The Murder of Colleen Slemmer
Colleen Slemmer was born on September 20, 1975. She lived in Orange Park, Florida with her mother, stepfather, and younger sister. In September of 1994, because her family couldn’t afford to send her to college, she decided to enroll in Job Corps, a government vocational training program, where she could study what she was most interested in, which was computers.
The closest Job Corps center was in Jacksonville, but they didn’t offer any training in computers, so she enrolled in the Job Corps location in Knoxville, TN instead. She was only 19 when she was murdered by Christa Gail Pike and several accomplices. The Job Corps center closed shortly after the killing.
Christa Gail Pike is the youngest woman ever sentenced to death in the United States, and the only woman on Tennessee’s Death Row. She was born on March 10, 1976 in West Virginia, and murdered her classmate in 1995 at the age of 18; she was 20 when she was convicted of the torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer. Also charged were Pike's boyfriend, Tadaryl D. Shipp, 18, and friend, Shadolla R. Peterson, 19.
Pike had a troubled and difficult life as a child, and she dropped out of high school, then joined the Job Corps. Dr. Engum, a psychiatrist who testified at her trial, described Pike as an "extremely bright young woman," and said that Pike had an IQ score of 111. According to Dr. Engum, tests showed Pike had no symptoms of brain damage and was not insane, however, he also concluded that she suffers from a very severe borderline personality disorder.
Christa became jealous of Colleen Slemmer because she decided that Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp; friends of Slemmer denied these accusations. Pike started dating Shipp, who was a year younger than she was, after they met in Job Corps. They bonded over developing an interest in the occult and devil worship together.
Pike, Shipp, Peterson, and Slemmer were all students at the Knoxville Job Corps Center together. On January 12, 1995, they all signed out of the log book at their dorm, and walked together to the woods, where Slemmer was told they wanted to make peace by smoking marijuana together. The log book showed that Pike, Shipp, Peterson, and Slemmer left together, and that Slemmer never came back.
The State presented testimony from Harold James Underwood, Jr., a police officer who worked the crime scene. Underwood testified that Pike came to the scene with several other females, asked Underwood why the area had been marked off, asked him about the identity of the victim, and asked whether or not the police had any suspects. None of the other females spoke during the fifteen minutes the group was there.
Underwood noticed that Pike appeared amused and giggled and moved around. He also noticed that Pike was wearing a necklace in the shape of a pentagram. After learning that the victim had a pentagram carved on her chest, he reported Pike's behavior and necklace to his superiors.
After her arrest, Pike confessed to the torture and murder of Slemmer, but insisted to police that they were just trying to scare her. According to court testimony, Slemmer was attacked by Pike and Shipp while Peterson acted as a lookout as soon as they got to the secluded spot. Slemmer was taunted, beaten, and slashed for the next thirty minutes, and a pentagram was carved on her chest. Then Pike smashed her skull with a large chunk of broken asphalt, killing her. Pike kept a piece of the skull and was showing it off at school. Within thirty-six hours the three were arrested.
Pike was charged with first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Knoxville Police Department Investigator York testified that Pike submitted to a statement a day after the body was found.
In her statement to investigators, Pike described enticing Slemmer with false promises of marijuana, walking from the Job Corps Center on Dale Avenue to a secluded area of Tyson Park park, where Pike suddenly turned on Slemmer.
Pike said she and an accomplice stabbed and slashed Slemmer, and she threw a rock that struck the victim in the head. When Slemmer tried to run, Pike made a long cut in her back.
She told York she decided she couldn't let Slemmer go because Pike would be cut from the program when the Job Corps found out about the assault on Slemmer.
“She wouldn't shut up,'' murder suspect Christa Gail Pike told police in a taped confession played in Knox County Criminal Court. “She kept talking and talking. She would start talking again, and I would say, `Shut up.' I didn't want to hear her talking.”
After her attackers struck her on the head with large chunks of broken asphalt, Slemmer’s body began jerking in the dirt.
