Khaberni - The American authorities have set the date for the execution of one of the most infamous female murderers in the history of the United States, after she was convicted of a brutal crime she committed at the age of eighteen, which was classified as "a crime of a demonic nature".
It has been decided that Christa Pike, now 49 years old, will be executed in September 2026 at the maximum-security "Riverbend" prison in Nashville, after decades of legal controversy and rejected appeals.
If the execution proceeds as planned, she will become the first woman to be executed in the state of Tennessee in more than two hundred years, making her case an extraordinary event in the history of American criminal justice.
According to court documents, the incident dates back to January 1995, when Pike, then 18 years old, lured her colleague, Colleen Slemmer (19 years old), into a wooded area inside the University of Tennessee campus along with her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and her friend Shadolla Peterson.
Pike believed that Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend from her, which triggered her intense jealousy, and there she began to torture her for more than half an hour, using a blade to inflict scattered wounds on her body, then carved a pentagram on her chest, in a ritual considered by the authorities to have a "demonic" dimension, before ending her life with a strike by a piece of brittle asphalt that crushed her skull.
After the crime, Pike kept a part of the skull as a souvenir, while the body was discovered two days later by a worker who initially thought it was an animal corpse due to the severity of the mutilation.
While Shipp, who was 17 years old at the time of the crime, was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, Pike became the youngest female prisoner to be sentenced to death in America at the time, and her case remained a subject of controversy for many years, especially since an additional 25 years were added to her sentence after she was convicted of attempting to strangle another inmate during a fight inside the prison in 2004.
Pike's lawyers repeatedly attempted to mitigate her sentence, arguing that she had a difficult childhood characterized by neglect, physical and sexual abuse, as well as suffering from bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, conditions that were not diagnosed until years after her imprisonment.
Recently, her defense team stated that their client "has expressed deep remorse and has become more aware and mature over time and therapy," however, all appeals have failed, until the Supreme Court issued the decision to set the date of execution.
