"Death Row 'Mean Girl' Killer Lured Love Rival into the Woods Before Carving a Pentagram and Keeping Her Skull as a Trophy"

A WOMAN has not been executed in Tennessee for over 200 years but next month Christa Pike faces the electric chair.

She has been languishing on for three decades ever since she tortured and killed her classmate in a sick spree dubbed ‘The Mean Girls Murder.’

Pike was just 18 years old and obsessed with and the occult when she discovered that her boyfriend was cheating on her with Colleen Slemmer in 1996.

She lured unsuspecting Colleen into the woods where she carved a pentagram into her chest before smashing her skull in a frenzy of jealous rage.

But she kept a piece of the skull as a twisted trophy which police discovered stashed in her pocket just hours later.

And for the past thirty years Pike has been caged in for 23 hours a day, embroiled in a complex legal battle for her freedom which finally collapsed last week.

On August 21 Supreme Court Judge W. Mark Ward set a date for Pike’s execution, although her supporters have long argued that she was also a victim scarred by an exceptionally traumatic childhood.

Pike, now 50, suffered an appalling catalogue of sexual abuse, mutiple rapes, abandonment and neglect.

Her early years were so bleak that she attempted suicide for the first time at the age of eight.

Pike’s parents were alcoholics, and her aunt reported finding the tot starving and crawling on floors littered with ‘piles of dog stool.’

She would create highly sexualised drawings in primary school, influenced by the horror she endured.

At 12 she was raped by Claude Davis, a neighbour who lived on the same trailer park, and tried to take her own life a second time.

On another occasion one of her mother’s boyfriends punched her in the face, and she beat a man named Kenny Clyde with a stick after he too threatened to rape her.

Pike was raped again when she was 17, by a stranger who dragged her from her home, and she ran away from home many times.

Things were perhaps looking up when she started training to become a nurse, but during her first year of college Pike started dating a boy called Tadaryl Shipp who introduced her to the dark cult of .

Other students were afraid of Shipp, and some carried box cutters or razor blades to protect themselves from his violent temper.

He would hit and kick Pike, and would not allow her to speak to any other boys.

But when she discovered Shipp’s affair in January 1995, Pike and her friend Shadolla Peterson lured Colleen to an isolated spot near the University of Tennessee campus, claiming they wanted to make peace and give her some marijuana.

With Peterson acting as lookout, for the next thirty minutes, Colleen was beaten and slashed before Pike finally killed her with a large chunk of asphalt.

Within 36 hours Pike, Shadolla and Tadaryl were all arrested.

Colleen’s mother has repeatedly pleaded for the missing pieces of her daughter’s skull to be returned for a proper burial, but police have kept it as evidence because the case has remained open all this time.

Pike was found guilty of and conspiracy to commit murder, and sentenced to death, making her the youngest woman sentenced to die under the modern .

Shadolla meanwhile became a witness for the prosecution, and Shipp is still incarcerated.

Pike has tried to appeal her sentence multiple times but in 2001 she was convicted of attempted murder after trying to strangle a fellow inmate with a shoe lace.

Then in 2012 she was busted in a foiled plot to escape when it emerged that she and another prisoner were bribing a guard to duplicate a key.

There are currently 45 women on death row in America.

But the United States rarely executes female prisoners, no matter how gruesome their crimes, in fact only 18 women have been put to death in the past 50 years.

Campaigners say the many years Pike has spent alone in her cell have taken a devastating toll on her already fragile mental health.

She suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and and her lawyers argued that physically dragging her from her cell and strapping her down would result in: “Christa involuntarily reliving the worst moments of her life, much like traumatised soldiers when they return from a war zone.”

Amnesty International has now stepped in and is calling on Bill Lee, the Governor of Tennessee, to stop Pike’s execution.

Deputy Director of Amnesty in the US Justin Mazzola told The Sun: “As the only woman on death row in she has deteriorated because she has been isolated and held separately.

“She hasn’t been afforded any level of contact beyond prison guards and lawyers.

“We are opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances via all methods, but in this case there are major concerns that information was not presented to the sentencing jury.

“We are in no way excusing or attempting to downplay the seriousness of the crime but because of legal hurdles her court-appointed lawyers failed to present much of the evidence about her childhood and its psychological impact.

“Christa had endured rape, sexual and physical violence, abuse, and neglect throughout her childhood which would have had an impact on her mental health and cognative ability.

“The state knew about the abuse but social services failed to protect her and she still hasn’t had the help she needs.”

But Crime Psychologist Professor David Canter says there was a grim inevitability about Pike becoming a killer given her abusive and violent past.

He said: “It’s all rather textbook.

“Somebody from a dysfunctional, disturbed or abused background learns to lash out.

“That aggression reflects what you have been a part of.

“Children learn from a very, very young age how to deal with the world around them and if they have been dealt with violently themselves then when they become frustrated the only mechanism available to them is to lash out.

“Crimes like this are sadly common among people with a violent history – it’s when serial killers don’t have a violent background that it is very curious to me.

“Perhaps there may have been some possibility of a different outcome for Christa, after all she managed to get into college and started a relationship, but there is a certain inevitability to it.

“On death row there are psychiatrists whose job it is to assess inmates to see if they are sane enough for execution, which sounds strange but if they don’t have the mental capacity to understand what is going on, they cannot be executed – it becomes inhumane treatment.

“Being on death row really does become a way of life, with its own culture, habits and expectations.

“The monotony is only broken by preparing for various appeals to the courts.

“Her lawyers have been trying for years to indicate that Christa has some sort of psychopathy or personality disorder because they have managed to get people off in the past by saying being a psychopath or deeply disturbed person is a medical disorder.

“But it is very difficult to get the US courts to accept it.”

Now at last Pike has exhausted all appeals processes and her execution is to take place on September 30.

All that remains is for her to choose between electrocution and lethal injection.