Christa Pike is set to be executed on Wednesday and has reportedly told the people closest to her that she doesn’t want them to witness the execution.
Christa Pike, 50, is due to die by lethal injection on September 30 in Tennessee. Over 30 years have passed since she was sentenced for killing her classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
She’s made it clear she doesn’t want her loved ones present when the execution happens, says her friend Ashlee Sellars.
The two met while Sellars was serving time for a robbery-murder and talked for years through the meal flaps in their cell doors on the high-security unit.
Sellars now works in justice reform advocacy and has spent a long time trying to square the woman she knows with the crime Pike committed as a teenager. She doesn’t downplay what happened to Slemmer, however.
“People want to know that everyone’s life matters, right? They want to know that Colleen’s life mattered,” she told the BBC.
“Christa, in this moment, I think she is fighting much more for her life to matter than she is to actually live.”
What happened in 1995
Pike was 18 when she, her boyfriend at the time Tadaryl Shipp, and another student, Shadolla Peterson, lured Slemmer to an isolated spot near the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus and stabbed her to death.
