Christa Gail Pike is an American convicted murderer who is incarcerated on death row in Tennessee. In 1995, when she was 18, Pike murdered her 19-year-old Job Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville. Pike and two friends led Slemmer into the woods where they tortured and killed her. In 1996, at the age of 20, Pike was sentenced to death, making her one of the youngest women to receive a death sentence in the United States during the post-Furman period. If the execution is carried out, she will be the 19th woman executed nationwide since 1976 and the first woman executed in Tennessee in 206 years, since the hanging of Eve Martin in 1820.

The act of swallowing live goldfish was a fad first popularized by students at American colleges in the late 1930s. Continue reading →