Inside ‘Satanic panic’ teen murder that put Christa Pike on death row for 30 years

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Tennessee botched its first execution of a female prisoner in 206 years late Wednesday, when convicted murderer Christa Pike survived the two lethal injections.

Pike, 50, was sent to death row following a murder committed in a jealous rage when she was 18 and had been due to be put to death after a court overturned a late stay. Experts say her survival is unprecedented.

Officials at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville administered pentobarbital to Pike twice, but she was later heard snoring. Witnesses say the curtain to the execution chamber was drawn and reopened on two separate occasions before the procedure was halted and they were asked to leave.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, who declined a clemency appeal from Pike’s lawyers earlier this week, has since issued a statement suspending all executions this year and calling for a “comprehensive, third-party review” of the execution attempt, according to The Nashville Tennessean .

Pike and her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, who was 17 at the time, were convicted over the January 1995 killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at Knoxville Job Corps. Prosecutors stated that Pike feared Slemmer was a love rival and lured her to a secluded area, where the pair tortured and killed her.

The case attracted widespread attention and rocked the city of Knoxville because to the brutal nature of the slaying, the ages of those involved and the fact that a Satanic pentagram was carved into the victim’s body.

Prosecutors said Pike slashed Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large chunk of asphalt. The pentagram detail stoked fears of Satan worship during the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s. Shipp has admitted that he was the one who carved the symbol.

Pike does not deny her guilt, but her attorneys and supporters argue that a death sentence is not appropriate for a crime committed at that age by a teenager suffering from untreated mental illness after a childhood of brutal sexual abuse and neglect.

However, Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has said she wanted the execution to go ahead, stating that she has waited decades to see Pike’s sentence carried out.

Pike's attorneys have said she experienced an exceptionally traumatic and abusive childhood.

Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike was sexually abused starting from when she was a toddler and that she was raped at ages 11 and 17.

He said her lawyers at the penalty phase of her trial did not present the jury with what he said was critical information about her past or argue that her age should be a consideration.

Pike was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Pike told police she initially only wanted to fight Slemmer but ended up killing her in a frenzied attack. In her clemency petition, Pike’s attorneys said her untreated mental illness and background made her unable to “put the brakes on.”

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid,” Pike herself said in a statement included in her clemency petition. “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.”

Ferrell said more today is known about adolescent brain development and that Pike’s death sentence is an outlier.

He noted that Shipp was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole because of his age at the time of the slaying. He was denied parole last year. A third teen admitted to being an accessory and received probation.

In the modern death penalty era, Ferrell said, other 18-year-olds who were sentenced to death in Tennessee have since had their sentences reduced.

The Death Penalty Information Center said 275 people nationwide have been executed for crimes they committed at age 18, 19 or 20 in the modern death penalty era, but that death sentences for those in that age group have become increasingly rare.

“If Christa Pike was tried today, I do not believe a jury that knew about the documented sexual abuse and neglect she experienced as a child would sentence her to death,” Robin M Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, has said.

Speaking by telephone from Florida , Martinez pointed to her daughter’s age and said Slemmer never got a chance to grow up.

“Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” she said.

Martinez said her daughter volunteered with the Special Olympics, loved roller skating and wanted to pursue a career in computers.

“She was easygoing,” Martinez said. “She was a computer geek to begin with. She and my husband would build and tear apart the computers constantly. She trusted everybody, and that was her downfall.”

She said her daughter called her from Job Corps on the night of the murder, but the call was dropping because of bad reception. When Martinez called back, her daughter had already gone out.

“Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen,” she concluded. “Holidays are the worst. Colleen’s birthday was last week. She would have been 51.”