JUST IN: The FINAL 80 DAYS Until Christa Pike’s Execution — Tennessee’s Only Woman On Death Row

Execution dates are now set for two people on death row right here in Tennessee, including one for an inmate who would be the first woman put to death in more than 200 years. Christa Gail Pike’s execution date is set for September 30th, 2026. She’s convicted in the brutal killing of Colleen Slimmer back in 1995.

 Pike’s boyfriend at the time was also convicted in the murder. I did something horrible that is unacceptable and I realize that but I don’t deserve to die for the actions of three individuals. >> It’s a cold January morning in Knoxville, Tennessee. A groundskeeper is walking his usual route near the green houses on the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus.

 The same path he’s walked a hundred times before, except this time something stops him. At first, his mind won’t accept what he’s looking at. It doesn’t look human. He tells himself it’s an animal. He has to look twice before the truth sets in. It’s 8:05 in the morning. What he’s found is the body of a 19-year-old woman.

 Within minutes, Knoxville police and University of Tennessee police are on the scene. They start piecing together what happened here overnight. But there’s one detail they don’t know yet. One piece of evidence that hasn’t even been reported missing. A piece of her skull isn’t at the scene. It isn’t lost.

 It’s sitting in the jacket pocket of one of her own classmates. Someone she knew. Someone she trusted enough to walk into these woods with. That was January 13th, 1995. 31 years later, the woman responsible for that jacket pocket is still alive, still on death row. And this September, the state of Tennessee is preparing to do something it hasn’t done in over 200 years.

 Who she is, what she did, and why it’s taken three decades to get here. That’s what we’re unpacking today. Welcome to the last sentence. This is your case of the day. Before we get into it, make sure you’re subscribed and drop a comment letting us know where in the world you’re watching from. Now, let’s get into it.

 To understand what happened in those woods in January of 1995, we have to go back further, 20 years further back to March 10th, 1976 in Beckley, [clears throat] West Virginia, the day Christale Pike was born. She came into the world premature, fragile, and from the very beginning, the two people responsible for her had almost nothing to offer her.

 Her parents were Cararissa Hansen and Emil Glenn Pike. Their relationship was chaotic from the start. They were married for two years before Carissa’s infidelity ended it. They divorced. Then after Cararissa attempted suicide, they found their way back to each other and remarried for another 2 years before it fell apart for good.

 Christa and her older halfsister were raised in the middle of that instability. An aunt who spent time around the family later described what she saw in that house. She remembered finding baby Christa crawling through animal waste that had been left on the floor untouched for who knows how long. Nobody had cleaned it. Nobody thought to.

 And the neglect had a medical dimension, too. As a toddler, Christa began experiencing severe seizures. Her mother knew. She kept drinking anyway. That drinking didn’t stop during the pregnancy either. Court records compiled years later during the long process of appeals that would follow her case established that Carissa’s alcohol use while carrying Christa caused real physical damage to the parts of a developing brain responsible for regulating impulses and behavior.

 Not a metaphor, not an excuse offered after the fact. Documented physical harm present before Christa ever took her first breath. The abuse wasn’t limited to one household or one caregiver. Her father beat her repeatedly, badly enough, according to later court filings, to leave scars on her back. At one point in her childhood, a neighbor abused her.

 Her maternal grandmother, who resented having to care for her at all, was physically and verbally abusive as well before eventually dying of alcoholic hepatitis. The one steady presence in Christa’s early life was her paternal grandmother, who stepped in when she could and who Christa would later say was the only person who ever truly loved her.

 When that grandmother died in 1988, whatever stability Christa had left began to unravel further. By age 8 in the third grade, Christa attempted suicide by overdosing on acetaminophen. It was serious enough that she was placed into psychiatric treatment afterward and she moved in and out of psychological care over the following years.

 As she grew older, the pattern didn’t ease up. It compounded. By adolescence, she had already experienced physical and sexual abuse. By age 12, she was dependent on alcohol and marijuana. She eventually dropped out of high school altogether. At no point in any of this did intervention arrive in a way that changed her trajectory.

