In the fall of 1994, two young women arrived at the same job training center in Knoxville, Tennessee. One was a 19-year-old from Florida who wanted to work with computers, and the other was 18, hoping for a fresh start. But within three months, one of them would be dead, and within two years, the other would be sentenced to die. This is the story of Colleen Slammer and Krista Pike. Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers, and murder. All things that I love to consume, and I know you do too, you sick, just a beautiful intellectually minded freak. And today is a highly, highly requested video, mostly because of what's been in the news lately. So without further ado, let's all embark on our seat belts go McFragged in the highway, slam of the brakes, and bust through the windshield into this case together. Let's take a quick pause to talk about something I've been working on. Now, we, at Sarah Boys, have been running our store now on Shopify for a hot minute. 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So be there with your business ready. So if you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to shopify.com/cccm to start your free trial. That's shopify.com/cccm. Go to shopify.com/cccm today to hear your first. Thank you so much to shopify for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel. And let's get back to it. Colleen Slemer was born on September 20, 1975 in Orange Park, Florida, just outside of Jacksonville, where her mother, Mae Martinez and her stepfather, Roel Martinez, raised her with her sister. And they were a close family. Her mother said of her, quote, "Colleen loved doing things. She baby sat. She loved to do anything with kids. And I think it was part of me because I had a daycare for 40 years." Now Colleen also loved computers. She and Roel were always putting computers together and taking them apart again. And the two of them also went out shrimping together in the early mornings. And Colleen went roller skating every weekend, run marathons, and love to go bowling. And at school, she gave up her lunch period every day to work with and feed autistic students and students in wheelchairs. And she also volunteered with the special Olympics, spending her time with children who had special needs. She was easygoing and playful, and her teachers found her quiet and gentle. She was also independent and quick to help anyone who needed it. Now Colleen wanted to make computers her career. So she signed up for Job Corps, a federal program that gives young people free job training, hoping to learn and make a better life for herself. Now the center she enrolled in was in Knoxville, Tennessee, which meant leaving Florida at 19 years old. Mae wasn't excited to see her go away from home, but Colleen had set her mind on it. So Colleen set her goodbyes on Halloween 1994 and set off for Tennessee to start her training. So in Knoxville, Colleen's fellow students at the center included an 18-year-old named Christa Pike. Now Christa Gail Pike was born two months premature on March 10, 1976, in Beckley, West Virginia. Her parents were Carissa Hanson and Glenn Pike, but neither of them were home much. And Carissa was drinking heavily and using drugs during those years. So Christa was raised mostly by her father's mother, Delpha, and the two of them were inseparable. Now Christa came to see Delpha as the one person who ever loved her. And Christa's aunt, Carrie Ross, said Carissa and Glenn's house was so filthy that as a baby, Christa would be "crawling around through piles of dog stool all over the house." And as a toddler, Christa had seizures, severe enough to put her in the hospital. And Ross was at a bar with Carissa when Carissa got the call about the seizures and said she didn't want to leave. She seemed just totally unconcerned about her own child. So Christa's parents divorced twice, and after the second time, Carissa left North Carolina with a trucker she'd met over CV radio. The two-way radio truckers used to talk to each other on the road. And Ross said Carissa said no rules for Christa, and by age nine, Christa was growing marijuana pots at home, which Carissa smoked with her to "establish a friendship" as she put it. So in 1988, Delpha would die of cancer, and Christa would be devastated. And at 12, she overdosed on piles and an attempt to end her own life. However, Carissa never got her much psychiatric help afterward. And after that, Christa bounced between two states living with her mother in North Carolina and her father in West Virginia, switching whatever one of them felt like she was too much to care for at the time. So she kept changing schools as she grew up, and she was held back twice in the third grade and the seventh grade. And Glenn admitted, picking his second family over her, and by 1989, he'd completely thrown her out of his home again. Now, Carissa would have numerous boyfriends over the years, and one of them would whip Christa with a belt, and Carissa had him arrested. And at 12 years old, Christa pulled a butcher knife on him, and at 14, Christa had a boyfriend of her own living with her, with Carissa's permission. And later, North Carolina's social service agency took Christa out of the home for a time after finding the man Carissa was living with, was abusing her physically and sexually. Around then, Christa wrote a letter to a friend saying she planned to end her own life. And among her reasons, she listed that a neighbor had raped her when she was 11. Now, that man was prosecuted, and he pleaded to a produced charge. It was also suggested that her grandmother's boyfriend had sexually abused her when she was very small, though some in her family, including her father, doubted it. So Carissa said that from the age of eight, Christa had been out of control, and her aunt had once called her a pathological liar. And in North Carolina, Christa broke into