The story of Christa Pike has once again captured the public’s attention after being featured on a recent episode of Investigation Discovery’s “Mean Girl Murders.” The documentary brought attention to Pike’s heinous crime, once again placing her in the public eye.
In 1995, Pike committed a heinous crime that shocked the nation – the brutal murder of her classmate, Colleen Slemmer. This act seemed to stem from a disturbing sense of jealousy.
Pike, who was a student at Knoxville Job Corps at the time, devised a scheme to entice Slemmer to an old, deserted steam mill. Pike set her deadly scheme in motion, accompanied by her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and a friend, Shadolla Peterson.
At the mill, Pike launched a brutal assault on Slemmer, driven by allegations of romantic treachery. The assault rapidly spiralled into a horrifying ordeal of brutality, with Slemmer enduring verbal abuse, physical attacks, and deep wounds. Pike and Shipp went to the extreme, leaving a lasting mark on Slemmer’s chest and delivering a fatal blow by crushing her skull with a piece of asphalt.
However, Pike’s depravity did not stop there. She proudly displayed a fragment of Slemmer’s skull to others, treating it as a morbid symbol of her accomplishment.
Despite efforts to present her difficult childhood as a factor to consider, Pike was given the death penalty, making her the sole woman on death row in Tennessee. Despite numerous appeals, her situation remained unchanged, and she spent years displaying aggressive behaviour behind bars.
Pike’s scheduled execution in 2020 was delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving her ultimate fate uncertain. Still, her case is widely regarded as one of the most chilling and notorious in Tennessee’s history. If her sentence is carried out, she will be the first woman to be executed in the state in almost two hundred years.