Christa Pike: What to know about the case of Tennessee death row inmate

They had asked the Supreme Court to halt Pike’s execution, saying she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from being molested and raped beginning when she was a toddler. Being held down and strapped to a gurney, they wrote, was likely to create “severe mental suffering and superadded psychological terror under Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol.”

The state has not denied that Pike has suffered from abuse. But in a response filed Monday, the attorney general’s office said a judge already concluded last month that it was “speculative whether Pike would suffer” greater mental harm from how the lethal injection protocol is carried out.

The Supreme Court appeared to be Pike’s remaining chance for a reprieve after Lee said he was upholding her death sentence “after deliberate consideration.” The high court denied her petition Tuesday evening.

For Subscribers

FOR SUBSCRIBERSAbdul El-Sayed tries to woo MAHA voters as Democrats seek inroads with RFK’s supporters

FOR SUBSCRIBERSGOP super PAC increases its spending for Sen. Jon Husted in tough Ohio race

FOR SUBSCRIBERSKratom-like substances are popping up in a typically benign supplement

FOR SUBSCRIBERSRecords reveal tumultuous marriage between slain New York Times executive and wife

FOR SUBSCRIBERSFrom clean energy warrior to ‘wall of shame,’ James Talarico reverses on a fossil fuel money pledge

FOR SUBSCRIBERSCongressional staff planned official trip with luxury stops in Italy and France weeks before election

FOR SUBSCRIBERSA harrowing ordeal aboard an Israel-bound plane

FOR SUBSCRIBERSOpenAI CEO Sam Altman to skip congressional hearing on rogue AI agents

FOR SUBSCRIBERSKey DOJ lawyers departed Trump ‘grand conspiracy’ probe amid pressure to produce, source says

FOR SUBSCRIBERSTrump’s new AI chatbot often links to a site launched under Clinton 26 years ago

FOR SUBSCRIBERSAt MAHA summit, industry CEOs the movement once vilified take the stage

FOR SUBSCRIBERSThis Paralympian has two goals: Win medals and give away $500,000 to her teammates

FOR SUBSCRIBERSCornell rape allegation spotlights stringent New York state laws that have long drawn criticism

FOR SUBSCRIBERSThe debate over AI’s future rages on both coasts

FOR SUBSCRIBERSDecades-old march dispute reignites in Northern Ireland, threatening political crisis

For Subscribers

FOR SUBSCRIBERSAbdul El-Sayed tries to woo MAHA voters as Democrats seek inroads with RFK’s supporters

FOR SUBSCRIBERSGOP super PAC increases its spending for Sen. Jon Husted in tough Ohio race

FOR SUBSCRIBERSKratom-like substances are popping up in a typically benign supplement

FOR SUBSCRIBERSRecords reveal tumultuous marriage between slain New York Times executive and wife

FOR SUBSCRIBERSFrom clean energy warrior to ‘wall of shame,’ James Talarico reverses on a fossil fuel money pledge

FOR SUBSCRIBERSCongressional staff planned official trip with luxury stops in Italy and France weeks before election

FOR SUBSCRIBERSA harrowing ordeal aboard an Israel-bound plane

FOR SUBSCRIBERSOpenAI CEO Sam Altman to skip congressional hearing on rogue AI agents

FOR SUBSCRIBERSKey DOJ lawyers departed Trump ‘grand conspiracy’ probe amid pressure to produce, source says

FOR SUBSCRIBERSTrump’s new AI chatbot often links to a site launched under Clinton 26 years ago

FOR SUBSCRIBERSAt MAHA summit, industry CEOs the movement once vilified take the stage

FOR SUBSCRIBERSThis Paralympian has two goals: Win medals and give away $500,000 to her teammates

FOR SUBSCRIBERSCornell rape allegation spotlights stringent New York state laws that have long drawn criticism

FOR SUBSCRIBERSThe debate over AI’s future rages on both coasts

FOR SUBSCRIBERSDecades-old march dispute reignites in Northern Ireland, threatening political crisis

Pike’s lawyers said Monday they were “saddened and heartbroken,” that the governor would not be granting clemency.

Another woman, Gaile Owens, was on Tennessee’s death row with Pike until 2010, when Gov. Phil Bredesen changed her sentence to life in prison.

Before she learned Monday that Lee would not intervene in her case, Pike wrote in a letter to NBC News, shared by her spiritual adviser that people have seen a “limited public persona that has been the only narrative” about her. Her lawyers had tried to convince Lee that she was a product of a tumultuous childhood.

