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.

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 stabb

See Full Page