(MENAFN- Live Mint) More than 30 years after she brutally murdered a classmate over a romantic rivalry, Christa Gail Pike, the only woman on Tennessee's death row, is scheduled to be executed on September 30 next year.

If carried out, Pike would become the first woman to be executed in the state in over 200 years, and only the 19th woman to face this fate in the United States since 1976.

What did Christa Gail Pike do?

Pike's crime dates back to January 1995, when she was a student at the Knoxville Job Corps, a career-training program.

Aged 18 at the time, Pike began dating a 17-year-old boy in the same program, and eventually came to fear that her 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer would pry him away from her.

In a depraved attempt to pre-empt a romantic coup, Pike, along with a friend and her boyfriend, lured Slemmer into the Knoxville woods on January 12, and proceeded to torture and murder her.

The sheer brutality of the crime-Slemmer was stabbed, beaten, bludgeoned for nearly an hour, and had a pentagram carved into her chest-made national headlines in the US.

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If that weren't all, after smashing Slemmer's head in with a large piece of asphalt, Pike went on to keep a piece of her skull, and began to show it around the campus.

Three days after the crime, she was arrested and charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, was found guilty on both counts in March 1996, and sentenced to death.

However, Pike's two accomplices-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and friend Shadolla Peterson-escaped the death penalty, with Shipp slated to become eligible for parole in November this year.

Meanwhile, Peterson, who prosecutors say kept a lookout during the brutal murder, testified against Pike during the court proceedings and was sentenced to probation.

What did Pike have to say about the crime?

Although her attorneys have tried to get her off death row, Pike, in a letter to The Tennessean in 2023, said she took responsibility for the murder, but added that she had "changed drastically" in the 30+ years since the brutal crime.

"I was a mentally ill 18 yr. old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I'd done. Even more to accept how many lives I effected (sic). I took the life of someone's child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think that someone as loving and compassionate as myself had the ability to commit such a crime," Pike wrote in the letter.

Having spent 27 years in what her lawyers say was effectively solitary confinement, given that she was the only woman in the state on death row, Pike's attorneys have argued that had she been on trial today, she would never have been awarded a death sentence, given her young age and mental health struggles at the time when the crime was committed.

"Christa's childhood was fraught with years of physical and sexual abuse and neglect. With time and treatment for bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders, which were not diagnosed until years later, Christa has become a thoughtful woman with deep remorse for her crime," USA TODAY quoted Pike's lawyers as saying.

The 49-year-old's attorneys are expected to challenge the sentence, believing she deserves life in prison without the possibility of parole, instead of capital punishment.

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