Death Row prisoner Christa Pike says she feels ‘kinship’ with Lindsay Clancy

The first woman to be given the death penalty in Tennessee for over 200 years has compared herself to Lindsay Clancy — saying she feels a ‘kinship’ with her.

Christa Pike, now 50, was just 18 when she and her then boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp beat and tortured to death 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.

Ahead of her execution, which is scheduled for tomorrow (Wednesday) she has made the comparison to Clancy, just weeks after her trial over the killing of her children Cora, five, Dawson three and eight-month-old Callan collapsed.

While Clancy does not deny killing her children by strangling them with an exercise band in the basement of their home, her defence claimed she was in a state of postpartum psychosis when the crimes took place, and therefore was not criminally responsible for her actions.

Speaking of how the case brought Clancy’s mental health issues into focus, Pike said: ‘We are both females who got into trouble because of uniquely female issues.

‘One thing [that] is different, however, is that times have changed a lot on awareness of women’s issues since I was put on trial.’

Pike was 18 when she was sentenced to death (Picture: WBIR-TV via AP)

She added that if she had been on trial today she estimates jurors may have shown her more sympathy due to the fact that ‘science about brain development has evolved’ — and said that the fact her accomplice was black may also have played a part in her punishment.

‘While racism has not gone away, it has diminished some,’ Pike insisted.

‘I think I was more harshly judged because of my relationship with Tadaryl.’ 

Pike killed Slemmer, a fellow Job Corps student, on January 12, 1995, after she, Shipp and another student, Shadolla Peterson, lured her to a remote corner of the campus at the University of Tennessee and tortured her before bludgeoning her to death.

Colleen Slemmer was lured to a remote part of Tennessee University campus where she was tortured and killed

At the time Pike believed Slemmer was trying to steal Shipp — a fellow student with whom she shared an interest in satanic imagery — away from her, although friends of the victim denied this.

Prosecutors said that Slemmer was kicked, beaten and slashed for half an hour, and that Pike carved a pentagram into her chest while she was still alive, before she died from blows to the head with a chunk of asphalt.

Slemmer’s half-naked body was found the next morning, with her blood-soaked clothes hanging above her on tree branches.

All the teenagers involved were arrested within 36 hours, with investigators discovering a satanic Bible and altar in Pike’s room, along with a fragment of Slemmer’s skull.

While Pike became the youngest woman ever to be sentenced to death in the US, Shipp was given a life sentence without parole, while Peterson was sentenced to probation after being found to be an accessory after the fact.

She subsequently became the youngest woman ever to be sentenced to death in the US.

Pike’s case has continued to be fought by her legal representatives, who claim she would not have received a death sentence had she been found guilty of the same crime as a teenager today.

Pike was also neglected and sexually abused as a child, with some details about her youth now being shared by her lawyers — details they say jurors weren’t able to consider.

A report by forensic psychologist Dr Diana McCoy found that Pike was abused by her mother’s partners and husbands and was raped at least twice, aged 11 and 17.

Dr Bethany Brand, another psychologist who studied Pike’s case in 2023, said her case was rare because of the number of people who abused her when they had a responsibility to protect her.

She said that Pike’s traumatic childhood helped to explain why she felt threatened by Colleen and was unable to control her emotions when she killed the young woman.

Pike is due to be executed by lethal injection on Wednesday after the governor of Tennessee denied a plea for clemency.

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