The video is timestamped March 30, 1996. It shows the back of a young woman’s head, her auburn hair held in a white scrunchie. She is crying quietly as a female judge reads the sentence. It is ordered that you shall be put to death by execution as prescribed by law,
the judge says. The woman’s shoulders begin to quiver, and her weeping intensifies. Your body shall be subjected to shock by sufficient current of electricity that you shall die. May God have mercy upon you.
The woman turns toward the camera, urgently searching for her mother seated a few rows behind her. Her almost childlike face is peppered with acne. Can I please hug my mom before I go,
she wails. Please, just let me have a hug. I love you.
Those are her last words before she is taken away, denied that hug, to death row. She would spend nearly the next 30 years in solitary confinement.
The crime and the sentence
Christa Pike had just turned 20 in the video. She was 18 on the night of January 12, 1995, when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, brutally beat and murdered an acquaintance, Colleen Slemmer, 19, on a University of Tennessee campus. The state of Tennessee has deemed Pike, now 50, to be among the “worst of the worst” — a cold-blooded murderer whose crime was so heinous that even life imprisonment would be too lenient. She is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville on September 30.
Only three women have been executed by Tennessee since the state’s founding in 1796, at least two of whom were enslaved people. The most recent execution of a woman occurred more than 200 years ago, in 1819.
Clemency petition highlights age, gender, and abuse
On Wednesday, Pike’s lawyers filed a 226-page clemency petition with Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee. The mercy plea reframes Pike’s story, beginning with her age at the time of the offense. In the modern era of the U.S. death penalty, Tennessee has never executed a person who was 18 at the time of their crime — the youngest was 23. Over the past 50 years, the state sent seven men who were 18 when they committed murder to death row, but in each case the sentence was vacated.
Shipp, Pike’s accomplice, held a fascination with satanic imagery; he carved a pentagram in the victim’s chest, sparking a media frenzy. Because he was 17 at the time, he was barred from execution under Tennessee law; today he is serving a life sentence and had his first, unsuccessful, parole hearing in October 2025.
Sandra Babcock, faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and involved in Pike’s representation since 2019, has studied the cases of 48 women on death rows across the United States. She told the Guardian: If they execute Christa Pike, it will confirm that the death penalty is reserved not for the worst of the worst, but for the most damaged and vulnerable among us.
A childhood marked by severe sexual abuse
The petition details a harrowing history of abuse. A forensic evaluation conducted in 2023 by Bethany Brand, a psychology professor at Towson University, documents repeated sexual violence beginning when Pike was a toddler. Brand spent 13 hours interviewing Pike at the Debra Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, which houses the state’s female death row — Pike is its only resident.
The abuse began around age two, perpetrated by Ernest Johnson, the boyfriend of Pike’s paternal grandmother. An alcoholic who drank all day, Johnson sent the grandmother out to buy liquor, then abused the child. Ernest orally raped her when she was in preschool,
Brand noted. Christa showed utter disgust on her face as she spoke of the smell of this man’s genitals — she was extremely revolted by him, despite more than 30 years having passed.
Johnson forced silence by threatening to hurt Pike’s pets, her grandmother, and Pike herself. Ernest locked Christa in a dark chicken coop where spiders crawled on her,
Brand wrote.
The abuse surfaced at Pike’s elementary school when she sketched a large penis and a demon face in a drawing class — a cry for help that went unanswered. The teacher marched her to the principal’s office, her parents were called, but no investigation was ever conducted.
Further rapes and systemic failures
At age 11, Pike was raped outside her home by a 37-year-old neighbor, Claude Davis, a known pedophile. She told her mother but was disbelieved. Child protective services became involved only after Pike developed an infection. Davis pleaded guilty to taking “immoral, improper and indecent liberties” with a child, received a suspended sentence, and returned to his trailer a few minutes’ walk from Pike’s home.
In January 1994, nearly a year before the murder, 17-year-old Pike was attacked by a stranger while walking to a store. He dragged her into the woods and raped her in the dark. She fought back, hitting his head with a rock, and escaped. A rape kit was collected at the hospital, but the assailant was never identified.
All three rapes — in infancy, at 11, and at 17 — were known to authorities. In the latter two instances, law enforcement documented the crimes. Yet little was done to protect or treat her. As a young girl, she was truly on her own, without loving support, treatment or protection,
Brand writes.
