Christa Pike's Real Name: Christa Gail Pike

Quick answer: Christa Pike's full name is Christa Gail Pike. She was born on March 10, 1976, in Beckley, West Virginia, and appears in court and corrections records under that civil name.

Real name and early life

Tennessee Department of Correction materials and contemporaneous court coverage identify Christa Gail Pike as her full name (Tennessee DOC; Davidson County case history). Pike is the family surname; Gail is the middle name. There is no stage or alias surname in the public record of the case. She was born in Beckley, West Virginia, and later enrolled in a Job Corps program in Knoxville, Tennessee, where the 1995 crime occurred.

Case overview

On January 12, 1995, when Pike was 18, she and others participated in the torture and killing of fellow Job Corps student Colleen Slemmer in a wooded area near the University of Tennessee agricultural campus in Knoxville. Pike was arrested within days. In 1996 a Knox County jury convicted her of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder; she was sentenced to death and has been held at what is now the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center. She was among the youngest women sentenced to death in the United States in the modern death-penalty era. In 2001, while incarcerated, she was involved in an assault on inmate Patricia Jones and was later convicted of attempted first-degree murder (Tennessee DOC; People). Coverage of appeals and execution scheduling has continued for decades; as of state listings she remains Tennessee’s only woman on death row. Across all filings, the documented name is Christa Gail Pike.

Name notes for searchers

Searchers should rely on Tennessee court and corrections records rather than true-crime entertainment sites for spelling and status. Victim Colleen Slemmer should be named accurately and respectfully. Wikipedia is a pointer after primary citations.