JUDGE: I honestly don’t know how you live with yourself… because this is unbelievable to me… I didn’t even hear you say you were sorry. CHRISTA PIKE: It’s okay, mommy Christa Pike will become the first woman executed in the state of Tennessee in over 200 years and the youngest woman ever sentenced to death in modern American history.
In the previous episode, we explored the dark past of Christa Pike, her troubled childhood, her obsession, and the growing tension with Colleen Slemmer. What began as a teenage rivalry led four young people into the woods that night, but only three came back. Before we close this case, there are still parts of Christa Pike’s story that few have ever heard.
CARISSA HANSEN: I should be the one in her seat, not her. I should be the one to be punished for this crime, not her. Yeah, I was a terrible mother. Christa and Tadaryl weren’t empty-handed. One held a small butcher’s blade, the other a utility knife. Their posture alone made it clear. They were ready to cross a line.
Nearby, Shadolla lingered nervously, told to act as a lookout. Colleen denied everything, her voice trembling. But Christa didn’t care. She lunged at her, knocking Colleen to the ground, striking again and again. “Why are you doing this to me?” Colleen screamed. Christa didn’t answer. Her boot connected with Colleen’s face, her fury spiraling out of control.
Mud and tears mixed as Colleen pushed herself up and tried to run, but Tadaryl caught her from behind and slammed her back to the ground. Christa’s blade traced across her back, leaving a deep burning line that made Colleen scream. Later, Christa would admit she stood there watching, almost mesmerized as Colleen struggled to breathe.
When Colleen tried to crawl away again, Christa stopped her, slicing through her shirt and skin. Colleen’s voice broke as she begged, “If you let me go, I’ll walk all the way to Florida.” Christa’s reply was chillingly flat “Be quiet. It’s harder to keep going when you start talking.” She would later confess that the more Colleen begged, the more she hit her. Each plea made her angrier.
Meanwhile, Christa’s friends began to realize, this wasn’t what they thought it was. They would later tell police they believed it was just a plan to scare Colleen, not something real. But Christa was past the point of return. Consumed by rage, she attacked again, aiming for Colleen’s neck and shoulders. Colleen’s cries echoed through the trees.
Against all odds, she managed to lift herself up one last time and tried to escape again. Christa later described remembering every sound. The gasping breaths, the struggling voice, the eerie quiet between them. And in that moment, she understood: if Colleen got away and told anyone, she’d be expelled, maybe even arrested. That thought set her off completely.
COLEEN SLEMMER’s MOTHER: Every child goes through broken homes or mixed-up families or whatever… that does not give a child a right to kill. As Colleen tried to rise again, Christa grabbed a broken chunk of asphalt lying nearby. She swung it down with full force once, twice, until Colleen collapsed.
The forest went silent. Tadaryl joined in, hurling rocks until there was no movement left. When it was over, the stillness was unbearable. The medical examiner later confirmed the brutal reality. Colleen’s heart had still been beating through much of the assault. None of the injuries were instantly fatal. She felt every second of it.
The life drained from her slowly, as if the earth itself was pulling her away. When the assault finally ended, Shadolla was still standing guard, pale and shaking. Christa and Tadaryl dragged Colleen’s body a few feet away into the shadows between the trees and covered it with dirt and scraps. DETECTIVE: What were they gonna do? TADARYL SHIPP: Well, at first I t
hought they were just gonna scare her. At least… that’s what I thought, But when we got there everything changed. DETECTIVE: There was a picture that’s cut on her chest. Who did that? TADARYL SHIPP: I did that! DETECTIVE: Alright, now tell me what it was? TADARYL SHIPP: It was a Satanic star! Then Christa did something even investigators struggled to process. She bent down and tore off a piece of Colleen’s skull, slipping it into her jacket pocket.
It wasn’t random. She told friends later that she took it as a “trophy”. Investigators discovered she believed in an occult idea that a person’s soul couldn’t move on if the body wasn’t whole. By keeping that peace, Christa thought she could “hold onto” Colleen’s spirit. COLEEN SLEMMER’s MOTHER: She has a compassion, helping people, feeding people.
She always fed the children that was handicapped. She kept telling her, “Let me go back to Florida”. “I will not tell anybody.” They knock her down and cut her again. Four students had signed out that evening. Only three came back. Later that night, Christa showed up at her friend Kim’s room. Laughing, singing, even dancing.
She told her everything, proud of what she’d done. The next morning, after Colleen’s body was discovered, Christa sat in the cafeteria, eating breakfast like it was any other day. She still had the skull piece with her. To another student, she lifted her boots, still marked from the night before, and said with a twisted smile, “That’s not mud. That’s from last night.