“I said, ‘Colleen, do you know who's doing this to you?’ ” Pike recalled in the taped statement, given Jan. 14, 1995, the day after Slemmer's body was discovered. Slemmer did not speak, Pike told Investigator Randy York. “She only moaned”, Pike said.
Pike denied carving the pentagram or keeping a piece of Slemmer's skull. The Prosecution called two former Job Corps students to the stand who said Pike not only spoke of killing Slemmer but that she told them she had kept a piece of skull as a souvenir. Detectives found the piece of skull in Pike's jacket pocket.
Kim Iloilo of Shelby, NC, remembered Pike from breakfast the morning after the murder. “I asked her what she had done with the piece of skull,” Iloilo said. “She said it was in her pocket. She said, ‘And, yes, I'm eating breakfast with it.’ ”
Dr. Engum testified that the defendant is not so dysfunctional that she needs to be institutionalized, but that she has a collection of problems in interpersonal relationships, in behavioral self control, and in achieving goals.
During direct examination, Dr. Engum shared his opinion that Pike had not acted with deliberation or premeditation but had acted in a manner consistent with his diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, in which she “lost control.”
On cross-examination, Dr. Engum stated that there was no question that the defendant had killed Slemmer, and agreed that Pike deliberately enticed Slemmer to the park, carved a pentagram onto Slemmer's chest, bashed Slemmer's head against the concrete, and had smashed Slemmer's head with asphalt.
On March 22, 1996, after only a few hours of deliberation, Pike was found guilty on both counts and on March 30, Pike was sentenced to death by electrocution for the murder charge, and 25 years in prison for the conspiracy charge.
Shipp received a life sentence with the possibility of parole plus 25 years. Peterson received probation for pleading guilty to being an accessory after the fact, and for turning State’s evidence against Pike and Shipp.
This is an excerpt from a letter Slemmer’s mother wrote the News Sentinel following the verdict.
We are, however, outraged and extremely angry with the fact that one year after her death, we find out from other sources that Colleen Slemmer was buried without her head, the piece of skin from her chest that had the pentagram carved and her genitals.
It seems that the coroner and the district attorney's office feel that families do not have to be informed of the fact that the state intends to use the victims' body parts as evidence.
We had been under the impression for the past year that we buried our daughter as an entire human being.
We are also angry at the fact that the state allowed co-defendant Shadolla Peterson to walk with just time served and probation for her participation in the crime.
This was allowed even though her name is splattered all over the statement co-defendant Tadaryl Shipp gave to investigator York of the Knoxville Police Department.
The reason given to us was that Shipp's statement was insufficient evidence and could not be used against her.
Shadolla R Peterson maintains a LinkedIn account where, as of 12/28/2022, she describes her occupation as being an “entrepreneur/visionary”. She also says that she has a decade of experience as a professional stylist.
She lists her specialties as Chemical Services, Skin care, Hair texturizing, Fashion, Hair Coloring, Team Building, Motivational Speaking, and Life-Style consulting.
Following the guilty verdict, Pike launched, cancelled, and then again launched an appeal of her conviction in the Tennessee courts. In June 2001, then in June 2002, Pike asked the courts to drop her appeal, seeking execution via electrocution. Criminal Court Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz granted the request and an execution date of August 19, 2002, was set.
Pike soon changed her mind again and on July 8, 2002, defense lawyers filed a motion to allow the appeal process to begin anew. The motion was denied. On August 2, 2002, a state appeals court ruled the proceedings would be continued and the execution was not carried out.
On August 24, 2001, Pike (with alleged assistance from inmate Natasha Cornett - an article about whom will follow this one) attacked and attempted to strangle fellow inmate Patricia Jones with a shoe string, nearly choking her to death.
Pike was convicted of attempted first degree murder for this assault on August 12, 2004. Although the Tennessee Department of Corrections believes that Cornett was an accomplice to this crime, there was insufficient evidence to charge her with helping Pike attack Jones.
