A teenage feud over a boyfriend ended with a 19-year-old dead , and nearly three decades later, the woman convicted of killing her is facing a lethal injection. The US Supreme Court has rejected Christa Pike’s last-ditch attempt to stop her execution, leaving Tennessee on course to carry out the death sentence against the 50-year-old inmate.
Pike was 18 when she was convicted of the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old she met at a job-training camp for troubled teenagers.
According to the case presented against her, Pike believed Slemmer had insulted her and was trying to take her boyfriend. The dispute escalated into a brutal attack in which Pike and her then-boyfriend beat and tortured Slemmer before killing her.
Slemmer’s death caused a media frenzy in Knoxville after her body was found with an inverted pentagram carved into her chest. Pike has denied carving the symbol herself.
Two other residents at the training camp later testified that Pike had spoken about the killing before and after it happened and had shown them a piece of Slemmer’s skull.
Pike has spent nearly three decades on death row. Her lawyers made a final appeal to the US Supreme Court, arguing that she was only 18 when the crime occurred and that an 18-year-old brain is not fully developed.
The Supreme Court has now declined to halt the execution. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee also rejected Pike’s clemency request on Monday.
Pike is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
If carried out, the execution would make Pike the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Only 18 women have been executed in the United States since executions resumed in the 1970s, compared with 1,663 men.
