Christa Pike is a woman from Tennessee who was sentenced to death for the murder of a young woman.
Christa Pike and the victim Colleen Slemmer were both students at Job Corp in Tennessee. Christa Pike learned that Colleen Slemmer was interested in her boyfriend so she set up a violent assault
Christa Pike would lure Colleen Slemmer to a remote location and proceeded to beat the young woman with a rock causing massive injuries and her death
Christa Pike would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Many years later Christa Pike would be convicted of attempted murder for an assault on a fellow inmate
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Where is Christa Pike now
Christa Pike is currently incarcerated at the Tennessee Prison For Women
Christa Pike Appeal Denied
A federal judge has refused to overturn the death sentence for Tennessee’s only female condemned prisoner.
Christa Gail Pike is one of Tennessee’s most notorious prisoners, garnering headlines for the trouble she has caused while on death row.
In a written ruling issued Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Harry S. Mattice Jr. said the 40-year-old inmate failed to show that her constitutional rights were violated during her 1996 trial when she was sentenced to death.
Pike, who is originally from West Virginia, was 18 years old when she tortured and murdered a fellow Job Corps student on the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus in 1995, according to authorities.
Prosecutors said she killed Colleen Slemmer because the student was a rival for her boyfriend’s affections.
Slemmer was just 19 years old when Pike, boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and friend Shadolla Peterson lured the victim to a remote area on the agricultural campus.
In his written ruling, Mattice cited chilling details from the crime that had been detailed in a Tennessee Supreme Court opinion issued in 1998. Pike told authorities that, armed with a box cutter and miniature meat cleaver, she beat and repeatedly slashed Slemmer as the teen begged for her life. The girl’s partially clothed body was discovered the following day. Someone had carved a pentagram into her chest.
“This is not a case where (Pike’s) conviction was only weakly supported by the record,” Mattice wrote.
Pike’s lawyers had argued that her prior attorneys were ineffective at trial and should have presented more evidence of mitigating circumstances in the case. They challenged the decision to allow cameras in the courtroom before the trial, resulting in widespread publicity of the case before a jury could be seated. They also raised questions about whether her attorney had a conflict because he asked Pike to sign media rights away to her story. The lawyer, according to the opinion, said he wanted to write a book telling Pike’s side, but never did.
Pike’s new defense also said she should not be put to death because she has organic brain injury, bi-polar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. After Pike’s conviction, a neurologist would later say that the frontal lobes in Pike’s brain are not put together properly. That portion of the brain, the doctor testified, regulates the ability to make moral and ethical decisions.
It’s not clear if Pike will appeal the ruling. The inmate’s attorney did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Pike made headlines in 2012 after a guard and a New Jersey man plotted to break her out of prison. While on death row in 2001, she tried to strangle another female inmate to death with a shoe string after a fire was started at the Tennessee Prison for Women. She was later convicted of the attempted murder of the inmate.
Christa Pike Links
Youngest Woman on Death Row: Christa Pike |- Video
A Case Almost Too Gruesome To Mention: Christa Pike – Video
The Disturbing Case of Christa Pike – Video
Christa Pike Now
| Supervision Status: | INCARCERATED | Assigned Location: | DEBRA K. JOHNSON REHABILITATION CENTER |
| Combined Sentence(s) Length: | DEATH | Supervision/Custody Level: | MAXIMUM |
| Sentence Begin Date: | 03/30/1996 |
Christa Pike News
As the only woman sentenced to death in Tennessee, Christa Pike has spent years living in something akin to solitary confinement at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center northwest of downtown Nashville. That’s where she’s been incarcerated since she was convicted in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer.
But this week, Pike’s attorneys finalized a settlement with the state that will bring an end to her isolation. The agreement will grant her the behavior-dependent opportunities afforded to the men on Tennessee’s death row, giving her more time out of her cell and allowing her to work a job and share meals with other incarcerated women.
“This settlement will be life-changing for Christa Pike,” said Angela Bergman, one of the attorneys who represented Pike in a lawsuit against the state over the conditions of her confinement. “For the last nearly 30 years, Ms. Pike has been subjected to solitary confinement in a cell the size of a parking space, where she has had nearly no meaningful human contact. These conditions have had a devastating impact on her mental and physical health. … For Christa, this not only means a reprieve from decades of harmful and unconstitutional conditions, but an opportunity to have a meaningful, positive impact on those around her.”
Bergman and other attorneys from Bass, Berry & Sims filed suit on Pike’s behalf in 2022, arguing that the state had been violating her rights in a number of ways and subjecting her to cruel and unusual punishment. While men on Tennessee’s death row are kept separate from the general population, they can work jobs, eat together and spend their days outside of their cells with good behavior. Pike, the suit argued, was effectively being held in solitary confinement “based on the arbitrary fact that she is the only woman sentenced to death in Tennessee.” With a few exceptions over the years, they wrote, Pike had been isolated in her “seven-by-twelve foot space with only a bed, shelves, sink, and commode, for twenty-two to twenty-four hours per day, every day.”
“The cumulative effect of this extreme punishment, and a corresponding deprivation of adequate psychological and medical care while under a sentence of death, has deprived Ms. Pike of basic constitutional guarantees of humane treatment,” the attorneys wrote in the 2022 complaint.
Under the terms of an agreement filed in court Monday, Pike will be able to earn more privileges, freedom of movement and interaction with other people after set periods of time without disciplinary infractions.
Pike, who is now 48, was 18 when she killed Slemmer while they were attending a job training program for troubled teens in Knoxville. The murder came after Pike reportedly became convinced that Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp. According to court documents, Pike, Shipp and another teen girl, Shadolla Peterson, lured Slemmer to the woods where they tortured and killed her. Pike later confessed to beating Slemmer and slashing her throat and body with a box cutter. Slemmer had also been hit over the head with a large piece of asphalt and a pentagram was carved on her chest. Although Pike denied being responsible for the pentagram, police later found a piece of Slemmer’s skull in her jacket pocket.
In 2004, Pike was convicted of attempted murder following an altercation with another incarcerated woman during a fire evacuation.
Pike’s attorneys have argued that the crime for which she was sentenced to death should be seen in the context of her youth at the time and a “horrific childhood” that started with her mother drinking heavily while pregnant.
“Before she was even born, she suffered brain damage,” Pike’s attorneys wrote in a 2021 filing opposing the state’s motion seeking an execution date. “Then, from the time she was a small child, she endured abuse, neglect, multiple violent rapes, and suffered from severe mental illness.”
After her trial, Pike became the youngest woman sentenced to death in the modern era of the death penalty. If she’d been a year younger when the murder was committed — like Shipp, who was then 17 — she would not have been eligible for the death penalty. Today, she is one of only 52 women on death row in the United States and, if executed, would be the first woman killed by the state in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
Although they were never housed together, Pike’s incarceration did overlap with the only other Tennessee woman sentenced to death since the death penalty was reinstated in the United States in 1976. But Gaile Owens, who’d been convicted in 1986 for hiring a hitman to murder her husband, was allowed to live with the general population for a decade. She was later put into isolation but brought out again after litigation over her confinement. Gov. Phil Bredesen commuted Owens’ death sentence in 2010 and she was released on parole in 2011. Owens died in 2019.
“When a person is incarcerated, the State still has a responsibility to treat them fairly and to refrain from incarcerating them in conditions that violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment,” Bergman said. “By filing this lawsuit and reaching this settlement, Ms. Pike has the opportunity to experience basic human interaction needed by all persons.”