By Isabelle Wilson-
Tennessee’s first death row’s female victim, Christa Pike, has refused to request a final meal as Tennessee prepares to execute her, bringing the state’s only woman on death row to the final hours of a decades-long legal battle over the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
Pike, 50, is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection Wednesday morning at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The Tennessee Department of Correction confirmed that she has not requested a customized last meal, a decision that comes as her final appeals for clemency have failed.
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Pike was sentenced to death for the killing of Slemmer, a University of Tennessee student who was lured to an isolated area of the Knoxville campus on January 12, 1995, and tortured to death. Pike was 18 at the time. She was convicted alongside others involved in the killing and has spent nearly three decades on death row.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee rejected Pike’s request for clemency on Monday, declining to intervene and leaving her execution scheduled to proceed. Before learning that her final appeal had been denied, Pike told NBC News that she had made peace with the possibility of death.
“Whether my clemency is granted or not, I am at peace,” she wrote in a letter. “I am not afraid to die. I’m only nervous about the process.”
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Pike’s attorneys had urged the governor to commute her death sentence to life imprisonment, pointing to her history of childhood abuse and mental-health difficulties. Her defense has argued that she was a severely troubled teenager when Slemmer was killed and that those circumstances should be considered when determining her punishment.
Pike has also questioned why she alone received a death sentence among those involved in the crime. Her case has remained a focus of arguments over how Tennessee applies capital punishment to young offenders and women.
Her history in prison has also included another serious criminal conviction. In 2001, Pike was convicted of attempting to murder fellow inmate Patricia Jones by strangling her with a shoestring, resulting in an additional 25 years being added to her sentence.
More than a decade later, authorities thwarted a separate plot to help Pike escape from the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville. The 2012 plan allegedly involved a corrections officer and a New Jersey personal trainer with whom Pike had been corresponding.
As the execution approaches, Pike has also drawn a connection between her own case and that of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman accused of killing her three young children. Pike told the Times of London that she felt a “kinship” with Clancy and said she was “pleased” after Clancy received a mistrial.
“We are both females who got into trouble because of uniquely female issues,” Pike said.
Pike has used her own case to argue that vulnerable women and girls can fall through gaps in mental-health and social-support systems.
“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,” she said. “There are so many women who don’t get the help they need: me and others.”
But for Slemmer’s family, the case is defined by the loss of a 19-year-old daughter and the nearly 31 years that have followed her murder. Pike’s execution would bring an end to a lengthy legal process that has included repeated appeals, disputes over her sentence and renewed arguments over her background and mental state.
Now, with the governor declining to grant clemency and Pike declining even to request a final meal, the countdown has reached its final stage.
Unless the courts intervene, Tennessee is set to carry out the execution Wednesday morning, making Pike the first woman executed by the state in more than two centuries.
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