Christa Gail Pike (born March 10, 1976) is an American convicted murderer, and the youngest woman to be sentenced to death in the United States during the post-Furman period.[1] She was 20 when convicted of the torture murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer, which she committed at age 18.
Christa Pike was born in 1976 to Carissa Hansen and Emil Glenn Pike in Beckley, West Virginia. Her parents had a tumultuous relationship, being married for two years, divorced for a year after Hansen was found to be cheating, and remarried for another two years after Hansen attempted suicide.[2] Both of them were frequently negligent. An aunt noted that infant Pike would be "crawling around through piles of dog stool all over the house," and that Hansen wanted to keep partying when she received news that her toddler was experiencing severe seizures.[3] Pike's paternal grandmother would frequently help care for her; Pike believed she was the only one who ever loved her.[3] When her grandmother died in 1988, Pike made her first suicide attempt at age 12, for which she received little support.[3]
Pike's living situation continued to be unstable throughout her teenage years as she was both the recipient, and perpetrator, of violence. One of her mother's boyfriends punched her in the face; criminal charges were filed, then settled.[2] While staying with her father's new family, one of her young half-sisters claimed to have been molested by Pike, causing her father to send her away.[2] Pike additionally claimed to have been sexually assaulted or molested at several points in time; her friends and family doubt these occurrences, noting that she is a pathological liar.[2] In one incident, a man phoned claiming that he was going to rape her; in response, Pike and a friend beat him with a stick in a parking lot.[2]
Although she had been bright as a child, her unstable home life caused her to frequently change schools, causing her performance in school to deteriorate.[4] In tenth grade, she was sent to a juvenile facility for a year, where she became interested in the Job Corps, a government program aimed at helping low-income youth by offering vocational training and career skills.
In the fall of 1994, Pike attended the now-closed Job Corps center in Knoxville, Tennessee. Pike began dating a man a year her junior named Tadaryl Shipp. Together, they developed interest in the occult and devil worship.[5]
Crime
Christa became jealous of her Job Corps classmate, 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, who she thought was trying to "steal" her boyfriend from her; friends of Slemmer denied the accusations. Along with friend Shadolla Peterson, 18, Pike planned to lure Slemmer to an isolated, abandoned steam plant near the University of Tennessee campus.[5]
On January 12, 1995, Pike, Shipp, Peterson, and Slemmer signed out of the dormitory and proceeded to the woods, where Slemmer was told they wanted to make peace by offering her some marijuana.[5] Upon arrival at the secluded location, Slemmer was attacked by Pike and Shipp while Peterson acted as lookout. According to later court testimony, for the next thirty minutes Slemmer was taunted, beaten, and slashed; and a pentagram was carved in her chest.[6][7] Finally, Pike smashed Slemmer's skull with a large chunk of asphalt, killing her. Pike kept a piece of Slemmer's skull.[5]
Pike began to show off the piece of skull around the school, and within thirty-six hours the three were arrested. The log book showed that Pike, Shipp, Peterson, and Slemmer left together and only three returned. Detectives found the piece of skull in Pike's jacket pocket. Soon after her arrest, Pike confessed to police of the torture and killing of Slemmer, but insisted they were merely trying to scare her and it got out of control.[5]
Trial
During Pike's trial, the prosecution was aided by evidence and Pike's confession. Pike was charged with first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. On March 22, 1996, after only a few hours of deliberation, Pike was found guilty on both counts. 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.[5] Peterson, who had turned informant, received probation for pleading guilty to being an accessory after the fact.[7]
Appeals of conviction
Following the guilty verdict, Pike "launched, cancelled and then re-launched" an appeal of her conviction in the Tennessee state courts.[8] In June 2001, then again in June 2002, against the advice of her lawyers, Pike asked the courts to drop her appeal and sought to be executed via electrocution. Criminal Court Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz granted the request and an execution date of August 19, 2002, was set. Pike soon thereafter changed her mind and on July 8, 2002, defense lawyers filed a motion to allow the appeal process to continue. This motion was denied. However, on August 2, 2002, a three judge state appeals court panel ruled that the proceedings should be continued and the execution was not carried out.[9] In December 2008, Pike's latest request for a new trial was turned down and she was returned to death row.[8] With this denial Pike's allowed appeals under the rules and procedures of the State of Tennessee's criminal justice system were exhausted.[10]
