Doomed teen Killer Christa Pike gets last minute stay of execution
· Toronto Sun
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With an hour to spare before being dispatched to oblivion, killer Christa Pike has been granted a temporary stay of execution.
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The 50-year-old long-time denizen of Tennessee’s death row had been slated to die by lethal injection at 10 a.m. Central Time.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit approved a last-minute request for a stay of execution for Pike. However, the stay for Tennessee’s only woman on death row is temporary.
Did childhood rapes and abuse play role?
Judges want to review whether Pike’s suffering horrific rape and sexual abuse when she was a child was fully considered before she was sentenced to death. Her execution would have been Tennessee’s first execution of a woman in 200 years.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a request to stay her impending death. That seemed to seal the deal, until Wednesday morning.
“The court has stayed this, recognizing the serious concerns about Christa’s scheduled execution,” her lawyer said, adding the stay is in place until further order of the court.
So far, it wasn’t clear whether the state’s attorney general planned to appeal the decision. Nor was there any indication of how long the execution would be delayed.
Christa Gail Pike grew up dirt-poor, physically, emotionally and sexually abused. This wasn’t a great start, and death rows from Pennsylvania to Texas are filled with men and women just like her.
An imagined love rival
Pike was 18 when she was tagged with a death sentence for the brutal 1995 torture murder of imagined love rival Colleen Slemmer. Both young women were Knoxville Job Corps students, trying to get back on their feet.
Slemmer, 18, was lured to the University of Tennessee’s Agricultural campus to smoke dope with Pike and Tadaryl Shipp, Pike’s then-boyfriend. The young lovers then pounced, and battered and stabbed Slemmer to death.
As a final touch, they carved a pentagram into the young Florida woman’s chest.
Detectives said Pike took a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a memento and showed it to friends. Shipp was sentenced to life in prison; Pike got a death sentence.
Pike has never denied murdering Slemmer.
However, her legal eagles and supporters have cited her age, mental illness and history of severe sexual abuse that included being raped from the time she was a toddler as mitigating factors. In addition, other 18-year-olds have been sentenced to death in Tennessee and all have had their dates with death vacated.
‘It sickens me now’
In her clemency petition, Pike said: “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.”
Meanwhile, her victim’s mother wanted Pike put on the night train to Nowheresville.
“Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” May Martinez said.
Since the reinstatement of capital punishment in the U.S. in 1976, just 18 women have gotten the big adios — just 1% of all executions.
The last woman put to death in the U.S. was womb raider Lisa Marie Montgomery, who was executed via lethal injection on January 13, 2021. Montgomery had travelled from Kansas to Skidmore, Missouri, under the guise of buying a puppy from 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant.
Instead, Montgomery strangled Stinnett to death, cut open her womb, and kidnapped her unborn baby girl.