Christa Gail Pike's execution has been stopped by a Tennessee court just about an hour before she was scheduled to receive a lethal injection Wednesday. Her execution would have been Tennessee’s first execution of a woman in at least 200 years. Pike, 50, was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, whom she killed when she was 18. The judges said they wanted to review whether allegations that Pike suffered sexual abuse and rape as a child had been fully considered when she was sentenced to death.
Who is Christa Gail Pike?
Christa Gail Pike is the first woman in Tennessee to face death sentence in 200 years. She was convicted in 1996 for killing Slemmer, her classmate at a job-training facility in Knoxville. As per prosecutors, Pike lured Slemmer into a wooded area on January 12, 1995, because she believed Slemmer was trying to take her boyfriend. Pike cut Slemmer with a box cutter and beat her with a large piece of asphalt. Pike's boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, was also convicted in the killing. Shipp, who was 17 at the time, later acknowledged carving a pentagram into Slemmer's body.
Shipp was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, while Pike received the death penalty. The case attracted widespread attention partly because of the pentagram and other details of the killing, which fueled fears surrounding Satanism during the "satanic panic" of the 1980s and 1990s.
