Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike taken to hospital after attempted execution, lawyer says

Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, whom they had met at a job training camp for troubled teens.

In her clemency petition, Pike said that she intended to beat Slemmer, not kill her, but that she was unable to “put the brakes on”.

“I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid,” she said in a statement. “It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”

The murder in 1995 created a media frenzy in Knoxville, Tennessee, after Colleen was found with an inverted pentagram – a symbol that is associated with satanic groups – carved into her chest. Pike has denied carving the symbol herself.

Before the killing, Pike had accused Colleen of insulting her and trying to steal her then-boyfriend.

Two other residents at the camp later testified that Pike had bragged about the murder before and after, and showed them a piece of Colleen’s skull.

Colleen Slemmer’s mother had said she wanted the execution to take place, telling the Associated Press she had waited decades to see Pike’s sentence carried out.

“Every time I think about it, I think about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run,” May Martinez told the agency on Saturday.

She said a group helped raise funds for her and her husband to travel from Florida to Tennessee to witness the execution.

“Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst,” Martinez said.

Since 1976, when the Supreme Court resumed the death penalty, only 18 women have been executed in the US, compared to 1,663 men. That’s about 1% of all US executions.