” Decades have passed, but one part of Colleen Slemmer has never come home. A fragment of her skull, carved out in the brutality of that night, still sits in a state evidence locker. The court refused to release it, ruling it must remain until every appeal in Christa Pike’s case is over. For her mother, May Martinez, the pain never ended.
She said, “I just want all of her back, so I can finally bury my child whole.” But justice, cold and procedural, said no. And somewhere, behind the walls of a courthouse, a piece of Colleen still waits to rest. COLEEN SLEMMER’s MOTHER: They need to put Colleen to rest, execute her, or give her life and give me the rest of Colleen back, so I can live. The next morning, a university groundskeeper stumbled upon something that would change everything. At first, he thought it was the remains of an animal lying in the dirt.
But as he stepped closer, he froze. The shape before him wasn’t that of an animal at all. It was human. He saw a bare torso and realized in shock that he was standing over the scene of a murder. By 8 a.m., Friday, January 13th, officers from the Knoxville Police Department and campus security had arrived at the scene.
One of the first responding officers later said, “I thought I was looking at her face, but it was so damaged I couldn’t even tell where the face began.” OFFICER: We have a body of a white female who appears to be in her 20s. She’s about 5’2 to 5’4. It’s hard to tell how much she weighs. She’s got brunette hair. I can tell you that she has been severely beaten… Christa Pike had made a long list of mistakes after the crime.
The very next day, she returned to the site, but this time the area was sealed off. Officer Harold James Underwood Jr. testified that Christa approached him with a few other girls, asking what had happened. When told about the murder, she casually asked who the victim was and whether the police had any suspects. None of her friends said a word. Underwood later said her behavior immediately stood out.
She was smiling, even laughing while asking about the killing, as if it amused her. Around her neck hung a pendant shaped like a pentagram, the very same symbol carved onto the victim’s body. Underwood reported her to his superiors, and investigators began questioning students from Job Corps. Not long after, Christa made another fatal mistake.
She left her jacket, the same one that had once held a piece of Colleen’s skull in the university’s administrative office. When the jacket was handed over to the police, they found that piece of bone inside. Christa, without realizing it, had just helped investigators build a rock-solid case against herself.
Throughout the day following the murder, she bragged to classmates about what she’d done, claiming she had tortured and killed Colleen. Her classmates were horrified. When police began their questioning, several came forward immediately. Within just 36 hours of the crime, all three were arrested. Christa Pike, Tadaryl Shipp and Shadolla Peterson. Investigators were shocked to discover that Christa, the smallest and youngest of the group, had been the ring leader. People couldn’t believe it. “She looked so sweet” one officer said.
“She had such an innocent face.” Tadaryl denied being the one in charge, but admitted he helped carve the pentagram, “the satanic star”, as he called it. Shadolla, meanwhile, said she had only been a witness. It didn’t take long for Shadolla to break. When Christa learned that her friend was talking to police, she confessed everything herself.
CHRISTA PIKE: I was the first one they arrested, the first one they interviewed. And I thought that, if I went in there and told him, that I did, every single thing that happened up there, that Tadaryl and Shadolla would just get to walk out of there and they wouldn’t worry about them anymore, because they had the real killer.
…down to the smallest, most disturbing details. Her written statement was 42 pages long, then walked them back into the woods to show exactly how it all happened. The evidence was overwhelming. Christa Pike was arrested and charged with first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. And as investigators would soon find out.
REPORTER: The victim’s partially dressed body was found in this brushy area Friday morning. An autopsy confirmed she was slashed repeatedly with a meat cleaver and some other small cutting device, perhaps a razor blade or box opener. Authorities say she was then beaten over the head with a large chunk of asphalt from this pile.
COLLEEN SLEMMER’s MOTHER: I would like to see her killed and not go on living with taxpayers money paying for her to live in jail, to get an education. It did not involve a university student. It did not occur on the bike trail. It was not a random or a stranger to stranger incident. The motive of the crime appears to be love triangle.
It appears that both of the females involved had been involved with a 17-year-old male. I’m glad it wasn’t a student, but still it’s kind of it’s still frightening that it would happen over here. You just don’t think it would ever happen to you. You think, well, you know, I’m 18. It’s not going to happen to me. I can walk and I know self-defense, but that really makes you stop and think.
The trial of Christa began on March 22nd, 1996. The prosecution was led by Bill Crabtree, an assistant district attorney for Knoxville. In his opening statement to the jury, he said, “The evidence in this case points to an act so disgusting, so inhuman, so monstrous and vile that it matches and even surpasses anything you have ever seen in movies, read in books, or imagined in your worst nightmares.
” This is the skull from the victim, later identified as Colleen Slemmer. These documents shows… This must be referred to a pentagram five pointed star in a circle. The defense argued that Christa suffered from mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder, and therefore could not appreciate the consequences of her actions. Dr.
