NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The state of Tennessee is preparing to do something it has not done in more than two centuries: execute a woman.
Christa Gail Pike, 49, has been scheduled for execution on September 30th, 2026, after the Tennessee Supreme Court granted the state’s request to set a firm date. If the execution proceeds as ordered, Pike will become the first woman put to death in Tennessee in roughly 200 years — a historic milestone in a case that has haunted the state for three decades.
Pike has spent nearly 30 years as the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. She was sentenced to die at just 20 years old, making her one of the youngest women ever sent to death row in the modern history of the United States. Now, after years of appeals, legal maneuvers, and a dramatic escape plot that nearly succeeded, her case has reached a critical juncture.
The crime that put Pike on death row dates back to a cold January night in 1995 in Knoxville, where investigators discovered the body of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in a wooded ravine near the University of Tennessee’s agricultural area. The scene was so disturbing that authorities initially feared they were dealing with a cult killing. A pentagram had been carved into the victim’s chest.
The truth, when it emerged, proved far more unsettling. The person responsible was not part of a cult and was not a serial killer. She was an 18-year-old classmate who had convinced her victim to walk willingly into the darkness.
To understand how this happened, one must first understand where it happened. In 1995, the Job Corps Center in Knoxville operated as a federally funded lifeline for at-risk young people. The program, created decades earlier, offered a second chance to teenagers who had dropped out of school, come from poverty, or carried minor juvenile records.
The government provided dormitories, meals, and a small stipend in exchange for students working toward their GEDs and training in vocational trades.
Colleen Slemmer wanted that better life. Originally from Orange Park, Florida, she had faced real challenges growing up, including enrollment in special education classes. Her mother, May Martinez, saw Job Corps as a solution — a place where structure might finally give her daughter the stability she had never quite had.
Colleen packed her bags, boarded a bus, and moved to Tennessee to study computer programming.
Those who knew her described her the same way again and again: quiet, trusting, someone who didn’t go looking for conflict and tended to back down when confronted. She was a teenager trying to navigate a complicated social world, and tragically, that made her a target.
Christa Pike arrived at the Knoxville Job Corps carrying a very different history. Born in 1976 in Beckley, West Virginia, her early years were defined by instability. Court records describe a childhood marked by neglect, poverty, and exposure to substance 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮.
She was born to a mother who drank during pregnancy — something her defense would later argue caused lasting damage to the part of the brain that regulates impulse and behavior. She endured 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 throughout her childhood, attempted suicide more than once, and by her early teens was already dependent on alcohol and marijuana.
At Job Corps, Pike began dating 17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp, who had a documented fascination with the occult. He talked about death and dark rituals, kept a makeshift shrine, and spoke openly about Satanism. Together, Pike and Shipp developed a shared interest in the occult, and Pike embraced a dark persona, pushing it further along with an 18-year-old acquaintance named Shadala Peterson.
The three formed a tight, intimidating circle within the campus.
Pike soon fixed her attention on Colleen. There was no complicated reason behind it. Pike became convinced that Colleen was trying to steal her boyfriend — a belief that may have started with something as small as a wave in a hallway.
Others who were there would later say Colleen was actually frightened of Shipp and wanted nothing to do with him or his interests. But the facts didn’t seem to matter.
The harassment started small: name-calling, rumors, whispered threats. Colleen didn’t fight back. She kept her head down and hoped it would fade if she simply ignored it.
She eventually reported the harassment to school officials, who warned Pike that further complaints could get her expelled. Pike played the role of the misunderstood student, denying the accusations and promising to smooth things over. Behind that performance, the hostility only grew.
On the evening of January 12th, 1995, Pike approached Colleen with a completely different attitude. She was calm, even friendly. She said she was tired of the 𝒹𝓇𝒶𝓂𝒶 and wanted to put the feud behind them.
As a peace offering, she invited Colleen to slip out after curfew and smoke marijuana in the woods nearby. Colleen, exhausted by months of fear, agreed. She believed the worst was finally over.
That night, temperatures in Knoxville dropped toward freezing. Colleen put on a winter coat and left with Pike, Shipp, and Peterson. The group signed out of the dormitory together and walked off the property, heading toward the University of Tennessee’s agricultural area near an old abandoned steam plant.
