Satan's Helper: The Christa Pike Story, Part 1 - Said Colleen Threatened Her First

Tony Brueski (0:01)

Christmas, 1994, Cedar Grove, North Carolina. Christa Pike was 18 and home for the holiday from a job training program in Knoxville, Tennessee. She told her mother a girl there had been threatening her. The girl, she said, hovered over her bed at night with a knife, or something like one. Her mother remembered two more things about that conversation. Christa said a boy named Tadaryl Shipp was her friend and would protect her, and she didn't seem afraid to go back. Her aunt remembered it the other way. To her, Christa said she was scared. I want everybody to be proud of me, she told her aunt, but people get hurt there.

She went back. 19 days later, a 19-year-old named Colleen Slemmer was dead on the University of Tennessee's Agricultural Campus. When Christa Pike sat down with a police investigator and explained why, the girl with the knife over the bed was in her story. It was Colleen.

No one but Christa Pike has ever told that story. Over 18 years, plenty of people had reasons to give up on her, and most of them gave her another chance instead. This is what she did with every one of them. Beckley, West Virginia, in March of 1976

Carissa Pike was a nurse. Glenn Pike was a Vietnam veteran who had married her the year before. They d stay married two years, split for one, try again for two, and then quit for good. Her mother says Christa came early, by C-section, and spent her first two weeks in an intensive care unit in Charleston. Her aunt would later tell a jury that mother and daughter never bonded, and that the person Christa did bond with was her father's mother. By the aunt's account, that grandmother raised her until Christa was twelve. Her father remembered it the same way. His mother loved the girl and spent a lot of time with her.

Her mother's own account of those years came out in a Knoxville courtroom in 1996, with a prosecutor asking the questions. By the age of nine, Christa was growing marijuana in flower pots in the house. Her mother agreed her daughter had been out of control since she was eight.

Her half-sister Alicia remembered a trip to the mall when Christa was about six. Alicia pocketed a pair of earrings. Christa walked out with 20 pieces of jewelry.

A neighbor named Fay Guy remembered Christa being left home alone a lot. She remembered Christa watching horror movies with her mother. When Guy said that wasn't right for a child, the mother laughed. Christa had been watching them, she said, since she was two or three.

In 1988, the grandmother died. Christa was 12 Her mother says Christa swallowed an overdose not long after. From then on, she lived with her mother almost all the time, 95%, as her mother put it. In that house, her mother smoked marijuana with her. Her mother's stated reason, under oath, was to establish a friendship. Her aunt saw that house, too. She'd tell the jury it was very dirty, and that there were no rules in it. Her mother had a boyfriend named Steve Caio. In 1996, she told the jury a boyfriend had whipped Christa with a belt, that she'd had him arrested for it, and that Christa had gone after him with a butcher knife. 15 years later, at another hearing, she named Caio, said he'd punched Christa, and that it went to court, and called the knife a butter knife. A school friend, Carol Goring, was in the house for one of those fights. She heard bumping and yelling, and then Christa came running out of a room with a knife in her hand, very panicked. Child Protective Services in Orange County opened a file. The caseworker's plan was to keep Christa safe whenever Caio was in the home, and the file closed when he moved out. Her mother would also tell the jury that Christa lied to her, and stole from her over and over, and that she quit high school. Her aunt put it another way. Christa never could understand what the word no meant. She ran away and skipped school so much that the county placed her for a time in a group home called Schaeffer House. It was the first of two. Her father had already stepped back. In 1989, Glenn Pike kicked his daughter out of his house for the last time. Before she turned 18, he signed papers so someone else could adopt her. On the stand, he described the girl who had lived under his roof as disobedient, dishonest and manipulative. At 14, Christa said she d run away and live on the street unless her boyfriend could move in. He moved in. The first time the law got hold of her, the crime was candy. She broke into a community center and stole some. A juvenile judge found her delinquent on felony breaking and entering and put her on probation. Her probation counselor, Peggy Hamlett, would describe a smart girl with a lot of potential. She'd also describe a girl who was out of control, drinking and huffing the fumes out of aerosol cans. The probation didn't hold. It was revoked and Christa was committed. Hamlett didn't see an aggressive kid. That's in the record too. Her lawyer in juvenile court was a man named Matthew Martin. He thought the state training school would be a mistake for her. He found a program he liked better and recommended it to the judge. The judge sent her to training school anyway.