Beyond Redemption: The Murder of Collen Slemmer
- Gina Westfall
- Feb 19
- 9 min read
Beyond Redemption: The Murder of Collen Slemmer
The Job Corps Program began in 1964 under the United States Department of Labor with a mission to help young people between the ages of 16 and 24 improve the quality of their lives through vocational and academic training aimed at gainful employment and career pathways. Eligibility criteria for the program includes being between the ages of 16 and 24, meeting low-income criteria, background check free of specific convictions, has consent if a minor, and does not use prohibited substances.
Why am I telling you about this program? Because in 1995, four students that lived on campus in a Tennessee Job Corps Program signed out of the dorm. But less than an hour later, only three of them signed back in. This is a story horrific murder, child abuse, sociopathic abuse, and the story of the woman who is scheduled to be executed in Tennessee in September 2026. This is the story of: Beyond Redemption: The Murder of Collen Slemmer
What does it mean to be beyond redemption? Christa Pike was sentenced to death at the age of eighteen, making her the youngest woman in the modern United States to be sentenced to death. Is her sentence justified? You decide.
Christa Gail Pike was born prematurely in 1976 to Carissa Hansen and Emil Pike in Beckley, West Virginia. During her early years, her parents had a tumultuous relationship and often abused substances. Their home was often neglected, as were their children. Relatives stated that Christa and her older half-sister would be neglected. When Christa was a toddler and started having seizures, her mother did not take her to the hospital. A friend of family member finally took Christa to get care, where it was determined that the seizures had damaged Christa’s frontal lobe. Carissa was frequently neglectful to her daughter.
After her divorce from Emil and move to Tennessee, a string of boyfriends and husbands lead to sexual abuse to Christa. With her permissive mother, Christa began to abuse substances in her early teens. She got into some fights and trouble, frustrating her mother. Once she turned eighteen, Christa dropped out of high school. She soon enrolled in the Job Corps Program in Knoxville, quickly completing her GED and then starting the Nursing Assistant Program.
Colleen Slemmer was nineteen years old in 1995. Colleen was born and raised in Florida. She was only in Tennessee for a six-month computing course on the Job Corp program to obtain the skills she needed to move on to a profession that would give her independence. Colleen was a sweet and mild-mannered young lady that was not known to be confrontational.
Christa Pike was only around five feet tall but had a head full of red curls and a personality that exploded like a bomb. She was a “firecracker”, and that could be a good or a bad thing depending on how she felt about you. Many of the girls at Job Corps considered her the leader of the “mean girls” if you will. She is Regina George. You know she is mean, but you still want her to like you. That was certainly true for Shadolla Peterson. Shadolla Peterson is an eighteen-year-old student described as a follower who desperately wanted to fit in with Christa.
Christa met Tadaryl Shipp, a seventeen-year-old from Memphis, at Job Corps and became infatuated. For her, it was love at first sight. According to all the friends and those who knew Tadaryl and Christa, Tadaryl felt the same way about Christa. However, Christa had learned that Tadaryl had once had a crush on another Job Corps student, Colleen Slemmer. This bothered her. Her eighteen-year-old brain with frontal lobe damage from seizures during childhood and years of neglect probably lacked the coping skills required to process. Christa began to behave irrationally.
Christa, with Shadolla and Tadaryl in tow, began to bully Colleen. She would come into her room uninvited. She would take her things. She was stalking her. She hit her. Colleen did what she was supposed to do and filed a complaint with the school. She asked that Christa be removed from the campus. The school is supposed to have a zero-tolerance policy for violence. However, Christa was given another chance and allowed to return to the Job Corps campus after the 1994 holiday break.
On January 12th, 1995, Christa, Shadolla, and Tadaryl approached Colleen and asked her if she would like to go to a secluded area nearby to smoke weed and Christa wanted to prove that they were friends now. Colleen reluctantly agreed, but she wanted to start the semester off friendly with these three so that maybe the harassment would end. The four of them signed out before they left campus.
The three lured her off campus to an area known as Tyson Park where Christa took out a box cutter and started accusing Colleen of trying to steal Tadaryl from her. It is unclear if Shadolla participated in this part of the crime. Christa starts to stab Colleen while Tadaryl helps to hold her down and beat her. Christa tortured her and stabbed her over 300 times with the box cutter. Colleen begged for her life for 45 minutes. She was forced to remove her clothing. When she tried to run, Christa used a meat cleaver on the back of Collen’s legs. Tadaryl carved a pentagram in her chest while she screamed and cried. Christa slit Collen’s throat several times but when, in her words, “The Bitch Wouldn’t Die”, she picked up a rock and beat Colleen in the head three times. She then took a piece of her skull as souvenir.
Shadolla, Tadaryl, and Christa then stopped at a gas station to clean up a bit before returning to the Job Corps campus and signing in. Christa quickly bragged about the murder to her friend Kim, showing her piece of skull and horrifying her with the details. She then threatened her. Kim was shocked and horrified by what her friend had confessed. She realized that the girl she thought was her best friend was a sociopath.