a community center and stole some candy, so a juvenile court put her on probation, and she broke the terms. The counselor who supervised her saw a "smart girl" with a lot of potential, but one who was drinking and huffing fumes from aerosol cans. So in November of 1991, at the age of 15 years old, Christa was sent to a juvenile evaluation center in Swananoa, a state training school in the mountains near Asheville. Her stay was supposed to last months, but every time she got close to release, she broke another rule. She ended up staying more than a year, and staff members came to believe she was sabotaging herself so she wouldn't have to go home. And in that time, she was allowed 60 visits, and she got eight. Christina Hargis, a counselor who met with her every week, found her quote-unquote "struggling and depressed." So at Swananoa, Christa told one of her supervisors, Onus Perry, that she had been abused verbally, physically and sexually, and Perry believed her. Christa often stayed up late, helping Perry clean, talking about how she wished her mother would love her more. And her teacher, Marshall Mews, found her defiant at first, then made her his teacher's aid, and remembered her as delightful with the sense of humor. And she also earned her GED there. But Perry also once walked into a darkened hobby room to find Christa and some of the other girls holding hands and chanting, with a pentagram drawn on a piece of paper. A bit spuspicious. Now, Christa left Swananoa in March of 1993, planning to study nursing and the staff helped her apply to the job corpse. She'd liked going long to work with her mother, a licensed practical nurse, and tending to the elderly patients in nursing homes. And then at 17 years old, Christa was attacked by a stranger as she walked on a road at night, and he raped her. And she would get away to a friend's house and was taken to the hospital, where a rape kit was collected. But the man was never caught. And shortly before her 18th birthday, Glenn signed papers that would have let someone adopt her, though that never happened. So on the fall of 1994, at 18 years old, Christa left North Carolina for the job corpse center in Knoxville, hoping to become a nurse and to make a fresh start. And her health instructor there found her smart and non-violent, and she finished her coursework, though she often slept through class. Now another student, Kim Rhodes, became a close friend, and said the two of them both felt like they didn't fit in. And Rhodes said she felt safe with Christa. But it wasn't long before Christa fell in with two other students. To Darryl Ship and Shandola, Peterson. So ship came from Memphis to the the next.
Phil Job Corps in 1994. Born in November 1977, he turned 17 that fall. Before he ever got there, one girlfriend said he'd hit, slapped, punched, and kicked her. And she and another former girlfriend both described him as abusive, manipulative, and controlling. Nath Center shipped along to the gangster disciples, a street gang. Now another student, Andrew Trace, described gang members going into students' rooms, covering them with sheets and beating them. And Trace said he was scared of ship every day, and that ship once tried to throw him from a bridge by the center. And when he did show up, he was often high, hungover, or drunk. And he was loud and rude. Not exactly an outstanding citizen. Soon after arriving, he and Krista started dating. And she said nobody had ever protected her the way he did. Now ship called her his best friend, a caring girl, who was also edgy, with mood swings in which she'd hit him even when he couldn't see a reason for doing so. However, people around them saw ship as the one in control. Tyrone Comfort, one of Krista's closest friends at the center, heard the two of them argue many times, and sometimes saw bruises and marks on her. And ship even threatened Comfort. And another student, Germaine Bishop, remembered the couple fighting often. Krista was more serious about the relationship than ship was. Ship, meanwhile, was going out with other girls and didn't think she knew. Now ship had been dabbling in Satanism since he was about 10 years old. According to him, he and Krista got pretty deep into it, and both of them wore pentagram necklaces. And in his dorm room, he kept a hexagram earring and a hat pin and a satanic Bible and an altar, red flags galore. So Shadola Peterson was 18 years old and from Cleveland, Tennessee, and was a friend to both of them and another student at the center. Like ship, she was a member of the gangster disciples, though Krista never was. Now one instructor will be a mode, new Krista and Peterson, and knew about what he called the "Devil Worshipping Business" unquote. And by then, Krista had also met another new student at the center, a quiet girl from Florida named Colleen. So the Knoxville job corpse was housed in a former holiday inn on Dale Avenue. Krista's friend, Kim Rhodes, found the place "scary" with a lot of drug use and a great deal of hostility between different groups of students. An ad drew trace called it a "pretty rough, violent place" unquote, and said many students hid in their rooms because they were afraid for their safety. And the instructor, William Mode, was slapped and hit by students, and one even threatened to kill him. He said the supervisors did little to discipline students and from what students told him the dorms just weren't safe. So Colleen had a hard time fitting in there and she complained to her mother that she was being bullied. But her instructors thought really well of her. And Mode remembered her as "a very sweet young lady" unquote, and her health instructor found her respectful and very skilled. But at some point, Krista came to believe that Colleen was after ship. Krista said Colleen had been "trying to get her boyfriend and was running her mouth everywhere" unquote. But