Court stays execution of Christa Gail Pike for Tennessee murder she committed when she was 18

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Christa Gail Pike’s execution in Tennessee for a murder she committed when she was 18 was halted Wednesday about an hour before it was scheduled to begin, as a federal appeals court sought to examine whether her allegations of childhood sexual abuse and rape were fully considered during her sentencing.

Pike, now 50, and her boyfriend were convicted of stabbing and beating Colleen Slemmer, 19, their classmate at a vocational training center in Knoxville in 1995. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in at least 200 years.

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The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the execution by a 2-1 vote after witnesses to the execution and others gathered at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

The Tennessee Attorney General immediately appealed the suspension to the United States Supreme Court. Witnesses and media remained at the prison in case the High Court authorized the execution. Media witnesses were brought into the jail around 10:15 a.m. to wait, but were then released into a parking lot after about 90 minutes.

More than 30 people, some wearing shirts reading “Love Heals,” gathered in a fenced-off area outside the prison while mounted police kept watch nearby.

The case gained attention at the time of the murder, in part because a pentagram carved into Slemmer’s body and other elements of the crime fueled fears of Satan worship during the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and 1990s.

The Pike affair rekindles the debate on the death penalty for adolescents

As the execution date approaches, the debate over the death penalty for young offenders has been reignited.

Pike does not deny committing the murder, but his supporters argue that the state should consider Pike’s age at the time, her mental illness and her history of severe sexual abuse, including being raped since she was a child. Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell said Pike’s death sentence was an exception because other 18-year-olds in Tennessee had had such sentences overturned.

After the murder, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. In her request for clemency, she said she only wanted to fight Slemmer, but killed her in a frenzied attack when she couldn’t “put on the brakes.”

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old. It took me many years to realize the severity of what I had done. Even longer to come to terms with how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, their sister, their friend. It sickens me now to think that I had the capacity to commit such a crime,” Pike said in a statement.

Victim’s mother says she awaits death sentence

Slemmer’s mother wants lethal injection to continue, saying she waited decades to see Pike’s sentence carried out.

“Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” May Martinez told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Saturday.

Martinez said a group helped raise money so she and her husband could travel from Florida to watch the execution. She did not respond to a message Wednesday after the execution was halted.

Martinez said her daughter’s age should also matter in deciding Pike’s fate.

“There’s not a day or a minute that goes by that I don’t think about Colleen. The holidays are the worst,” she said, noting that her daughter would have turned 51 earlier in September.

The murder shook the city of Knoxville. Prosecutors said Pike, fearing that Slemmer was trying to rob her boyfriend, lured her to a wooded area on Jan. 12, 1995. Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large piece of asphalt. Shipp, Pike’s boyfriend, admitted that he was the one who carved a pentagram, a star-shaped symbol associated with Satan, into her body.

Shipp was 17 when the crime occurred and was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike was the only one to be sentenced to death.

Executions of women are rare in the United States

Tennessee has not executed a woman in at least 200 years, according to Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Older records can be spotty, however, so it is difficult to know precise details about the last woman put to death there.

This is a rare situation in the United States. Since 1976, 18 women have been put to death in the country, representing about 1 percent of all executions, according to the center.

Most recently, Missouri executed Amber McLaughlin in 2023 for a 2003 murder, in what is believed to be the first execution of a transgender woman in the United States. In 2021, the federal government executed Lisa Montgomery, marking the first time in nearly seven decades that the U.S. government put a female inmate to death.

Pike would be the 30th person executed in the United States this year. Florida carried out its 16th execution in 2026 on Tuesday.

Associated Press journalists Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, and Ed White in Detroit contributed to this report.