Christa Pike is set to be executed on Wednesday and has reportedly told the people closest to her that she doesn’t want them to witness the execution.
Christa Pike, 50, is due to die by lethal injection on September 30 in Tennessee. Over 30 years have passed since she was sentenced for killing her classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
She’s made it clear she doesn’t want her loved ones present when the execution happens, says her friend Ashlee Sellars.
The two met while Sellars was serving time for a robbery-murder and talked for years through the meal flaps in their cell doors on the high-security unit.
Sellars now works in justice reform advocacy and has spent a long time trying to square the woman she knows with the crime Pike committed as a teenager. She doesn’t downplay what happened to Slemmer, however.
“People want to know that everyone’s life matters, right? They want to know that Colleen’s life mattered,” she told the BBC.
“Christa, in this moment, I think she is fighting much more for her life to matter than she is to actually live.”
What happened in 1995
Pike was 18 when she, her boyfriend at the time Tadaryl Shipp, and another student, Shadolla Peterson, lured Slemmer to an isolated spot near the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus and stabbed her to death.
Pike got the death sentence, while Shipp, who was 17 at the time, got life with a chance at parole instead, since he couldn’t legally be sentenced to death as a minor. Peterson testified against both of them and got six years’ probation.
Pike will be the first woman executed by the state of Tennessee in over 200 years.
A last legal push to save Pike’s life
Pike’s lawyers tried to fight for her life by filing a 226-page clemency petition with Governor Bill Lee, arguing Pike’s childhood, marked by abuse, rape, neglect and abandonment, was never properly laid out to the jury that sentenced her, which Governor Lee refused.
Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in prison, and her team also raised PTSD as a factor tied to the significant amount of trauma she had to go through.
The legal team has also separately asked for an all-female team to carry out the execution, saying being handled by male officers could retraumatize her given her history. Tennessee has agreed that female officers will transport her and that it will try to keep female staff present, but it hasn’t guaranteed the whole process will be women-only.
The Tennessee Supreme Court has already rejected challenges to the execution. Pike’s team says they’re not done trying.
Just days before this latest request about her loved ones being absent from the execution, Pike spoke on camera for the documentary Dead Woman Walking: Pike Vs Tennessee.
In it, she said she still thinks about Slemmer’s mother.
“I’ve always felt bad for her mother, that I took someone’s child, someone’s sister, someone’s friend away,” she said.
“I feel remarkably remorseful for what I did.”
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