They kept walking until they reached a secluded wooded spot — dark, completely isolated.
The moment they were out of sight, everything changed. There was no truce. According to court testimony, Pike and Shipp turned on Colleen and began beating her.
When she tried to flee, she was pulled back. Prosecutors would later describe an assault that stretched on for roughly half an hour. Pike had a box cutter and a meat cleaver said to have been taken from the campus kitchen.
Colleen was slashed and cut. Shipp carved a pentagram into her body. Peterson acted as a lookout.
Court records describe how Colleen begged them to stop and pleaded for her life. She was ignored. In the end, prosecutors said Pike struck her in the head with a large piece of asphalt, delivering what was believed to be the fatal blow.
Then came the detail that would follow this case for the rest of its history: Pike kept a fragment of Colleen’s skull and carried it back to campus.
Rather than hide what had happened, Pike bragged about it. The next morning, she showed the skull fragment to other students and described the attack in detail, seemingly believing that fear alone would keep everyone quiet. She was wrong.
Within 36 hours of the murder, the Knoxville Police Department received information pointing directly at the people responsible. The dormitory sign-out log showed that four people had left together that night and only three had returned.
Detectives brought Pike, Shipp, and Peterson in for questioning. Investigators expected Pike to deny everything or immediately ask for a lawyer. Instead, she waived her rights and confessed.
On the recording, her account was calm and detailed. She admitted to the attack and the killing. When detectives searched, they recovered the skull fragment from her jacket along with other evidence tying the three of them to the crime.
When investigators asked Pike why she had done it, her answer was chillingly simple. She said Colleen had been acting tough and she wanted to prove she was tougher. She never once asked about Colleen’s family.
She never asked whether the girl she had left in those woods might somehow have survived. Her attention, from beginning to end, stayed fixed on herself.
In early 1996, Christa Pike stood trial. The prosecution’s case was airtight: murder weapons, physical evidence, and Pike’s own voice recorded on tape calmly describing what she had done. During the trial, that confession was played for the jury.
Sitting in the gallery was May Martinez, Colleen’s mother, forced to listen as her daughter’s killer described the murder without a trace of panic — reportedly even laughing as she recounted it.
Pike’s defense team did not deny that she was there or that she took part. Instead, they argued she was the product of severe, unrelenting childhood trauma — neglect, 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮, and untreated mental health struggles that had shadowed her since birth. They argued that damage to her developing brain had left her without the full capacity to grasp the weight of her actions.
The jury did not accept it as a reason to spare her.
They weighed the premeditation. They weighed the 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 peace offering that had lured Colleen into the dark. They weighed the prolonged, deliberate nature of the assault.
It took them only a few hours to return a verdict. Christa Pike was found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. On March 30th, 1996, at just 20 years old, she became the youngest woman on death row in the United States.
Her accomplices walked very different paths. Tadaryl Shipp was 17 at the time of the killing and, because he was legally a juvenile, could not be sentenced to death. He received a life sentence with the possibility of parole.
Shadala Peterson’s outcome was more startling still. Prosecutors treated her role as that of a lookout, and she cooperated fully with investigators. In exchange, she was allowed to plead to a lesser charge.
She served no prison time and eventually walked free.
That disparity — one woman condemned to die, one man imprisoned for life, one accomplice released — left Colleen’s family with a wound that never fully closed. May Martinez began what would become a decades-long vigil, attending appeal hearing after appeal hearing, parole meeting after parole meeting, refusing to let the courts or the public forget the daughter she had lost.
For most people, a death sentence feels like the final chapter. For Christa Pike, it was nothing of the sort. Held at a women’s facility in Nashville as the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, she lived under tight security.
Yet even there, she found ways to operate. In August 2001, she approached a fellow inmate named Patricia Jones, wrapped a shoelace around the woman’s neck, and tried to strangle her inside the unit. Correctional officers intervened before Jones was killed.
Pike was convicted of attempted murder.
While sitting on death row, Pike also developed a pattern of calculated manipulation. She began writing letters to men on the outside, casting herself as a misunderstood young woman failed by the justice system. Some of the men came to believe she loved them.
