Christa Pike, who earned her spot as Tennessee’s only female death row inmate by stabbing and beating her classmate to death – then nearly executing an elaborate prison break – was featured on a recent episode of Investigation Discovery’s “Mean Girl Murders.”
Now 48, Pike was convicted in 1995 for killing fellow Knoxville Job Corps computer programming student Colleen Slemmer, who was 19 at the time. The murder was carried out because Pike believed Slemmer wanted to “steal” her boyfriend. Pike was also the last person sentenced to death for a crime committed when they were 18 in the state.
Pike was the subject of the documentary’s “She-Devil” episode, which featured details of the gruesome killing in the episode 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)
Those who knew Slemmer denied that she ever had intentions with Pike’s then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp. But in the days leading up to luring Slemmer into the woods, according to reporting by the Straits Times in 2001, Pike told Shipp that the “little wh— has to be taught a lesson.”
Pike, along with Shipp and friend Shadolla Peterson, signed out of their dormitory and lured Slemmer with marijuana to an abandoned steam mill, telling her that she wanted to make amends, the documentary details.
Before they left, Pike pocketed a box cutter and a meat cleaver, per court documents.
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Colleen Slemmer, 19, was tortured for about a half hour before Christa Pike crushed her skull with a chunk of asphalt in January 1995. (May Martinez/Special to the News Sentinel)
When they reached the remote mill in the woods, Pike began accusing Slemmer of trying to sleep with her boyfriend. When the other teen denied it, Pike allegedly kneed her in the face, kicking off a half hour of taunting, beating and slashing.
Pike and Shipp attacked Slemmer while Peterson stood watch. The teen assailants carved a pentagram into her chest before Pike smashed her skull with a chunk of asphalt. Before she died, Slemmer had been stabbed hundreds of times, according to court documents.
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Christa Pike enters a Knox County courtroom on Dec. 4, 2007. (J. Miles Cary/Knoxville News Sentinel)
Pike fished a bloody piece of Slemmer’s skull out of the gash in her head and secretly slipped it into her jacket pocket, according to reporting by the Straits Times. Pike showed the piece of skull to friends, according to the documentary.
All three teens were arrested within 36 hours, with police noting that four students had signed out of the dorms and only three had returned. When they eventually searched Shipp’s room, they found a satanic bible and an altar. The fragment of Slemmer’s skull was found among Pike’s belongings.
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Christa Pike is pictured in court in 2021. (Knoxville News Sentinel-USA TODAY NETWORK)
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Shipp was given a life sentence with the possibility of parole, because he was only 17 when he carried out the crime. He will become eligible for parole in 2026, according to the Tennessee Department of Correction. Peterson got off with six years of probation after pleading guilty to being an accessory in Slemmer’s murder.
Pike’s upbringing, fraught with violence, sexual abuse, drug abuse and neglect, was a pervasive element of her trial, according to court documents.
The convicted killer’s aunt testified that her niece would regularly “crawl around through piles of dog stool all over the house” and that her mother, Carissa Hansen, ignored her child’s severe seizures as a toddler. Hansen attempted suicide after cheating on her husband and separating, according to court documents, but the couple would remarry for two years. Pike attempted suicide for the first time when she was 12.
Pike’s father sent her away to boarding school after her younger sisters claimed that she molested them, per court documents. Pike also said she was sexually assaulted and molested at several points in her life. Her family and friends cast doubt on many of these claims, noting that she is a pathological liar, per testimony.
Pike’s lawyers appealed her death sentence multiple times. In 2014, attorneys tried to commute her sentence to life in prison, arguing that she had ineffective assistance from counsel and that the death penalty would be unconstitutional due to her diagnosed mental illness.
That request was denied but was dredged up in 2018 and denied a second time by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, per court documents.
Christa Pike is shown in an April 2008 photo. (J. Miles Cary/Knoxville News Sentinel)
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Since her conviction, Pike has lived on death row at Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville, according to Tennessee Department of Correction records.
In 2001, Pike tried to strangle another incarcerated woman, Patricia Jones, with a shoestring. Three years later, she was convicted of attempted murder, Fox News Digital previously reported.
In 2012, Pike recruited corrections officer Justin Heflin and pen pal Donald Kohut in an elaborate escape attempt, the Associated Press reported.
Although many details surrounding the foiled escape have been suppressed due to security concerns, Heflin’s unsealed indictment revealed that the trio intended to make a copy of a prison key and laid out a plan for escape before prison personnel were tipped off to the plot.
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Pike’s scheduled execution on Aug. 27, 2020, was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time of this report, Tennessee had yet to announce a new execution date.
If she were executed, per the documentary, Pike would be the first woman to be executed in the state in approximately 200 years.
