Death row inmate Christa Pike, convicted of murdering a schoolmate three decades ago, is due to be executed by lethal injection in Tennessee on Wednesday (September 30, 2026), becoming the first woman that state has put to death in more than two centuries.
The grisly nature of the slaying, which involved the perpetrators carving the shape of a pentagram in the victim’s chest and taking a chunk of her skull as a souvenir of the carnage, drew intense media coverage at the time. Pike and Shipp confessed to the killing, and both were convicted the following year of first-degree murder. Pike was sentenced to death, while Shipp received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. And they cited the diagnoses she received in prison for bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Currently the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, Pike was also convicted in August 2001 of attempted first-degree murder in an assault on another inmate, according to the Tennessee Department of Correction. In a 226-page petition asking the governor to commute her death penalty to a life sentence without the possibility of parole, her lawyers documented her history as the childhood victim of violence, neglect and sexual abuse, including two rapes at ages 11 and 17. Christa Pike cries after being sentenced to death on March 30, 1996, in Knoxville, Tennesse File | Photo Credit: AP Executions of female prison inmates are exceedingly rare in the U.S., with women accounting for just 18 of the 1,683 people put to death since the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Before Wednesday, Tennessee had executed 17 people.
Pike’s case has drawn international attention, with a group of United Nations human rights experts issuing a recent statement calling for commutation of her death sentence.