Some sent her money. At least one became convinced he was rescuing an innocent woman. Investigators believe Pike was doing something far more deliberate: studying each man and telling every one of them precisely what he wanted to hear.
In 2012, that effort took its most serious form. Pike turned her attention to a male correctional officer who worked in her housing unit. According to the case against him, Pike drew that officer into a romantic relationship, passing notes and speaking in moments other guards weren’t watching.
Over time, she persuaded him to consider helping her get past the facility’s secured doors. Through a web of correspondence, she connected with a man from out of state, and using a contraband cell phone smuggled into her cell, she began coordinating a plan.
The roles were carefully divided. The outside man was to travel to Tennessee, obtain a vehicle, and acquire weapons. The officer was to help her slip past the security doors during a scheduled shift.
Once she was beyond the walls, a driver would be waiting to carry her away. The scheme developed over months. Money changed hands.
Details about guard rotations and security routines were shared.
What Pike did not know was that the plan had already begun to unravel. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation intercepted the communications. Agents monitored the money transfers, tracked the movements of her outside contact, and listened as the plot took shape.
They let it develop just far enough to secure indictments, then moved in before anyone could act. The correctional officer was arrested and lost his job. The outside accomplice was apprehended.
Pike’s cell was raided and the contraband phone seized.
The investigation had proven something remarkable and deeply unsettling: nearly two decades after her conviction, Christa Pike was still actively directing criminal activity from within one of the state’s most secure facilities. Because of that continued behavior, prison officials kept her in extreme isolation for years afterward. In late 2024, the state settled a lawsuit over the prolonged isolation, granting her somewhat more time out of her cell.
But by then, a far larger reckoning was drawing near. For years, executions in Tennessee had effectively been paused following intense scrutiny over lethal injection procedures. The governor ordered a full review of the protocols, and the death chamber went quiet.
Then the review was completed. The Department of Correction revised its procedures, secured the drugs it needed, and the attorney general’s office began pressing to move forward with inmates who had exhausted their standard appeals.
Pike’s name rose to the very top of that list. On September 30th, 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court granted the state’s request and set a firm date: September 30th, 2026. Confronted with an actual date on the calendar, Pike’s attorneys launched a final legal campaign.
They have petitioned the governor for clemency, asking him to commute her sentence to life in prison. They argue that executing someone for a crime committed at 18 runs against modern understandings of how the adolescent brain develops. They point again to the vast gap between her fate and that of Tadaryl Shipp.
Their central effort, however, is a lawsuit challenging the method itself. Tennessee now relies on a single 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔, pentobarbital, to carry out executions. Pike’s lawsuit argues that using it on her would amount to cruel and unusual punishment.
Her attorneys claim she has a documented medical condition affecting her blood and that the 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 would trigger a reaction causing her lungs to rapidly fill with fluid — in effect, she would experience the sensation of drowning before the 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 stopped her heart.
The state firmly disputes this, insisting the protocol is both lawful and humane. State attorneys also note a legal wrinkle: because Pike’s crime occurred before a cutoff in state law, she retains the right to choose the electric chair instead. If she truly fears the injection, they argue, she has an alternative available to her.
The courts are now weighing those competing arguments. The attorney general’s office maintains that the time for appeals has run out, pointing to the 30 years Colleen’s family has already waited and citing the 2001 strangulation attempt and the 2012 escape plot as evidence that Pike cannot be safely managed even under maximum security. Should the federal courts dismiss the challenge to the 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 protocol, the remaining legal avenues will close and the state will be cleared to proceed.
Job Corps was built on a simple belief: that a change of surroundings could change a young person’s future. For Colleen Slemmer, it was meant to be the start of a new life. For Christa Pike, it became the place where she committed the crime that would come to define the rest of hers.
More than 30 years after Colleen walked into those woods believing a long, frightening feud had finally ended, Tennessee is preparing to carry out the sentence handed down in 1996.
Whether that execution ultimately goes forward will be decided in a courtroom. But the facts of what happened that night are no longer in dispute. A young woman who came looking for a second chance never made it home.
And nothing the courts decide now can give Colleen Slemmer back the life she never had the chance to live.