The following day, January 13th, 1995, a partially nude dead body was found. The body was not identifiable due to the extent of damage, particularly to the head. Investigators took notice of the pentagram carved into the chest of the victim, however. University of Tennessee Officer Harold Underwood was at the scene of the crime that morning when Christa Pike appeared among the spectators. He remembered her being giggly as she asked what was going on and if the cops had any suspects.
The lead detective on the case, Randy York, followed the most promising lead in his opinion: the pentagram. In the 1990’s, witchcraft and devil worship was thought to be the motive behind many crimes by young people. This crime was no different. The detective asked around about young people who may practice these things and was told there were students at the local Job Corps in Knoxville that practiced devil worship and satanism.
He then went to the Job Corps location and asked to see the check in and out logs. The night of January 12th, only four people signed out of that Job Corps location: Tadaryl Shipp, Christa Pike, Colleen Slemmer, and Shadolla Peterson. However, only three people signed back in that night: Tadaryl Shipp, Christa Pike, and Shadolla Peterson. The detective believed that the unidentified body found that morning must be that of Colleen Slemmer. He was right.
It did not take very long to put the pieces of the puzzle together for detectives. A search warrant for Tadaryl’s dorm revealed items of devil worship including books and pentagrams. Under questioning, Christa quickly confessed to the crime in grim detail. She took responsibility for the entire crime, minimizing the role that Shadolla and Tadaryl played in the crime. Christa was eighteen years old, Tadaryl was only seventeen years old. That would become very important.
Witnesses, including Christa’s friend whom she confessed to and showed the piece of Colleen’s skull to, testified on behalf of the State of Tennessee against Christa and Tadaryl in their subsequent trials. Shadolla Peterson also testified against Christa and Tadaryll in exchange for a plea agreement. Shadolla’s first degree murder charge was dismissed, and she pleaded guilty to accessory to first degree murder and was given credit for 460 days served and given a suspended 6-year sentence of probation.
Christa went to trial first. Christa had confessed with giddiness while in custody with no empathy or remorse. During the trial, Colleen’s actual skull was shown and passed to the jurors so they could see where Christa had taken a piece from it. Christa cried in court, despite her earlier giddiness. There was no question of her guilt, and she was found guilty of first-degree murder. The jury had to consider, as Christa was an adult, if Christa should be put to death. In the courtroom, Christa looks like a small child crying hysterically. The jurors considered her childhood, but decided that at eighteen years old, she was beyond redemption and was sentenced to die.
Tadaryl Shipp was also found guilty of first-degree murder. Tadaryl, however, was only seventeen at the time of this crime. He was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. He was up from parole in 2025 but was denied due to “the seriousness of the offense”. He will have another chance for parole in 2031.
Christa Pike is the only female on death row in Tennessee. Christa was also the youngest woman at the time to be sentenced to death. Despite looking like a remorseful scared child in court, just hours later Christa wrote a letter to Tadaryl saying something implying that “she was kind to Colleen by putting her out of her misery and that’s what she gets is the death penalty”. Christa has proved to be manipulative and unremorseful.
While in prison, she remained violent. She was charged with attempted murder in 2001 while in the Deborah K Johnson Detention Center in Nashville, TN., the women’s prison in Tennessee. A fellow inmate, Patricia Jones, disliked Christa’s girlfriend. On August 24th, 2001, there is a fire in the prison. Christa, her friend, and Patricia end up together. Christa and her friend gang up on Patricia. Christa uses and shoelace to start strangling Patricia. Christa nearly succeeds before a prison officer separates them. Christa readily confesses that she was attempting to kill her. She is convicted in 2004 of attempted murder, adding 24 additional years to her death sentence.
Christa’s manipulative behavior doesn’t stop there. In March of 2012 it was revealed that she has also convinced two men to help her escape from prison. She had one guard make a copy of a key and engage in a plan to help her escape. She also had another man from New Jersy who funded and planned the escape. His frequent visits to the death row inmate likely sparked the investigate that thwarted their plans. Both men were arrested, but no charges were brought against Christa.
Christa has had her appeals processes delay her execution as expected. She was on solitary confinement for nearly thirty years due to being on death row. The few times that confinement was broken, Christa behaved badly including an attempted murder on another inmate. In 2020, the pandemic delayed her execution further. Now, her execution is scheduled for September 30th, 2026. If she is executed, Christa will be the first woman executed by the state of Tennessee in over 200 years.
For Colleen’s mother, May Martinez, it will be a day of justice. Colleen was just nineteen years old. No one, other than Christa, believed Colleen had done anything wrong or wanted anything to do with Tadaryl. Christa had targeted her for no reason at all. This was a senseless murder. Colleen had a bright future and was working hard to make her dreams happen. Christa Pike had no right to take those dreams away from her.
There is no doubt that Christa did not have a privileged childhood. In fact, she did not have even a stable childhood. Some sources say that she may have lied about some of the abuse allegations. Perhaps that is possible, but I tend to believe that people who lie about abuse have probably experienced it before. There are likely problems with her brain. She seems to be habitually violent and manipulative. Perhaps that explains why she was susceptible to behaving in the way that she did, but it doesn’t excuse her from consequences.
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