Trial counsel failed to present mitigation
At trial, Pike was convicted of first-degree murder. The jury’s only decision was between life without parole and the death penalty. None of the documented sexual abuse was presented in mitigation. Pike’s lawyer was four months out of law school and had never tried a murder case, let alone a capital one. In closing, counsel made no mention of Pike’s youth — a recognized mitigating factor under Tennessee law — nor her lack of a significant criminal record.
Kelleigh Gleason, one of Pike’s clemency lawyers, told the Guardian: None of the rapes, none of the sexual abuse as a child, were introduced. Trial counsel were aware of most of that — it was documented by law enforcement — but they chose not to use it.
The jury also never heard of years of physical abuse and neglect: being forced by her great-aunt Norma to sit in a bathtub of cold water for hours, beaten with an improvised leather whip by one of her five stepfathers, and exposed as a preteen to hours of pornography. They did not know she attempted suicide at least three times as a child, the first at age 12. They were unaware that in early adolescence she developed bipolar disorder, a condition that periodically erupted in manic bursts that could have helped explain her violent explosion. The disorder was diagnosed only years after the trial.
Pike described the manic spells to Brand: My hair and skin hurt, I’m rocking, my skin is crawling. I want to claw my face off. I claw and claw and claw the skin on my legs to the point of bleeding. It feels like bugs are crawling under my skin.
Petition argues Pike is ‘broken, not evil’
The clemency petition synthesizes these details and presents Governor Lee with a choice. It does not seek forgiveness or freedom. It states plainly that Pike chose to participate in the circumstances which spiraled out of control and led to Colleen Slemmer’s death. For that she should be punished severely,
by spending the rest of her life behind bars. What it argues is that Pike is not the “worst of the worst.” Christa was broken, not evil,
the petition says. She was broken by a mental health, juvenile, and criminal justice system that ignored, misdiagnosed, and mistreated her at every turn.
Tennessee has not disputed any of the abuse details. At a recent hearing, an attorney for the state, Will Ayers, said: I think everybody in this courtroom wishes that those things had never happened to Ms Pike. We all wish that we were not here today and that she was not on death row.
Governor Lee’s clemency record and a contradictory law
The decision now rests with Governor Lee, who has the power to commute Pike’s sentence to life without parole. Doing so would be unprecedented for his administration. Lee has never granted clemency in a death case,
Gleason said, referring to the many previous appeals that have crossed his desk. He is zero for eight.
In May 2024, Lee signed legislation extending the death penalty in Tennessee to cover those who rape a child — a move widely viewed as unconstitutional because the U.S. Supreme Court has long prohibited executions for crimes in which no one is murdered. Lawmakers argued that child rapists deserve the ultimate punishment because the damage they inflict has a permanent psychological, emotional, and sometimes physical impact on the child.
Now, Tennessee is days away from executing a victim of multiple child rapes.
Decades in solitary confinement
Since the 1996 video of Pike wailing for her mother, she has spent nearly three decades in solitary confinement, held in an 8-by-10-foot cell for up to 24 hours a day. As the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, her isolation was near total — a far more restrictive regime than that for male condemned prisoners. On rare occasions when she encountered other people, her notoriety preceded her; she was leered at and objectified as a female killer. She felt, she said, like a “ballerina kept in a box.”
Two years ago, she won a lawsuit that slightly eased her conditions. She can now spend a few hours with one or two other female prisoners outside her cell. Her lawyers say she is doing well: she is finally being treated for the long-undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and her extreme mood swings are under control. The clemency petition describes her as “thoughtful, even-tempered, bright, funny, and hopeful.” She shows deep remorse for Slemmer’s death and has become a mentor to new arrivals in her prison unit, offering guidance and support.
Counting down to execution
Despite her improved mental health, Pike struggles with the impending execution. Her execution date was set a year in advance — September 30, 2025 — and since then she has had to negotiate every milestone. Gleason said: She had to think, ‘Is this my last Thanksgiving?’ ‘Is this my last Christmas, how am I going to spend it?’ She turned 50 in March, and it was, ‘Is this my last birthday?’
If last-minute legal challenges fail and the execution proceeds, Pike’s lawyers have requested that only female corrections staff be present in the death chamber. The state of Tennessee has declined to guarantee that. She faces the possibility of being pinned down on the gurney by men who will pierce her restrained body to find a vein for the lethal injection — a terrifying prospect for a survivor of multiple male violations inflicted on her as a child. Only this time, there will be no prospect of healing.
Resources for survivors of abuse
In the U.S., call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline at 800-422-4453 or visit their website for more resources and to report child abuse. For adult survivors of child abuse, help is available at ascasupport.org. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International.
