Nearly three decades after 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer was killed in Knoxville, Tennessee, the state has set an execution date for the woman convicted of her murder. The Tennessee Supreme Court has scheduled Christa Gail Pike’s execution for September 30, 2026. If it happens, she would be the first woman executed in Tennessee in two centuries and only the 19th woman put to death in the U.S. in the modern era.
The case stretches back to 1995. Pike was 18 and a student at the Knoxville Job Corps when, prosecutors said, jealousy led her to lure Slemmer—another student—into nearby woods. Believing Slemmer was trying to take her boyfriend, Pike attacked. Over the course of about an hour, Slemmer was beaten, stabbed, and had a pentagram carved into her chest. Court records say Pike later boasted about what she’d done, even showing classmates a fragment of Slemmer’s skull she kept as a trophy. A groundskeeper discovered the body the next day; the injuries were so severe he initially thought he’d found an animal.
The horror didn’t end there. After police taped off the scene, Pike returned and started asking officers if they’d identified the victim and where the body had been found. An officer later testified that she seemed almost excited, “giggling and moving around.” She was arrested the next day. In March 1996, a jury convicted her of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced her to death. Pike collapsed into sobs as the verdict was read, pleading to hug her mother one last time.
Her mother, Carissa Hansen, had already offered a bleak window into Pike’s upbringing. She testified that she’d been a poor parent, allowing her daughter to have a live-in boyfriend at 14 and even using drugs with her in an attempt to bond. “I should be the one in her seat,” Hansen said in court. “I should be punished for her crimes.”
Pike’s case is an outlier in a system that almost never sends women to death row. Out of roughly 2,100 people currently sentenced to die in the U.S., only about 48 are women. Since 1976, just 18 women have been executed nationwide.
Now 49, Pike has spent most of the last 30 years in near-solitary confinement as Tennessee’s only female death-row prisoner. In a letter to The Tennessean, she acknowledged her guilt but insisted she isn’t the person she was at 18. “Think back to the worst mistake you made as a reckless teenager,” she wrote. “Mine happened to be huge, unforgettable and ruined countless lives… It sickens me now to think that someone as loving and compassionate as myself had the ability to commit such a crime.” Her attorneys point to her youth and diagnoses including bipolar disorder and PTSD from years of abuse and argue that, under today’s standards, she would not receive a death sentence. They’re asking for life without parole instead.
For Colleen Slemmer’s family, there is no mercy in the balance. Her mother, May Martinez, has long pushed for the sentence to be carried out. “I just want Christa down so I can end it,” she told local reporters. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about Colleen or how she died and how rough it was.”
Barring a successful appeal or clemency, Tennessee plans to carry out the execution at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. If it proceeds, it will be a historic moment for the state—and one of the rarest events in American criminal justice: a woman put to death.
