Christa Gail Pike (born March 10, 1976) is an American convicted murderer, and the youngest woman to be sentenced to death in the United States during the post-Furman period.
An aunt noted that infant Pike would be "crawling around through piles of dog stool all over the house," and that Hansen wanted to keep partying when she received news that her toddler was experiencing severe seizures.
Pike additionally claimed to have been sexually assaulted or molested at several points in time; her friends and family doubt these occurrences, noting that she is a pathological liar.
[4] In tenth grade, she was sent to a juvenile facility for a year, where she became interested in the Job Corps, a government program aimed at helping low-income youth by offering vocational training and career skills.
Along with friend Shadolla Peterson, 18, Pike planned to lure Slemmer to an isolated, abandoned steam plant near the University of Tennessee campus.
[11] Her lawyers sought a commutation of the sentence from death to prison on the following grounds: ineffective assistance of counsel; Pike suffered from mental illness; and capital punishment as administered in Tennessee is unconstitutional.
In a 61-page ruling by U.S. District Judge Harry Sandlin Mattice Jr. issued on March 11, 2016, all grounds were rejected and the requested commutation was denied.
[16] Although it is the position of the Tennessee Department of Corrections that Cornett assisted in this crime, their investigators concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge her with helping Pike attack Jones.
[17] In March 2012, it was revealed that Pike had made escape plans involving corrections officer Justin Heflin and a New Jersey man named Donald Kohut.
[18] Though it has never been determined how it exactly began, Kohut, who worked as a personal trainer and was then in his early thirties, entered into a letter-writing correspondence with Pike around the beginning of 2011.
Eventually Kohut communicated a plan for her escape to Pike and enlisted the help of corrections officer Heflin, who agreed to participate in return for cash and gifts.
[19] Because of security concerns, the Tennessee Department of Corrections has not provided many details about the plan; however, the eventually unsealed indictment laid out a scenario where a prison key would be traced and then a duplicate created.
[23] Heflin, who cooperated with authorities after his arrest, served no prison time, but was terminated from his job with the Tennessee Department of Corrections.
On August 30, 2023, lawyers for Pike used the November 2022 Supreme Court ruling (State v. Booker) in an attempt to reopen her bid to have her 1996 conviction and sentence thrown out.
Pike's lawyers argued her young age and damaged mental health at the time of the killing should spare her from facing execution.
"The high court, in the opinion written by now retired Justice Sharon Lee, specifically addressed the question of juveniles, not adults.