Part 1A Bad Connection
It's a Thursday night in January of 1995, down in Orange Park, Florida, and May Martinez's phone is ringing. It's her daughter, Colleen. 19 years old, calling from Knoxville, Tennessee, about 500 miles up the interstate, where she's been living for three months in a place she can't stand. And the call won't hold, it keeps breaking up. May gets a few words, then nothing, then a few more. That's all. So, May does what any mom does. She hangs up, and she calls her kid back. And Colleen's not there. She's gone out. Now, I want you to hang on to that, because that is the last ordinary thing in this story. A bad connection. A mother calling back. A 19 year old who didn't sit by the phone. Up in Knoxville, at about 8 o'clock that night, Colleen walked past the front desk of the Job Corps Center, a place where the government put kids who needed a trade, a diploma, and a bed. And the rule in that building was, you sign out when you leave. So, she signed out. And she wasn't alone. Three other kids from the building signed out right along with her, and the four of them walked out into the cold, headed across town toward the university. Four names in the book, going out. A couple of hours later, three of those names came back in.
May Martinez has been waiting on the rest of that phone call for more than 30 years. To understand why, and why the story everybody tells about that night gets it so wrong, we have to go back into that building on Dale Avenue. Back to four kids, a front desk, and a sign out book.
Part 2Podcast Intro
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Forgotten True Crime, the true crime podcast where we tell the stories of crimes that happened long ago. If you are a true crime fan, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. That way, when we have new episodes, you will be the first to know. Also, check us out on our YouTube and Facebook pages, Forgotten True Crime. Visit our blog, Section29.com, where we post many cool things we found for each episode. This episode, the Job Corps killing, has some really interesting stuff for you to look at, including the court opinions, a map of the walk from Dale Avenue to the university that night, and a timeline of the whole case. Make sure you go there and check it out. The links to all of that are in the description below. Parts of this story may contain opinions and speculations and should be taken as such. What I'm going to do today is tell you this story the way I've come to believe it happened, built out of the court record, the sworn testimony, and the reporting that survives. Where I'm reading between the lines, I'll try to tell you I'm doing it. These stories depict violent crimes of all types and may be a trigger for some listeners. And I'll be straight with you. This is one of the hardest cases we've ever covered. The victim was 19, and what was done to her was cruel. If you need to sit this one out, I understand. Listener discretion is advised. Now, you may have seen this case in the news this week. This isn't that story. This one is hers. And let me tell you, this story has everything. A hotel full of teenagers a long way from home, a threat said out loud the night before, a detective who had just come back from a class on the occult, a deal that was on the table and turned down, and a mother who has spent 30 years fighting for every part of her daughter. All of this happened in Knoxville, Tennessee in the winter of 1995. And almost everybody who talks about it today is talking about the wrong person. So let's fix that.
Part 3Colleen
So let's start where Colleen started with May. Colleen Anne Slemmer was born in September of 1975 up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. But she grew up mostly in Florida, in Orange Park, right outside Jacksonville. And when you ask May Martinez about her daughter, and a lot of reporters have asked her over a lot of years, she doesn't start with that night. She starts with the Special Olympics. From the time Colleen was eight years old, she helped look after disabled kids. That was her thing. May says she loved it. She called her daughter an awesome, giving person. And I'm going to take her word for it because she's the one who was there. Colleen loved roller skating. Now, if you were a kid in the 80s, you know exactly what that means. Friday night at the rink, colored lights spinning on the floor. Whatever was on the radio that year turned up way too loud. Somebody's cousin trying to skate backwards and taking out half the rink. That was the world. And she loved computers. She used to sit and work on them with her stepfather. Think about that for a second. This is the early 90s. Most families didn't have a computer in the house. The ones that did had a big beige box on a desk in the corner that made us sound like a fax machine being strangled every time you tried to get online. And here's this teenage girl in Florida who looks at that box and thinks that I want to do that for a living. So that became the plan, not a someday plan, an actual one. And the way she was going to get there was the Job Corps. Now, a quick word on what the Job Corps is, because a lot of people have never heard of it. It started in 1964, part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. The idea was simple. If you're young, 16 to 24, and you don't have much money, the federal government will give you a place to live, meals, a diploma if you need one, and training in a trade. For free. You move in, you learn, you leave with a skill. There were more than a hundred of these centers around the country. But here's the catch. Every center teaches different trades. And the one in Jacksonville, the one close to home, didn't teach computers. The one in Knoxville, Tennessee, did. So in the fall of 1994, Colleen turned 19, packed up, and moved about 500 miles north into a building full of strangers to learn the things she wanted to learn. Now put yourself in May's shoes for a minute. Your kid wants to move to a city you've maybe never seen, to live with people you've never met, because it's the only way to get the training she wants. What do you say? Do you tell her no? Do you drive her up there yourself? Or do you do what most parents do? You hug her, you tell her to call, and then you sit by the phone. And the phone calls did come. But by May's account, they weren't happy ones. Colleen was miserable up there. She wanted to come home. And there's one more thing her family has always been certain about. And I want to put it down right here, because it's going to matter later. Colleen was not interested in anybody at that place. Not romantically, not anybody. She wasn't there for that. She was there to learn computers, and then she wanted to go home. Remember that. Which brings us back to that Thursday in January. The call that kept breaking up. May calling back. Colleen already gone out. Here's the part I can't shake. She wanted out of that building so badly. And on the night she finally walked out the front door, she walked out with three people from inside it. So who were they? To answer that, you have to understand the building.
