Christa Pike refused her last meal before Wednesday’s lethal injection, becoming Tennessee’s first woman executed in over 200 years after Gov. Bill Lee denied clemency.
The 50-year-old death row inmate is scheduled to die by lethal injection Wednesday morning at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, the New York Post reported.
Tennessee Department of Corrections officials confirmed she made no last-meal request. Gov. Bill Lee rejected her clemency plea on Monday and said he would not intervene.
Pike was 18 when she helped lure 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer to an isolated stretch of the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus on Jan. 12, 1995, and tortured her to death. Nearly three decades later, the state is set to carry out the sentence.
Pike, her then-boyfriend, and a female friend drew Slemmer to the campus and killed her. Pike alone received a death sentence for the murder.
She has spent the years since racking up more prison violence and a failed escape plot. In August 2001, she was convicted of trying to strangle fellow inmate Patricia Jones with a shoestring. Prosecutors added 25 years to her sentence.
In March 2012, authorities thwarted a plot to spring her from the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville. A corrections officer and a New Jersey personal trainer who had been corresponding with Pike were tied to the scheme.
That record sat before Lee when her lawyers sought clemency. They pointed to childhood abuse. Lee refused.
Before she learned the clemency bid had failed, Pike wrote to NBC News.
She told the network:
“Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace.”
She added:
“I am not afraid to die.”
And:
“I’m only nervous about the process.”
Pike also asked for an all-female lethal injection team, citing what she called “uniquely female issues.” Tennessee corrections officials said they may grant that request.
On Monday she went further, telling the Times of London she felt a “kinship” with Lindsay Clancy, an accused child murderer who had just won a mistrial. Pike said she was “pleased” by that outcome.
She framed both cases the same way:
“We are both females who got into trouble because of uniquely female issues.”
She continued:
“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old girl who committed a crime with two other individuals and I was the only one to receive this sentence. There are so many women who don’t get the help they need: me and others.”
Colleen Slemmer was 19. She never got a second chance, a last meal, or a letter to the press.
Pike’s path after the murder undercuts the claim that she was simply a troubled teenager who never got help. She tried to kill again inside prison. She plotted to break out. She compared herself to a woman charged with murdering her own children and called the result a win.
Lee’s decision left the sentence intact. The Tennessee Department of Corrections moved forward with the Wednesday morning execution. No final meal was ordered.
If carried out as scheduled, Pike will be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. The method is lethal injection at the Nashville maximum-security prison.
Justice delayed is still justice owed. Colleen Slemmer’s killers do not get to revise the crime as a gender grievance at the end.
