Christa Pike Case File: The Torture-Murder of Colleen Slemmer

On the morning of January 13, 1995, at about 8:05 a.m., an employee of the University of Tennessee Grounds Department came upon a scene of profound horror near the greenhouses on the school’s agricultural campus in Knoxville. What he saw was so mangled and brutalized that his mind initially refused to process it as human; as the Tennessee Supreme Court summarized his testimony, the body “was so badly beaten that he had first mistaken it for the corpse of an animal.” Only upon closer inspection, when he saw the victim’s clothes and her nude breast, did he realize the truth: he had discovered the body of a young woman.¹

Shadolla Peterson, 18 at the time, was the third accomplice. She was present from the beginning, walking with the group as it led Colleen away from the Job Corps center.¹ Earlier that day, according to testimony at Shipp’s trial, Pike and Peterson asked another student whether he had seen Slemmer, and Shipp said, “[W]hen we find her, she’s dead”; the witness said all three were in agreement, though he conceded he may once have attributed the remark to Pike.⁷ According to the statement Tadaryl Shipp gave police, Peterson’s role was far from that of a mere lookout: he said Peterson also struck Slemmer, “had a box cutter and joined Pike in cutting and stabbing the victim,” and “hit Slemmer with a brick or piece of asphalt.”⁷

Faced with the overwhelming evidence against the group, Peterson (who, in the University of Tennessee’s Volopedia account, “turned informant”¹⁸) pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact and “received a six year probationary sentence.”⁷ Although her cooperation is widely reported, the Tennessee Supreme Court’s summary of the proof at Pike’s trial does not list Peterson among the witnesses who testified.²⁹

The motive presented at trial was rooted in teenage jealousy. Pike had become convinced that Colleen Slemmer was trying to “get [her] boyfriend” and was “running her mouth” about her around the Job Corps campus. This perceived romantic rivalry served as the catalyst for the violence.²⁷

However, evidence of premeditation suggests a deeper, more detached malice. On January 11, 1995, the day before the murder, Pike confided in another student, Kim Iloilo, that she intended to kill Slemmer. When Iloilo asked why, Pike’s reason was not jealousy or anger over a specific transgression. Her chillingly simple explanation was that she “had just felt mean that day”.²⁹

The ruse was layered. Pike first told Slemmer they were walking to a Blockbuster Music store. Along the way, to guide Slemmer toward the isolated agricultural campus, Pike claimed she had a bag of marijuana hidden in nearby Tyson Park. The promise of smoking together was the final bait used to lead Slemmer to the secluded spot where she would be murdered.²⁷

Pike’s premeditation was further confirmed by her own admission that she had armed herself before they left, carrying a box cutter and a miniature meat cleaver she had borrowed from someone she refused to name.²⁷ Who supplied the box cutter is less clear. On the day of the murder, Pike told Iloilo she was “looking for Peterson to get a box cutter from her,” and Shipp’s statement to police said Peterson had one.⁷ Shipp later testified at a post-conviction hearing that he himself had used the box cutter to carve the pentagram.⁹ Regardless of who carried which weapon, the group left the dormitory armed and with a clear, pre-planned intention.

The attack took place in a secluded area behind the steam plant on the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus. Based on Pike’s detailed forty-six-page statement and subsequent trial testimony, the assault was a prolonged act of torture that lasted, by Pike’s own estimate, “for about thirty minutes to an hour.”²⁷²⁸

At the steam plant, Pike and Slemmer exchanged words. What followed is set out in the Tennessee Supreme Court’s summary of Pike’s recorded statement:

Pike then began hitting Slemmer and banging Slemmer’s head on her knee. Pike threw Slemmer to the ground and kicked her repeatedly. According to Pike, as she slammed Slemmer’s head against the concrete, Slemmer repeatedly asked, “Why are you doing this to me?” When Slemmer threatened to report Pike so she would be terminated from the Job Corps program, Pike again repeatedly kicked Slemmer in the face and side.²⁷

Pike told police that as the assault went on she heard a voice telling her she had to do something to keep Slemmer from reporting it and sending her to prison for attempted murder; when Slemmer begged for her life, Pike said she was not going to be “rotting in jail” because of her. That evidence became the basis for the prosecution’s second statutory aggravating circumstance: murder to avoid prosecution.³⁰

