NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Nashville Banner) — This story was originally published by the Nashville Banner. Sign up for their newsletter.
Over the course of three days in August, Christa Pike watched as lawyers and expert witnesses in a Knoxville courtroom meticulously analyzed the abuse she suffered as a child and the different methods the state could use to kill her. Attending by way of a video call from the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row hovered over the proceedings on a projector screen as testimony moved from the rapes that began before she was in kindergarten to the question of whether she would suffer more during a hanging or a lethal injection.
At one point, after a day of testimony, Pike was so overwhelmed that she had to be carried out of the room where she’d been sitting, according to multiple people who were at the hearing.
Now 50, she is set to be executed on Sept. 30 for her part in the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer at an East Tennessee job training program when they were both still teenagers. She and her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, along with another teen girl, Shadolla Peterson, lured Slemmer to a wooded area where they tortured and killed her. Shipp, who was still 17 at the time, was sentenced to life in prison but could still be released on parole. Peterson agreed to testify for the state and avoided prison time altogether. But Pike, who was 18 at the time of the murder, was sentenced to death. Absent intervention from a court or Gov. Bill Lee, she will be the first woman executed in the state in more than 200 years.
Last month’s hearing came after the Tennessee Supreme Court appointed a Special Master to hear arguments over whether Pike’s medical and psychological conditions make her uniquely susceptible to a torturous death. Her attorneys have said small veins and a history of difficult blood draws portend complications during a lethal injection similar to the failed IV placement that caused the attempted execution of Tony Carruthers to be aborted in May. A clinical psychologist testified at the hearing that the lethal injection process — including being strapped down to a gurney, possibly by male guards — will result in Pike not merely remembering her sexual traumas, but “fully reliving them.” More recently, a coalition of experts and organizations focused on sexual violence urged the governor to call off Pike’s execution, which they said will cause her to “feel and believe that she is being raped to death.”
The court-appointed Special Master, Judge Mark Ward, announced on Aug. 21 that he would not block the execution after deciding that Pike’s attorneys had not proven it would violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. But the question at the heart of the August court hearing and the clemency petition Pike’s attorneys submitted to the governor earlier this month is something beyond the matters of law.
In Pike, there is a child, sexually brutalized and neglected and arguably failed by the society she was born into; there is an 18-year-old shattering the skull of someone who was not yet 20, stamping out the multitudes she did and would have contained; and there is a 50-year-old woman known now to people close to her as a gentle source of compassion for those around her in the dark place where she has been imprisoned for her entire adult life. How should these be weighed against one another in the pursuit of something like justice?
‘Truly extreme’ childhood trauma
Very few people arrive on death row without a history of profound neglect, abuse or mental illness that goes back to their most formative years. But after an assessment of Pike in 2023, clinical psychologist Dr. Bethany Brand noted that her case was “truly extreme.”
“The level of trauma she was subjected to as a preschooler through her 18th year, when she was arrested, is almost impossible to grasp because it is so severe,” Brand wrote.
In 2024, Tennessee enacted a law making the rape of a child punishable by death. Now the state is preparing to execute a woman who was herself raped by multiple men before she turned 18.
After being subjected to drugs and alcohol while she was still in her mother’s womb, according to Brand’s report, Pike was first sexually abused by her grandmother’s boyfriend, who would orally rape her before she was in kindergarten. Once in school, Pike responded to a teacher’s request for students to draw what they did at home by sketching “a huge penis and demon face.” Her parents were called but neither law enforcement nor child protective services in North Carolina, where the family was living at the time, ever got involved.
After living through periods of physical and emotional torment by extended family members and one of her mother’s husbands, Pike was later raped by a known predatory neighbor, according to Brand’s report and other materials included in the clemency petition. Still a preteen, Pike told her mother and sister about the assault but they did not believe her. When she later reported the rape to a perceptive teacher, the authorities were notified, and the 37-year-old man was arrested. He served a short sentence after pleading guilty to a lesser offense and was soon living in the neighborhood again.
Pike started exhibiting symptoms of severe post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder, according to Brand’s report. She was hospitalized at the age of 12 after overdosing on pills during a suicide attempt. But there would be more trauma to pile on top of what was already there. After another divorce, one of her mother’s boyfriends moved into the family’s home and brought with him violence and depravity. He sexually assaulted Pike, exposed her to an immense personal collection of pornography and abused her physically and verbally. At one point Pike was temporarily removed from the home and a restraining order was put on her mother’s boyfriend. He agreed to move out as part of a legal settlement when Pike was 14.
The young girl’s mental and emotional condition continued to deteriorate. In the wake of her abuse and the devastating death of a grandmother who was her only source of solace, Pike had started to drink alcohol, smoke marijuana and cut herself. In her later teen years, she would try huffing aerosols, and using cocaine, LSD and methamphetamine. At 16, she got pregnant but got an abortion after her mother lied to her about the condition of the fetus, according to Brand’s report. Her remaining teen years included some stretches spent living on the streets.