Part 4621 Dale Avenue
621 Dale Avenue, Knoxville, Tennessee. If you'd driven past it in 1994, you'd have known exactly what it used to be. It was a Holiday Inn. Somebody took a hotel, the lobby, the long hallways, the rows of room doors, and turned it into a Job Corps center. The ice machine probably still hummed at the end of the hall. It just had teenagers in it now instead of salesmen. It sat just north of a neighborhood called Fort Sanders, a few blocks from the University of Tennessee. And quick detour because I can't help myself. Fort Sanders is named for an actual fort from the Civil War. In November of 1863, Confederate troops threw themselves at that fort in the freezing cold just before dawn, and the whole assault was over in about 20 minutes. It was a disaster for them. 130 years later, the hill where it happened is covered in old Victorian houses cut up into student apartments. And a few blocks away is the strip, Cumberland Avenue. Bars, pizza, record stores, college kids everywhere. So that's the neighborhood. College town. And right on the edge of it, a hotel full of kids who were not in college. And the neighbors did not love it. Here's why. In December of 1993, less than a year before Colleen got there, two residents of that Job Corps center went after two University of Tennessee students who were sitting in a car at the edge of campus. The young man was beaten badly. The young woman was driven somewhere else and raped.
Both of the Job Corps residents were convicted. After something like that, a neighborhood makes up its mind about a place. Victor Ashe was the mayor of Knoxville back then. And years later, he put it about as bluntly as a politician ever will. The center, he said, had all kinds of criminal and vagrant issues. That's the building Colleen moved into in the fall of 1994. A place the neighborhood already didn't trust. Full of kids from all over the country. Most of them a long way from home. Now let's meet a few of them because Colleen did.
There was a girl named Christa Pike, 18 years old. She'd come from North Carolina and she got to Dale Avenue around the same time Colleen did. Two new girls in the same building the same season. Christa had a boyfriend there. His name was Tadaryl Shipp. He was 17 from Memphis. Those two were a pair. And there was a third. Shadolla Peterson, 18 from Cleveland, Tennessee, down near the Georgia line, three teenagers, two young women and a young man all a long way from home, all living in the same converted hotel as a 19 year old girl from Florida who wanted to learn computers and go back to her mom. Now I want to be careful here because it's easy to look back at these three and see what came later. So let's not. Not yet. Right now in the fall of 1994, they're just kids in a Job Corps center. Nobody in that building was a stranger to anybody else. They ate in the same cafeteria. They walked the same halls. They knew each other's names and each other's business. And somewhere in those three months, something went wrong between two of those girls. What was it? A boy? A rumor? Something one of them said about the other in a hallway? It depends entirely on who you ask. And only one of those two girls ever got to tell her side of it. By the second week of January 1995, one of them had made up her mind about the other and she told somebody. So what went wrong between Christa Pike and Colleen Slemmer? Here's the honest answer. We've only got two versions and they don't fit together. The first one is Christa's. We have it because a couple of days later, she sat down with a detective and a tape recorder and told him. And according to what she told him, she and Colleen had been having problems for a while. Colleen, she said, had been trying to get her boyfriend Tadaryl and Colleen had been running her mouth all over the building. Then she told him something else. She said she woke up one night and found Colleen standing over her with a box cutter. Now, hold on, because nobody ever backed that up. Not a witness, not a roommate, not a single other person. It's Christa's word, told to a detective after everything. So you can decide what it's worth. The second version is Colleen's family's. And you already know what it is because I asked you to remember it. Colleen wasn't interested in anybody at that place. Not Tadaryl, not anybody. She wanted to finish her course and go home. Both of those can't be true. Was Colleen flirting with somebody else's boyfriend in a building where everybody knew everybody's business? Or was a homesick girl from Florida just in the wrong hallway saying the wrong thing about the wrong person? Or was it nothing? Nothing at all. And the reason came later, made up to fit what happened. I don't know. And I'm not going to pretend I do. What I can tell you is that one of those two girls decided the answer didn't matter. January 11th, 1995. A Wednesday. The night before. There was another student in that building named Kim Iloilo. She was Christa's friend. And on that Wednesday, Christa Pike went to Kim Iloilo and told her flat out that she was going to kill Colleen Slemmer. And she gave her a reason. It's in the court record, word for word, because Kim Iloilo later swore to it under oath. She said she had just felt mean that day. That's it. That's the whole reason. She just felt mean that day. Not the boyfriend, not the box cutter, not the rumors. When she said it out loud, the day before, to her friend, that's the reason she gave. Now think about what it takes to say that to another person. Not to write it in a diary. Not to mutter it under your breath. To look at a friend and tell her plainly that you are going to kill somebody tomorrow. And the reason is that you feel mean. And put yourself in Kim's shoes for a second. You're a teenager in a job corps center. Your friend says something like that. What do you do with it? Is it a joke? Is it just talk? The kind of thing people say when they're mad and don't mean? Do you tell somebody? Who would you even tell? I don't think anybody listening can say for sure what they'd have done. I know I can't. But I'll tell you this, that sentence is one of the only things in this entire case that shows us what was in Christa Pike's head before anything happened. And what it shows us is that the decision was already made, 24 hours early, said out loud to a witness. The next night was a Thursday, and at about 8 o'clock Christa Pike asked Colleen to go to the store with her.
Part 5Eight O'Clock
Thursday, January 12th, 1995. Somewhere around eight o'clock that night, Christa Pike asked Colleen Slemmer to go to the store with her. Not just any store, Blockbuster Music. Now, quick detour, because I know some of you just said Blockbuster Music? Yes, that was a thing. In the early 90s, Blockbuster, the video rental giant, the blue and yellow ticket stub, the late fees you still haven't paid, bought up a bunch of record store chains and slapped its name on them. So for a few years, you could walk into a Blockbuster and buy a CD instead of renting Jurassic Park. It didn't last, but in January of 1995, it was right there, and it was a perfectly normal place for two girls to walk to on a weeknight. And the way the reporter who covered the trial put it, the promise was simple. Go get a video, smoke a little pot. That was the pitch.
