Christa Pike, the first woman sentenced to death in Tennessee in 200 years, said she is “at peace” ahead of her rare execution, even as the state’s governor rejected her final request for clemency.
“Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace,” Pike wrote in a letter to NBC News before learning that Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee would not intervene on behalf of the condemned murderer.
“I am not afraid to die,” Pike wrote. “I’m only nervous about the process.”
Pike, 50, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Wednesday. It would mark Tennessee’s first execution of a woman in more than two centuries.
She was 18 when she lured fellow Job Corps student Colleen Slemmer, 19, to a secluded area of the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville. On Jan. 12, 1995, Pike and her boyfriend tortured Slemmer during a jealous attack that ended in her death.
Pike’s attorneys have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the execution, pointing to her post-traumatic stress disorder and the potential for “severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror” as she is strapped to a gurney for the lethal injection, NBC News reported.
Her lawyers argue that severe childhood trauma, including sexual and physical abuse, neglect and domestic violence, was never properly addressed by the adults and institutions responsible for her care. They also say the jury did not consider that history while weighing the death penalty.
Pike has also asked for an all-female lethal injection team, saying the presence of men during her final moments could trigger additional trauma.
Tennessee corrections officials have indicated they will try to accommodate some of her requests. That includes using female guards to transfer her from the prison in Nashville to a nearby maximum-security facility within 24 hours of the planned execution, NBC reported.
Officials may also approve her request for an entirely female execution team.
Pike was among the youngest women in the United States to receive a death sentence when she was sentenced in March 1996. She was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
In a 226-page clemency petition filed in September, Pike’s attorneys argued that her untreated mental illness and traumatic past left her unable to “put the brakes on.”
“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime,” Pike said in a statement included in the petition.
Pike attacked Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large piece of asphalt. Pike’s boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, also carved a Satanic pentagram into the victim’s body.
The brutality of the killing, along with the occult symbol, shocked Knoxville and fueled the “satanic panic” that swept through the United States during the 1980s and 1990s.
Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has said she wants Tennessee to carry out Pike’s execution.
“Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” Martinez told The Associated Press.
“Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst. Colleen’s birthday was last week. She would have been 51,” Martinez said.
Shipp was 17 at the time of the murder and received a life sentence with the possibility of parole because of his age. He was denied parole last year. A third teenager who admitted to being an accessory was sentenced to probation.
With Post Wires
