“I did something horrible that is unacceptable and I realize that but I don’t deserve to die for the actions of three individuals.”

Finally, after years of appeals, Christa Pike is set to be executed in 2026. The youngest woman ever sentenced to death, just 18 years old at the time, an occultist who brutally murdered her classmate.

It is therefore ordered that you shall be put to death by electrocution in the mode prescribed by law that you shall be transferred to custody of the warden at the Tennessee prison. And further on the 12th day of January 1997, your body shall be subjected to shock by sufficient current of electricity. May God have mercy upon…

“I can do that. I’m just going to play with my mom before I go.”

Christa Gail Pike was born on March 10th, 1976 in Beckley, West Virginia into a deeply dysfunctional family. Her mother, Cararissa Hansen, struggled with alcoholism and drug abuse, consistently prioritizing her party lifestyle and multiple romantic relationships over the care of her daughter. As a result, Christa was largely raised on her own without maternal supervision, moving from one relative to another. During her childhood, she was a victim of abuse from a very early age. Growing up in a chaotic and unstable environment, by the age of nine, she was already addicted to marijuana. And by 12, she was consuming large amounts of alcohol.

In the absence of her mother, she lived for a time with her father, but he eventually kicked her out of his home due to her ongoing drug abuse and poor academic performance. As a result, she was sent to a juvenile institution for educational purposes. However, she failed to complete the program and dropped out of school in the ninth grade. During her time at the juvenile center, Pike learned about Job Corps, a federal program designed to help low-income youth through vocational training and the development of professional skills. Motivated by this opportunity, she applied and was accepted into the Knoxville Job Corps Center, where she began studying computer programming. The center was designed to remove young people from disruptive environments and operated as a residential program. Approximately 90% of participants lived on campus, allowing the center to provide services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In 1995, at the age of 18, Christa officially moved into the center.

On her first day of classes at the Job Corps Center, Pike was not very social at first and struggled to make friends. However, sitting next to her was Tadaryl Ship, a 17-year-old student who was the first to speak to her. They quickly became friends, and over time, that friendship developed into an intense romantic relationship. Once they were together, both developed an interest in the occult and devil worship, even wearing necklaces with pentagram symbols.

Colleen Slemmer, originally from Orange Park, Florida, had arrived at Job Corps just 3 months earlier to train in computer programming after dropping out of high school. Her mother, May Martinez, had hoped the program would help her daughter turn her life around. Since they were in the same computer programming class, Slemmer had formed a friendship with Tadaryl Ship. In class, whenever Pike saw Colleen talking to Tadaryl, she was consumed by jealousy, and the two women never got along. During one of these jealous episodes, Pike became obsessed with the idea that Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend. Slemmer’s friends strongly denied these accusations, insisting that they were just friends. But Pike remained firmly convinced that Colleen posed a threat to her relationship.

On January 5th, 1995, Pike confessed to her friend Shadolla Peterson, who was also involved in the occult, that she intended to kill Colleen Slemmer. She later told Tadaryl Ship that because of their occult beliefs, they needed to take things to a more extreme level by carrying out a human sacrifice in the name of Satan, with Colleen Slemmer as the victim. She asked both Shadolla and Tadaryl to help her. Although they were initially hesitant, both would eventually agree to go through with the plan.

On the night of January 12th, 1995, Pike put her plan into motion. Along with her friend Shadolla Peterson, she planned to lure Colleen Slemmer to a secluded location under the false pretense of reconciliation. Pike borrowed a small box cutter from the job corps center and also carried a utility knife. The plan was to offer Slemmer marijuana as a supposed gesture of peace. At approximately 8:00 p.m., the four met and headed to Slemmer’s dormitory. She reacted with happiness, believing they wanted to make peace and agreed to go with them. Pike, Slemmer, Peterson, and Tadaryl Ship left the Job Corps complex and walked along 17th Street toward the University of Tennessee campus. Only three of them would return.

The group arrived at a desolate area near an abandoned steam plant on the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus, a remote location far from the main campus activity. Once there, Pike ambushed Slemmer, violently striking her and slamming her head into her knee. When Slemmer tried to escape, Tadaryl Ship chased her down, captured her, and dragged her back so Pike could continue the attack.

Over the next 30 to 60 minutes, Colleen Slemmer was subjected to brutal, systematic torture. Pike and Ship used a box cutter to slash her throat at least six times, causing deep wounds that cut through fat and muscle. Using a small knife, they inflicted deep cuts across her back. To keep her under control, they forced her to remove her blouse and bra and stuffed a cloth into her mouth to prevent her from screaming. Forensic evidence later revealed numerous defensive wounds on her arms and hands, indicating that Colleen fought desperately throughout the entire attack. While torturing her, Pike and Ship carved a pentagram symbol, a five-pointed star approximately 3 inches in diameter, into the victim’s chest. Throughout the assault, Colleen Slemmer repeatedly begged them to stop beating and cutting her.

