Tennessee is close to making dark history: the state may soon put a woman to death for the first time in over two hundred years. The woman waiting for the final needle is Christa Gail Pike, now forty-nine years old and the only female face on the state’s death-row roster. She was still a teenager when she crossed a line so violent that her name became shorthand for the worst Knoxville had ever seen. While years have passed and lawyers have argued back and forth, the state’s highest court has now signed the papers that could set the execution date in motion, pushing an old but horrific crime back into the spotlight.
The story begins on a cold Thursday in January, 1995, when two young women from the same Job Corps campus walked into the woods near the university’s agricultural fields. One was Colleen Slemmer, nineteen, bright and trusting; the other was Christa Pike, eighteen, simmering with suspicion. Classmates later told detectives that Pike had convinced herself Colleen was moving in on her boyfriend, a seventeen-year-old named Tadaryl Shipp. What started as hallway whispers and angry notes soon turned into a plan that no argument could excuse.
Once they were deep among the trees, Pike’s jealousy stopped being just talk. Court records say she carried a small meat-cleaver-style knife and a box cutter, tools she had tucked into her coat earlier that day. With the help of Shipp and another friend who came along, Pike turned an isolated clearing into a private courtroom where she would be judge, jury, and executioner. Colleen was knocked to the ground, tied up, and tortured for nearly thirty minutes while the group took turns cutting and beating her. The final blow came when Pike smashed the girl’s skull with a chunk of asphalt, then kept a piece of the broken skull as a sick souvenir she later showed off at the dorm.
The next morning campus police found the body, and within forty-eight hours all three teens were in custody. The details spilled out fast: the planned lure, the rehearsed roles, the bragging afterward. Jurors sat through crime-scene photos that made even seasoned officers look away, and they listened to Pike giggle during parts of her taped confession. The panel took only a few hours to convict her of first-degree murder and even less time to decide she should die for it. Shipp received life with the possibility of parole decades down the road; the third teen cut a deal and testified, walking away with a lighter sentence that still cost years of freedom.
Now, after appeals that climbed every level of the court system and bounced back again, the legal fight appears nearly over. Pike’s lawyers argue she was mentally ill, abused as a child, and too young to fully grasp forever actions, but the state counters that the crime was so calculated and cruel that mercy was never an option. Victim advocates remember Colleen as a girl who loved art and animals, someone who deserved a full life instead of becoming a cautionary tale. If the governor denies clemency and no last-minute stay arrives, Tennessee will add a grim new chapter to its history books, proving that even after two centuries the state’s hand can still extend to the ultimate punishment when a woman is the condemned.