 Psychiatric treatment came and went. No sustained system stepped in and altered the direction things were heading. Whatever safety nets exist to catch a child like this, they didn’t catch her. She kept falling and there was no floor. None of this explains what came later. None of it excuses it. But it is the documented truth of where Christa Pike came from.

 Established not by tabloids or rumor, but by court filings, psychiatric records, and sworn testimony entered into the legal record over decades of appeals. It matters because it’s the last chapter of her life before everything changed. Because somewhere in her teenage years, hundreds of miles from Beckley, Christa Pike found her way to Knoxville, Tennessee.

She enrolled in a program called JobCore. and she went in with a goal that on its face sounds almost hopeful for a kid with a childhood like hers. She wanted to become a nurse. By the time Christa Pike enrolled at the Knoxville Job Core Center in late 1994, she’d already been through a version of the system that was supposed to help kids like her.

 In 10th grade, her home life having unraveled the way it had. She was sent to a juvenile detention facility for a year. It was there, of all places, that she first heard about JobCore. a federally funded program built for young people with nowhere stable to land, offering vocational training and a shot at a real career. While inside, she completed her GED.

 And when she came out, she had a plan. She wanted to become a nursing assistant. She was living in North Carolina at the time. Knoxville, Tennessee was hundreds of miles away, a fresh start on paper. The Knoxville Center itself had a reputation that didn’t match its mission statement.

 It housed some of the most vulnerable teenagers in the country in a high stress, low security environment, and it showed. Students carried box cutters and razor blades, not as weapons of choice, but as protection because enough of them felt they needed it. Gangs had formed inside. On-site mental health support was minimal in a population where nearly everyone carried some version of the trauma Christa had, and the danger wasn’t theoretical.

 More than a year before anything happened to Colleen SLR, in December of 1993, two other residents of that same center were convicted of attacking two University of Tennessee students at the edge of campus. In that same unsecured strip of land where the center bordered the university, it was already a known danger zone.

 Nothing about the cent’s security changed. This is the world Christa Pike walked into. And this is where she met three people whose names would become permanently tied to hers. Tateral ship, 17 years old from Memphis. He and Christa became a couple not long after she arrived, and by most accounts, they grew inseparable.

 The two of them shared more than a relationship. Both had leaned into a self-styled fascination with Satanism. Christa referred to herself, half jokingly or not, as Lil Devil. Tataro kept a small shrine in his room at the center. It was the kind of thing other students noticed and mostly shrugged off the way teenagers do with each other’s phases.

Shadala Peterson, 18 years old, a mutual friend of both Christa and Tadel, someone who moved in the same social circle. and Colleen Slmer, 19 years old, a fellow trainee at the center, someone who, by the accounts of people who knew her, had a quiet interest in computers, the kind of person you wouldn’t expect to end up at the center of a story like this one.

 Somewhere in the weeks that followed, something shifted in Christ’s mind. She became convinced, with what court records would later describe as little to no actual evidence, that Colleen Surmer was pursuing Tadel, trying to take him from her. It wasn’t a private suspicion. Peers at the center later said the jealousy was visible in the days before anything happened.

 So were the threats. Christa talked about it. People heard her. And still nobody who worked at that center stepped in. No dorm reassignment, no conversation, no intervention of any kind. On the evening of January 12th, 1995, at around 8:00, four teenagers walked out of the Dale Avenue dormatory together.

 Only three of them would walk back. The night before it happened, Christa Pike told someone what she was planning to do. On January 11th, 1995, she said it plainly to a friend at the center, a fellow student named Kim Elo. She intended to kill Colleen SL. Her reasoning as she gave it wasn’t jealousy or fear or self-defense.

She said she just felt mean that day. Nobody stopped her. Nobody reported it. And the next evening it happened. At around 8:00 on January 12th, Elo watched four familiar faces leave the job core center together heading toward 17th Street. Christa Pike, Tateral Ship, Shadala Peterson, and Colleen Slmer walking alongside people she knew believing.

 as far as anyone could tell that this was nothing more than an ordinary night. The story she’d been given was simple. They were going to smoke marijuana together, maybe patch things up. At around 10:15 that same night, Elo saw three of them come back. Colleen wasn’t with them. What happened in the 2 hours in between, I’m not going to walk through in detail.