people close to Colleen denied that she had any interest in him at all. Krista said that trouble between them had been building for a while. In one night, she claimed she woke up to Colleen standing over her, holding a box cutter. And over Christmas, back home, Krista told her mother about it. She didn't want to go back to job corpse after the holiday, but her mother and sister Alicia pushed her to finish the program. And Krista said she was one fight away from being thrown out of the program and claimed Colleen knew it and was just trying to provoke her. So on January 11, 1995, Krista told another friend, Kim Eloilo, that she was going to kill Colleen. Her reason, she said, was that she "had just felt mean that day." So on the night of January 12, 1995, Colleen called her mother in Florida. And the call kept dropping because of bad reception, and by the time May called her back, Colleen had already gone out for the night. Now Krista had asked Colleen to come along to the blockbuster music store, and on the way, she told Colleen there was a bag of weed hidden in Tyson Park. Now the meetup was described as a "peace offering" meant to settle things between the two of them. So around 8 p.m., the four of them signed out of the center together. Krista, Colleen, Ship, and Peterson, and Kim watched them walk away towards 17th street. Now from there, the group made its way onto the University of Tennessee's agriculture campus to a secluded spot near a steam plant. Krista had brought a box cutter along with a small meat cleaver she borrowed from someone at the center. By Krista's own account, she and Colleen exchanged words, and then Krista just started hitting her. Colleen kept asking her, "Why are you doing this to me?" And for somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour by Krista's estimate, she and Ship beat, kicked, and cut Colleen while Peterson stood watch. Colleen tried again and again to run, and each time she was caught and forced back down. She begged them to let her go, promising she'd walk all the way home to Florida and never come back to the center. At one point, Krista thought she had heard a noise and walked off to check whether anyone was nearby. And when she came back, Krista cut her throat several times. And finally, hit her in the head with rocks and a large chunk of asphalt. And Colleen died of blunt force injuries to her head. Someone had also carved a pentagram into her chest. And that's when Krista and Ship dragged Colleen's body to a spot near some trees and left her there. With her clothes thrown into the bushes. Before she left, Krista would actually take a piece of Colleen's skull. And afterward, they cleaned off their hands and shoes in a puddle and got rid of the box cutter. Then Krista returned the meek lever to the person she borrowed it from. And at a Texaco station on Cumberland Avenue, she dumped two of Colleen's IDs and Colleen's black gloves in the trash. So at about 10-15 pm, Kim saw Krista, Ship, and Peterson come back to the center without Colleen. And the three of them signed back in. Later that night, Krista went to Kim's room and told her she'd just killed Colleen and showed her the piece of her skull. Kim said Krista smiled as she talked, singing La La La La La, while dancing in a circle. So on the agriculture campus the next morning, at about 805, a worker from the University of Tennessee's grounds department found a body lying close to the green houses. It had been beaten so badly that at first he thought it was a dead animal. Then he saw the clothes. Realized it was a woman and called the police right away. Knoxville police officers and the university's own police came out to secure the area. As they examined the scene, every new patch of blood, piece of clothing, footprint, and broken branch they found pushed the boundary further out until the scene measured 100 feet long by 60 feet wide. And they could see a struggle had taken place. In the mud were handprints, knee prints, and drag marks and the bushes around them had been trampled. Randy York and investigator with the Knoxville police took the case that day. York had described the scene as "one of the most disturbing crime scenes I have ever had to deal with." Back at the center, that morning, Kim saw Krista at breakfast and asked her what she'd done with a piece of skull. And Krista answered that she had it in her pocket, adding, "And yes, I'm eating breakfast with it." Now later, in class, Krista pointed out brown spots on her shoes to another student, Stephanie Wilson, and told her, quote, "That ain't mud on my shoes. That's blood." Unquote. Then she took a napkin out of her pocket and held out a piece of bone for Wilson. Telling her, it was part of Colleen's skull. However, neither Kim nor Wilson went to the police right away. That day, Krista also went to the office of Robert Pollock, an orientation specialist at the center, about an ID card she'd misplaced. After she left, Pollock saw that her black leather jacket was still on the chair she'd been sitting in, and at about 4 p.m., he locked up with the jacket still there. Between four and five p.m., Krista and a few other girls walked up to the crime scene. She asked Harold Underwood, the campus police officer, posted there, who the victim was, whether police had any suspects and why the area was marked off. The other girls didn't say a word in the 15 minutes they were there. Underwood said Krista giggled and kept shifting around, as if she were amused by the situation, and he noticed she had on an unusual pentagram-shaped necklace. So, Drase and a friend ran into Krista on Cumberland Avenue that same day, while they were out with some liquor they just bought. She joined them, drank through two plastic fountain cups of mad dog 2020, and was clearly drunk when she left, but she wanted to keep drinking. After the murder, the center was put on lockdown.
