Christa Pike on death row: the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer and what followed

Christa Pike was 18 when she killed Job Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer in Tennessee in 1995. She became the youngest woman sentenced to death in the US since 1972.

Tennessee's youngest female death row inmate: the Christa Pike case

Christa Pike was 18 years old when she murdered her Job Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer on 12 January 1995. The killing — carried out in woodland near the University of Tennessee in Knoxville — was among the most brutal on record in the state. Pike's subsequent conviction made her the only woman on Tennessee's death row and, according to the-line-up.com, the youngest woman in the United States to be sentenced to death since the 1972 Furman v. Georgia ruling, which had invalidated existing legal frameworks for capital punishment across America.

A childhood marked by neglect and instability

Pike was born in West Virginia in 1976. Her early years were shaped by parental neglect: her parents' marriage was repeatedly disrupted by infidelity and deteriorating mental health. Those familiar with her upbringing have described an infant left to crawl through pet waste while her mother maintained a heavy social life, even as the child began suffering severe seizures.

A stabilising influence — her paternal grandmother — was lost in 1988 when the woman died. Pike was 12 at the time. Shortly afterwards, she attempted suicide for the first time. She received little support following that attempt. Violence continued to mark her home life: one of her mother's boyfriends struck her in the face, and Pike herself was later accused of molesting a younger half-sister during a period spent at her father's home. Pike claimed she had her own history of sexual abuse, though people close to her have described her as a pathological liar and expressed scepticism about those accounts.

Her school attendance was inconsistent, her grades declining sharply alongside her domestic upheaval. During her second year of high school she spent time in a juvenile facility, where she first heard about Job Corps — a government programme designed to equip low-income young people with vocational skills.

Meeting Slemmer, and a plan hatched out of jealousy

Pike began attending the Knoxville, Tennessee Job Corps programme in the autumn of 1994. There she met Tadaryl Shipp, with whom she began a romantic relationship. The couple developed an interest in the occult. She also met fellow student Colleen Slemmer, 19.

Pike became convinced — a belief those close to Slemmer disputed — that Slemmer intended to pursue Shipp. Consumed by jealousy, Pike devised a plan with a friend, Shadolla Peterson, to lure Slemmer to a remote steam plant on the edge of the University of Tennessee campus.

On 12 January 1995, Pike told Slemmer she wished to make peace and invited her to walk into the nearby woods to share marijuana. Pike, Shipp, Peterson, and Slemmer all signed out of their dormitory together. Only three of them would return.

The killing

Once the group reached the isolated location, Peterson acted as lookout while Pike and Shipp attacked Slemmer. Over approximately 30 minutes, they beat and cut her, carving a pentagram into her chest. Pike then struck a killing blow to Slemmer's head using a large piece of asphalt. She removed a fragment of Slemmer's skull and kept it as a trophy.

After returning to the Job Corps campus, Pike began showing the skull fragment to others. Within 36 hours, police took her into custody. The dormitory sign-out log confirmed that four students had left and only three returned. Detectives found the skull shard in Pike's jacket pocket.

Trial, conviction, and death sentence

Pike confessed to torturing and killing Slemmer following her arrest, though she maintained the death had not been premeditated — that a scare tactic had escalated beyond her intentions. The confession, combined with the physical evidence, left little room for doubt at trial. On 22 March 1996, Pike was found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Eight days later she was sentenced to death by electrocution, with an additional 25 years for the conspiracy charge.

Shipp received a life sentence with the possibility of parole, plus a further 25 years. Peterson, who cooperated with prosecutors, pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact and was given probation.

Years of appeals and reversals

Pike began challenging her conviction through the Tennessee state courts in June 2001. The following year, acting against her lawyers' advice, she withdrew the appeal and requested immediate execution by electrocution. An execution date was set for 19 August 2002.

On 8 July 2002 — with weeks remaining — she reversed course again. Her legal team filed a motion to reinstate the appeal process. That motion was initially denied, but a three-judge panel intervened 17 days before the scheduled execution and ordered that proceedings continue.

A further request for a new trial, submitted in December 2008, was rejected. With all state-level avenues closed, Pike's lawyers moved into the federal court system in May 2014, seeking a commutation of her sentence from death to a lesser term. That process was ongoing at the point the-line-up.com's account of the case was published.

The encounter on death row

The-line-up.com also reports on a journalist's visit to Pike in prison, describing an encounter with a woman whose careful appearance — immaculate makeup, neatly styled hair — stood in sharp contrast to the nature of her crime. The report notes that Pike's demeanour during the visit included an unexpected final gesture that the journalist described as leaving them unsettled.

Pike remains the sole woman on Tennessee's death row. Her case continues to draw attention both for the savagery of the original crime and for the protracted legal proceedings that have kept her sentence from being carried out for nearly three decades.

Source: The Sun