence a little over a year later.
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Pike and Slemmer were both students at the Job Corps Center in Knoxville, a federal training program for teenagers. Court records describe a strained relationship between them, with Pike accusing Slemmer of pursuing her boyfriend, fellow student Tadaryl Shipp, who was 17 at the time. The day before the murder, Pike reportedly told a friend, Kim Iloilo, that she planned to kill Slemmer because she “had just felt mean that day.”
On January 12, Pike lured Slemmer away from the Job Corps campus under the pretense of a trip to a video store. Along with Shipp and another student, Shadolla Peterson, Pike beat and cut Slemmer with a box cutter and a meat cleaver, then carved a pentagram into her chest. Court documents say Pike told Iloilo afterward that she had cut the victim’s throat six times and thrown chunks of asphalt at her head, and that Slemmer had begged the group to stop. Pike also told Iloilo she had kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull, reportedly carrying it in her pocket the next morning at breakfast. A University of Tennessee employee found Slemmer’s body the following day.
Pike waived her right to remain silent and gave police a full statement admitting her role in the killing. She and Shipp were convicted, but Shipp, a minor at the time of the murder, was ineligible for the death penalty under Tennessee law and instead received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. That parole was denied in 2025. Peterson was not sentenced to death either.
On March 30, 1996, Knox County Criminal Court Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz sentenced Pike to die by electrocution, telling her, “You shall be put to death by electrocution … May God have mercy upon you.” Pike, then 20, broke down sobbing and turned to search the courtroom for her mother. “Can I please hug my mom before I go?” she asked. She did not get to hug her mother. She did not get to say goodbye. She was led directly to death row.
Pike has now spent close to thirty years incarcerated, much of it in solitary confinement. In 2001, while on death row, she was convicted of attempted first-degree murder after attacking a fellow inmate. In 2024, her legal team reached an agreement with the state giving her a job and shared meals with other incarcerated women, easing some of the isolation she had lived under for decades.
If the execution goes forward on September 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Pike will become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years, since 1819. She would also be the first person executed in the state for a crime committed at 18 since Tennessee reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
Pike’s lawyers are fighting to stop it. In early September, they filed a 226-page clemency petition with Governor Bill Lee asking that her sentence be commuted to life without parole. The petition centers on a childhood her attorney Kelly Gleason describes as marked by repeated sexual abuse, starting when Pike was a toddler, at the hands of her grandmother’s boyfriend. Gleason has said the petition gives the governor a chance to “protect a victim of child rape.” Pike was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, conditions her attorneys say went untreated for years before the crime.
Colleen Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has publicly opposed clemency. After the Tennessee Supreme Court rejected a separate challenge to the state’s lethal injection procedure, Martinez told a local outlet she supports the ruling. “She did the crime. I think she should pay for it,” Martinez said.
Governor Lee holds sole authority over clemency in Tennessee. As of now, his office has not announced a decision. Unless he intervenes or the courts step in, Pike is set to die by lethal injection, a single dose of pentobarbital, at Riverbend on September 30.
Christa, I wished you would’ve listened to me. you wouldn’t have lost your freedom nor a death date set by man. My sis would still be alive.