It took 30 years for Christa Pike’s sentence to be set in motion. Thirty years of agony for the family of the teenage student she’d killed in a crime still embedded in public consciousness as one so horrific it defied comprehension.
It should have taken just a few minutes for Pike’s life to have been ended, by lethal injection at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville – making her the first woman to be executed in the state of Tennessee for more than 200 years.
Instead, today the 50-year-old murderer holds another place in the annals of legal history as the woman who was given a lethal injection – twice – yet survived.
So what happened? It’s a question being asked the world over, as the horror of the events of Wednesday night are pieced together. The Daily Mail has spoken exclusively to one of the witnesses inside Riverbend, fulfilling a legal duty that calls for observers to document such events.
A first time ‘viewer’ as he put it, William Puckett, of television station WVLT, said he was given no preamble about what to expect and is still deeply shocked by what he saw.
‘I was one of seven media witnesses chosen by the state of Tennessee to view this execution and the entire idea of having media witnesses in there is to make sure the process goes correctly,’ he told us. ‘Something clearly in this process did not go right. I’m honestly at a loss for words.’
But he adds: ‘I will also tell you this. One member of the Department of Corrections, as we were leaving, was visibly holding back tears.’ His words were backed up by fellow witnesses and death penalty campaigners across the world. ‘Nothing about today was normal,’ said one seasoned female broadcaster who had witnessed five previous executions.
And Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said: ‘This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other in the modern era.’
Christa Pike, while on death row, appeared in court back in April 2012 to fight a conviction in a 2001 attack on an inmate
Pike’s life was set to have been ended by lethal injection at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee
Randall Spivey, a member of Pike’s legal team who was also present, said: ‘Last night was not just inefficient, it was cruel and it was torturous.’
He said he had watched prison staff taking an hour trying to establish an IV line. He counted seven needles used in her left arm, one that appeared to be bent when it was removed.
Pike was rushed from the prison by ambulance late on Wednesday evening, as an independent inquiry was already under way, amid widespread outrage at the astonishing blunder.
Last night Pike’s legal team said: ‘Christa is alive right now. We don’t have a sense of her prognosis. She is in a critical condition receiving lifesaving care.’
But if she did survive two doses of the potent sedative pentobarbital, could she possibly have done so, given the length of time it took to get her to hospital, without suffering brain injury?
The jury at Pike’s 1996 trial heard how she and her victim, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, were both on an educational programme for disadvantaged young adults when there was a falling out over a boy.
In January 1995, Pike and two accomplices lured Colleen into woodland, where she was bludgeoned to death, before a pentagram symbol was carved into her chest with a box cutter. Part of her skull was also taken as a twisted souvenir. So gruesome was the killing, it fuelled what was known as the Satanic Panic in the US, where fears spread about devil-worshipping cults engaging in human sacrifice and child abuse.
Pike spent the best part of the next 30 years in solitary confinement inside the Debra K Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Tennessee, awaiting her fate.
There were many appeals and attempts to commute the sentence from death to life in prison, at every level of the US justice system and spanning three decades.
But hope of a reprieve had dulled to the merest glimmer by the time execution day arrived.
It was on Wednesday morning that Mr Puckett had expected to fulfil his duties. Then, with an hour to spare, a last minute stay of execution was granted. Nine long hours later, as Mr Puckett says, the authorities decided ‘all right, it’s go time’.
It was 6.41pm when he entered the viewing chamber, a room with curtains drawn across a glass window, and walls so solid that every sound echoed. It wasn’t until 7.27pm that those curtains opened for the first time, much longer than the ten minutes Mr Puckett’s fellow witnesses told him was typical.
‘When the curtains opened, Christa Pike was laying down on a gurney,’ he told the Daily Mail.
‘We could only see the right side of her body. I could only see her right arm extended – like giving blood at the Red Cross. There was a single line running into her right arm.
‘You didn’t get to see the process of the needle being put into her arm, which was part of her objection to the injection process to begin with.’
Pike’s legal team, apart from arguing that her age at the time of the crime and extensive physical and sexual abuse she suffered as a child should be a factor in determining the severity of her punishment, had also said that lethal injection was fraught with risk. She had a blood disorder, they said, and her small veins created a heightened risk of complications, as well as the possibility of extreme pain and bleeding.
Mr Puckett watched as Pike, who chose not to select a final meal and requested only that her execution team be female, made her last words. ‘I’m going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life, and that is in love. I’m good now. I’m at peace. I’m ready to be free. I’m going to celebrate my freedom. This is a good day.’
Pike and two accomplices lured their victim into woodland, where she was bludgeoned to death, before a pentagram symbol was carved into her chest with a box cutter
Colleen Slemmer was just 19 when she was murdered in 1995 after her and Pike were both on an educational programme for disadvantaged young adults
At her side was Mikey Noechel, a Buddhist spiritual adviser. Much of what they said to each other was inaudible to those in the viewing room although they sang together.
But what Mr Puckett describes next sounds anything but peaceful.