with nobody allowed to leave, and students quit going to classes. A detective Donald Cook at the campus police went with the body to the morgue, and once the body had been cleaned there, Cook noticed the pentagram carved into Colleen's chest. The medical examiner, Dr. Sandra Elkins, started labeling each of the wounds with the letters of the alphabet. But there were so many that she ended up only recording the most serious ones. She also found defensive wounds on Colleen's bright arm. Now back in Florida, a maize phone rang again at around 11.15 on Saturday morning, two days after Colleen's call, and a man on the line told her, "We think your daughter might have been killed. Can you identify some marks she has on her body?" And the body was officially identified as Colleen's through her dental records. Now, roll call on January 14th under what heard about the pentagram carved into the victim's chest, so he reported Christa's strange behavior and her necklace to his superiors. York had sat through a course on cults and Satanism shortly before the murder, and he has said the pentagram was the key to open the case. By his account, the call that led him to Christa came from a woman who told police her daughter, a job-corp student, was concerned about a satanic cult. And police also got a tip that Christa had shown a piece of Colleen skull to someone. So on January 14th, York questioned Christa and ship separately at the Knoxville Police Department. Christa waved her Miranda rights and agreed to talk. She was tape recorded as she gave her statement, with the transcript running some 46 pages long. Not tape, she sobbed as she described how she'd started hitting Colleen and didn't stop. Quote, "I literally thought I was going crazy because I'd never seen myself act like that before in my life." She wouldn't name anyone else who'd been there, referring to the person with her only as he and the other person. And she denied carving the pentagram, saying the other person had cut Colleen's chest. That's when she told York the blood-stained genes she'd worn were still in her room, smeared with mud from her shoes to hide the blood. She also admitted throwing Colleen's IDs and gloves in the trash at the Texaco, and an officer went and recovered them. She let York search her room, then went back to the center with him, and retraced her steps from that night, until she led him to the exact spot where Colleen's body had been found. So police photographed Christa and ship at the station that day, and both of them were wearing pentagram necklaces. Ship told police it was Christa who brought the weapons, that she helped with carving the pentagram, and that taking Colleen out there had been her idea. And within 36 hours of Colleen's body being found, Christa, ship, and Peterson were all under arrest. So at 7.30am on January 17, Paula came back to his office and found Christa's jacket still hanging on the chair where it was left. Word had reached him over the weekend that she was a suspect, so he handed it straight to the center's security captain, who called the Knoxville police. Now, in the jackets inside pocket, Officer Arthur Bowen and found a small piece of bone. And he took it directly to Dr. Murray Marks, a forensic anthropologist at the university. Meanwhile, blood from Christa and ship's clothing went to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, where the lab matched it to Colleen's DNA. So with all three in custody and Christa's confession on tape, the question was no longer who killed Colleen, but what a jury would do about it. Let's take a good pause to talk about my wine-down ritual. It's pretty simple, because it just involves this. Pretty much my Lola blanket, my super soft Lola blanket. Or it was until literally all five of my dogs decided that all these Lola blankets were theirs, and they laid on them, and they made them smell like dog, and got their hair all over it. Because the second I grabbed this, they are on top of me burrowing their heads into it, because they love it so much. And honestly, I get it, okay? This is luxury faux fur with a four-way stretch, machine washable, no pilling, no shedding, over 20,000 five-star reviews, amazing blanket, and they call it the world's number one blanket for a reason. And turns out, pets everywhere were stealing their owners Lola's, so Lola made a pet collection, and I adore their pet collection, and so do my pets. Including my cats, not just my dogs. So my Puppers got the Lola pet bed, probably like over six months ago now, but it has the same ultra-soft fur, but with an orthopedic foam base for their joints. And a removable cover that goes straight into the wash, if you have any messes or anything, or if they're really dirty. And it's completely shed free. So now I finally have my Lola blankets back, and you can too. And for a limited time, our listeners are getting 40% off, select Lola blanket products with code
[email protected]. That's LolaBlankets.com. Using code CCCM for 40% off. Not to mention, they also make an amazing gift. I've given people these every single Christmas for the past few years, and everybody raves about them. So check out Lola Blankets. Thank you so much to Lola Blankets for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel. So Christus Murder Trial opened in March, 1996, in Knox County criminal court, with Judge Mary Beth Liebowitz presiding. And the Knox County District Attorney General's Office tried the case, with Assistant District Attorney William Crab Tree as lead prosecutor, alongside Assistant District Attorney Joe Helm. And Christa was defended by two court appointed lawyers, William Talman and Julie Martin. Now just before it began, prosecutors offered her life in prison if she'd plead guilty. But she said no. Now her lawyers asked to move the trial out of Knox County, because so many people there had already followed the case in the news. However, the judge refused. In any potential juror who said that they couldn't set aside what they'd heard about the case was sent home, and television cameras were in the courtroom for the whole trial. And Christa came to court day after day in modest floral dresses. Her lead lawyer, William Talman, wrote that she seemed content with the crowds in the courtroom, and that at one point she told them she was happy. When he asked her why, she told him it was, quote, "the first time in her life that she could remember so many members of her family being there