Christa Pike, who earned her status as Tennessee’s only female death row inmate for stabbing and bludgeoning a classmate to death and then attempting an elaborate jailbreak, was featured in a recent episode of Investigation Discovery’s “Mean Girl Murders.”
Pike, now 48, was convicted of murdering Colleen Slemer, a fellow computer programming classmate at Knoxville Vocational Institute, in 1995. Slemer was 19 at the time. Pike committed the murder because he believed Slemer was trying to “steal” his boyfriend. Pike was also the last person in the state to be sentenced to death for a crime committed at age 18.
Pike’s brutal murder was detailed in an episode of the documentary series “She Devils” that aired this Monday.
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Christa Pike looks at her mother after the jury read the guilty verdict in Knox County Criminal Court in Knoxville, Tennessee, on March 29, 1996. (Byron Small/Knoxville News Sentinel)
People who know Slemma denied that she had an affair with Pike’s then-boyfriend, Tadaril Shipp, but in the days before she lured Slemma into the woods. The Straits Times “That little guy needs to be taught a lesson,” Pike told Shipp in 2001.
As detailed in the documentary, Pike, along with Shipp and a friend, Shadra Peterson, snuck out of their dorm and lured Slemer to an abandoned steam plant using marijuana, telling him he wanted to make amends.
Before they left, Pike put a box cutter and a butcher knife in his pockets, according to court documents.
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Colleen Slemer, 19, was tortured for about 30 minutes by Christa Pike in January 1995 before crushing her skull with a block of asphalt. (Mae Martinez/Special to the News Sentinel)
Upon arriving at the secluded factory in the woods, Pike began accusing Slemah of trying to sleep with her boyfriend, and when Slemah denied it, Pike put his knee on her face, beginning a 30-minute battering, punching and slashing spree.
As Peterson looked on, Pike and Shipp attacked Slemer. The teenage assailant carved a pentagram into her chest, then Pike crushed her skull with a block of asphalt. Slemer had been stabbed hundreds of times before she died, according to court documents.
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Krista Pike enters a Knox County courtroom on Dec. 4, 2007. (J. Miles Carey/Knoxville News Sentinel)
The Straits Times reported that Pike then removed part of Slemah’s bloody skull from a gash on his head and secretly slipped it into his jacket pocket, which he then showed to friends, according to the documentary.
The three young men were arrested within 36 hours, and police records showed that four students had left the dormitory, with only three returning. When police eventually searched Shipp’s room, they found a satanic Bible and an altar. Fragments of Slemah’s skull were among Pike’s belongings.
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Christa Pike is in court in 2021. (Knoxville News Sentinel-USA Today Network)
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Shipp was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole because he was only 17 at the time of the crime. He will be eligible for parole in 2026, according to the Tennessee Department of Corrections. Peterson pleaded guilty as an accessory after the murder of Slemmer and was sentenced to six years’ probation.
According to court documents, Pike’s upbringing was filled with violence, sexual abuse, drug abuse and neglect, all of which factored into her trial.
The convicted murderer’s aunt testified that her niece “crawled through dog feces that piled up throughout the house” and that her mother, Carissa Hansen, ignored the child’s violent seizures as a toddler. According to court documents, Hansen attempted suicide after cheating on her husband and separating from him, but the couple remarried two years later. Pike first attempted suicide when she was 12 years old.
According to court documents, Pike’s father sent her to boarding school after her sisters alleged that she had been sexually abused. Pike also said that she had been sexually assaulted and molested several times in her life. Her family and friends have questioned many of these claims, calling her a pathological liar, according to testimony.
Pike’s legal team has appealed her death sentence multiple times. In 2014, they tried to have her sentence commuted to life in prison, arguing that she received insufficient assistance of counsel and that the death penalty was unconstitutional because she had a diagnosed mental illness.
The request was initially denied, but was taken up again in 2018 and turned down a second time by the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, court documents state.
Christa Pike is seen in an April 2008 photo. (J. Miles Carey/Knoxville News Sentinel)
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Pike has been on death row at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville since his conviction, according to Tennessee Department of Corrections records.
In 2001, Pike tried to strangle another inmate, Patricia Jones, with a shoelace. Three years later, she was convicted of attempted murder, Fox News Digital previously reported.
According to the Associated Press, in 2012, Pike recruited corrections officer Justin Heflin and pen pal Donald Kohut to carry out an elaborate escape plan.
Many details about the thwarted escape are being withheld due to security concerns, but Heflin’s unsealed indictment revealed that the three men made copies of the prison locks and planned their escape before prison officials learned of the plan.
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Pike’s execution, which was scheduled for August 27, 2020, was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As of this writing, the state of Tennessee has not yet announced a new execution date.
If she is executed, Pike would be the first woman to be executed in the state in nearly 200 years, according to the documentary.