 It’s documented extensively in trial records, in testimony, in a Tennessee Supreme Court opinion that spans dozens of pages. But dwelling on the mechanics of it doesn’t serve this story, and it doesn’t serve Colleen’s memory either. What matters is this. By Pike’s own later admission, the attack lasted somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour.

 Colleen tried to run more than once. She begged. At one point by testimony, she offered to leave Knoxville entirely, to disappear from all of their lives if they just let her go. It didn’t stop what was already happening to her. She was 19. She died in those woods that night, and her body was left there, dragged near a stand of trees on a pile of dirt and debris.

 What came next is, in some ways, harder to sit with than the crime itself. Christa Pike didn’t leave those woods in horror at what she’d done. She left with a piece of Colleen’s skull in her possession and she went straight to Kim Iloilo<unk>’s room to tell her about it. She showed her the fragment. According to testimony, she danced in a circle while she talked, smiling, singing quietly to herself, like she was recounting something exciting rather than confessing to a killing.

 She wasn’t finished. The next morning, she found another student, a young man named Wilson, and showed him the same piece of bone, pulling it from her pocket wrapped in a napkin. When he noticed dark spots on her shoes, she corrected him before he could ask. “That’s not much,” she told him. “That’s blood.

” In the hours after the killing, she also did what people who understand they’ve committed a crime tend to do. She stopped at a gas station and washed the tops of her shoes. She rubbed mud from the bottoms of her shoes onto her own jeans to disguise the blood stains underneath it. She got rid of the weapons. One she disposed of outright.

 The other she quietly returned to the person she borrowed it from. She threw away Colleen’s identification cards so there’d be nothing on her when she was found. And then later that same day, after police had already roped off the wooded area behind the steam plant to keep people back, Christa Pike walked up to the edge of the scene herself.

 She asked a University of Tennessee police officer what was happening, whether they had any suspects. The officer would later testify that she seemed amused. Giggly, even standing at the perimeter of a crime scene that was in every sense her own. Colleen SLmer’s body was found the next morning, January 13th, 1995 at 8:05 a.m.

 by a University of Tennessee grounds department employee making his usual rounds near the green houses. She was found nude from the waist up, covered in dirt and twigs, exactly where she’d been left. Given how openly Pike had already been talking to Elo, to Wilson, to anyone who’d listened, it barely took an investigation at all. Investigators simply had to follow the trail she’d left herself.

 It didn’t take investigators long to close in. Within roughly 36 hours of Colleen Surmer’s body being found, all three of them were in custody. Christa Pike, Tadel Ship, and Shadala Peterson. Given how freely Pike had already been talking to anyone who’d listened, there wasn’t much mystery left to solve.

 She had confessed repeatedly before police ever needed to ask her a single question. The evidence backed up every word of it. DNA testing matched blood found on both Pikees and ship’s clothing to Colleen Slmer. The skull fragment itself, the thing Pike had carried around and shown off like a trophy, was recovered and entered directly into evidence.

 Prosecutors also had something else working in their favor against Ship specifically. His own statements in the days leading up to the murder. Days before it happened, he told a fellow student that he needed to make what he called a human sacrifice because the celestial bodies were aligned. A comment made, according to testimony, while he had a Ouija board with him.

 And on the day of the murder itself, when another student crossed paths with Pike, Peterson, and Ship off campus and asked if anyone had seen Slmer, Ship reportedly answered without hesitation. When we find her, she’s dead. There was very little left for any of the three defense teams to work with.

 Christa Pike went to trial first in March of 1996. Her attorneys leaned heavily on her mental state, presenting expert testimony that she suffered from severe borderline personality disorder and had in the moment lost all control of her own actions. It was a defense built around a single idea that what happened in those woods wasn’t calculated.