Finally, after between 30 and 60 minutes of torture, Pike lifted a large chunk of asphalt from the ground and smashed it onto Colleen Slemmer’s head. The impact was so violent that the asphalt shattered into several pieces, which were also thrown against the head of the dying victim. According to the autopsy conducted by Dr. Sandra Elkins, the Knox County Medical Examiner, the official cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.

“Tadaryl was respected if not feared. He protected me. He was probably the first man that I’d ever had in my life that wanted to protect me, that saw me as, you know, a treasure, something good instead of something to use and toss to the side. I wanted to get her off campus and I had every intention of fighting her. I knew exactly what I was doing. Everything that I did that night, I knew what I was doing. And I think I was taking things out on her that had happened to me years ago.”

After the murder, Pike committed a particularly macabre act. She took a fragment of Colleen Slemmer’s skull as a souvenir. When she returned to the job corps center at around 10:15 p.m., she went straight to Kim Ilonzo’s room and told her that she had just killed Colleen Slemmer. Pike showed her the piece of skull she had kept in the pocket of her jacket and began describing in detail how the attack had been carried out. As she spoke, she danced in circles, smiled, and sang, displaying a complete lack of remorse.

The following morning, January 13th, 1995, at approximately 8:05 a.m., two employees from the University of Tennessee’s grounds department discovered Colleen Slemmer’s body near the greenhouses on the agricultural campus. Subsequent DNA analysis confirmed that the blood found on Tadaryl Ship’s shirt and pants matched the victim’s genetic profile.

“I was the first one they arrested, the first one they interviewed. And I thought that if I went in there and told him that I did every single thing that happened up there, that Tadaryl and Shadolla would just get to walk out of there and they wouldn’t worry about them anymore because they had the real killer.”

On January 14th, 1995, just 2 days after the murder, Pike was arrested along with Tadaryl Ship and Shadolla Peterson. Shortly after her arrest, Pike waived her Miranda rights and gave a detailed confession of approximately 46 pages to criminal investigator Randy York. The confession was recorded and later transcribed. In it, Pike admitted her involvement in the attack, but claimed that she and Ship only wanted to scare Slemmer and that the situation got out of control.

“I took somebody’s life, took somebody’s child away, some, you know, somebody’s friend, somebody’s sister. I’ve hurt so many people with this. And even though it’s not me and I can’t take full responsibility for this anymore, and I won’t because if I’m going to die in here, I’m going to die for my truth, not for my lie. You know, accept me for who I am, good, bad, and ugly. But I’m not going to die for a lie anymore. I’ll die for my truth.”

This version, however, sharply contrasted with her later behavior and her boastful, remorseless attitude. Pike also stated that she heard voices telling her what she needed to do and claimed to have experienced blackouts or dissociative episodes during the crime.

Pike’s trial took place in March 1996 in Knox County. On March 22nd, 1996, the jury found her guilty of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. On March 30th, 1996, Pike was sentenced to death by electrocution, becoming the youngest woman on death row in the United States at the time at just 20 years old. Upon hearing the sentence, Pike collapsed and cried uncontrollably.

Tadaryl Ship was tried and convicted in January 1997 of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Because he was 17 years old at the time of the crime, he was not eligible for the death penalty under Tennessee law and received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. His request for parole was denied in October 2025 due to the severity of the crime and his case is scheduled to be reviewed again in October 2031. Shadolla Peterson, who acted as a lookout during the attack, pleaded guilty as an accessory after the fact and received a sentence of 6 years of probation.

“I knew from the beginning that I would be found guilty and I knew from the beginning, well, from the beginning of my trial that I would get the death penalty. I think I deserve to be in here for the rest of my life. I do. I know I do. I know I don’t deserve to be out walking around with everybody else in normal society. I did something horrible that is unacceptable and I realize that. But I don’t deserve to die for the actions of three individuals when I’m only one person.”

Pike’s violence did not end with her incarceration. On August 24th, 2001, while in prison, she attacked and attempted to strangle a fellow inmate, Patricia Jones, using a shoelace, nearly suffocating her to death.

“Trisha Jones had tortured me for about 4 years. She used to call me fried chicken, make noises to me, and tell me that’s how I was going to fry in the electric chair. Patricia was about 220 lbs at the time. I weighed about 100 lbs and she jumped on my friend and was hurting her and I jumped on Patricia and choked her with a shoestring. Get her off my friend. Get her off me.”

Finally, on September 30th, 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued an execution order for Pike, scheduling her death for September 30th, 2026. Pike will become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years and the only person executed in the state in the modern era of the death penalty for a crime committed at the age of 18. The execution is scheduled to take place at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, which houses Tennessee’s Execution Chamber. Under state law, Pike has the right to choose between lethal injection, the default method, or electrocution since the crime was committed before January 1st, 1999.