Some people who tell this story say Colleen went because Christa said she wanted to make peace, to clear the air. Maybe that was part of it too. I can't tell you for sure what was in Colleen's head. But think about who she was by then. Three months in, homesick, miserable, wanting nothing more than to get through her course and go home. And the girl she'd supposedly been having trouble with shows up and says, hey, come out with us tonight. Why would she go? Maybe she wanted the fight to be over. Maybe she was just tired of sitting in that building. Maybe she was 19 and somebody asked. She went.
It wasn't just the two of them. Tadaryl Shipp came. So did Shadolla Peterson. Four kids from the same building heading out on a weeknight. And there's something else I need to tell you about before they walk out that door. Earlier, Christa Pike had borrowed something from somebody at the Job Corps Center. She never ever said who. Not to the detective, not in 30 years. Hang on to that. At about eight o'clock, Kim Iloilo, the same friend Christa had talked to the night before, watched the four of them leave the building together, walking towards 17th Street. And on their way out, they did what everybody in that building did. They signed out. That's the book from the beginning of this episode. Four names going out. I want you to picture that front desk. It's the most boring object in this whole story. A book, a pen, a column for your name, and a column for the time. The kind of thing nobody looks at twice. And by the end of the weekend, it's going to be the most important piece of paper in Knox County. Remember that book. They walked south, through the edge of Fort Sanders and down to the strip. Cumberland Avenue, lit up, busy, college kids coming and going. Then down to Tyson Park. From there, they picked up a greenway. One of those paved walking trails along the creek that people jog on every day of the year. Four teenagers walking together on a popular trail. Nobody would have looked twice. And then, somewhere past the park, they left the greenway. They turned up a paved path, away from the lights, toward the edge of the University of Tennessee's agricultural campus. At the top of that path, there's a corner of the campus most people never see. Behind the university's steam plant, the building that heats the place with the big smokestack, near a row of greenhouses. In the daytime, it's a working corner of a working campus. Trucks, pipes, grounds crews. At night, in January, it's dark. It's out of sight of the road. And it's not the kind of place you'd ever find by accident. Somebody in that group, I think, knew it was there.
Part 6The Steam Plant
I'm going to tell you what happened behind that steam plant, but first I have to be honest with you about where it comes from. There were four people there, and the fullest account anybody has of the inside of that hour comes from one of them, Christa Pike. She told it twice, once that same night to her friend Kim Iloilo, and once two days later to a detective with a tape recorder running. The two tellings line up, so everything I'm about to tell you is her version. It's the version of the person who did it. Keep that in mind, because some of it is her trying to make herself sound better, and some of it, I think, is her not being able to. Here's what she said. When they got up behind the steam plant, she and Colleen exchanged words. And then, Christa started hitting her. She grabbed Colleen's head and banged it against her knee. She threw her to the ground, and she kicked her, over and over. And while this was happening, Colleen kept asking one question. Why are you doing this to me? At some point, Colleen said she was going to report it. She'd tell the Job Corps, and Christa would get thrown out of the program. And Christa's answer to that was to kick her in the face, and in the side, again and again. Christa said there was a second person helping her. She only ever called that person he. She said he helped hold Colleen down until she stopped struggling. And now, remember what I told you Christa had borrowed from somebody back at the center? It was a meat cleaver, a small one. She brought it with her, along with a box cutter. She carried both of them out of that building, past the front desk, down the strip, along the greenway, and up that path. So, you tell me, was this a fight that got out of hand? That's what she'd claim later, that she only meant to fight Colleen, to tell her to leave her the hell alone. But you don't borrow a meat cleaver for a fight, and you don't tell a friend the night before that you're going to kill somebody. She cut Colleen with the box cutter, and Colleen, in Christa's words, screamed and screamed. Christa said that's when she started hearing voices, voices telling her she had to do something now, because if Colleen told anybody, Christa would go to prison for attempted murder. And she said, for a while, she just stood there, just watching her bleed. And this next part is the part I can't get past. Colleen started bargaining. She begged Christa to talk to her, and she made her an offer. She said if Christa would just let her go, she would walk home, back to Florida. She wouldn't even go back to the Job Corps for her things. She'd just go. Remember what her mother said? She was miserable up there. She wanted to come home. She was still trying to go home. She offered to walk there, and Christa told her to shut up. Because, and these are her words, it was harder to hurt somebody when they're talking to you. The more Colleen talked, the more Christa kicked her in the face. At one point, Christa took a rag out of her own hair and tied it around Colleen's mouth so she'd stop talking. And when Colleen kept begging anyway, Christa cut her throat. And when she still kept talking, she cut it again, and again. And she used a chunk of asphalt on her head, more than once. And near the end, Christa leaned down and asked her a question. Colleen, do you know who's doing this to you? Colleen didn't answer. She just made a sound. Then, Christa and the person she called He each took one of Colleen's feet, dragged her over near some trees, and left her there on a pile of dirt and debris. Christa said the whole thing lasted about 30 minutes to an hour. Now, here's the other side of it. Because there's one more witness to that hour, and she wasn't there. Her name was Dr. Sandra Elkins, the Knox County Medical Examiner. And what she found tells you what Christa's version leaves out. There were so many cuts that the doctor stopped cataloging them. She said she basically threw up her hands. She found bruises on Colleen's knees, fresh ones, the kind you get from crawling. She found defensive wounds on her arm. And she found that Colleen's heart was still beating when she was cut, and that none of those wounds would have knocked her unconscious. So let me put that plainly, one time, and then I'll leave it. She was awake. She tried to crawl away. She tried to fight them off. She begged, and she asked to go home. What killed her, in the end, was the asphalt. Blows to the head. At least four of them. As for who he was? The record never says. Tadaryl Shipp was there. Shadolla Peterson was there. And anybody who tells you for certain which one of them held Colleen down is telling you more than the record does.