for her," unquote. So to show a killing was planned, the prosecution called Kim, who told the jury that day before the murder, Christa had said she was going to kill Colleen. The jurors also heard about the brown spots on Christa's shoes, and the piece of bone she'd shown Wilson in class. And Christa's own tape statements were played in the courtroom, with each juror listening through a set of headphones and following along in the transcript. Dr. Elkins used Colleen's skull, rebuilt by Dr. Marks, to show the jury the force of the blows. One gap in the skull had never been filled. And in front of the jury, the piece of bone from Christa's jacket pocket fit that gap perfectly. And for the defense, a clinical psychologist, Dr. Eric Ungam, testified that Christa had a severe borderline personality disorder, and that once the attack began, she just lost control. In his view, she hadn't acted with premeditation. But under cross-examination, he agreed that bringing weapons along pointed to deliberation. And that she'd had time to calm down when she walked off to check on the noise. And a Vanderbilt psychiatrist, Dr. William Burnett, saw the case as a teenager dabbling in Satanism inside a group that worked itself up into violence. He admitted, though, that he'd never spoken with Christa, and couldn't say whether she planned the killing. So on March 22, 1996, the jury found Christa guilty of murder in the first grade, and of conspiring to commit it. And after the conviction, May said that she believed Christa was evil, and that the state, quote, "should kill her right away," unquote. Then the trial moved on to her sentencing, and the defense called her aunt, her father, and her mother, to talk about the way she was raised. And the state answered, with Underwood, the campus officer she'd questioned the crime scene. In closing statements, the prosecutor called Christa, a, quote, "monster that we have to deal with," unquote. In under 90 minutes, the jury came back with death as her sentence. They found that the murder was especially cruel, with torture far beyond what it took to kill, and that it was committed to avoid arrest. And that same day, back in her cell at the Knox County Jail, Christa wrote a letter to ship and asked a corrections officer to pass it along. The officer gave it to her lieutenant instead, and prosecutors later read it out at her sentencing on the conspiracy charge. And it would say, quote, "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," unquote. And she signed it, little devil. So on March 30, Judge Leibowitz set Christa's execution for January 12, 1997, telling her that on that day, quote, "Your body shall be subjected to shock by sufficient current of electricity," unquote. Christa sobbed as she heard the sentence, and through her tears she asked, quote, unquote, "Can I please hug my mom?" So at 20 years old, just weeks past her birthday, Christa became one of the youngest women anywhere in the U.S. to be given a death sentence. And for the conspiracy conviction, the judge added 25 years to be served on top of the death sentence. And Peterson never went to trial. Instead, she took a plea admitting she was an accessory after the fact, and agreed to testify against Christa in ship. Prosecutors said they couldn't prove she'd taken part in the killing at all. In the roughly 460 days she'd already
spent in jail, counted toward a six-year sentence, and she served the rest of it on probation. In Chip's own trial came in 1997, and jurors in Knox County convicted him of the same two charges that Krista was convicted of, and his lawyer has since written that that offense he was put on was, quote, "to shift as much blame as possible to Krista," unquote. "Ship had been only 17 that night, and under state law that ruled out the death penalty." So he was given a life sentence instead, with a chance of parole one day. Now May didn't realize at first that not all of Colleen had been buried, because some of her remains had been kept as evidence for the trial. But over the years, the medical examiner's office mailed the rest to her in pieces, quote, "We had her buried in a Catholic cemetery," unquote, May would say, and she had to be dug up every time they mailed me body parts, unquote. Meanwhile, Krista's own story behind bars was far from quiet. So on death row, Krista spent up to 23 hours a day in her cell. Doctors prescribed her pro-zac for obsessive compulsive disorder, and for all that three of her years there, she was the only woman on Tennessee's death row. The other, Gail Owens, was in the same prison, but the two never had any contact before. And Owens' death sentence was changed to life in prison in 2010. Now Tennessee's Court of Criminal Appeals upheld Krista's conviction and sentence. The state's Supreme Court did the same in October, 1998, and in 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear her case. In June 1999, Krista filed her own petition for post-conviction relief, the next stage of review. Two years later, at a hearing in June 2001, she told the court she wanted to drop it and have her execution date set. In two months after that, on August 24, 2001, staff had to clear part of the prison because of a fire, and they moved another inmate, Patricia Jones, into an exercise cage with Krista and her friend Natasha Cornett. Now, Jones and Cornett started fighting, and Krista jumped in, coming up behind Jones and choking her with a bootlace. Officers finally stepped in, and Jones survived. Krista later told the investigator, quote, "I don't want to say that I intended to kill her, but I would say that I didn't care if she died," unquote. But on a recorded call afterward, she told her mother, quote, "I premeditated the hell out of this," unquote. She's a genius, folks. The attack earned her a conviction for attempted first-degree murder and 25 more years. Not September, she wrote to the court again, repeating that she wanted to drop her petition, and at a hearing that October, the judge appointed a psychiatrist to Dr. William Kenner to evaluate whether she was competent to make that choice. And in June 2002, the judge found that she was competent and granted her request. Krista had, quote, "the right as a competent individual," unquote, "to decide," the judge said. And then her petition was dismissed, and a new execution date was set. However, 29 days after that order, Krista changed her mind. In a handwritten note added to her sworn statement, she