A woman set to be put to death in Tennessee this week has expressed sympathy for Lindsay Clancy, saying she feels a sense of “kinship” with the Massachusetts woman tried for fatally strangling her three children.
Clancy, 36, a former labor and delivery nurse, admitted to killing Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months, at their home in Duxbury on January 24, 2023.
Her trial this summer saw her argue that she was not criminally responsible for the deaths because she was suffering from severe postpartum depression at the time and ended in a mistrial after the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict due to a lone holdout.
In a new interview with The Times, Christa Pike, who is facing execution by lethal injection Wednesday for torturing and murdering a fellow teenager in 1995, expressed sympathy with Clancy.
“I feel a kinship with Lindsay,” said Pike, 50. “We are both females who got into trouble because of uniquely female issues.”
“One thing is different, however, is that times have changed a lot on awareness of women’s issues since I was put on trial,” she continued.
“I am pleased she received a mistrial and is getting the help she needs. There are so many women who don’t get the help they need: me and others.”
Pike will be the first woman executed in Tennessee in 206 years and just the 19th subjected to capital punishment in the U.S. since 1976 if her sentence is carried out at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville as scheduled.
She was just 18 on January 12, 1995 when she, her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, 17, and their friend Shadolla Peterson, 18, led Knoxville classmate Colleen Slemmer, 19, into the woods before subjecting her to a gruesome and drawn-out assault in which a Satanic pentagram was carved into the victim’s chest before she died.
Pike later reportedly told another friend she “had just felt mean that day” but told police investigators she had been convinced that Slemmer was plotting to steal Shipp from her.
She does not deny her guilt but has since argued that she her history of childhood sexual abuse, which left her with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, was not taken into account in her defense.
“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid,” Pike said in a recent clemency petition. “It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected.
“I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”
Her attorneys continue to protest that a death sentence is not appropriate in Pike’s case because of her young age at the time of the murder and her documented history of trauma.
However, the victim’s mother, May Martinez, has said she wishes the execution to go ahead and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said Monday he would not grant clemency. The Supreme Court has been asked for a stay.
Clancy, meanwhile, is due back in court Tuesday, with prosecutors weighing whether to attempt to retry the case in the wake of September 4’s 11-1 verdict.
The new status hearing “is less about relitigating Lindsey Clancy’s guilt than determining what legal path remains after the mistrial,” Marian Braccia, law professor at Temple University, told PBS New Hour.
Judge William Sullivan is expected to determine where the prosecution and defense stand, review pending motions and set a schedule for what comes next.
Plymouth County prosecutors must decide whether to retry the case with a new jury, reduce the first-degree murder charges Clancy faces, reach a plea deal with the defendant or drop the charges altogether.