The final, fatal blows came from rocks and asphalt. When Slemmer tried to run again, Pike threw a rock that hit her in the back of the head, and, Pike said, “the other person” also hit her in the head with a rock.²⁸ (Shipp’s account names Pike and Peterson as the ones who struck with rocks, a brick or asphalt; he said he walked down a hill and returned to find Slemmer’s head “all busted open on the side,” gurgling and breathing.⁷) Pike did not stop. The Tennessee Supreme Court recounted her statement:

When Slemmer fell to the ground, Pike continued to hit her. Eventually Pike said she could hear Slemmer “breathing blood in and out,” and she could see Slemmer “jerking,” but Pike “kept hitting her and hitting her and hitting her.” Pike eventually asked Slemmer, “Colleen, do you know who’s doing this to you?” Slemmer’s only response was groaning noises.²⁸

Pike said she and the other person then each grabbed one of Slemmer’s feet and dragged her to an area near some trees, leaving her on a pile of dirt and debris, with her clothing left in the surrounding bushes.²⁸

The crime scene was “wet and muddy,” and there was “evidence of a scuffle, with trampled bushes, hand and knee prints in the mud, and drag marks.”¹ Photographs introduced at trial showed “blood drippings on leaves, and pools of blood.”²⁸ A large pool of blood was located about 30 feet from where Slemmer’s body was ultimately left on a pile of debris, consistent with Pike’s account that she and the other person dragged her there by the feet.¹²⁸

The weapons were only partially recovered. “Photographs of bloody chunks of asphalt” were introduced into evidence, along with “the bloody piece of asphalt” itself.²⁸ The box cutter and miniature meat cleaver were not found at the scene. According to Pike’s statement, the group discarded the box cutter, and Pike returned the miniature meat cleaver to the person at Job Corps from whom she had borrowed it: a person she never identified.²⁸

To explain the complex, roving nature of the scene to the jury, Officer Lanny Janeway “used a chart to illustrate each of the locations where blood or evidence was found”.²⁸

A simple, impulsive murder might leave a single point of violence. A 100×60 ft crime scene with multiple blood pools, blood-spattered leaves, and, most importantly, “drag marks,” serves as physical corroboration of a prolonged, roving assault that Pike herself put at thirty minutes to an hour. The blood trail is consistent with Slemmer’s repeated attempts to flee; the drag marks with Pike’s account that Slemmer was held down and dragged to another area, and finally dragged by the feet to the debris pile.²⁷²⁸ This physical evidence made it impossible for the defense to argue against the facts of the crime, shifting their (ultimately failed) strategy to a psychological one (i.e., why it happened, not if it happened).

Sharp-Force Wounds (Torture): Dr. Elkins tried to catalog the slash and stab wounds on the torso by assigning each a letter of the alphabet, but there were so many that she catalogued only the most serious; to record every one, she said, she would have had to go through the alphabet again and stay in the morgue for “three days.” Eventually, she testified, she “basically threw up [her] hands and just said, enumerable [sic] more superficial slash wounds on the back, arms and chest.”² She found purple contusions on the knees, “indicating fresh bruising consistent with crawling,” and defensive wounds on the right arm; “a six inch gaping wound across the middle of the victim’s neck which had penetrated the fat and muscles of the neck”; ten other slash wounds on the throat; slash wounds on the face; and “what appeared to be a pentagram carved onto the victim’s chest.” Because “the area around each wound was red in appearance,” Dr. Elkins concluded that “the victim’s heart had been beating when the wounds were inflicted,” and that Slemmer “would not have been rendered unconscious by any of the stab or slash wounds.”² She was alive (and, on that medical account, conscious) through this entire portion of the assault, including, on Dr. Elkins’ reading of the wounds, the carving of the pentagram.