wrote, quote, "I still feel conflicted about what I want to do, but as of now, I feel this is the only logical decision," unquote. So the appeals court stayed her execution and sent the case back for her hearing. And there, in February of 2003, Krista testified that she hadn't understood, quote, "exactly how final her decision would be," or what it would do to her family. Her life, she said, meant more, quote, "than being stuck in that little room," unquote. Yes, so did Colleen's, you stupid fucking monster. And she also said, her mental health had greatly improved since Dr. Kinner had put her on the antidepressant along with lithium. So in 2005, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that a competent inmate on death row could give up these appeals, but would have 30 days to take that back. Krista had acted within that window, barely, so her petition was reinstated. So at the hearing, on that petition, her new lawyers argued that her trial lawyers had failed her by not giving the jury the full story of her childhood, including the sexual abuse. And Talman testified that he decided not to call the psychologist the defense had prepared. Dr. Diana McCoy, partly because shortly before the trial, they'd learned she was dating the lead prosecutor, William Crabtry. Dr. McCoy testified that the relationship had been briefed that it was over before she started on the case and that she'd told Talman early on. And Talman had also asked Krista to sign over the rights to her story, quote, "My thought was I would write a book on Krista, the human side of Krista," unquote, he would testify. And ship took the stand at the same hearing and said that he was actually the one who'd carve the pentagram into Colleen's chest, and that he'd done it because he felt like it. He acknowledged that this wasn't what he'd first told police, and the courts turned Krista down with the appeals court affirming the denial in April of 2011, and the US Supreme Court declined the case the next year. And also, in 2012, investigators broke up a plan to help Krista escape from the Tennessee prison for women, because a 23-year-old guard there, Justin Heflin, had been getting gifts and money to help. He'd met the other man charged, Donald Coett, who was 34 years old, of New Jersey, during Coett's frequent visits to Krista. Both men were arrested in March of 2012, before anyone tried to carry the escape out. Luckily, in Krista's case, then moved to federal court, where a judge denied her petition, and in 2019, the six-circuit court of appeals agreed. The court found that, even with everything her lawyers now offered, quote, "the sheer weight and degree of aggravation evidence before the jury outweighs the mitigation evidence raised on appeal," unquote. So one of the judges, Jane Strands, joined the ruling but wrote separately about sentencing someone so young to death. We presume that she is incapable of reform even though the stories of other teenage killers, many of whom have been rehabilitated behind bars reveal other possibilities. So in 2022, Krista sued the state, arguing that it had kept her in solitary confinement in all but name for over a quarter of a century. The men on death row could work and spend time together, but she had, quote, "nearly no physical contact with another human being," unquote, and what her lawyer called, quote, "a cell the size of a parking space," unquote. Sounds too big to me, to be honest. So on September 16th, 2024, she settled the case, winning a job, meals alongside other women prisoners, and more hours outside her cell. And at this point, ship is still in prison. And in October of 2025, the parole board turned him down saying, quote, "due to the seriousness of the offense," unquote, and his case, won't be reviewed again until October 2031. Now, Peterson finished her sentence and has lived a private life ever since, never speaking publicly about the murder. For Krista, though, the appeals had run out in 2020 when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take her case. So the Tennessee Supreme Court set Krista's execution date on September 30, 2025, but it ended up being scheduled for September 30, 2026, exactly one year later, and at this point, she'd spent nearly 30 years on death row. Now, the state had asked the court for the execution date back in August of 2020, soon after the U.S. Supreme Court turned Krista away. Her lawyers were given more time to respond, at first, because one of them was also defending a client on federal death row. And in June of 2021, they answered with a request of their own. That the court tell the governor her sentence should be commuted because of her mental illness and her youth at the time of the crime. In the meantime, her lawyers kept trying in the state courts. They used a 2022 Tennessee Supreme Court decision about life sentences for juvenile killers to try to reopen her case, but the attempt failed. In September of 2024, the state Supreme Court refused to hear it. In the end, the same 2025 order that set the execution date turned their 2021 request down, finding nothing in her case that justified it. Now if Krista's execution went ahead, she'd be the first woman Tennessee had put to death, since at least 1820. Of the 17 people Tennessee had executed in the modern era, the youngest had been 23 at the time of the crime. And across the country, 18 women had been executed since 1976, about 1% of all executions. Of Krista's lawyers had spent decades building the case for sparing her life. And in 2023, they asked a psychologist who specialized in trauma, Bethany Brand, to evaluate her. Brand wrote that the level of trauma Krista had suffered, quote, "is almost impossible to grasp because it is so severe," unquote. By then, Krista's diagnosis in prison included bipolar disorder, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder, though her lawyers said neither had been diagnosed until years after her arrest. Brand said that with medication, Krista now had, quote, unquote, "empathy and great regret" for what she had done. So in January of 2026, Krista's lawyers filed a challenge to Tennessee's lethal injection process. In May, a doctor spent more than an hour trying to find a vein on another prisoner, Tony Karuthers, until the state gave up and halted his execution. Then in June, Krista's lawyers took their challenge to the Tennessee Supreme Court, pointing to what happened to that other inmate. they argue that they are not.
