US3 min(s) read
The lawyer for a woman who is facing execution in Tennessee later this month has revealed what his client “fears more than death.”
Christa Pike, who is set to be the first woman executed in the state in over 200 years, will receive the lethal injection next week should her last-ditch appeal be dismissed.
Now 50, Pike murdered Colleen Slemmer in 1995, and was sentenced to the death penalty a year later, having waited for her date with the executioner ever since.
Pike is scheduled to be executed on September 30, unless a last-ditch 226-page clemency petition dissuades authorities presiding over her death.
While her lawyers remain locked in negotiations over her death sentence, requesting her original punishment be downgraded to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, her execution date is yet to be, at the very least, delayed.
Her legal team has also openly revealed her biggest fear as she heads towards her death date.
Pike’s lawyer, Stephen Ferrell, disclosed to authorities that it wasn’t death itself the murderer feared most, but rather the process of being executed, and the potential implications.
According to Ferrell, Pike’s concerns remain deeply ingrained following an abusive childhood, explaining that being fastened to an execution gurney, having people handle her body, and the insertion of an intravenous line are what fill her with the most apprehension in the lead-up.
He claimed: “Her biggest fear is not the fear of dying. It’s the fear of that process.”
It has been reported that Pike requested an all-female execution team to carry out the lethal injection due to post-traumatic stress related to physical abuse she was subjected to as a child.
Pike was just 18 when she brutally killed Slemmer, with her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, after believing Slemmer was interested in her partner.
Slemmer was mercilessly attacked by Pike and Shipp, who cut her throat, beat her, carved satanic symbols into her skin with a box cutter, and removed a part of her skull.
While Shipp was given life imprisonment with the chance of parole, Pike was handed the death penalty, a sentence she has contested ever since, with the latest appeal yet to be answered.