 It was a psychological break. The jury didn’t accept it. On March 22nd, 1996, after only a few hours of deliberation, Pike was convicted on both counts against her, firstderee murder, and conspiracy to commit murder. During the penalty phase, jurors found that the killing had been especially heinous, involving torture and abuse well beyond what was needed to end a life, and that it had been carried out in part to keep Colleen from reporting an earlier incident between them.

 8 days later on March 30th, the sentence came down. Death by electrocution. At the time, it made her the youngest woman on death row anywhere in the country. Tadro Ship’s case didn’t go to trial until nearly a year later in January of 1997. His jury reached a different kind of verdict. They convicted him on both counts, the same charges Pike faced.

 But when it came to sentencing, they couldn’t agree unanimously that he deserved to spend the rest of his natural life in prison without any possibility of release. Because of that, the judge sentenced him to life with the possibility of parole. But the same judge describing Ship as a dangerous individual didn’t stop there.

 He added a consecutive 25-year sentence on the conspiracy count. a decision made specifically to ensure Ship wouldn’t be eligible for parole until he was well into his late 40s or early 50s. The reason Ship escaped the death penalty entirely wasn’t leniency was math. He was 17 years old at the time of the murder, one year younger than Pike, and under Tennessee law, that single year meant capital punishment was never legally available as a sentence for him at all.

 Had Christa Pike also been 17 that January night instead of 18, this would be a fundamentally different story, and she likely wouldn’t be sitting on death row today. As for Shadala Peterson, the friend who stood watch while it happened. Her path diverged even further from both of theirs. She cooperated with investigators early, agreed to become a witness for the state, and pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact.

 Her sentence was 6 years, served almost entirely as probation, with credit given for time she’d already spent in jail awaiting the outcome. One crime, three people who walked into those woods that night, all of them fully aware of what was happening. Three completely different outcomes. One death sentence, one life sentence with a distant shot at freedom, and one plea deal that let a woman walk free in her early 20s.

 And if you’re wondering whether Ship ever made it out, as of now, he hasn’t. Decades later, in October of 2025, he had his first parole hearing. It was denied on the record due to the seriousness of the offense. His case won’t come up for review again until 2031. So, here’s the question worth sitting with.

 Was this justice carefully calibrated to each person’s role and culpability in what happened to Colleen Slmer? Or was it something closer to arbitrary, one legal technicality, a single year of age standing between one woman’s death sentence and her codefendants chance, however distant, at freedom? Let me know what you think in the comments.

 We’ll get into what the next 30 years looked like for Christa Pike right after this. Being sentenced to death didn’t mean Christa Pike’s story went quiet. If anything, the years that followed added as many strange, disturbing chapters as the crime itself. On August 24th, 2001, 5 years into her sentence, Pike was involved in a violent incident inside the prison, a fire had broken out in another wing of the facility and staff moved a fellow inmate, a woman named Patricia Jones, into a shared space with Pike and another inmate, Natasha Cornet.

Jones was serving a life sentence herself for the 1994 murder of an 84year-old woman in Knoxville and had a reputation among other inmates for being a bully. Whatever happened between them escalated fast. Pike took a shoestring, wrapped it around Jones’s neck, and began to choke her, flipping her onto her stomach, sitting on her, and continuing even as Jones, who outweighed her by more than 100 lb, struggled beneath her.

 Officers intervened before Jones died. Investigators looked into whether Cornet had helped, but ultimately found insufficient evidence to charge her. Pike herself wasn’t especially ambiguous about her intent when she spoke to investigators afterward. She said she wasn’t sure she meant to kill Jones, but she also said she didn’t care whether Jones lived or died.

 In 2004, she was convicted of attempted first-degree murder for the attack and received an additional 25 years on her sentence. Around that same period, Pike did something that surprised even the people closest to her case. In 2001, and again in 2002, against the direct advice of her own attorneys, she asked the courts to let her drop her remaining appeals and be executed. A judge granted the request.

An execution date was set for August 19th, 2002. Then she changed her mind. Her lawyers moved quickly to reinstate the appeals process on her behalf. That motion was initially denied, but on August 2nd, 2002, just over 2 weeks before the scheduled date, a three judge appellet panel intervened and ruled that her case should continue.