The damage was so severe that, to determine the cause of death, Dr. Elkins had to “remove the head of the victim and have the skull prepared by Dr. Murray Marks, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Tennessee.” Portions of skull had been driven into the brain; Dr. Elkins removed them and forwarded them to Dr. Marks, who reconstructed the skull, fitting the loose pieces into its left side. One area on the left side remained unfilled. In front of the jury, Dr. Elkins took a piece of skull that had been given to her shortly before trial and “demonstrated that it fit perfectly into the remaining area of the victim’s skull.” Dr. Marks later repeated the demonstration with the fragment recovered from Pike’s jacket.²²³

This testimony was the lynchpin for the death sentence. The prosecution sought the death penalty by alleging the aggravating circumstance that “[t]he murder was especially heinous, atrocious or cruel in that it involved torture or serious physical abuse beyond that necessary to produce death.”²⁴ By clinically separating the non-fatal (but conscious) sharp-force wounds from the fatal blunt-force wounds, Dr. Elkins provided the factual foundation for this aggravator. She showed the jury, through medical evidence, that Slemmer was tortured before she was killed.

Later that morning in a class, she approached another student, Stephanie Wilson, and pointed to brown spots on her shoes, declaring, “that ain’t mud on my shoes, that’s blood.” She then pulled a napkin from her pocket and showed Wilson the bone fragment, telling her she had slashed Slemmer’s throat six times and beaten her in the head with a rock, and that the victim’s blood and brains had been pouring out.¹

Pike’s behavior culminated on the afternoon of January 13, after the body had been discovered and the area secured as a crime scene. Between four and five p.m., she returned to the scene with “three to five other females.” UT Officer Harold James Underwood, Jr., who was securing the scene, testified in rebuttal at the sentencing phase that Pike asked him why the area had been marked off and questioned him about the victim’s identity and whether police had any suspects. None of the other young women spoke during the fifteen minutes the group was there; Underwood said Pike “appeared amused and giggled and moved around.” He also noticed that she was wearing “an unusual necklace in the shape of a pentagram,” and after learning at roll call on January 14 that a pentagram had been carved on the victim, he reported her behavior to his superiors.²⁴

The formal investigation, led by the Knoxville Police Department and the UT Police Department, was swift. KPD Investigator Randy York began work on January 13, the day the body was found, and interviewed Pike and Shipp separately in the early morning hours of January 14, little more than a day after the discovery.¹⁷

Neither Iloilo nor Wilson immediately reported Pike’s statements to police.¹ The appellate opinions do not describe how investigators first focused on the trio; at trial, Iloilo’s eyewitness account of four leaving and three returning was central. Officer Underwood, meanwhile, reported Pike’s giggling visit to the scene and her pentagram necklace to his superiors after learning at roll call on January 14 that a pentagram had been carved on the victim.²⁴

On January 14, 1995, York interviewed Pike and Shipp separately at the Knoxville Police Department. Pike was advised of her Miranda rights and chose to waive them;²⁷ Shipp also gave a statement, which was used at his own trial.⁷ Pike’s statement was tape-recorded and transcribed in some forty-six pages; jurors received copies of the transcript and listened to the tape through individual headphones.²⁷

With the facts of the murder rendered irrefutable by the confessions and forensic evidence, Pike’s defense team was left with only one viable strategy: to challenge her mens rea, or mental state. They attempted to argue that she did not possess the “premeditation” and “deliberation” required for a first-degree murder conviction.

The defense called Dr. Eric Engum, a clinical psychologist, who described Pike as an “extremely bright young woman” with a full-scale IQ of 111, found that she had no symptoms of brain damage and was not insane, and diagnosed “a very severe borderline personality disorder.” On direct examination, as the Tennessee Supreme Court summarized it, he opined that she had not acted with deliberation or premeditation but in a manner consistent with that diagnosis: “she had lost control.”²³

A second defense expert, Dr. William Bernet, medical director of the psychiatric hospital at Vanderbilt University, addressed the Satanism evidence, concluding that “the pattern was that of an adolescent dabbling in Satanism.” He also described “collective aggression,” in which “a group of people gather and become emotionally aroused and the end result is that they engage in some kind of violent behavior.” On cross-examination, he admitted that he had spoken with neither Pike nor any other witness and did not have enough information to offer an opinion on whether she acted with premeditation.²³

The subsequent sentencing phase focused on whether the circumstances of the crime warranted the state’s ultimate punishment.