Part 7The Morning After
So now there are three of them. Walking back down off that campus in the dark. They had to clean up first. And here the account split a little. Christa told the detective they washed their hands and their shoes in a mud puddle. The reporter who covered the trial says they walked to a gas station on Cumberland Avenue to wash up. Maybe it was both. Either way, they got rid of things on the way. The box cutter went. So did a couple of Colleen's IDs. As far as anybody has ever said, that box cutter was never found. And the meat cleaver? Christa took it back. Back at the center, she returned it to whoever had lent it to her. She never named that person. Not to the detective, not ever. Think about that for a second. Somewhere in that building, somebody got a small meat cleaver handed back to them. Did they know? Did they ask? Did they ever say a word to anybody? I would love to know. I don't think we ever will. At about a quarter past 10, the three of them walked back into 621 Dale Avenue. Kim Iloilo saw them come in. Christa, Tadaryl, Shadolla. Colleen wasn't with them. And they did the thing everybody in that building did. They signed back in. Three names. That book on the front desk now said something nobody in the building had read yet. Four out, three in. And 500 miles south, in Florida, May Martinez had called back and been told her daughter had gone out. As far as she knew, that's where things stood. A kid who didn't wait by the phone. Later that night, Christa Pike went to Kim Iloilo's room. Remember, this is the same friend she'd told the night before what she was going to do. And now she came to tell her she'd done it. She said she'd killed Colleen Slemmer, and she'd brought something back with her to prove it. A piece of Colleen's skull. She showed it to Kim. In the words the court used, she brought it back as a souvenir. Then she told Kim how it happened. The throat, the beating, the asphalt. She told her Colleen had begged them to stop. Them. Not her, them. And while she told it, this is Kim Iloilo's sworn testimony. Christa was dancing. Dancing in a circle in that room. Smiling and singing. La la la. I've read a lot of case files. I've read things I wish I could unread. And I keep coming back to that one. Because here's what I think. A 19 year old girl being killed in the dark over the better part of an hour. God help us. That is a thing that happens in this world. It's happened before and it'll happen again. But coming home afterward and signing back in at the front desk and walking down the hall to your friend's room and dancing. Showing her a piece of the girl you just killed. Like a ticket stub from a concert. I don't have a word for that. I don't think there is one. And then she went to bed. In that building. The same building where Colleen's bed sat empty. And in the morning, she got up and went to breakfast.
Friday, January 13, 1995. About five minutes after eight in the morning. A man who worked for the University of Tennessee grounds department was out on the agricultural campus near the greenhouses behind the steam plant. Just a guy at work. First thing on a Friday. And he saw something on the ground near the trees. He testified later that at first he thought it was an animal. Then he got closer and saw the clothing and he realized it was a young woman. The police came and the more they looked the bigger the scene got blood in one place. Clothing in the bushes, footprints, broken branches. The area they had to tape off tripled in size until it was about 100 feet long and 60 feet wide. The ground was wet and muddy. And in that mud, they found signs of a struggle. Trampled bushes, drag marks, and hand prints and knee prints. You remember what the medical examiner found on Colleen's knees. Bruises. The kind you get from crawling. Those prints in the mud are the other half of that. She was trying to get away. They'd identify her through her dental records. A 19 year old Job Corps student. Now here's the thing I want you to sit with. By the time that grounds worker found Colleen, the three who'd walked out with her weren't the only people in that building who knew what had happened. Kim Iloilo had been told. Twice, really. The night before the killing and the night of it. And nobody called anybody. Colleen was found because a man went to work. Not because anybody told. Meanwhile, back at Dale Avenue, it's breakfast time. Kim Iloilo sits down and there's Christa. And Kim asks her what she did with that piece of skull. Christa says it's in her pocket. And then she says, and yes, I'm eating breakfast with it. Later that morning in class, Christa turns to another student, a girl named Stephanie Wilson. She points to some brown spots on her shoes and she says, that ain't mud on my shoes. That's blood. Then she pulls a napkin out of her pocket, unfolds it and shows Stephanie a piece of bone. She tells her it's Colleen's skull. She tells her she cut Colleen's throat six times and beat her in the head with a rock. Two people now. Two people, she told. And still that morning, nobody went to the police. Why were they scared of her? Did they not believe it? Did they think a piece of bone in a napkin was some kind of sick joke? I honestly don't know. Kids in a strange city, a long way from home in a building where you don't snitch. Maybe that's all it was. Maybe it wasn't. That afternoon, somewhere between four and five o'clock, Christa Pike went back, back to the campus, back to where the police had taped everything off. And she brought company, three to five other girls from the center. A University of Tennessee police officer named Harold Underwood was standing there and Christa walked right up to him and started asking questions. Why was this area marked off? Did they know who the victim was yet? Did they have any suspects? The other girls didn't say a word for 15 minutes. Underwood would later describe Christa's demeanor in one word, amused. And then she was giggling and moving around. And he noticed one more thing. She was wearing a necklace, an unusual one. He remembered it. Meanwhile, a UT police detective named Donald Cook had gone with Colleen's body to the morgue. And after she'd been cleaned, he saw something none of them had been able to see out in the mud. Carved into her chest was a five-pointed star inside a circle, a pentagram. Now go back to that officer out at the scene. The necklace he noticed on the girl who was giggling and asking about suspects, it was in the shape of a pentagram. And go back one more night to Kim Iloilo's room and Christa dancing in a circle, because that was one of the details Christa told her, that a pentagram had been carved into Colleen, the forehead and the chest. Who actually did the carving? We're going to get to that. And I'll tell you right now, it's not settled. But from the moment Detective Cook saw that star, this stopped being a murder in Knoxville. It became something else. Something everybody in East Tennessee was about to hear about. And there was a detective at the Knoxville Police Department who, it turned out, had just come back from a training course on exactly that.