“Stepping into the chaos of Christa’s life that led her to that moment will not justify her actions that night,” one of her lawyers, Randall Spivey, said of the time when she committed her crime. “But the chaos will show you that Christa was broken, not evil.”

Different sentences

Pike’s lawyers also pointed to her age and how it led to such a different outcome in her case.

While she faced a death sentence because of her first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder conviction in Slemmer’s death, another conspirator was spared: Pike’s boyfriend, who was 17 at the time.

Tadaryl Shipp was sentenced to life in prison because he was a juvenile and remains eligible for parole. Shipp testified at his post-conviction hearing that he was the one who carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest.

The third accomplice — Shadolla Peterson, then 18 — served as a lookout in the crime and was sentenced to probation in exchange for her cooperation.

Pike told police that she “wasn’t even thinking” when she assaulted Slemmer and that she had been jealous, believing the victim was trying to steal Shipp’s attention.

Pike’s lawyers said her age would have been more of a factor today, given how scientific research has evolved in understanding that young people’s brains are still developing well beyond their teen years.

In addition, her lawyers said her legal representatives at the time could have accepted a deal from prosecutors who were offering a life sentence without parole in return for a guilty plea.

Pike sobbed as the judge told her she would die by electrocution, then the only form of execution in Tennessee before the state moved to lethal injection as its primary method.

She pleaded through tears: “Can I please hug my mom?”

Pike entered prison, where she was placed into solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day and prescribed Prozac to treat her obsessive-compulsive disorder. Early on, she struggled to express remorse.

“It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike said in her clemency petition.

Lingering trauma

Three years ago, Pike’s lawyers asked Bethany Brand, a psychologist specializing in trauma, to assess whether she suffers from psychological disorders and consider whether any contributed to the crime.

She sat with Pike at her Nashville prison and reviewed police reports, past medical examinations and other files in her case detailing physical and sexual abuse.

Brand learned that Pike’s parents were not stable figures in her life. Her mother’s boyfriends and other men had molested her from a young age, the files said. She did poorly in school, living with other family members in West Virginia and North Carolina. At 17 — one year before she would take part in Slemmer’s murder — Pike reported to North Carolina police that she was walking to the store when a man threw her to the ground and raped her. No one was ever arrested.

In her final report, Brand wrote that the adults in Pike’s life failed her. Doctors only diagnosed a bipolar disorder a few years after she was already in prison.

The level of trauma Pike was subjected to “is almost impossible to grasp because it is so severe,” Brand wrote.

She told NBC News that medications in prison have helped Pike tremendously and that she now has “empathy and great regret” for what she did. Pike’s case, she added, is a lesson in the need for greater awareness surrounding women’s mental health and recognizing trauma and untreated mental illness.

“In Christa’s case, nobody was trying to get her help,” Brand said.

May Martinez, the mother of victim Slemmer, is unconvinced that the person responsible for mutilating her daughter’s body and leaving her nude from the waist up could change.

Martinez recalled that, after the investigation ended, she did not realize all of her daughter’s body parts were not buried with her remains, as some had been retained as trial evidence. She had to pick up Slemmer’s skull from the courthouse, and she remembers that the medical examiner’s office mailed her other parts later. (The office said it rarely retains human remains as it did 30 years ago because of better technology, enhanced photography and lab work.)

“We had her buried in a Catholic cemetery,” Martinez said. “And she had to be dug up every time they mailed me body parts.”

Recently, she said, she has refused to communicate with Pike directly. The only way she can get justice now is when she watches Pike be executed.

“I will sit there with her picture in my hand,” Martinez said of her daughter, “and as she gets hooked up to a needle to go to sleep, she can look at the picture.”

All-female execution team

Given the rarity of the execution of a female prisoner, Tennessee corrections officials said they would make an effort to fulfill certain requests made by Pike. They included using female guards when she was moved from her all-women’s prison in Nashville to the nearby Riverbend Maximum Security Institution within 24 hours of her planned execution. An all-female execution team may also have been assigned.

At least one exception was expected to be a male physician who was involved in the failed execution earlier this year of Tony Carruthers. Dr. Mark Walton Fowler told NBC News that he intended to participate in Pike’s execution. Fowler declined to comment after Pike’s failed execution Wednesday night.