Eric Engum, the psychologist who examined her, testified that every test he administered showed Christa was sane and had no brain damage that could explain her brutality. Her family testified on her behalf, essentially admitting they had been such poor parents that they bore some responsibility for her behavior.
Almost no one of sound mind disputed that, but neither the judge nor the jurors found that it justified torturing and killing an innocent girl. The jury deliberated an hour and 15 minutes after listening to testimony about Christa Pike’s harsh upbringing. Her father says he couldn’t control her and eventually kicked her out at age 13. GLENN PIKE — Christa Pike’s father She voiced her opinion to me that she no longer wanted my name and that she wanted to be adopted. And I signed papers for her to be adopted.
During the trial, Christa cried constantly in the courtroom, but her tears did not sway the jurors. It took them only a few hours to convict her on all counts. The jurors described her as “an angelic face with the heart of a devil”. Christa Pike was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death by electric chair.
Tadaryl Shipp received life in prison with the possibility of parole and Shadolla Peterson avoided prison after agreeing to testify against the others. She plead guilty as an accessory after the fact and received probation. A few days after Christa learned she had been sentenced to death, she wrote a chilling letter to Tadaryl Shipp, her lover and accomplice. It read, “Please write me. I miss you so much.
See what I got for trying to be nice to that [ __ ]. I just smashed her brain so she would die fast, not suffer, bleeding out. And they [ __ ] decide to fry me. Isn’t that [ __ ]? Please write and tell me how you feel. And tell your lawyer. If he needs me to testify in your defense, I will. Love you forever.” She signed the letter “Lil’ Devil”.
Colleen Slemmer’s mother, MAY MARTINEZ: Crista kept looking back, laughing and joking, sending notes to her mom, sending notes to her lawyer, just laughing away. When the media frenzy over the “Satanic murder” finally faded, Christa once again found herself in the headlines. On August 24th, 2001, 5 years into her sentence, she tried to kill again.
Her new target was her cellmate, Patricia Jones. Christa attacked her with a shoelace, trying to strangle her. The woman barely survived. Later, in a phone call to her mother, Christa said, “I bet, if she ever comes near me again, I’ll do it again.” She was tried again and convicted of attempted first-degree murder. In 2012, Christa tried to escape from prison.
While incarcerated, she began corresponding with a personal trainer from New Jersey named Donald Kohut. Kohut began driving 900 miles to Tennessee to visit her regularly. 34 year-old Kohut was charged with bribery and conspiracy to commit escape and 22-year-old guard Justin Heflin, who worked at Christa’s facility, was charged as an accomplice. The plan, to put it mildly, was reckless.
Nearly 30 years have passed since the crime. Even though all her appeals have been exhausted, she continues to claim she should not be put to death. Because she is the only woman on death row in Tennessee, Christa has effectively lived in permanent isolation. In Tennessee, death row inmates are housed separately from the general population, but with good behavior, they are allowed to work, spend time outdoors, and eat in communal areas.
Christa has none of those privileges. With no other women on death row, she cannot work or interact with anyone else. CHRISTA PIKE: I think I deserve to be in here for the rest of my life. I do. I know I do. I know I don’t deserve to be out walking around with everybody else in normal society. I did something horrible. That is unacceptable.
And I realize that. But I don’t deserve to die for the actions of three individuals when I’m only one person. According to her attorney, Christa spends 22 to 24 hours a day in a cell no larger than a parking space. Her routine is mechanical. “Breakfast at 6:30. Then a brief walk, a shower, and back inside. Until the next time they let her out.
” CHRISTA PIKE: I live in one room 23 hours a day, and for going on almost 12 years. That’s a long time. I’m only out of my room 1 hour a day and that’s just in another cage. It’s like a dog cage and kennel. So I’m either in a box or in a kennel and you know that’s pretty much it. Years after her brutal crime, Christa Pike found a new way to shock the public.
From her prison cell, she wrote letters and drew cards, later sold online for profit. Her words, her handwriting, sold to the highest bidder as collectors sought a piece of infamy. For the victim’s mother, it was unbearable. While Pike’s name made money, May Martinez was left furious, calling it “a business built on horror”. To her and to many o
thers, it was proof that some people will do anything, even profit from pure evil… Today, Christa’s future looks grim. She has no chance of parole, and her attempt to kill her cellmate erased any possibility of clemency. However, on August 27th, 2020, Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery formally requested that an execution date be set for Christa Pike. Since the start of the modern death penalty era in 1976, only 18 women have been executed across the entire United States.
On September 30th, 2026, she will likely eat her final meal, take her last steps in shackles, and sit down in the electric chair to face the end. When that day comes, the family of Colleen Slemmer may finally find the justice they’ve been waiting for, knowing that the punishment for their daughter’s horrific death has finally been carried out…
