Satan's Helper: The Christa Pike Story, Part 3 - Told Mom She Planned It

Tony Brueski (0:00)

August 30th, 2001, at the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville. Every call an inmate makes from that prison, except to a lawyer, gets recorded. Christa Pike called her mother that day, and her mother asked who'd started the fight. Christa said no one had really started it. Then she got to what she wanted to say.

See, now I know the difference between premeditated murder and what happened with Colleen. Cause see, I premeditated the hell out of this. Sure did.

Five years earlier, a jury had sentenced her to die for killing Colleen Slemmer. The thing she was bragging about on this call was six days old. It had happened in a cage with a shoelace.

For three decades, her lawyers would ask the courts, a governor, and the public to see a different Christa Pike. The whole time, she'd be on tape, in her own voice, telling them who she was. Knox County, Tennessee, March 1996 Just before trial, prosecutors offered Christa Pike a deal. Plead guilty and take life in prison with no chance of parole. Her lead lawyer would later testify that she turned it down because she didn't want to grow old in jail. He'd also say that maybe he should have pushed her harder to take it. Her lawyers in 2026 would say the whole conversation about it lasted about 90 minutes. The judge was Mary Beth Leibowitz. The prosecutors were Bill Crabtree and Sally Jo Helm. Her lawyers were William Tallman, who'd never tried a death penalty case, and Julie Martin, appointed on January 23rd to her first murder trial. The jury listened to the confession through headphones. They watched Dr. Sandra Elkins fit a piece of bone into Colleen Slemmer's rebuilt skull. Then the defense tried to explain her. Dr. Eric Engum, a clinical psychologist, had tested her. Her IQ was 111 in the 77th percentile, which she called remarkable for someone who'd only finish the 9th grade. He found no brain damage, and he found she wasn't insane. What he found was a very severe borderline personality disorder, and his opinion was that once the attack started, she lost control. He had explanations for the rest. The dancing in Kim Iloilo's room, he said, was emotional release. The skull in the pocket was a girl with no identity looking for recognition, no matter how distorted. Then the prosecutor stood up. Engum agreed there was no question she'd killed Colleen. He agreed she'd lured Colleen to that spot on purpose and that bringing two weapons showed deliberation. And he agreed that when she walked away to check on a noise, she'd had time to calm down and think about what she was doing. The second defense expert, Dr. William Burnett, told the jury this looked like an adolescent dabbling in Satanism. He'd never spoken to Christa Pike. He couldn't offer an opinion on whether she'd planned it. The jury found her guilty of first-degree murder and of conspiring to commit it. To decide whether she'd live or die, the state put on nothing new. The defense called three people, her aunt, her father, her mother. They described a hard childhood. Then the prosecutor cross-examined them, and each one gave him what he came for. The aunt had called her a pathological liar. The father called her disobedient, dishonest, and manipulative. The mother admitted she'd been out of control since she was eight.

The state's only rebuttal witness was the officer who'd watched her giggle at the crime scene tape. He told the jury about the pentagram necklace.

Her own co-counsel years later would describe the case she'd been handed. A horrible case with horrible facts and someone that confessed ad nauseum and kept confessing over and over and over in letters that she was passing out.

The jury found two things that qualified this murder for the death penalty under Tennessee law. First, it involved torture. Second, Christa killed Colleen to keep from being arrested, and the proof of that was her own confession. She told police she wasn't going to be rotting in jail over Colleen's stupid ass.

On March 30, 1996, Christa Pike was sentenced to death in the electric chair, which was Tennessee's method at the time. She was 20, and she was the second woman in Tennessee to get a death sentence. She cried, and she asked the judge, Can I please hug my mom before I go?

She wasn't allowed to. That same day, in the Knox County Jail, she handed a corrections officer named Debbie Wade a letter and asked her to pass it to Tadaryl Shipp. Wade gave it to her lieutenant instead. It was read into the record at Christa's sentencing on the conspiracy charge.

I have ten months to live, she wrote. I want to tell you to tell them you lied in your statement and go along with mine. Then she wrote this, You see what I get for trying to be nice to that hoe? I went ahead and bashed her brains out so she would die quickly instead of letting her bleed to death and suffer more, and they fucking fry me. Ain't that some shit? She signed it, Little Devil.