In May 2014, Pike's lawyers entered an appeal in the federal court system.[11] 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.[12][13] 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.[14]
Attempted murder conviction
On August 24, 2001, Pike (with alleged assistance from inmate Natasha Cornett) attacked and attempted to strangle fellow inmate Patricia Jones with a shoe string, and nearly succeeded in choking her to death. Jones had been serving a life sentence for the 1995[lower-alpha 1] murder of 84-year-old Alberta Coker in Knoxville at the time of her attack.[15] Pike was convicted of attempted first degree murder on August 12, 2004.[16] Although it is the position of the Tennessee Department of Corrections that Cornett assisted in this crime, their investigators concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge her with helping Pike attack Jones.[17]
Attempted prison break
In March 2012, it was revealed that Pike had made escape plans involving corrections officer Justin Heflin and a New Jersey man named Donald Kohut.[18] Though it has never been determined how it exactly began, Kohut, who worked as a personal trainer and was then in his early thirties, entered into a letter writing correspondence with Pike around the beginning of 2011. By July of that year, Kohut was making the close to 1800 mile (by car) round trip from Flemington, New Jersey to Nashville, Tennessee to visit Pike in person on visiting days once or twice a month. Eventually Kohut communicated a plan for her escape to Pike and enlisted the help of corrections officer Heflin, who agreed to participate in return for cash and gifts.[19]
Because of security concerns, the Tennessee Department of Corrections has not provided many details about the plan; however, the eventually unsealed indictment laid out a scenario where a prison key would be traced and then a duplicate created.[20] Early in 2012, prison personnel received information about the escape plot.[19][21] This led to the attempted prison break being thwarted by a joint investigation involving the Tennessee Department of Corrections, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) and the New Jersey State Police.[18] According to the TBI, the plan was not very far along when uncovered and "the jailbreak was not imminent".[19]
In March 2012, Kohut was arrested and charged with bribery and conspiracy to commit escape, while Heflin was arrested and charged with bribery, official misconduct and conspiracy to commit escape.[22] Pike was not charged and it was unclear to the investigators if she was a participant in the conspiracy other than being aware of it.[19]
On May 31, 2012, Kohut was sentenced to seven years in prison the time to be served at the Tennessee State Northeast Correctional Complex.[23] Heflin, who cooperated with authorities after his arrest, served no prison time, but was terminated from his job with the Tennessee Department of Corrections.[19]
Scheduled execution
On August 27, 2020, Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery's office requested the Tennessee Supreme Court to set an execution date for Pike. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Tennessee and various other factors, Pike's attorneys were granted extensions by the court, allowing them more time to argue as to why Pike should not be executed. The state did not oppose the extensions. On June 7, 2021, Pike's attorneys filed a motion to oppose the execution date and request a Certificate of Commutation. The motion was denied.
Prior to November 2022, Pike had completely exhausted all appeals process. However, in November 2022, the state Supreme Court found that the state's law for juveniles automatically sentenced to life in prison without a chance at parole was unconstitutional. (See Knoxville case State v. Booker, for complete ruling).
On August 30, 2023, lawyers for Pike used the November 2022 Supreme Court ruling (State v. Booker) in an attempt to reopen her bid to have her 1996 conviction and sentence thrown out. Pike's lawyers argued her young age and damaged mental health at the time of the killing should spare her from facing execution.
In October 2023, Knox County Criminal Court Judge Scott Green denied Pike's request, saying the November 2022 Supreme Court ruling didn't apply to her. "The Booker case addressed only juvenile offenders in Tennessee," Judge Green noted. "The high court, in the opinion written by now retired Justice Sharon Lee, specifically addressed the question of juveniles, not adults. This ruling applies only to juvenile homicide offenders-not to adult offenders," the decision states.
Pike, however, was legally an adult, Green wrote.[24]
As of March 10, 2024, the state had not yet set an execution date for Pike.
If Pike is executed, she would be the first woman to be executed in Tennessee in roughly 200 years.[25][26]
In popular culture
The murder of Colleen Slemmer was featured on the TV shows Deadly Women,For My Man, Killer Kids, Martinis and Murder, and Snapped: Killer Couples. A book was written about the murder, called A Love To Die For, by Patricia Springer.
