Christa Pike was scheduled to be executed last Wednesday in Tennessee—the first woman in that Southern state in 200 years. But at 50 years old, she survived the lethal injection protocol. The Governor of Tennessee had denied her clemency earlier in the week.
A small voice that sounds like a child’s—that’s Christa Pike’s voice. She presents a stuffed animal to the camera, her dog Ed. It’s 1999, she is 22 years old, she looks like any girl her age, except she wears an orange uniform. It is the uniform of the inmates at the Tennessee State Prison in Nashville, where she is incarcerated on death row and in isolation. She also shares that she loves butterflies and angels.
A Horrific Murder
Yet, four years earlier, she killed in January 1995 in Knoxville, in the heart of Tennessee. Christa Pike was part of the Job Corps, a vocational training center for troubled youth. She had a boyfriend there, and she was convinced that Colleen Slemmer wanted to steal him from her. So, one evening, Christa, her boyfriend, and a third accomplice lured Colleen into the woods and tortured her, notably with a box cutter. Christa finished off her victim with a large piece of asphalt. Before leaving, she took a piece of her skull and put it in her pocket as a “souvenir,” she would later say.
She was quickly arrested and immediately confessed. The following year, she was found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy, becoming the only woman in Tennessee to be sentenced to death. When the judge announced the sentence, she sobbed; she was only 20 years old.
Speaking by phone from prison on the YouTube channel Criminally Obsessed, she confided: “We were all really disturbed teenagers, we were struggling, we were suffering, we were all going through our own problems.”
A Youth of Suffering
Problems, Christa Pike had many, in fact. From the beginning, her life was a Calvary: raped, sexually assaulted multiple times. She doesn’t know at what age it started, but she is sure of one thing: it began with her grandmother’s partner. She testified in the American podcast Unforbidden Truth:
“I was in kindergarten and the teacher asked us to draw a picture of what we did at home. I drew a man with a demon’s face and huge, very realistic genitalia. So the teacher grabbed me by the arm, dragged me to the principal’s office, and called my mother.”
A mother who was a nurse and an alcoholic, who did not help her. Every day, Christa Pike saw her drinking rum and coke or beer. She remembers that, as a small child, she would sip from the glasses left around the house. How many partners did her mother have? She has no idea. But she remembers the beatings she received. When it wasn’t the lovers hitting, her own father would unleash on her with a belt. At age 9, Christa Pike began self-harming; at 12, after the death of her beloved grandmother, her first suicide attempt. Listening to her, it sounds like a horror movie.
Bipolar Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress
“In my childhood, there were many sordid things that passed for normal. For example, my grandfather was a butcher and I played where he kept his cows. I became friends with them, I gave them names, I put flowers where they had a piece of plastic in their ear. Then my grandfather sat me on the counter and I watched the cows being slaughtered. Ten minutes ago, you were still my friend!”
Real friends, little Christa had none. Between the states of West Virginia and North Carolina, she never stopped moving. Until she was 12, not a single year in the same school. This atrocious past was barely mentioned during her trial. Much later, a medical diagnosis came: she suffered from bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2005, she was again convicted for attempted murder of a fellow inmate.
“If someone had intervened when I was 5, when I was 7, or when I was 11, if someone had done anything to help me, to provide psychological support, or anything, then maybe things would have turned out differently.”
— Christa Pike on the podcast “Unforbidden Truth”
In recent years, Christa Pike has found Buddhism. Recently, she wrote that she is “at peace” and that she is “not afraid to die.” She does not forget, however, the harm inflicted by the men she encountered. Also, for the day of the supposedly lethal injection, she had one request: around her, an all-female team. After her failed execution, Christa Pike was hospitalized in critical condition.
