The Tennessee Supreme Court has scheduled the execution date for the state’s only female death row inmate, who infamously carved a pentagram into her victim’s chest.
Christa Pike received the de@th sentence when she was 18 for torturing and murdering fellow 18-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995. The two were both Knoxville Job Corps students.
Slemmer was st@bbed and beaten by Pike with her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, on the University of Tennessee´s Agricultural campus. The two carved a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest, and Pike took a piece of her skull as a souvenir, according to investigators.
Shipp, a Memphis native, was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Pike also received a secondary conviction in 2004 for trying to strangle a fellow inmate during a prison fight, which added 25 years to her sentence.
Pike’s lawyers previously asked the Tennessee high court to commute her sentence because of her age and ‘severe mental illness at the time of her crime.’
It was also argued that Pike was the victim of s£xual abuse and neglect as a child, according to her lawyers. She suffered from bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders that were not diagnosed until years after her arrest.
“With time and treatment, Christa has become a thoughtful woman with deep remorse for her crime,” her attorneys wrote in a statement published on Wednesday.