 The question of whether her original waiver had even been valid to begin with kept working through the courts for years afterward until the Tennessee Supreme Court finally ruled in 2005 that it hadn’t been and allowed her postconviction case to be reinstated for good. Her final standard postconviction appeal at the state level was denied in December of 2008, which technically exhausted the ordinary paths available to her under Tennessee’s own court system.

 Four years after that, in March of 2012, it came out that Pike had been quietly working on something else entirely, a plan to escape. The scheme reportedly involved a corrections officer, Justin Hefflin, along with a man from New Jersey named Donald Cut. It didn’t get far. The Tennessee Department of Correction and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation caught it before it went anywhere near execution.

 Her legal fight, meanwhile, moved into the federal court system. In February of 2013, her attorneys filed a federal habius corpus petition, arguing that her original trial council had been ineffective and that sentencing an 18-year-old to death, given her documented mental illness, was itself unconstitutional. A federal district judge rejected the petition in March of 2016 in a ruling that ran 61 pages.

 In August of 2019, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld that decision and shortly after denied a request to have the full court rehear the case. But one judge on that panel didn’t leave it at a simple agreement. she wrote separately, making clear that in her own view, sentencing someone to death for a crime committed at 18 likely violated the eth amendment, given what the law already recognized about the reduced culpability and greater capacity for change that comes with youth.

 Pike’s attorneys took the case one step further still, petitioning the United States Supreme Court to review it. On June 8th, 2020, the Supreme Court declined, denying the petition without comment. That single decision effectively closed out her federal appeals for good. And it didn’t take long for the state to act on it. On August 27th, 2020, the Tennessee Attorney General’s office moved to have the Tennessee Supreme Court set an execution date.

 That’s when Pike’s case reached somewhere almost nobody expected it to, an international human rights body. That November, her attorneys filed a petition with the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights. The following month in December of 2020, the commission issued formal precautionary measures on her behalf, concluding that there was a serious and urgent risk of irreparable harm to her life and formally requesting that the United States refrain from carrying out her execution and ensure her conditions of confinement met international human

rights standards. The US government’s response was that she hadn’t exhausted the legal options still available to her domestically. Partly because of the CO 19 pandemic and partly because of the ongoing international petition. Pike’s attorneys were granted extensions by the Tennessee Supreme Court to keep arguing against a set execution date.

 In June of 2021, they formally opposed the state’s request and asked instead for a certificate of commutation. That request was denied. Those conditions of confinement had become their own separate legal battle by then. In 2022, a team of attorneys filed suit on Pike’s behalf, describing what her daily life had actually looked like for the better part of three decades, confined to a cell roughly the size of a parking space, 7 ft x 12, for 22 to 24 hours a day, with almost no meaningful human contact. The lawsuit argued this

amounted to unconstitutional, cruel, and unusual punishment and pointed out that male inmates on Tennessee’s death row had access to communal housing and each other’s company in a way she never had simply because she was the only woman there. One more attempt at overturning her sentence came around the same time.

In November of 2022, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled in a case called State versus Booker that mandatory life sentences for juveniles convicted of homicide violated the 8th amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Pike’s attorneys moved in August of 2023 to use that ruling to reopen her own case, arguing that her age and mental state at the time of the crime deserved the same consideration.

 A Knox County judge denied the motion that October, ruling that the Booker decision applied specifically to juvenile offenders under the law and that Pike, who was 18 at the time of the murder, didn’t qualify as one. Her attorneys didn’t stop there. They appealed that denial to the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, which upheld it in May of 2024.

 From there, they took the fight to the Tennessee Supreme Court itself, filing an application that July. That same year, the solitary confinement lawsuit reached its conclusion. In September of 2024, nearly 30 years after her sentencing, Pike and the state finalized a settlement that finally gave her a job inside the prison, the ability to share meals with other incarcerated women, and meaningfully more time outside her cell than she’d ever had before.

 By the time all of this had played out, nearly 30 years had passed since the night in those woods, and the state of Tennessee still wasn’t finished with her case. On September 30th, 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued a death warrant scheduling Chris Pike’s execution for exactly 1 year later to the day, September 30th, 2026.

