Christa Pike, 50, is set to be executed Wednesday morning in Tennessee for the 1995 murder of a classmate. (Photo: TN Department of Correction)
The state of Tennessee will carry out a death sentence Wednesday on a woman convicted in a 1995 killing, marking the first time it will execute a female since the early 1800s.
Christa Pike, now 50, was 18 when she killed a classmate and became one of the youngest women sent to death row.
She is set to die by lethal injection Wednesday at 11 a.m. ET.
The backstory:
Pike and her boyfriend were convicted in the torture and killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate at the Knoxville Job Corps career-training program.
Prosecutors said Pike considered Slemmer a potential romantic rival and she and her boyfriend lured Slemmer to a wooded area where they killed her on Jan. 12, 1995.
Court records state Pike cut Slemmer’s throat with a box cutter, struck her with a cleaver, carved a pentagram into her chest and crushed her skull with a piece of asphalt. Court documents also state Pike kept a piece of her skull as a souvenir.
Pike admitted to killing Slemmer in 1996, the same year she was sentenced to death row.
Big picture view:
Pike has not denied her guilt. But her attorneys and supporters have argued a death sentence should not be appropriate for a crime committed by a teen with untreated mental illness and a childhood of brutal sexual abuse and neglect.
In August, the Tennessee State Supreme Court denied Pike’s request to avoid death by lethal injection based on her diagnosis of thrombocytosis, which her defense team said would cause "serious illness and needless suffering" during the execution. Pike fought to be hanged, but the courts denied that request since hanging was no longer an approved method of execution in the state.
She also requested an all-female execution team to avoid trauma given her history of sexual abuse, arguing that if men attempted to execute her and something went wrong, the resulting trauma would violate her constitutional rights.
Last week, the Tennessee State Supreme Court denied her request for clemency and Gov. Bill Lee said Monday he would not grant clemency.
A complicated history of Tennessee's death row
Dig deeper:
Details on the state’s earliest executions can be difficult to find. Tennessee’s Department of Correction’s website states that before 1913, all executions in the state were conducted by hanging, but notes that there are no official records of the number or names of those executed during that time.
There was no capital punishment in the state from 1913 to 1915. Executions resumed in the state in 1916.
Limited records have suggested that Eve Martin, sometimes reported as Martin Eve, and listed as a woman, was executed by hanging in 1820 for accessory to murder. However, research from the University of Tennessee’s Journal of Law and Policy states that a source on the subject may have mistakenly listed Martin as having been executed when Martin was herself the victim of a murder.
Before that, records from the M. Watt Espy Papers, written by a noted death penalty researcher, suggest that the last woman executed in the state, an enslaved woman accused of killing her mistress, was put to death in 1819. That would make her the first woman to be put to death in Tennessee in about 207 years and only the fourth woman executed in state history.
The Source: Information in this article came from the Associated Press, the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, The Tennessee Department of Correction, the M.E. Granader Special Collections & Archives of the University at Albany in New York and previous FOX News reporting. The story was reported out of Orlando.