Christa Pike: Life, death and a botched execution in Tennessee

The only time in her 50 years of life that Christa Pike found herself cast in anything like a sympathetic light came on Wednesday evening, when the state of Tennessee botched her death by execution. After two lethal doses of pentobarbital administered at the Riverbend Security Institution in Nashville, Pike was still breathing, heavily, and emitting snoring sounds. The execution was suspended. The prisoner was transferred to hospital. Her legal team said on Thursday evening her condition has yet to be determined. Brain damage is considered a possibility, raising questions as to the future of a life that, from a distance, can read like an enduring, half-century nightmare.“This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” Robin Maher, director of the Death Penalty Information Centre, said afterwards. “There is no precedent.”READ MOREThroughout Wednesday, Pike’s execution had drifted through the US news cycles: she would be the first woman to be executed in Tennessee since an enslaved woman, never named, was hanged in 1819. In the background was the familiar tableau of ardent defence pleas, death-penalty protesters outside the Nashville prison and interviews with the family of Colleen Slemmer, the 19-year old classmate murdered by Pike and another teenager in barbaric circumstances in 1995. As a news story, Pike’s imminent death was relentlessly grim and struggled for air time against other big items - the emerging details of Israeli passengers foiling a terrorist hijacking and in-depth coverage and analyses of the rape accusation case involving students at Cornell university. The Cornell story concerned a gilded United States educational institution, and the conduct of some of its students in a disturbing sexual assault scandal. Christa Pike’s experience of life in America during the 18 years she spent as a free citizen was at the farthest possible remove from that distant Ivy League world and the treadmill towards further prosperity and advancement.Pike was born in March 1976 in Beckley, the urban centre of Raleigh county, one of the many West Virginian coal-mining communities by then in steep decline. In the decades after her sentence, details of a tortuous and abysmal childhood and adolescence were pieced together. The shorthand version is that she was in trouble from her birth, with her mother’s heavy drinking during pregnancy causing brain malformation and foetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Her early years were defined by frequent heavy beatings by her father, her grandfather and several boyfriends of her mother; years spent handpassed between her father in West Virginia and her mother, then in North Carolina; ‘indications’ that she had suffered horrific sexual abuses from the age of two by a male companion of her grandmother; multiple rapes at the ages of 11, 14 and 17; and a failed suicide attempt at 12. She was 18 when she enrolled in a Jobs Corp programme aimed at troubled adolescents in Knoxville, Tennessee, with a vague plan to become a nurse, which thrust her into another brutal environment. While there, she met Tadaryl Shipp, who became her boyfriend – and who also physically abused her. Convinced that another classmate, Colleen Slemmer, was trying to steal her boyfriend, Pike convinced the girl to follow her, Shipp and another student, Shadolla Peterson, into a secluded area near the facility on January 12th, 1995. Colleen Slemmer’s life to that point had been different from that of Christa Pike’s. She had been loved, intensely, by her family. Her parents were not keen on her enrolling in the Job Corps, but their daughter felt the course, despite her misgivings about the facility, offered her a chance at career progression. She’d called her mother on the evening before her death, saying that she was worried about three other kids who were bothering her. Childhood photos of Colleen Slemmer, who was tortured and killed in January 1995 at the age of 19. Photograph: Zack Wittman for The New York Times Pike persuaded Slemmer to accompany her on the pretext of making peace, suggesting they might smoke some weed. In Tyson Park, an argument broke out and, in her recorded evidence​, Pike said that “she just started going off on me. And I hit her. And I hit her and hit her.”But both Pike and Shipp subjected their victim to sustained torture, beating asphalt against her skull, repeatedly cutting her and taunting her and ignoring her pleas. Her ordeal lasted for more than half an hour. Shipp, who had a fixation with satanic imagery, cut a pentagram symbol into her skin. That shocking detail, and the revelation that Pike had taken with her a piece of Colleen Slemmer’s skull as a macabre memento, contributed to intense national media coverage when the trial took place 30 years ago. Pike had confessed to the killing a day later. Randy York, a Knoxville detective who investigated the case, said in a documentary released this spring that it was “one of the most disturbing crime scenes I have ever had to deal with”.Pike was found guilty and sentenced on March 30th, 1996. Over the past few hours, the videotape of her reaction in the courtroom that day – sobbing, a white scrunchie in her hair and wearing a good frock as she was told by the judge “on the 12th day of January 1997, your body shall be subjected to shock by sufficient current of electricity” – have been replayed on the news networks this week. As she was taken from the courtroom she cried: “Can I please hug my Mom?”In the most recent order for Pike’s execution, the cause – electric shock – was changed to lethal injection. Those who continue to advocate for Pike have made the case that none of the appalling circumstances of her life were presented to the court during the trial. They have argued that the attorney appointed to handle her defence was woefully out of his depth and had advised her to reject an early plea deal in exchange for life without parole. Pike claims he told her that no Tennessee courtroom would sentence “a pretty little white girl to death”. Tadaryl Shipp, 17 when the murder was committed, was too young to be considered for the death penalty and remains in prison. Former inmates and prison officers who got to know Christa Pike spoke about the difficulty of reconciling