At the same time, signs of a different child inside her — the one she might have been — were evident. A judge quoted in her clemency petition, who had represented her as an attorney in North Carolina juvenile court proceedings, recalled her “bright, charming and with a sense of humor.”
“We failed her,” he told Pike’s attorneys.
When she was 17 in January 1994, Pike was sexually assaulted again, by a man who saw her walking to the store in Carrboro, North Carolina. She told local police that the man threw her to the ground and started raping her but that she had escaped after hitting him in the head with a rock. She ran to a friend’s house who took her to a hospital, where staff documented “abrasions on her breast and leg, and bruising on her inner thigh close to her genitals and her knee.” They collected a rape kit but the man was never identified or caught.
It was almost a year to the date later that Pike, Shipp and Peterson cornered Colleen Slemmer in a wooded area on the University of Tennessee campus.
‘The sweet little girl that she was’
Colleen Slemmer. Speaking on the phone from her home around an hour outside Jacksonville, Fla., May Martinez sounded like a mother whose daughter could have been murdered 31 years ago or 31 days ago. But her memories of her Colleen as a young girl seemed just as fresh.
“She did a lot of stuff for the school system,” Martinez said. “She worked with the handicapped children at lunch and fed them and made sure they could get around.”
One summer she helped paint her school’s building and she was a regular volunteer at Special Olympics events. She struggled with reading, Martinez remembered, but she was a smart girl. She had a fascination with computers and loved to build them and take them apart with her stepfather. One of her favorite t-shirts said “computer geek.”
“We had her t-shirt made into a teddy bear so we have that at all times,” Martinez said.
After high school, Slemmer went to the Knoxville Job Corps after encouragement from her grandfather. On the evening of Jan. 12, 1995, a 19-year-old Slemmer tried to call her mother back in Florida. The call was brief, interrupted by a faulty signal.
“I called her back about 10 or 10:15 p.m. — she was already gone,” Martinez told the Banner. “I couldn’t get back with her.”
Pike later told police that she hadn’t planned to kill Slemmer, just to fight her. There had been friction between the two and Pike had become convinced that Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, Shipp. That relationship, like so many others in her life, had been marked by violence and toxicity, according to Pike’s clemency petition.
In a statement recorded by police, Pike said she had invited Slemmer to a nearby Blockbuster music store before leading her to a park where Pike said she had hidden some marijuana. When Pike, Slemmer and the two others — whom Pike initially refused to name — got to a secluded area behind the steam plant on the U.T. Agricultural campus, they began to argue. Then, Pike told police, she attacked Slemmer, throwing her to the ground, kicking her repeatedly and slamming her head into the concrete. When Slemmer tried to run away, Shipp caught her and threw her back down. As Slemmer begged for her life, according to Pike’s statement, Pike slashed her body repeatedly with a box cutter, slit her throat and ultimately beat her over the head with a large chunk of asphalt. Shipp later testified at a post-conviction hearing that he was responsible for one of the murder’s most notorious details: using the box cutter to carve a pentagram into Slemmer’s chest.
But another act that became part of the case’s lurid lore was Pike’s. Police found a fragment of Slemmer’s skull in the jacket she’d been wearing during the murder, and two other job corps students said she’d bragged to them about keeping it as a souvenir.
Every detail of the case seemed almost designed to make it fodder for the true crime industrial complex — a female killer, a supposed love triangle, satanic imagery and even Pike’s name evoking medieval weaponry. A Knoxville News-Sentinel story days after the murder cited police sources explaining that the skull fragment was likely kept because "satanists believe the body has to be whole for the soul to escape” and that "by keeping this, they had the soul captive.” In the decades since, the case has been highlighted by various television series and podcasts, and served as the subject of a book.
In March 1996, Pike became one of the youngest women ever sentenced to death, at age 20, and one of only eight people in the modern era of Tennessee’s death penalty to be sentenced to death for a crime committed when she was 18. The other seven, all men, have since had their death sentences vacated and no 18-year-old offender has received a death sentence in the state since she did.
But for May Martinez, Pike’s conviction and sentencing were only the beginning of a decades-long nightmare.
In the immediate aftermath of her daughter’s murder, Martinez said she and her family moved out of the house where they had been living. More recently, after her other daughter died from COVID, they moved out of town completely.
“I couldn’t take the area anymore,” she said. “There’s too many memories. The school, the skating rink, the movies, it’s just all there.”
In interviews over the years, Martinez has told news outlets — as she told the Banner — that the state of Tennessee sporadically mailed pieces of Slemmer's remains, which had been held as evidence, back to her. She told Knoxville’s WBIR earlier this month that the skull fragment Pike had taken was never returned and has since been lost. Pike’s legal team disputes this. An email sent to media Sunday evening read in part that “attorneys have confirmed numerous times with the State that all evidence from the trial associated with Colleen’s remains, including all pieces of skull retained as evidence, was returned to Colleen’s mother.”
