Tennessee stands on the verge of conducting its first execution of a woman in over two hundred years following a decision by the Tennessee Supreme Court to grant the state’s request to proceed with the death sentence imposed on Christa Gail Pike. Pike, who has reached the age of forty-nine, remains the sole woman housed on Tennessee’s death row. She committed the crime that placed her there when she was eighteen years old, in an act that continues to rank among the most notorious murders in state history.
On the evening of January 12, 1995, Pike persuaded nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer to accompany her to a secluded, wooded location near the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus in Knoxville. Both young women participated in the Knoxville Job Corps program at the time. Law enforcement officials later determined that Pike had developed a deep conviction that Slemmer harbored romantic interest in Pike’s seventeen-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp. That intense jealousy rapidly transformed into a calculated and savage assault.
Working alongside Shipp and another Job Corps student, Shadolla Peterson, Pike attacked Slemmer with extreme violence. She used a box cutter to slash the victim’s throat, delivered heavy blows with a meat cleaver, carved a pentagram symbol into Slemmer’s chest, and finally ended the attack by repeatedly smashing a large chunk of asphalt against Slemmer’s skull. The sheer brutality of the scene left seasoned investigators and the surrounding community in a state of profound shock.
Among the many disturbing details that surfaced during the investigation, one moment stands out with particular chilling clarity. Pike voluntarily presented detectives with a small piece of Colleen Slemmer’s skull that she had retained as a macabre keepsake. Retired Knoxville detective Randy York, who participated in the interrogation, later described Pike’s demeanor as remarkably calm and even animated as she explained how the bone fragment matched perfectly into the fatal wound, comparing the fit to pieces of a puzzle.
A Knox County jury convicted Christa Gail Pike of first-degree murder in March 1996 and returned a sentence of death. Tadaryl Shipp received a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for his role in the killing. Shadolla Peterson, who provided crucial cooperation to prosecutors, avoided prison entirely and served a term of probation instead. Several years later, in 2004, Pike added another serious conviction to her record when prison authorities discovered her attempting to strangle a fellow inmate with a shoe lace, earning an additional consecutive twenty-five-year sentence.
After more than a quarter-century of exhaustive appeals and legal challenges, Tennessee officials formally moved to schedule Pike’s execution. The Tennessee Supreme Court has now cleared the path, and the state has set September 30, 2026, as the date on which the sentence will be carried out by lethal injection, unless further court intervention occurs.
Attorneys representing Pike continue to press several mitigating arguments in their effort to spare her life. They emphasize that she was only eighteen at the time of the offense, an age when the brain remains in a critical stage of development. They present extensive documentation of severe childhood trauma, including physical and emotional abuse, profound neglect, and early exposure to substance abuse within her family environment. Medical experts have diagnosed her with bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other significant mental health conditions that, the defense maintains, impaired her impulse control and judgment during the crime.
Members of Pike’s current legal team assert that she has demonstrated genuine remorse during her decades on death row and has worked to better herself within the confines of prison life. They argue that executing a person whose actions stemmed from untreated mental illness and extreme youth crosses a moral boundary that society should respect.
Should the execution proceed on the scheduled date, Christa Gail Pike will become the first woman put to death by the state of Tennessee since 1820, when a woman faced hanging for unspecified offenses. That historical gap of more than two centuries highlights both the exceptional nature of female death sentences in Tennessee and the intense scrutiny this particular case continues to attract from legal observers, criminal justice reformers, and the general public across the nation.
The upcoming months will likely bring additional motions, psychological evaluations, and public debate as the state moves closer to this rare and momentous event in its criminal justice history.
