In 12 days, Tennessee could execute a woman for the first time in over 200 years — and only Governor Bill Lee can stop it.
Christa Gail Pike, 50, is set to die by lethal injection on September 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville — unless the governor intervenes at the eleventh hour. She’s spent nearly three decades on death row for a murder so gruesome that prosecutors told jurors she kept a piece of her victim’s skull as a trophy.
Now her fate rests in one man’s hands. Earlier this month, Pike’s legal team filed a clemency petition asking Mr. Lee to commute her sentence to life without parole — a call that, under Tennessee law, is his and his alone to make. It isn’t an attempt to rewrite what happened on that Knoxville hillside three decades ago, according to the attorney leading the fight to save her life.
“Commuting her sentence to life without possibility of parole does not absolve her of her guilt,” the attorney representing Christa Pike, Kelly Gleason, continues. “To the contrary, it would continue to hold her accountable for the remainder of her natural life.”
A Killing That Shocked Knoxville
According to court records, Pike lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer to a wooded stretch of the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus in January 1995. Ms. Pike had convinced herself that Slemmer was flirting with her boyfriend, TaDaryl Shipp. All three were enrolled together at the Knoxville Job Corps, a federal training program for low-income teenagers.