‘At 7.33 she said, “The vein in my arm feels like it’s about to burst”. One minute later, she goes, “One spot is really throbbing”. There was no panic in her voice, it was as if she said, “Oh, I have a bruise”. That’s almost the way she said it. She continued to blink on and off, she was smiling, she let out a couple of laughs. I saw a tear rolling down her right eye.’
He is, as a witness should be, precise. At 7.37pm, he says, she took ‘four extremely deep’ breaths, three minutes later – at 7.41pm – he describes a rock being placed on Pike’s chest. It’s a curious detail amid the horror. A tradition apparently meant to signify that a lethal drug dose has been administered. Life is ending. But not, this time.
At 7.46pm the curtains closed then, just as suddenly, three minutes later they opened again.
‘That’s when she began to snore,’ he says. ‘It sounded like – if you have ever walked in on somebody who was snoring – she was in the deepest sleep anyone could be in.’
The spiritual adviser, who had been ushered out, was escorted back in and the rock was gone.
Mr Puckett’s minute-by-minute account is stark. He describes a series of large body movements.
‘The body rose off the gurney and went back down. Very abrupt. She was still snoring then at 8.01pm the rock was placed for the second time.’
His last sight was when her body flexed again and she gasped once more, at which point the curtain closed for ‘a second and final time’.
What unfolded next he and the others could only hear: Snores, doors opening and closing, footsteps.
‘The snoring continued but with a noticeable squeak. And so it would be, breathe in and then squeak. You still couldn’t see anything, so among the seven of us we were all trying to figure out what that squeaking was.
‘Was it her breathing pattern? Did they hook up a ventilator?’
At 8.53pm, one hour and 26 minutes after the curtains opened, the witnesses were asked to leave and the microphone connection was cut.
At some point between 8.05pm, when the curtains were closed for the second time, and the witnesses being led out, a second dose was administered.
Mr Puckett recalled: ‘We could faintly hear that snoring noise until we were escorted out by Department of Corrections staff.’
Now, his questions are the same as those being demanded far and wide in the wake of an execution that Colleen Slemmer’s anguished mother has declared ‘a mess’.
Mr Puckett stresses that his own observations pale next to what Colleen’s family, who attended the facility but did not sit with media, have endured. ‘There were family members of Colleen Slemmer who have waited 30 years to see this sentence carried out. They too viewed all of this.
‘They went into the day thinking that the killer of their daughter, their niece, their aunt, their loved one, was going to meet the sentence handed down by a jury of their peers and then this happened and now, repeatedly, Christa Gail Pike’s name is back in the headlines, instead of Colleen Slemmer who was killed at the hands of Pike and two others.’
Pike’s crime was one of unfathomable brutality.
She was 18 on January 12, 1995, when she, along with boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, 17, and a second young woman, friend Shadolla Peterson, 18, lured Colleen to her death under the pretence of smoking cannabis. Pike believed Colleen was trying to ‘steal’ her boyfriend and claimed that Colleen, a gentle teenager who volunteered to help during Special Olympics competitions and often wore a T-shirt emblazoned ‘computer geek’, had been ‘running her mouth’ about her.
Pike would tell Shipp, according to court records, ‘that little whore has to be taught a lesson’.
She enlisted the help of Peterson to lure her victim to an abandoned steam mill, under the guise of a peace offering. But there was to be no peace.
For 30 minutes, Pike and Shipp subjected Colleen to a drawn-out attack, beating and cutting her with a meat cleaver and a box cutter, as Peterson looked on.
According to court documents, the anguished victim repeatedly cried out: ‘Why are you doing this to me?’
Colleen was stabbed more than 100 times, her throat was slashed and, as she lay fighting for breath, Pike picked up a large chunk of asphalt and smashed it into her victim’s head.
Chillingly she took a memento from the scene: A piece of her victim’s skull, allegedly brandishing it afterwards as evidence of her crimes, warning a classmate: ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you too.’
Colleen’s battered body was found the following day. It was an sickeningly dark crime and Pike admitted her guilt, though denied carving the pentagram.
Peterson, who acted as a lookout, became a prosecution witness. She pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact and received probation. Shipp was convicted the following year but, because he was only 17 at the time, was tried as a juvenile and escaped death.
Pike was 18 when she, along with her boyfriend and a second young woman, lured Colleen to her death under the pretence of smoking cannabis
As for Pike, just weeks ago her lawyers filed a 226-page petition asking the state 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 the ages of 11 and 17.
Outside of prison, the body of support for Pike was enormous and yet hers was not a straightforward case of a crime committed and time served.
In 2004 she was convicted of the attempted murder of a fellow inmate whom she tried to strangle with a shoelace.
In 2012, two men (one who had been visiting Pike) were arrested in connection with an escape plot.
Colleen Slemmer would have been 51 this month.
Her mother, May Martinez, has at times felt like a voice lost amid the melee of debate about Pike and even more so now as Pike lies in a hospital bed.
Her sentence and its botched execution will be debated for a long time to come.
But Colleen is the one untarnished victim at the heart of this appalling tragedy.