In the U.S. state of California, capital punishment is not allowed to be carried out as of March 2019, because executions were halted by an official moratorium ordered by Governor Gavin Newsom. Before the moratorium, executions had been frozen by a federal court order since 2006, and the litigation resulting in the court order has been on hold since the promulgation of the moratorium. Thus, there will be a court-ordered moratorium on executions after the termination of Newsom's moratorium if capital punishment remains a legal penalty in California by then.
Capital punishment is one of two possible penalties for aggravated murder in the U.S. state of Oregon, with it being required by the Constitution of Oregon.
Margie Velma Barfield was an American serial killer who was convicted of one murder but eventually confessed to six murders in total. Barfield was the first woman in the United States to be executed after the 1976 resumption of capital punishment and the first since 1962. She was also the first woman to be executed by lethal injection.
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in the U.S. state of Texas for murder, and participation in a felony resulting in death if committed by an individual who has attained or is over the age of 18.
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Capital punishment in Alabama is a legal penalty. Alabama has the highest per capita capital sentencing rate in the United States. In some years, its courts impose more death sentences than Texas, a state that has a population five times as large. However, Texas has a higher rate of executions both in absolute terms and per capita.
The Tamms Correctional Center is a closed Illinois Department of Corrections prison located in Tamms, Illinois. Prior to its 2013 closure, the prison housed people in two sections: (1) a 200-bed minimum security facility, opened in 1995, and (2) a 500-bed supermax facility known as the Closed Maximum Security Unit ("CMAX"), opened in 1998, that housed people defined by the prison leadership as most disruptive and dangerous.
Natasha Wallen Cornett is an American criminal currently serving a sentence of life without parole at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center in Nashville for her involvement in the Lillelid murders.
On March 19, 1906, Ed Johnson, a young African American man, was murdered by a lynch mob in his home town of Chattanooga, Tennessee. He had been wrongfully sentenced to death for the rape of Nevada Taylor, but Justice John Marshall Harlan of the United States Supreme Court had issued a stay of execution. To prevent delay or avoidance of execution, a mob broke into the jail where Johnson was held, and abducted and lynched him from the Walnut Street Bridge.
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Capital punishment is a legal punishment in Tennessee.
Thomas Bartlett Whitaker is an American convicted under the Texas law of parties of murdering two family members as a 23-year-old. Whitaker was convicted on December 10, 2003, for the murders of his mother and 19-year-old brother; he was sentenced to death in March 2007. He spent years on death row at the Polunsky Unit near Livingston, Texas, before the commutation of his sentence.
Edmund George Zagorski was an American convicted murderer from Michigan who was executed by the state of Tennessee for the 1983 murders of John Dotson and Jimmy Porter in Robertson County. Zagorski lured the two men into a wooded hunting ground under the pretense of selling them 100 lb of marijuana before shooting them and slitting their throats.
Daryl Linnie Mack was an American man who was executed in Nevada for murder. Mack was sentenced to death for the October 1988 rape and murder of Betty Jane May in Reno. The murder went unsolved for twelve years until DNA evidence linked him to the crime. He was already in jail at the time, having been sentenced to life in prison without parole for the April 1994 murder of Kim Parks. He was sentenced to death, waived his appeals and asked to be put to death. Mack was executed via lethal injection at Nevada State Prison on April 26, 2006. He remains the most recent person executed in Nevada.
Nicholas Todd Sutton was an American serial killer who was responsible for murdering two acquaintances and his own grandmother in North Carolina and Tennessee from August to December 1979. Convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for these crimes, Sutton, among three others, later participated in a 1985 prison killing over drugs. For this final crime, he was sentenced to death and executed in 2020 by electric chair. Sutton is the most recent person to be executed in this manner.
Thomas Eugene Creech is an American serial killer who was convicted of two murders committed in 1974 and sentenced to death in Idaho. The sentence was reduced two years later on appeal to life imprisonment. He was sent back to Idaho's death row for a 1981 murder committed while imprisoned. Creech personally confessed to a total of 42 murders in various states, some of which allegedly involved the Hells Angels and the Church of Satan. Most of his additional confessions are uncorroborated, but police believe strong evidence links Creech to seven additional murder victims. In January 2024, an investigation by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department concluded that Creech murdered Daniel A. Walker.
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