I interviewed Christa Pike 20 years ago – I can't stop thinking about herJournalist Helen Roberts says Christa Pike the person and the criminal were "two different people".8 hrs agoWales

Two decades ago, Helen Roberts met Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike to understand the woman behind the brutal murder of Colleen Slemmer.

Aged 30, Pike had served 11 years on death row and was the youngest woman to receive the penalty in the United States when Roberts interviewed her as real life editor of women’s lifestyle magazine.

Pike, now aged 50, faced her long-awaited execution on Wednesday, but survived two lethal doses of pentobarbital and remains in critical condition.

Roberts, who has been following the developments, reflected on her conflicting encounter with Pike and how it had stayed with her as both a journalist and a human being.

“They were like two very separate people, I could not imagine the person I met to have been so horrifically violent.”

Roberts entered Tennessee’s maximum-security prison for women, now known as Debra K Johnson Rehabilitation Center, in Nashville in December 2006.

“I’d never been into a prison, let alone a maximum security prison, so I was quite nervous and a bit unsure of how it was going to go, a little bit intimidated I suppose,” she recalled.

Roberts, from Conwy in north Wales, was working for More Magazine and flew to the US for the interview.

After passing through security checks and several doors, she met Pike through a glass window, and carried out the interview using a speaker.

They were just years apart in age and Roberts said she tried to go into it without any kind of judgement, but admitted she expected a “very honest, brutal woman”.

But the person she met was much different.

“I was in my mid-20s then,” said Roberts, adding: “I was similar age [to Pike], just about, and there were some elements we connected on.”

She recalled Pike being very well put together, with similar curly hair to her own, and she felt their small similarities gave them common ground.

Pike seemed warm and “eager to please”, said Roberts, and was giggling, smiling, and picking up on cues.

“I didn’t want her to feel intimated and, within a few minutes, she popped up onto the window ledge on her side so she could get closer to us.”

“We didn’t have a lot of time… she knew that, and we had a lot of ground to cover,” Roberts said.

“She got straight into it, she wasn’t defensive, she wasn’t difficult, she wasn’t cagey. She answered all of my questions quite articulately and quite open, to be honest.”

She said Pike had “lots of eye contact” and “was forthcoming”.

“She was eager to answer. She just came across, sometimes, as quite ordinary.

“I didn’t meet her with any animosity… she could obviously feel, I guess, the vibe that we were going to be very placid, and just talk.

“I wanted to meet Christa Pike just the woman, understand her life, the bad decision she made, and how she was coping living the life she was there.”

In 1995, Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and murdered Slemmer, a 19-year-old they met at a job training camp for troubled teenagers.

She had accused Slemmer of insulting her and trying to steal her boyfriend. Two other residents at the camp later testified that Pike had bragged about the murder before and after, and showed them a piece of Slemmer’s skull.

Pike was given the death penalty in 1996, but Shipp – who was 17 – was given a life sentence with the possibility of parole, and he remains in prison.

Roberts said Pike explained she had no real understanding of the magnitude of what was happening during the trial, but enjoyed being the centre of attention, “because she never had been”.

When it came to discussing the details of the murder with Roberts, Pike didn’t hesitate.

“There was no different emotion,” Roberts said, adding Pike “was very matter of fact about it”.

“She had been on death row for 11 years already, and she would have spent a lot of time already on her own, a lot of processing at that time and coming to terms with what she did.

“She talked about herself as if that’s a very different person. She said she lost her mind the night she killed Colleen. She said it was like an out-of-body experience, she didn’t realise what she was doing and it’s like someone had taken over her.”

Pike told Roberts she was deeply sorry for what she did, but did not feel anything she said could compensate for what took place.

Pike grew up in Beckley, a small, working-class city in southern West Virginia, and her parents, Carissa Hansen and Glenn Pike, were alcoholics who neglected her.

She told Roberts she did not have “any love”, apart from her grandmother who died of cancer when she was 12, setting off a rage inside Pike, alongside suicidal thoughts.

“She was raped at 11 by a neighbour, and again at 17 by a stranger who she said dragged her into the woods. She went through different periods of neglect and abuse,” said Roberts.

Pike bounced from one school to another before joining Knoxville Job Corps aged 18 – what was meant to be a new start.

She told Roberts she had hoped to become a nurse.

Pike’s lawyers, who filed a 226-page clemency petition, hoped for a last-minute reprieve of her execution, but it was rejected, while United Nations human rights experts had also called for the execution to be stopped.

“She definitely had hope,” said Helen, and said Pike hoped someone may step in and help her by “realising” the impact of her childhood and mental health on her actions.

“She knew it was either death penalty and prison for life, but she definitely wanted prison for life, and a peaceful death,” said Roberts.

Roberts described the past week as “bizarre”, despite knowing the execution was coming.

“All day Wednesday I couldn’t not be with her, I was constantly thinking of what would be happening.

“I’d read she had refused her last meal… I cannot even imagine what she was thinking, how she felt, and how you prepare yourself knowing you’re going to die.”

She said waking up to the news Pike had survived the injections was “like watching a horror movie”.

“I can’t comprehend, I can’t understand. It’s absolutely barbaric.

“And then the irony of the state trying to kill her and then her being taken to hospital to try and save her. It doesn’t even make sense.”

At the time Roberts interviewed Pike, she was incarcerated for at least 23 hours a day, only let out for a one-hour walk on some days.

She was the only female on death row, so was not able to mix with others, but Roberts said Christa had some sense of routine, finding comfort in reading, watching TV, and writing to pen pals.

Not long after their meeting, Roberts received a handmade card from Pike, thanking her for how she treated her.

“I remember it was purple paper in the shape of a butterfly, and she had wrote inside ‘thank you for being nice, thank you for treating me as a woman’ and that was it,” she said.

“It was really poignant.”

“No matter what I’ve said about Christa Pike, I am no way diminishing her crime,” Roberts added.

“She deserved to be in prison, of course she did. She committed a crime, she took another woman’s life and she had to be punished for it.

“However, you cannot ever not think, if she had help when she needed it would she have done what she done?”

She continued: “I can’t deny the woman I met, the woman I had in front of me and how I bonded with her and how she reacted to me and how she responded to me and my questions.

“She’s still a human being. There is no way I could have met her and it not have an impact on me.

“I think she knows she wasted her life, and I think she knows she could have done good in her life but she didn’t.”