Four months after that, on January 8th, 2026, Pike’s attorneys, Steven Ferrell and Luke Inn of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee, filed a lawsuit in Davidson County Chancery Court. The target was the state’s execution protocol itself. Specifically, its reliance on a single drug, Pentobarbatl, to carry out lethal injection.

 The lawsuit makes several distinct arguments and it’s worth understanding them as separate from each other rather than one single complaint. The first is about religion. Pike is a practicing Buddhist and her legal team argues that two different restrictions under the state’s protocol violate her sincerely held religious beliefs.

 One is a mandatory 14-day isolation period leading up to any scheduled execution, which the lawsuit argues amounts to cruel and unusual punishment on its own. The other is narrower and more specific. A 12-hour blackout window in the final hours before execution, during which contact with a spiritual adviser is restricted.

 Her attorneys point out that three other Tennessee death row inmates executed in 2025, Oscar Smith, Byron Black, and Harold Nichols were granted exceptions to that same blackout rule and allowed contact with their spiritual adviserss. Pike’s team argues she should be entitled to the same exception and that without it, she’d be denied access to her Buddhist spiritual adviser at the exact moment she’d need that support most. The second argument is medical.

Pike’s filing cites a documented blood disorder called thrombocyopenia along with her diagnosed bipolar disorder and PTSD, arguing that these conditions make a pentobarbital execution likely to cause what the lawsuit calls unnecessary and super added pain and suffering language pulled directly from 8th amendment case law on cruel and unusual punishment.

 A third argument is about fairness rather than her specific conditions. Two other Tennessee prisoners, Terry King and Donald Middlebrooks, were previously granted stays of execution specifically so they could challenge the state’s execution protocols in court before their sentences were carried out. Pike’s legal team is asking for that same treatment, a chance to litigate this fully before any execution date arrives.

The state didn’t let any of this go unanswered. On March 19th, 2026, Tennessee filed its formal response, and it was blunt. The state’s position is that the ETH amendment has never guaranteed a prisoner a painless death, and that some degree of risk is inherent to any method of execution, no matter how humane the intention behind it.

Tennesseeey’s Attorney General Jonathan Sketti went further in comments to the press, turning attention back to the crime itself, reminding the public that Pike had carried a piece of Colleen Slmer’s shattered skull around in her pocket after luring her into the woods and had shown it off to her friends like a trophy.

 In his view, Pike had offered nothing but speculation to support the idea that lethal injection posed any unique risk in her particular case, and the state’s filing leaned on what it called an overwhelming history of courts affirming lethal injection and pentobarbatital specifically as constitutional. Worth noting here because Pike’s crime happened in 1995 just before a legal cutoff of January 1st, 1999, she has the option under Tennessee law to request execution by electrocution instead of lethal injection.

 That choice sits alongside everything else being litigated since her attorneys have separately argued that being forced to choose electrocution just to avoid the mandatory isolation period tied to lethal injection is itself a cruel and arbitrary bargain to have to make. On May 7th, 2026, the case took a procedural turn.

 Chancellor Aayashia Miles transferred it out of Davidson County Chancery Court and up to the Tennessee Supreme Court directly, citing a recently amended rule that requires any legal challenge to the method or timing of an execution to be filed with the state’s highest court from the start. That rule change itself came out of an earlier legal fight over a different death row case, Byron Blacks, in which the Tennessee Supreme Court had overturned a lower court’s ruling the year before.

 Then on June 12th, 2026, the case escalated again. Just weeks earlier, Tennessee had attempted to execute a different death row inmate, Tony Kurthers, and it had gone wrong badly enough that the governor postponed the execution entirely, delaying it by a full year. In the direct wake of that failure, Pike’s attorneys filed a new motion with the Tennessee Supreme Court, asking the justices to appoint what’s called a special master, an independent investigator with the authority to examine exactly how the state’s lethal injection protocol would function in

Pike’s specific case given her documented medical conditions. Her attorney, Luke Inn, didn’t mince words about what he thought the Kurther’s failure proved. In his filing, he wrote plainly that the state of Tennessee is not currently capable of constitutionally carrying out executions and that TDOC lacks the qualified trained medical personnel required to prevent unnecessary suffering during an execution.

