Updated Sept. 24, 2026, 11:04 p.m. ET
Defense attorneys and prosecutors agree about one thing when it comes to death row inmate Christa Pike: Her childhood was uniquely traumatic.
Before she was even in preschool, Pike was a rape victim. Her grandmother’s boyfriend targeted her for years, sexually assaulting the child until she was in kindergarten, according to court documents obtained by USA TODAY.
At the age of 11, a neighbor raped Pike in an attack that caused an infection and preceded a suicide attempt at the age of 12. And at 17, a stranger attacked Pike while she was out walking, forced her into the woods, and raped her, court records say.
Because of that trauma, Pike’s attorneys and dozens of women’s advocacy organizations and sexual abuse experts are making a novel argument about why she should be spared from execution next week in Tennessee: They say that Pike will relive the trauma of her rapes when corrections officers strap down her head, arms, and legs, and a male doctor gives her a lethal injection, possibly near her groin.
“She will relive the sounds, the smells, and the pain,” wrote a dozen women’s advocacy organizations in what’s known as a friend-of-the court brief filed in the Tennessee Supreme Court on Sept. 10. “She will feel it now as she did then. And it will be as horrific for her now as it was then. … (We) have very little doubt that Christa Pike will go to her death believing and feeling that she is being raped yet again.”
Pike is set to be executed on Sept. 30 for the prolonged and brutal murder of her romantic rival, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
As the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, and just one of 45 nationwide, Pike is in an extremely unique position. Only 18 women have been executed in the U.S. in the last 50 years, and Pike would be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
The Tennessee Attorney General’s Office does not dispute any of the sexual violence Pike experienced throughout her girlhood nor her diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder from long-term trauma. The state maintains that her death sentence represents justice and that Pike must be held to account for her crime.
“The standard is not a painless execution,” attorney for the state William Ayers said at a recent hearing about the matter. “Psychological harm alone is not a violation.”
They also point to the ruthlessness of Slemmer’s murder.
On Jan. 12, 1995, 18-year-old Pike, her boyfriend, and another young woman lured Slemmer to the woods in Knoxville. Pike and her boyfriend, then-17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp, tortured and murdered Slemmer in a crime that made international headlines both for its brutality and because of Pike’s gender and youth.
“Armed with a box cutter and meat cleaver, Pike and two accomplices lured Slemmer to an isolated area. There, Pike kneed Slemmer’s head, threw her to the ground, and repeatedly kicked her,” the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office wrote in court documents. “When Slemmer tried to flee, Pike sliced her stomach with the box cutter. … As Slemmer begged for her life, Pike repeatedly kicked her in the face. Pike then cut Slemmer’s throat as she begged for mercy.”
After Slemmer made one final attempt to escape, Pike smashed the back of her head with a rock, they wrote. Shipp also carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest, and Pike later showed off a piece of Slemmer’s skull to a friend.
Pike was sentenced to death and Shipp got a life sentence because at 17, he wasn’t eligible for the death penalty.
For Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, Pike’s execution more than 30 years after her daughter’s murder represents long-awaited justice.
“I just want Christa down so I can end it, relieve my daughter, so she finally can be resting,” Martinez told WBIR-TV in 2021. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about Colleen or how she died and how rough it was.”
As Pike’s execution day nears, here’s what the experts say about her abusive past, how prosecutors say the state will try to make the execution less traumatic, and what Pike has to say about why she deserves mercy.
Experts: Pike will relive rapes in execution chamber
Death row inmates aren’t guaranteed a pain-free death, but the U.S. Constitution requires that their executions be free of “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Pike’s execution is certain to take her back to the multiple times that men raped her as a toddler, a child and a teenager, the women’s advocacy organizations wrote in the friend-of-the-court brief. The experience is likely to be so visceral to Pike, that it will be unconstitutionally cruel, they argue.
“There is a substantial risk she will feel and believe that she is being raped to death,” argue the groups, which include the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, Rights4Girls and Survivors Justice Project.
Survivors of extreme and prolonged sexual assault like Pike often experience powerful flashbacks when triggered, they argue. To this day, they say, Pike still struggles to brush her teeth because it can cause her to relive the sexual assaults she endured as a pre-schooler.
Relived trauma for survivors of sexual assault is not, contrary to an old myth, “all in their head,” the groups write. “Survivors and their allies have struggled for more than a century to dispel this myth, which dates at least to the mid-19th century, when women who experienced flashbacks were diagnosed with ‘hysteria’ and believed to be malingerers.”
What they actually experience, the groups say, is more like “eruptions roiling a survivor’s entire body and mind while she is reliving the torture she endured at an earlier time.”
The groups, joined by dozens more sex assault experts and women’s advocates, also appealed directly to Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and urged him to commute Pike’s sentence to life in prison. Governor’s spokeswoman Elizabeth Johnson has not responded to multiple requests for comment from USA TODAY.
