There's no getting away from the heinousness of the crime. She, along with two others killed a 19-year-old young woman in a Tennessee park in 1995, prolonging the torture with a boxcutter and meat cleaver, finally bashing the head with a concrete slab to see the brains spill out and keeping a part of the skull bone as souvenir. She admitted the crime to Police, was convicted by a jury in 1996 and has been sitting on Death Row ever since.
What is different about this crime than all the other murders committed every day somewhere in the world, whether planned or spur of the moment crimes? Maybe nothing, but a recent examination of the defendant's brain by a neurologist alleges that there is something different in a killer's brain, involving the frontal lobes not being formed enough to be able to make the ethical decisions which most of us have to make as we go through the motions of daily existence. According to Dr. Jonathan Henry Pincus all killers share the same three characteristics: brain damage, a history of abuse and mental illness.
Of course one might well say she deserves all that's coming to her, she knew what she was doing was wrong and what about the victim in all this who can easily become forgotten? I don't have the full record of Christa Pike's 18 years of life, which included watching animals being killed in a slaughterhouse as a young girl where her grandfather worked, an alcoholic grandmother who verbally abused her and a mother who admitted she had let her child down, along with a boyfriend who dabbled in Satanism to add to the confusion of an intelligent girl who craved attention and achieved her wish in the most tragic of circumstances.
https://youtu.be/pQifBf0ZbPw