Part 8The Statement and the Jacket
The detective who caught this case was a Knoxville police investigator named Randy York. He started working it on Friday, the day Colleen was found. And here's the thing about Randy York. Right before any of this happened, he'd been to a training course. The subject was Satanism and cults. Now, I want you to think about what 1995 felt like, if you're old enough to remember it. This was the tail end of what people now call the satanic panic. For about a decade, America had been convinced there were devil worshiping cults hiding in daycares and heavy metal albums and Dungeons and Dragons games. Talk shows ran whole episodes on it. Police departments sent officers to seminars on how to spot the signs. Almost none of it turned out to be real. So picture this detective fresh out of one of those seminars, walking into a case with a pentagram carved into a 19 year old girl. And then a call comes in. A woman calls the police. She says her daughter is at the Job Corps Center on Dale Avenue. And her daughter is worried about a satanic cult in that building. Randy York has said for years that the pentagram was the key, that the symbol and that tip are what unlocked this case and led him to Christa Pike. And maybe that's exactly how it felt from where he was standing. But there's another piece of this and it's the most boring thing in the whole story. Remember the book on the front desk? A reporter who wrote about this case a few years later put it this way. The police looked at the log book and saw the four of them signed out together and only three coming back four out three in. So which was it? The symbol or the sign out book? Here's my read, and it's just my read. I think the book told them who and the symbol told everybody what kind of story this was going to be. The book didn't make the news. The pentagram led the news. And once the police started looking at those three kids, the symbol kept showing up. Christa Pike, the story goes, had a nickname. She called herself Lil Devil. Tadaryl Shipp had one, too. Baby Satan. And in Tadaryl's room at the center, police said, there was a small shrine, a satanic altar. For what it's worth, a reporter who went back through all of this just this year came down firmly on one point. Of the two of them, it was Tadaryl, not Christa, who was actually into it.
Saturday, January 14th, two days after the killing, Randy York brought Christa Pike and Tadaryl Shipp down to the Knoxville Police Department, and he talked to them separately. Christa was read her rights and she waived them. She decided to talk. The tape recorder went on and York's voice starts it the way these things always start. It's a statement, he says, from Christa Gail Pike about the death of Colleen Slemmer, who was also a Job Corps student. And then he says, state your full name, honey. Honey. She talked for a long time. When it was typed up later, it ran to about 46 pages. He asked how she got Colleen up there. She said she told her she wanted her to come to Blockbuster with her. She said when they got up there, Colleen realized there wasn't really any weed. She said Colleen started going off on her and I hit her. And at one point, she said this, I really thought I was going crazy because I've never seen myself act like that before in my life. She told him she couldn't let Colleen go because if she did, she'd get thrown out of the Job Corps. So how did she say all of this? That depends on who you ask. Randy York has told interviewers she was giddy telling it. But the reporter who sat in the courtroom a year later when that tape was played for a jury, described the statement as tearful. And wrote that Christa sobbed while it played.
Two people, two very different memories of the same voice, same tape. And then there were the two things she wouldn't admit to. She denied carving the pentagram. She said the other person did that. And she denied taking any piece of Colleen's skull. That same day, the police photographed Christa Pike and Tadaryl Shipp. In both pictures, they're wearing pentagram necklaces. And at some point, Tadaryl Shipp gave the police his own version of why Colleen died. He said she was a sacrifice to the devil.
Hold that one loosely, because the people who looked hardest at this case, including years later, Tadaryl Shipp's own lawyer, would say Satanism was never really the reason. But in January of 1995, in Knoxville, that's the story that took off. And Christa Pike had just told a detective on tape that she never took a piece of Colleen's skull.
So Christa Pike told the detective on tape that she never took a piece of Colleen's skull. Let's back up one day. That Friday, the same day she told Kim Iloilo she was eating breakfast with it, the same day she showed it to Stephanie Wilson in a napkin, Christa had some business to take care of at the center. She went to see a man named Robert Pollock. He was an orientation specialist at the Job Corps. She talked to him about a misplaced ID card. Then she got up and left his office and she left her jacket behind a black leather jacket hanging on the back of the chair she'd been sitting in. Now, it was a long weekend. That Monday was Martin Luther King Day. And sometime over that weekend, Robert Pollock heard the news going around. Christa Pike was a suspect in the murder of Colleen Slemmer. When he came back to his office, the jacket was still hanging there. And Robert Pollock did exactly the right thing. He turned that jacket over right away to the center's head of safety and security. And it went to the police. A Knoxville police officer named Arthur Bohanan went through that jacket. And in the inside pocket, he found a small piece of bone. She told the detective she never took it. She told her friends she was eating breakfast with it. And then she left it hanging on a chair in the Job Corps office. I've read that part probably 20 times and I still don't know what to do with it. Was it carelessness? Did she just forget? Or did she think on some level that nothing could touch her? I don't know. But I know it's the moment this case stopped being her word against anybody's. Officer Bohanan took that piece of bone straight to the University of Tennessee. And here's a detour because Knoxville happens to be one of the best places on earth to take a piece of bone. In 1981, a U .T. anthropologist named Bill Bass started something that sounds like a horror movie and is actually one of the most important research sites in forensic science. A patch of wooded land behind the university's medical center where donated human bodies are left out under the sky. So scientists can study exactly what happens to a person after death. How fast? In what weather? What the insects do? What the bones look like after a week, a month, a year? People call it the body farm. Half the forensic science you've ever seen on television runs through that place. So in 1995, if you had a question about bone in Knoxville, you had some of the best people in the world a few miles away. The man who got this question was a U .T. forensic anthropologist named Dr. Murray Marks. Colleen's skull had been painstakingly reconstructed from the pieces and there was a gap in it. Dr. Marks took the piece of bone from Christa Pike's jacket and he fit it into that gap. It fit perfectly at the trial. In front of the jury, he did it again. He showed them and there was more. The state crime lab tested the blood on Christa's clothes and on Tadaryl's both matched Colleen. So this is where it stood. A friend who'd been told the night before, a friend who'd been told the night of a classmate who'd been shown the bone, a sign out book, a tape, two pentagram necklaces, blood on their clothes and a piece of Colleen Slemmer in a jacket pocket that fit exactly where it came from. Christa Pike had been arrested and charged with murder that Saturday, the day she gave her statement Tadaryl Shipp and Shadolla Peterson were charged to three kids from one building who walked out one door together. And the question now wasn't whether it was what the state of Tennessee was going to do with them.