that her blood condition, her small veins and her PTSD put her at risk of, quote, "unnecessary and superrated pain and suffering," unquote, and being the only woman surrounded by male guards in her last days would, quote, "trigger her PTSD and result in a torturous execution or mental decompensation to the point she will be incompetent to be executed," unquote, they would write. And they also proposed other methods, including hanging. At the State Supreme Court appointed a senior judge, Mark Ward, to hear the evidence. In August, he held a three-day hearing, and the state didn't dispute the abuse Christa had suffered, and in the state's closing argument, Will Ayers of the Attorney General's Office said, "I think everybody in this courtroom wishes that those things had never happened to Miss Pike. I think we all wish that we were not here today, and that she was not on death row," unquote. Ward found that her lawyers had, quote, unquote, "failed to prove she'd face needless suffering." And he said, "She'd be unconscious within 20 to 30 seconds of the injection long before she'd be able to feel pain." So on September 2nd, her lawyers sent Governor Lee a 226-page clemency petition. It asked him to commute her death sentence so that she'd serve life without parole instead. And Ayers' words from the hearing were on its cover, that everyone wishes she wasn't on death row. The petition argued that Christa had been 18 and deeply mentally ill, and that if she were on trial today, she wouldn't get a death sentence. In of the eight people sentenced to death in Tennessee's modern era for crimes committed at 18, the other seven, all men, had since had their death sentences thrown out, quote, "None of this is meant to justify the killing of Colleen's slimmer," unquote, the petition would say. It also carried a statement from Christa, saying, quote, "I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I'd done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone's child's sister," friend, unquote. And Chip's own trial lawyer, Christopher Coffey, wrote to the Governor, too, arguing that the gap between their sentences came from, quote, "their slight age difference rather than the respective role in the crime," unquote. And more than 100 groups of experts working to end violence against women asked Lee to commute her sentence as well. Her history didn't excuse the crime, they wrote, but it offered, quote, "in explanation for how she came to commit the crime," unquote. And a group of United Nations human rights experts called on Tennessee to stop the execution and a petition from Tennesseans for an alternative to the death penalty gathered more than 2,500 signatures. So less than a week before the execution date, the state Supreme Court turned down Christa's request to delay it, finding she hadn't shown she was likely to win. And on Sunday, September 27, protesters gathered at the state Capitol in Nashville. Then, on September 28, two days before her execution date, Governor Lee announced his decision, quote, "After deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pikes' request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the state of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene," unquote. And her lawyer said they were deeply saddened and heartbroken. Christa is a 50-year-old, remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women they would write. And in a letter written before she learned of Lee's decision, Christa said, "I'm not afraid to die, I'm only nervous about the process," unquote. And her lawyers had also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the execution, presenting the challenge to lethal injection. In Tennessee's Attorney General urged the justices to let it go ahead, accusing Christa of, quote, "abusive tactical delay," unquote, and arguing that after 30 years, it was, quote, "long past time," unquote. But May had the peace she was looking for. And on Tuesday, evening, the day before her scheduled execution, the court said, "No." And Colleen's mother, May, wanted to see the execution carried out. And when Ward rejected most of Christa's challenges in August, to May said, quote, "she did the crime, I think she should pay for it," unquote. And she said, Christa had never apologized to her family. Speaking from Florida in the days before the execution, she said, quote, "Not a day goes by or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst." Colleen's birthday was last week. She would have been 51," unquote. And she planned to watch the execution, saying, quote, "I will sit there with her picture in my hand, and as she gets hooked up to a needle to go to sleep, she can look at that picture," unquote. And she said, she needed to watch, quote, "so I can remember that she is gone and I don't have to fear that she's going to pop up somewhere," unquote. And a victim's advocacy group in Florida raised money for the trip, but not enough for a plane ticket. So she and Ruhl planned to drive the 600 miles to Nashville. Let's take a quick pause to talk about something we all do. And that's laundry. And honestly, real question, when was the last time you were actually excited about doing the laundry? Because I'm always excited to do my laundry. I have used laundry sauce for years now. And finally, they noticed, they noticed us, guys, they noticed me. And they wanted to work with me. And I am ecstatic because I am their biggest customer, biggest fan. 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Also, they don't have a laundry list of ingredients they're made with super simple ingredients. Yes, that was a joke. Laundry list because we're talking about laundry anyway. But what you wash your clothes in does actually matter because you're putting it on your body, so that matters. And they actually just landed in Target too, and there's a full money back guarantee if you don't love it. And for a limited time, our listeners are getting 20% off your entire order with code