In December 2008, Pike's latest request for a new trial was turned down and she was returned to death row. With this denial Pike's allowed appeals under the rules and procedures of the State of Tennessee's criminal justice system were exhausted.
In March 2012, it was revealed that Pike made escape plans involving a corrections officer named Justin Heflin and a New Jersey man named Donald Kohut. It has never been determined how it began. Kohut, a personal trainer in his early thirties, started writing letters and corresponding with Pike around the beginning of 2011.
By July of that year, Kohut, of Flemington, New Jersey, was making the 900 mile drive to Nashville, Tennessee once or twice a month to visit Pike in person on visiting days. Eventually Kohut concocted an escape plan and enlisted corrections officer Justin Heflin, who agreed to participate in return for bribes.
The Tennessee Department of Corrections has not provided details about the plan; the unsealed indictment sketched out a scene where a prison key would be traced and then a duplicate created from the tracing somehow. The attempted prison break was thwarted by the Tennessee Department of Corrections, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) and the New Jersey State Police. The plan was not very far along when it was uncovered.
In March 2012, Kohut was arrested and charged with bribery and conspiracy to commit escape, Heflin was arrested and charged with bribery, official misconduct and conspiracy to commit escape, and Pike was not charged because investigators couldn’t prove if she was actually a participant in the conspiracy or was merely aware of it.
On May 31, 2012, Kohut was sentenced to seven years in prison. Heflin, who cooperated with authorities after his arrest, served no prison time but was terminated from his job with the Tennessee Department of Corrections.
In May 2014 Pike's lawyers entered an appeal in the federal court system. Her lawyers sought a commutation of the sentence from death to prison on the following grounds: ineffective assistance of counsel; Pike suffered from mental illness; and capital punishment as administered in Tennessee is unconstitutional. In a 61-page ruling by U.S. District Judge Harry S. Mattice Jr. issued on March 11, 2016, all grounds were rejected and the requested commutation was denied.
On August 22, 2019, having heard the same appeal by Pike's lawyers on October 1, 2018, the three judge United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit panel unanimously upheld the lower court ruling and denied relief.
On August 27, 2020, Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery's office requested the Tennessee Supreme Court to set an execution date for Pike. On June 7, 2021, Pike's attorneys filed a motion to oppose the execution date and request a Certificate of Commutation.
In 2023, a Knox County Criminal Court Judge Scott Green denied a motion from Pike’s attorneys to to reopen the case, saying that Pike was not a minor at the time of the murder, and that a jury saw fit to sentence her to death.
Pike’s lawyers argued that her punishment was not justified and filed a motion to reopen for post-conviction relief, on constitutional grounds, and also arguing that if she was just a little bit younger, like Shipp, she would be up for parole in three years, not facing death.
“At the capital sentencing hearing for the murder, the jury determined that a sentence of death was appropriate based upon its finding of two aggravating circumstances: that ‘the murder was especially heinous, atrocious or cruel in that it involved torture or serious physical abuse beyond that necessary to produce death’ and that, ‘the murder was committed for the purpose of avoiding, interfering with or preventing a lawful arrest of the defendant or another.’”
—Judge Scott Green, ruling against Pike
If Pike is executed, she would be the first woman executed by Tennessee in roughly 200 years. Slemmer's mother May Martinez told WBIR that she still hasn't gotten peace back and won't until Pike, now 47, is put to death.
"Honestly, my heart breaks every single day because I keep reliving it and reliving it," Martinez told the station. "I want this to happen before I die. Otherwise, nobody will see justice."
Meanwhile, Martinez told WBIR that both Pike and Shipp have been giving interviews about her daughter's murder while behind bars. "They both get fame from it. And I just want Christa down so I can end it," she said.
I think Pike was WAAAAAY overestimating her bfs looks. 😆
Unfortunately a lot of people who work with "troubled youth" have to be trained on how to handle physically violent young people. I know of an person who killed his adoptive mother due to his severe mental illness. People can be more capable of harm than they appear to be.