The prosecution’s case for death rested on the evidence from the guilt phase. The jury found the existence of two statutory aggravating circumstances beyond a reasonable doubt:²⁴

1. The murder was “especially heinous, atrocious or cruel in that it involved torture or serious physical abuse beyond that necessary to produce death.” This was supported by Dr. Elkins’ pathological testimony and by Pike’s own statements.³⁰
2. The murder was committed “for the purpose of avoiding, interfering with or preventing a lawful arrest or prosecution of the defendant or another.” This rested on Pike’s statements that during the assault she heard a voice telling her she had to keep the victim from reporting it, and that she would not be “rotting in jail” because of her.³⁰

Her lawyers argue that the conflict showed in the mitigation strategy. Talman “originally intended to rely solely on the testimony of Dr. Diana McCoy, a mitigation expert hired by the defense. But shortly before the sentencing hearing, Talman switched his plan and called only Pike’s aunt, father, and mother.”³³ At the post-conviction hearing, Talman gave several reasons: McCoy would not corroborate Dr. Engum; her report contained “negative things” about Pike’s history that he did not want in the record; the family could supply substantially the same testimony; and the defense had learned shortly before trial that McCoy was in a romantic relationship with William Crabtree, the lead prosecutor on the case. He called the decision “one of those last minute decisions,” made the morning the penalty phase began, in “one of those little huddles outside during a break.”³⁶ As a result, no expert presented Pike’s social history to the jury. Her current lawyers call that evidence compelling; the Sixth Circuit, assuming McCoy would have testified consistently with her report, concluded that “the jury already got much of the social history’s general content during the penalty phase of the trial.”²⁰

After her 1996 sentencing, Christa Pike was sent to the Tennessee Prison for Women, now the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, and for nearly all of the three decades since she has been the only woman on Tennessee’s death row.⁸ Her attorneys argued that this status amounted to unconstitutional de facto solitary confinement. In a lawsuit filed in 2022, they said she had been held in isolation for decades; attorney Angela Bergman described “a cell the size of a parking space, where she has had nearly no meaningful human contact,” in contrast to men on death row, who could socialize and work together. The case never reached a ruling: in September 2024 the state settled, agreeing to give Pike opportunities comparable to those of men on death row, including a job, shared meals with other incarcerated women and more time out of her cell.³⁸

In 2012, an escape plot was uncovered and thwarted by a joint investigation involving the Tennessee Department of Correction and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. On March 21, 2012, the state announced that former correctional officer Justin Heflin, 23, who had been fired on March 5, was indicted on charges including bribery, official misconduct, conspiracy and facilitation, and that Donald Kohut, 34, of Flemington, New Jersey, was also involved.⁴⁰ Kohut, who had frequently visited Pike in prison, was charged with bribery and conspiracy to commit escape.³⁹

Her legal challenges and petitions for clemency have consistently revolved around a core set of arguments:

1. Ineffective Assistance of Counsel: The primary claim is that her trial lawyers were unprepared for a capital case and, because of a conflict of interest, failed to present the jury with extensive mitigating evidence of her lifelong trauma, contested evidence of brain damage (see Chapter 2), and later-diagnosed mental illness. The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals and the federal courts rejected these claims.¹⁵²⁶
2. Youthfulness: Her attorneys argue that scientific understanding of adolescent brain development has evolved significantly since 1996. Citing neuroscience and cases like Roper v. Simmons, they contend that at 18 her brain was not fully mature, making her less culpable and more susceptible to impulsive behavior, and that a death sentence for a crime committed at that age violates evolving standards of decency.
3. Disproportionate Sentence: A central and persistent argument is the disparity between her death sentence and the sentences of her co-defendants. Shipp, an active participant, received life with parole eligibility, in part because he was 17; Peterson, whom Shipp accused of cutting and striking the victim, received probation after pleading to a lesser charge.⁷

Tadaryl Shipp: Shipp has been incarcerated since January 1995. At his first parole hearing, in October 2025, board member Tim Gobble voted to deny parole, citing the seriousness of Slemmer’s murder; the full board denied parole and set his next review for October 2031.⁵³¹⁴

Shadolla Peterson: Peterson pleaded guilty as an accessory after the fact and received a six-year probationary sentence.⁷ Her life after the case is not a matter of public record.