the person they knew with the monstrous crime she had committed. None of this influenced May Slemmer Martinez, the mother of the victim who, in addition to her ongoing grief, was subjected to terribly cold treatment by the state, that included the return, with no prior warning, of pieces of her daughter’s remains that had been held in evidence, in small brown boxes that were delivered to her home. Martinez has always maintained that Christa Pike deserved to die for what she did to her daughter, and that she had shown no remorse during the trial, nor apologised.In an interview earlier this year, Pike described the sensation after learning that her execution date would be September 30th as “a roulette wheel of thoughts and your actual brain is the ball bouncing around”. She had also spoken of her fear that her procedure would go awry after attempts in May of this year to execute Tony Carruthers, another death row inmate in Tennessee who was sentenced to die despite suggestions of a miscarriage of justice. That execution failed following an hour of trying to find a sufficient number of open veins in his arm. He was granted a stay of execution for a year by Tennessee governor Bill Lee. May Martinez holds a photo of her daughter, Colleen Slemmer, as she awaits the execution of her killer, Christa Pike. Photograph: Zack Wittman for The New York Times In the days before Pike’s execution, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights added its weight to numerous organisations pressurising Lee to commute her sentence. Sandra Babcock, a clinical professor of law at Cornell, represented Pike before the commission and said, in a statement, the finding confirmed that “Christa Pike has been punished more harshly because she is a woman. She was subjected to tortuous prison conditions that men don’t experience and is now facing execution under conditions that will cause her to relive her experiences of sexual violence.”On Wednesday, a temporary halt on Pike’s execution was ordered, only to be removed by the US supreme court hours later, setting the disturbing series of events in motion.“The court delay was just the tip of the iceberg. When we got inside I think it was around 6.41pm when we got into the witness chamber. We were waiting there for almost an hour, which is unusual. Normally it’s 10, 15 minutes. You could hear a little crying and whimpering at times, but when the curtains finally opened, she said her last words, which you heard, she kept them about herself. She mentioned her haters and people who don’t like her. She mentioned that she was looking forward to being free,” said one of the media witnesses outside the Nashville facility on Thursday evening.“At 7.34 she said: ‘my arm feels like it is about to burst open’. Then she smiles, really big.”Pike’s spiritual adviser had told her to try to relax. The curtains were closed shortly after 8pm, but by 8.53, when the microphone was switched off, it was clear to those present that Pike was still breathing.May Martinez had travelled from Jacksonville, Florida, to witness the death of the woman who had ended her daughter’s life only to find herself confronted with further uncertainty.“It was a mess,” she told NBC News.“They went to try to execute her and she didn’t die. They didn’t say anything, and then, all of a sudden, they asked the victims to leave and we left.”It’s an extraordinarily bleak story without any redemption or solace. When Nashville last featured in news bulletins across the world, it was in remembrance of Dolly Parton, whose ballads and odes to the hardships and richness of life in the immense ribbon of forest and coal and mountain towns running through southern Appalachia and into the Smoky Mountains conferred a kind of magic on to a neglected region. Parton was born exactly 30 years before Christa Pike and also into acute poverty – but into a household of deep faith, and music, and love. It’s obvious that whatever chance Christa Pike may have had to make something of her life was destroyed by a repeated failure of the social, civil, religious and educational institutions in her various communities to rescue her from evils she was subjected to on a regular basis. It may or may not be significant that Pike often identified her grandmother, Delfa Clark Pike, as the only person in her first 18 years to ever show her any guidance or love. Delfa Clark Pike was raised in that same region and same era as Parton, when the same values were imparted. The testimonies Pike gave to various psychologists and advocates in her later years – of hours unattended, and horror films on the videocassette recorder, and alcoholism, and myriad abuses – contain the suggestion of a general societal slide away from community support and outdoors freedom that run through the lyrics of Dolly Parton’s music – and of an appalling public failure to safeguard children like the child Christa Pike had been. It led to the hour when Colleen Slemmer paid an unimaginably terrible price.Once again, the eye-for-an-eye religious absolutism of the US death penalty is under severe scrutiny. An August poll in The Tennessean found 93 per cent of respondents favoured abolishing the death penalty in their state. Christa Pike cries after being sentenced to death on March 30th, 1996, Photograph: WBIR-TV via AP After the botched execution of Pike, governor Lee moved to suspend all further executions for the remainder of the year. Marsha Blackburn, the Republican likely to succeed him after the November gubernatorial election, described the situation as “tragic”, adding that Pike should have been executed “long ago”. The answer, she said, is simple: “bring back the electric chair and deliver justice for these victims swiftly.”The family of Colleen Slemmer are now uncertain if or when they will witness the outcome of a death sentence that has followed them for decades. Christa Pike remains suspended between two worlds, with no indications as to whether in attempting to end her life, the state of Tennessee has left her with irreparable damage as she continues with what has been a phenomenally blighted and troubled existence. “I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life,” she said in the execution chamber on Wednesday evening in what she presumed would be her last words. “And that is with love.”