Part 9The Trial
The trial started on a Friday in March of 1996, the 22nd, 14 months after that night. It was a capital case, which means it came in two halves. First, the jury decides whether you did it, then, if they say yes, the same jury decides whether you live or die. The first half was never really a contest. The state had the tape, the jacket, the piece of bone that fit, the blood, Kim Iloilo, Stephanie Wilson. On the third day, they played Christa's statement for the jury, and she sat there and cried while her own voice described it. The state's theory of why was simple, jealousy, a girl who thought another girl was after her boyfriend. And here's a little detail that didn't come out until years later, and I can't stop turning it over. Tadaryl Shipp, the boyfriend, eventually testified that Christa took their relationship a lot more seriously than he did, and that at the time, he was seeing other girls. He didn't think Christa knew. So think about that. If jealousy was the reason, it was jealousy aimed at the one girl in that building who, according to everybody who loved her, wanted nothing to do with him. On Friday, March 29th, the jury came back. Seven men and five women, guilty, premeditated first degree murder and conspiracy to commit it. Then came the second half. And this is where we finally get to ask the question we've been holding off on. Who was Christa Pike? The defense's answer was her family. They called three relatives who happened to be in the courtroom. Her father, her aunt, and her mother, a woman named Carissa Hansen. And her mother got up there and said something I don't think I've ever heard a parent say under oath. She said she'd been a poor mother. Christa's parents told the jury they'd divorced each other, twice, and passed her back and forth whenever one of them didn't want her around anymore. Her mother said she'd let her daughter have a live-in boyfriend when she was 14. She said she'd smoked marijuana with her, trying to be her friend. And then, when the prosecutor was cross-examining her, she said this. I should be the one in her seat. I should be punished for her crime. That was most of what the jury heard about who Christa Pike was. That and a psychologist who'd tested her IQ at 111, above average, and diagnosed her with severe borderline personality disorder. Here's what they didn't hear. The defense had hired a mitigation expert, a psychologist named Dr. Diana McCoy, and she'd put together a three-volume history of Christa's life. The plan had been for her to be the whole case for sparing Christa's life. Her lawyer's words, later, were that she was going to come out and save the day. At the last minute, the ninth hour, his co-counsel called it, they decided not to call her. Why? Christa's lead lawyer, a man named William Talman, gave a few reasons. The main one was that Dr. McCoy hadn't examined Christa herself, but he also said he was uncomfortable about something else. Dr. McCoy had once dated the lead prosecutor, the same man who cross-examined Christa's mother. The prosecutor testified it was over before the trial ever started, and Talman said he never doubted her integrity. But that's the courtroom this was. And even though they didn't call her, her whole report ended up in the prosecution's hands anyway.
Now, it's also fair to say who was defending a 20-year-old in a death penalty trial. Talman had tried murder cases, but never one where the state wanted to execute his client. His co-counsel had been appointed less than two months before the trial. It was her first murder case. And years later, Christa's lawyers would argue that the jury never heard the rest of it. They'd claim she'd been sexually abused starting when she was a small child. They'd claim bipolar disorder and PTSD.
Those are claims made in her appeals, and I'm telling them to you as claims. The courts that looked at them later decided they probably wouldn't have changed a thing. Saturday, March 30th, 1996. The jury went out to decide whether Christa Pike should live. They were gone about an hour and 15 minutes.
Death by electrocution. And when Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz pronounced it, she said, may God have mercy upon you. Christa had turned 20 that month. She started crying, and she asked for one thing. Can I please hug my mom before I go? Please, let me just hug my mom.
They let her. Her mother was right behind her, sobbing. And then the officers took her down to the jail. Now I'm going to tell you something that jury never knew. It didn't come out for years. Before the trial, the state of Tennessee had offered Christa Pike a deal. Plead guilty. Life in prison without the possibility of parole. No trial, no jury, no death sentence. She said no. Her own lawyer testified about it later. And the reason he said she gave him was this. She did not want to grow old in jail. He also said, on the record, that he probably should have pushed her harder to take it. Christa tells it differently these days. By her account, her lawyer told her a jury would never sentence a pretty young girl to death. He denies ever saying that. So there are two versions, and I'll let you sit with both of them. But either way, think about what that means. She wasn't sentenced to death because nobody offered her a way out. She was offered life. And a girl who wasn't even 21 yet, after what she'd done, looked at the rest of her life in a cell and said, no, I'll take my chances. She did not want to grow old in jail. She spent the next 30 years in one.
