Tennessee To Execute First Woman In 200 Years: Inside Christa Pike Case

Tennessee is set to execute 50-year-old Christa Gail Pike by lethal injection at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville on Wednesday, in what would be the state's first execution of a woman in more than 200 years. Pike was 18 when she was convicted of the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at a Job Corps training centre in Knoxville. The case drew national attention after a pentagram carved into the victim's body fuelled fears associated with the era's so-called "satanic panic".The US Supreme Court on Tuesday denied Pike's request for a stay of execution, while Governor Bill Lee rejected her clemency plea a day earlier."I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I'd done," Pike said in a statement included in her clemency petition. "Even more to accept how many lives I affected.