“It is not just that she was a toddler when she was sexually abused for the first time, or that she was raped by three more men before her 18th birthday,” they wrote in a letter on Sept. 10. “It is that Christa was forced to cope with her sexual abuse and rape virtually alone, without any of the victim support services that we know are so vital to recovery.”
The experts say that the rapes and their aftermath do not excuse Pike’s crime, but they do provide “context for trying to understand what otherwise might seem incomprehensible.”
“No dispassionate observer could look at the circumstances of Christa’s life, including her age at the time of the crime and her mental illness, and believe that she is among the most depraved and irredeemable offenders for whom the death penalty is traditionally reserved,” they say. “Indeed, her execution would shock the sensibilities of most people who were familiar with the facts of her life.”
In a filing on Sept. 22, Pike’s attorneys told the Tennessee Supreme Court that executing her would be “a form of gender-based violence prohibited under international law.”
“Ms. Pike’s life should not be spared simply because she is a woman,” they wrote. “But Ms. Pike’s sexual abuse and the systems that failed her happened because she is.”
Prosecutors push for execution, say women will be involved
Attorneys sparred over Pike’s trauma and how it will impact her execution during a recent three-day hearing in a Knoxville courtroom.
Under questioning by the defense, they psychologist who assessed Pike said that it will be extremely triggering for Pike to be strapped to the execution gurney by four guards and that the two-week period known as death watch also likely will trigger Pike’s past traumas. During death watch, guards closely monitor inmates, largely to prevent them from dying by suicide.
The state fell short of guaranteeing that the four guards would be female, but prosecutors said they would try to keep men away from Pike.
David Wickenheiser, an assistant attorney general, quoted from the psychologist’s own report at the court hearing: “Christa has matured and learned to process her trauma and she is truly a different person than she was at the time of the murder,” wrote Bethany Brand, a Towson, Maryland-based clinical psychologist and trauma expert who personally assessed Pike.
She continued: “Christa will always carry that history of trauma with her, but she now has the tools and emotions to deal with life stressors.”
Senior Judge Mark Ward, the special master appointed by the Tennessee Supreme Court who presided over the hearing, concluded that Pike failed to show that her history of sexual assault and PTSD would make it likely that she will experience needless suffering. He also found that the Tennessee Department of Corrections has “minimized the potential” for Pike to experience significant triggering.
He cited measures including arranging for female staff and a privacy screen for Pike to use while she is taking a shower or using the restroom.
On Sept. 23, the Tennessee Supreme Court found that Pike isn’t entitled to a stay of execution because of the sexual abuse she experienced, leaving her and her attorneys to pin their hopes on Lee or the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We will press forward,” they said in a statement on Sept. 24, saying that they’ll seek relief in the Supreme Court while pressing Lee to commute her death sentence to life in prison without parole. “We remain hopeful that he will.”
Christa Pike: Colleen Slemmer’s murder ‘sickens me’
Christa Pike has expressed remorse for killing Slemmer.
“Think back to the worst mistake you made as a reckless teenager. Well, mine happened to be huge, unforgettable and ruined countless lives,” she recently wrote in a clemency petition. “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. … 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.”
She said that it took her years to realize the gravity of what she did and even more to accept the how many lives it affected. Today, she said she’s a completely different person.
Pike, 50, takes mood-stabilizing medications for her bipolar and PTSD, goes to therapy, and has found an outlet both in painting and in “helping new women to the prison,” her attorneys say in the clemency petition.
“After years of psychotherapy and medications to treat her mental illness, Christa is thoughtful, even-tempered, bright, funny, and hopeful,” they say. “She exhibits deep remorse for killing Colleen Slemmer and the impact of her actions on Colleen’s family and friends.”
Further, they argue that a brain at 18 years old is “less mature, more impulsive and emotional, more susceptibleto peer pressure, and less able to make rational decisions.” They point out that it’s unusual for Tennessee to execute anyone who was so young when they committed murder.
Of more they 200 people sentenced to death in Tennessee in the last 50 years, they say only seven others were 18 at the time of their crimes. All of their death sentences have since been vacated, they say.
Slemmer’s mother recently told WBIR-TV that she plans to attend Pike’s execution next week. Had Slemmer lived, she would have turned 50 on Sept. 20.
“I’ll hold Colleen’s picture up to remind her of what she did,” Martinez told the station. “She never apologized − never even tried − or her family.”
She said she remembers her daughter as a playful and compassionate young woman who loved roller skating, computers, and playing old games with her family. She laments that her daughter has been so overshadowed by Pike over the years.
“It’s never about the victims,” she said. “It’s like Colleen was never there.”
Contributing: Keith Sharon, Nashville Tennessean
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime and courts reporter who covers the death penalty, cold cases and breaking news for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.
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