Part 10Three Fates
That same night, the night she was sentenced to death, Christa Pike sat in a holding cell at the Knox County Jail and wrote a letter. It was to Tadaryl. She handed it to a jailer to mail. The jailer didn't mail it. It went to her supervisor and from there to the district attorney's office. And that June, at a later hearing, the prosecutor stood up in court and read it out loud. Here's some of what it said. Hey love, I just want you to know how much I love you. I have 10 months left to live. Imagine that. She asks him to tell the police he lied in his statement and to go along with mine. And then this. You see what I get for trying to be nice to that ho? I went ahead and bashed her brains out so she'd die quickly instead of letting her bleed to death and they fry me. Ain't that some shit? And she signed it with that nickname, Lil Devil, trying to be nice. That's how she saw it. That was the kindness.
Hours after she asked if she could hug her mother, she was 20 years old. So that's one of the three. What about the other two? Tadaryl Shipp was 17 on the night Colleen died. 17. And that one year turned out to be everything. Under the law, you can't be sentenced to death for something you did before you turned 18. So no matter what a jury decided about Tadaryl, death was off the table before his trial ever started. He was tried in January of 1997 and convicted of murder. And when that jury went out to decide his sentence, they couldn't agree on life without parole. So he got life with the possibility of parole plus another 25 years on top of it. He's been in prison ever since. In October of 2025, at a prison in West Tennessee, he finally had a parole hearing. The board turned him down, citing how serious the crime was. His next chance comes up in 2031. And Shadolla Peterson. 18. The same age as Christa. She was never convicted of murder. Prosecutors said they didn't have the evidence to prove she was a murderer. She pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact, and she testified for the state. She got credit for about 460 days she'd already spent in jail and served the rest of a six year sentence on probation. Tadaryl's statement to police said she was a willing part of it. But that's his word. And it's the only word there is. She has lived as a private citizen ever since. And I'm going to leave her there. So let's line them up. Christa was 18. Tadaryl was 17. Shadolla was 18. Colleen was 19. In 2019, a federal appeals judge named Jane Stranch was part of the court that turned down one of Christa's last appeals. She agreed with the decision. But she wrote a separate note on her own because something about this case bothered her, and she put the whole thing in one sentence. Had she been 17 rather than 18 at the time of her crime, like her co-defendant Tadaryl Shipp, Christa Pike would not be eligible for the death penalty. One birthday. And here's the part that makes it bigger than one case. Christa's lawyers went and counted. Of all the people sentenced to death in Tennessee in the modern era, only eight were 18 when they committed their crimes. Seven of them were men. All seven had their death sentences thrown out. The eighth was Christa Pike. Now, I'm not going to tell you how to feel about that. You heard what she did. You heard the letter. There are people listening right now who think that's exactly where she belongs, and people who think the state shouldn't be killing anybody at all. And a whole lot of people somewhere in between. But I'll tell you what I keep coming back to. Three kids walked out of that building with Colleen. One birthday and one plea deal sent them to three completely different places. And none of those three places was the one Colleen was trying to get to. She just wanted to go home.
Part 11Thirty Years
Let's go back to May Martinez, because while all of that was happening in a Knoxville courtroom, she was living the other side of it. One reporter who spent time with her put it this way. For May, Christa Pike's conviction and sentence weren't the end of anything. They were only the beginning of a decades-long nightmare. Here's part of why. When the state of Tennessee built its case, it kept Colleen's skull. It had to. It was evidence. The piece from the jacket, and the rest of it too. It sat in an evidence system, in a murder case, while the appeals went on and on. And May made a decision that I don't think any of us can judge unless we've stood where she stood. She had Colleen cremated, and she kept her daughter's ashes at home, in a pewter box, and she refused to bury them. Not until the state gave her back every part of her daughter. Execute her, she told a reporter, or give her life, and give me the rest of Colleen back so I can live.
There's a monument to Colleen in a Catholic cemetery in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, back in Bucks County, where she was born. Section 8, Range 9, Lot 1, Grave 3. But that's a monument. Whether Colleen is actually there, I honestly can't tell you. In 2015, a Knoxville newspaper reported that her skull and that fragment were still being held as evidence. I haven't been able to confirm where they are now.
Meanwhile, Christa Pike's 30 years started. In 1998, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld her conviction and her death sentence. And here's a detail I can't get past. Her trial lawyer, William Talman, had been under investigation for over-billing the state fund that pays lawyers for poor defendants. He'd found, in his own records, days where he'd billed for more than 24 hours. He paid back something like $67 ,000. And the Tennessee Supreme Court suspended his law license for 11 months and 29 days. That suspension was entered on November 24, 1998, one day after the same court had upheld Christa's conviction and death sentence. One day. Oh, and about a month after she was sentenced, Christa had signed a paper giving that same lawyer the rights to her story. He said later, looking back, it's probably something I shouldn't have done. He said he never made a dime off it. That same year, 1998, a TV show called Fox Files did a profile on her. The way the coverage sold her, the youngest woman on death row, a pretty girl who'd done something unspeakable. People couldn't get enough. She told a pen pal she'd gotten over 500 letters after that show aired. And then in 2001, things got strange. She wrote to the court and said she wanted to stop her appeals. She wanted an execution date. Then she changed her mind and tried to take it back. The court spent the next few years untangling whether you're allowed to do that. And in August of 2001, in the middle of all of it, there was a fire at the Tennessee prison for women. Three women were moved out into an outdoor recreation cage. An argument started between two of them. And Christa came up behind the other one and choked her unconscious with a boot lace until an officer pulled her off. That woman survived. Christa was convicted of attempted first degree murder. A week later, on a recorded prison phone call to her mother, she said this. Now I know the difference between premeditated murder and what happened with Colleen. Cause see, I premeditated the hell out of this.