Now, a Jacksonville-based victims advocacy organization, is raising money to cover the cost of Martinez traveling to Tennessee later this month for Pike’s execution. She said she does not believe statements of remorse from Pike included in her clemency petition. She said she hoped witnessing the execution herself would quiet a fear of Pike that has stayed with her for decades.
What does she hope for when it’s over?
“That I get some peace and I don’t have to wake up and dream every night or have to take a sleeping pill to sleep and worry about stuff like this,” she said. “And that Colleen can always be remembered as the sweet little girl that she was.”
An ‘incredibly smart’ and ‘deeply empathetic’ woman on death row
By the time Angela Bergman met her in 2021, Pike was 45 years old. As the only woman on the state’s death row since Gail Owens’ release in 2010, she had been essentially held in solitary confinement for more than two decades. She had not only been alone in a cell, but in a cell separated by a set of doors from the rest of the unit where she lived.
Bergman, a veteran attorney at Bass, Berry & Sims, was part of the team that filed a lawsuit in 2022 on Pike’s behalf, challenging the conditions of her incarceration. That litigation ended with a settlement in 2024 allowing Pike to have the same opportunities offered to the state’s condemned men — time outside of her cell, the chance to work a job and meal times with other incarcerated women.
For Bergman, the lawsuit served as the beginning of an attorney-client relationship that turned into a deep friendship. Bergman told the Banner that she was familiar with Pike’s case and with her history in prison. Five years after she was sentenced to death for Slemmer’s murder, Pike had been convicted of attempted murder after an altercation with another incarcerated woman. That woman, Patricia Jones, later testified that Pike had intervened in a fight between her and another inmate and likely saved the other woman’s life. But the headlines announcing Pike’s conviction only added to her notoriety.
“I had a sense of what she looked like on paper,” Bergman said. “What I was not necessarily prepared for was her softness in that moment. Seeing someone who, despite all of the things that had happened to her, all of the isolation — how deeply human she was in those moments.”
In Pike, she said, she came to know an “incredibly smart” and “deeply empathetic person.”
“I’ve never known the person that she was at 18,” Bergman said. “Who she is today — and I think she would say this — is relatively unrecognizable from the person that she was at 18.
Throughout her isolation, the people occasionally placed in cells near Pike were people trying to recover from addiction or suffering from severe mental illness.
“As a lawyer, that always seemed very problematic to me that the only people they would put around Christa were people who were essentially in crisis,” Bergman said. “For Christa, that meant that she was around people who had very severe needs and she would find ways to step in and be a friend to these folks.”
Bergman recalled the story of a woman named Teddy who became Pike’s neighbor while struggling with drug addiction and a heart condition. After first being terrified that her daughter was going to be housed near an infamous killer, Teddy’s mother, Marcy Graves started hearing stories like the ones recounted by Pike’s attorneys in her clemency petition.
“As Teddy was escorted to the shower the first time, she heard Christa’s voice coming through her pie flap, ‘You better not get in that shower with no shower shoes, girl!’” the petition reads. “A few minutes later, an officer handed Teddy a new pair of shower shoes. ‘Love, Christa Pike’ was written in marker on the sole.”
Pike also secured Teddy a radio, Bergman recalled, and the two would spend hours kneeling in front of the doors of their neighboring cells, talking through their respective pie flaps.
“Christa’s commissary order is always hilarious because half of it is for other people and she’s just kind of distributing it around,” Bergman said.
Teddy has since died but Graves contributed a letter in support of Pike’s request for clemency.
Christa is a beautiful soul who did a really bad thing when she was very young,” Graves wrote. “She is not that person anymore.”
Getting the news that Pike had received an execution date the state was likely to keep, Bergman said, was “like getting a cancer diagnosis for a friend, except at the end someone’s going to murder them.” Still, as an attorney, she had a job to do. She was the one sitting by Pike’s side during last month’s excruciating three-day court hearing.
“It was a horrific experience, I think for everyone,” she said.
Bergman has seen the comments on news articles and YouTube videos about that hearing, the ones from people asking why anyone should care if Pike suffers after the way she seemed to delight in Slemmer’s suffering more than 30 years ago. What she doubts is that killing Pike will truly balance the scales.
“No one can change the harm and the pain that was caused by Christa’s actions when she was 18,” Bergman said. “She knows that. I think if anything, she has only come to understand even more deeply how that pain continues to resonate and expand, especially for the victim’s family. No one has denied that pain is real. What I do not understand is how our collective reaction to that pain is to create more pain and harm.”
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Every night, Forrest Sanders brings us stories showcasing the best of humanity. This story profiles, perhaps, Tennessee's most eccentric resident who made an impact on an aspiring journalist. I'm always in awe of Forrest's storytelling; I truly appreciated his vulnerability with this one.
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