MINI TRUE CRIME ROUNDUP: A deep dive into the botched execution of Christa Pike

Lauren Barry (0:02)

This is a True Crime Roundup from The On Deadline Podcast. We explore crime stories reported on by Audacy's radio newsrooms across the country. I'm your host, Lauren Barry. This week, we're diving in to the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer and the botched execution of her convicted murderer, a story that's been making headlines. 50-year-old Christa Pike still remained alive but in critical condition this weekend, days after her scheduled execution on September 30th.

Christa Pike was sentenced to death 30 years ago, when she was 20 years old, for killing her 19-year-old classmate, Colleen Slemmer. Before we get into the shocking and gruesome details of Pike's botched execution, Scoot, from Audacy Station WWL in New Orleans, will fill us in on the crime that landed Pike in prison, and another violent crime she was accused of while incarcerated.

Scoot (1:11)

She murdered a college classmate. And according to the story that I have, Christa Pike and her boyfriend, they were involved in the occult, they were involved in dark rituals, and they, I guess, were also part of the Satan worshiping group.

They tried to create this satanic panic hysteria in the 1990s. And so in 1995, Christa was 18 years old. She and her boyfriend and another female killed Collen Slemmer in Knoxville, Tennessee. October 2026, they tried to execute her. That was yesterday. Well, no, today, early this morning, they tried to execute her. And it didn't work. But she and her 17-year-old boyfriend and their friend, a female, were students at a job training facility in Knoxville. They were apparently jealous and suspicious of this girl, Collen Slemmer. And they thought that she was interested in Christa's boyfriend. So Christa and her accomplices lured Collen into a remote wooded area of the University of Tennessee's agricultural campus. And over the course of a few hours, they tortured her, stabbed her, and beat her. Elements of the crime just created this widespread public attention about the fears of satanic panic at the time. And so this was going on in the 90s, and a lot of people were freaking out about satanic panic. A pentagram was carved directly into the girl's chest during the attack. And Christa crushed her skull, not her skull, but the skull of Colleen. And ultimately killed her.

She kept a piece of her skull as a trophy.

So following the arrest, Christa Pike was convicted in 1996 of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, receiving the death penalty. She became the only woman in Tennessee's death row, one of the youngest women in modern US history, to ever receive the death penalty. Her accomplices received different sentences due to their age and involvement. Her boyfriend was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole because he was 17 at the time of the crime and legally ineligible for capital punishment. The female accomplice pled guilty to being an accessory after the fact and received six years of probation. That seems like kind of a light sentence to me.

Now, while incarcerated, Christa Pike was also convicted in August of 2021 of attempted first degree murder during the assault of another inmate.

Lauren Barry (4:26)

Scoot also discussed how this attempted execution of Pike has brought up a barrage of questions about the death penalty at large.

Scoot (4:35)

Actually, it's really kind of sad because this this woman who she was young when she committed the crime in 1995, she's a little older now, but still, when you consider the years that people spent on death row, somebody being executed for a crime they committed in 1995 is pretty soon. But Christa Pike, they attempted in Tennessee to execute her last night, giving her not one but two doses of the lethal injection, Petrobarbatol, and she didn't die. She's still alive now. She's in the hospital and they have not released any information about her condition, but she is still alive. This really just resurrects conversation about the death penalty and a lot of people want to talk about it. This is one of those continuing debates in our society.

It's like the abortion debate, it's like the gun control debate, it's the death penalty debate.

It touches a lot of people. Some people very much for it and I understand that point of view. I mean, I get it. But then there are people who are very much against it and it's one of the reasons that I'm ambivalent about the death penalty because we're not the murderers.

The people who commit the crime, they're the murderers. They're the bad people. We're not the bad people. So for us to go through this calculated process of taking a human life is a challenge for some people and it is a challenge for me.