In 2012, the state broke up a plan to break her out of prison. A man from New Jersey who'd been visiting her and a former correctional officer. They were both charged. In 2019, a federal appeals court turned down her appeal. That's the one where Judge Stranch wrote her sentence about the birthday. And through nearly all of it, she lived in solitary confinement. An eight by 10 cell, 22, 23 hours a day. Her lawyers described it as a room smaller than a parking space.
And then 2026, the Tennessee Supreme Court set an execution date. Wednesday, September 30th at 10 in the morning. Her lawyers filed a 226 page petition asking the governor for mercy. And in a hearing that August, the lawyers arguing for the state, the side asking to carry out the execution, said something I didn't expect to read. The state does not dispute the terrible things that Ms. Pike suffered. I think everybody in this courtroom wishes that those things had never happened to Ms. Pike. The state does not dispute it. And the state still asked to execute her. The Tennessee Supreme Court refused to stop it. On September 28th, Governor Bill Lee denied clemency. And her lawyers took one last request to the Supreme Court of the United States. And May Martinez said she'd be there. She said she hoped that watching it would quiet a fear of Christa Pike that had stayed with her for decades.
She said she'd bring a photograph of her daughter to remind Christa of what she did. And in its filing to the Supreme Court, the state of Tennessee wrote that after 30 years, it was long past time for May Martinez to get the peace she was looking for. Years before that, May had told a reporter the thing she was most afraid of. With all the attention on the woman who killed her daughter, she was afraid everyone had forgotten about Colleen. I've got to fight for Colleen, she said. I'm her voice.
Part 12The Ending
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court of the United States turned her down. One line on the docket. The application for a stay of execution is denied. On Wednesday morning, the witnesses had already gathered at Riverbend, the maximum security prison in Nashville. People had helped raise the money so May Martinez and her husband could come up from Florida for it. And about an hour before it was set to begin, a federal appeals court stopped it. The Sixth Circuit wanted time to look at whether her claims of childhood sexual abuse had been fully considered when she was sentenced. That pause lasted a matter of hours. Later that day, the Supreme Court lifted it. Three justices dissented. That evening, the state of Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike. According to the reporters who were there, she was given the drug. Then she was given a second dose and she didn't die. A little before nine o'clock, the microphone was cut off and the witnesses were taken out of the room. She was taken to a hospital. The Department of Corrections says it followed every step of its protocol. Governor Bill Lee has ordered an outside review of what happened and he says there will be no more executions in Tennessee this year. Her lawyers have gone back to court. As I record this, Christa Pike is alive and nobody can tell you yet what happens next. May Martinez told the AP what she thinks about. Every time. Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run. Whatever Wednesday was, it wasn't an ending. So that's where the record ends. And I told you at the start that I'd tell you where I come down. So here it is. This case is hard for me because it was a part of my childhood. I am just a few years younger than everyone in this case, and I can't imagine being held to my actions as a child or young adult for the rest of my life. But at 17, I knew right from wrong. And even when I was a young teen, I knew about this case and knew it was wrong. With what happened today, I honestly don't know how to feel about this. All of the last second changes seemed unnecessary. Both the judges interrupting the process and the state rushing to get back on track seemed wrong. What happens now? I'm not sure. I do not think that she should ever be a free woman again. I am not sure at all if there has been any remorse or rehabilitation going on. She killed, and then when in prison tried to kill someone else. Not to mention the escape attempt that was organized by someone who was visiting her. But here's the part I'm sure of. For 30 years, this case has been told as a story about a symbol. The pentagram. Satanism. The girl on death row with the devil nickname and the pretty face. That's the story that made the news in 1995. And it's the story that sold the TV specials and the documentaries right up to this year. And almost none of that story is about Colleen. What actually happened was smaller and uglier and a lot more ordinary. A girl who felt mean. A borrowed meat cleaver. A walk on a weeknight with people she knew. And a book on a front desk that knew, before anybody else did, that four had gone out and three had come back. And there's still so much we don't know. Who carved that pentagram? Christa said it was the other person. Tadaryl first told police one thing and then, years later, swore under oath that he did it because he felt like it. Who was he? The person Christa said held Colleen down? The record never says. Who lent Christa that meat cleaver and got it handed back afterward? She never gave up the name. In 30 years. What would have happened if she just said yes to life without parole? And where is Colleen now? All of her. Did May Martinez ever get back every part of her daughter? I don't know. And I'm not going to pretend I do. There are records I'd still love to get my hands on. The Knoxville police file. The actual sign out book from that front desk. The full 46 page transcript of that tape. The name of the grounds worker who found her. Who was the first witness in this story and whose name I still can't tell you. When all of this was closing in, May Martinez told a reporter what she hoped would happen. She said she hoped Colleen could always be remembered as the sweet little girl that she was. So let's do that. Colleen Anne Slemmer was 19 years old. She helped look after disabled kids from the time she was eight. She loved roller skating. She wanted to work with computers and she moved 500 miles to learn how. And the last time her mother tried to reach her, the call kept breaking up. May called back and Colleen had gone out. Four names went out of that building on a Thursday night in January. Three came back. The fourth one was hers and she was trying to go home. If you know anything about Colleen or her family or this case, especially if you were at the Knoxville Job Corps Center on Dale Avenue in 1994 or 1995, or you know where that sign out book or the Knoxville police file ended up, I would love to hear from you. And if you have an idea for a future true crime case you'd like us to dig into, reach out to me at section29 .com. I'm always looking for the next forgotten story. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Forgotten True Crime. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves true crime. Check out the blog at section29 .com for the court opinions, the map of the walk from Dale Avenue to the University, and the timeline of the whole case. All the links are in the description below. Until next time, I'm Trevor with Forgotten True Crime. Stay safe out there. Just know you are unique, you are special, and you are loved.