 A warning he said his team had been raising for more than a year before Kurther’s execution went wrong. As of now, the Tennessee Supreme Court hasn’t ruled on the original protocol lawsuit, the state’s response to it, or the special master motion. All of it is still sitting in front of the state’s highest court, unresolved, with less than 3 months to go before the date already sitting on the calendar.

 If nothing changes between now and then, Christa Pike will be executed on September 30th, 2026 at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. She’ll be 50 years old. The historical weight of that date is hard to overstate. Tennessee hasn’t executed a woman in more than 200 years, not since the early 1800s.

 If Pike’s execution goes forward, she’ll be only the fourth woman the state has ever put to death in its entire history. Nationally, she’d become the 19th woman executed in America since the modern death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The one before her, a woman named Amber McGlaughlin, was executed in Missouri back in January of 2023.

 Notable in her own right as the first openly transgender person ever executed in the United States. As of now, roughly 48 women sit on death row across the entire country, compared to nearly 2100 men. Whatever else is true about this case, it exists inside numbers that are almost vanishingly rare. She’ll also be the only person Tennessee has executed in the modern era of capital punishment for a crime committed at 18, 19, or 20 years old.

 Her codefendant, Tadel Ship, was 17 at the time, one year younger, and it’s that single year more than anything else, standing between his eventual shot at parole and her scheduled death. For Colleen Surmer’s mother, May Martinez, none of the legal maneuvering changes anything about what she wants to see happen. She’s shown up to hearings, spoken to reporters, and pushed for this exact outcome for three decades now, ever since her daughter’s murder in 1995.

Over the years, she’s described what it’s like to carry this. the fact that a piece of her daughter’s skull was kept from her, treated by her killer as a keepsake rather than evidence of a crime, and how that image alone has never stopped haunting her. She said in her own words to different reporters over different years, that there isn’t a day that goes by where she doesn’t think about Colleen and what was done to her, not birthdays, not any occasion at all.

She’s made clear she wants this specific outcome, Pike’s execution, so that, as she’s put it, her daughter can finally be allowed to rest, and so that no other parent has to carry what she’s carried every single day since. Christa Pike, for her part, hasn’t spent these 30 years insisting on her innocence.

 She’s acknowledged what she did plainly and repeatedly. In a letter she sent to a Tennessee newspaper, she described the killing as the worst mistake anyone could make as a reckless teenager. one that in her own words ended up ruining far more lives than just Colleen’s. She said it sickens her now to think that she was capable of what she did at 18.

Her attorneys have gone further still, describing her after decades of treatment for bipolar disorder and PTSD as someone fundamentally different from the teenager who walked into those woods in 1995. A woman they say who carries real deep remorse for what she did alongside an understanding that her trauma and mental illness explain her actions without excusing them.

 None of that changes what happened to Colleen SL. And none of it in May Martinez’s eyes earns Christ anything other than the sentence a jury handed down 30 years ago. So here’s where this leaves us and it’s not a simple question. Christa Pike was 18 years old when she did something almost unthinkably brutal to a teenager who trusted her enough to walk into those woods with her.

 She also grew up inside a level of documented trauma, abuse, and untreated mental illness that most people will never come close to experiencing. Both of those things are true at the same time. The question this case actually turns on is whether severe childhood trauma and untreated mental illness at 18 should change how a society judges and act like this one.

and whether 30 years of appeals, legal fights, and a woman’s own account of who she’s become since should count for anything at all, or whether some acts are simply beyond what time and remorse can answer for. I’m not going to tell you what to think about that. I want to know what you think. Drop it in the comments. I read every one of them.

 If you found this case as compelling as we did, make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss our coverage of Chris Pike’s case as September approaches. And hit that notification bell so you’re the first to know the moment anything changes. Thanks for watching and we’ll see you in the next one.