[email protected]. That's 20% off at laundrysauce.com, promo code cccm. And when they ask where you heard about them, just tell them that I sent you. Make Laundry Day the best day of the week, and get Laundrysauce today. Thank you so much to Laundrysauce for keeping my clothes nice and divinely scented and fresh. And let's get back to the video. Crystal was scheduled to die at 10am on Wednesday, September 30th, at the River Bend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. And the reporters chosen as media witnesses were at the prison by 8.30am that morning. However, about an hour before it was set to begin, a federal appeals court stopped the execution. The sixth circuit voted 2-1 for a pause, so it could consider whether the abuse Crystal suffered as a child had been fully weighed when she was sentenced. And Judge Dan Strands, who had written separately about Crystal's age back in 2019, wrote the order. The judge who disagreed, Richard Allen Griffin, called it, quote, "Another last ditch meritless effort to delay a lawful execution," unquote. In the state, went to the US Supreme Court to get the pause lifted, arguing once again that Crystal's lawyers were stalling and that it was hurting Colleen's family. Meanwhile, the witnesses spent the day held at the prison, unable to leave the grounds. So at around 6pm, the Supreme Court lifted the stay 6-3 without explaining why. And Justice Sonja Sotomayor, writing the three dissenters, said she sought, quote, "No reason to short-circuit the ordinary process of appellate review." Particularly in the light of the grave consequences of an erroneous decision, unquote. So once the witnesses were inside, the curtain over the chamber window stayed closed for 45 minutes. When setting an IV usually takes 10 or 15, and behind it, according to her lawyer, Randy Spivey, the team worked for about an hour to get a line into a vein, going through at least seven needles. And Crystal was trying to help them, he said, saying, quote, "Please try up on my shoulder higher. Please try here. Please try here," unquote. And at 7.27pm, the curtain went up. Crystal was strapped to the gurney with an IV in her arm, and her spiritual advisor, Mikey Notchell stood near her head. She faced the window of the room set aside for the victim's family, and May was watching. In her final statement, Crystal said, quote, "I'm going to leave this world the way I spent most of my life, and that is in love," unquote. And she said she was at peace, and she ended by calling it, quote, unquote, "a happy day." No apology in sight, but not long after, she told a prison official her arm hurt, and asked if that was normal. Prisoners usually show signs of the sedative within a few minutes. But Crystal kept talking to Notchell. And at 7.41pm, a small rock was set on a ledge in the wall, which witnesses understand.
stand to mean the drug has all gone in. In three minutes later, Christa was still quietly talking to Noicell, and at 746, the curtain closed, but three minutes later, it opened again. Under Tennessee's protocol, a second round follows, quote, "If the inmate is not deceased," unquote. Christa began making a snore-like sound and kept breathing, and at about 756, her head came up slightly, and turned to one side. A little after 8pm, the curtain closed for the last time, and by 826, according to witnesses, the second dose had gone in. For about 40 minutes, the witnesses could hear Christa snoring over the speaker from behind the curtain, and the protocol had no instructions for what to do if the second round failed. One reporter asked the prison spokesperson, quote, "Do they do a third round? Are you going to resuscitate her?" She had no answer. Inside, Spivy later said, he had demanded a phone at about 822, insisting that the execution be stopped in that Christa get medical care. And at about 850, he was told an ambulance was on its way. At 853pm, the warden came over, the loudspeaker, and told the media witnesses to leave. So as they spoke to reporters outside, emergency vehicles pulled up to the prison, and the witnesses watched them leave again with their sirens on. Christa was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital now. Still alive. No known person in the modern era had survived after execution drugs were actually given to them. Seven people had lived through failed executions before her, but in each of those, no IV line could be placed, so no drugs ever went in. So when Nashville's emergency dispatch office later released its recordings from the night of the execution, they showed that confusion had slowed down the help Christa needed. And the first 911 call was at 840pm, but the caller couldn't give the code needed to prove the request was real. And at 903, a dispatcher said supervisors had been told it was a false call. There is no medical assistance needed at River Bend, prison. And at 908, one of Christa's lawyers, Kelly Gleason, called 911 herself, saying Christa was, "Still alive and breathing and needs immediate life-saving care," unquote. And prison officials confirmed the call was real a few minutes later, and responders were let in at about 9/11. Now, the Department of Corrections said it had carried out each step of the protocol the Attorney General's Office had approved, and that the protocol didn't allow for anything beyond what had been done. Governor Lee ordered a comprehensive through-party review of what happened and put off the only other execution Tennessee had scheduled in 2026. Speaking to reporters the next day, he would say, "There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen. It shouldn't have happened," unquote. And asked whether he'd spoken to Collins' family, he said he had not. And on the phone, with an AP afterward, May said, "I didn't get justice for my daughter. I watched the whole thing. She was awake. She was moving her head, moving her feet. She was trying to sit up," unquote. And the next day, on her way home to Florida, she told the Jacksonville TV station that when she asked officials what would happen next, the answer was, "I don't know what we're doing with her yet." I said, "Here we are, 31 years, and you're laughing in my face again. I think that the state owes me a big apology, and as a mother, I failed her," unquote. Back in August, before the execution, May had said she wouldn't feel justice was served until she got the last piece of Collins' skull back. Getting Collins' skull back took her 16 years, and when the time finally came, she had to collect it from the courthouse. And even then, she said, that final piece was still missing. The fragment Christa had carried in her pocket. Collins' niece, Morgan Ceeley, said May couldn't talk through her crying, and hadn't eaten since the execution failed. Ceeley said of her grandmother, "She wanted to get justice. Pike serving being in prison was not justice," unquote. And Ceeley also wanted the state to move quickly, quote, "They need to figure out what's going to happen with her within the next couple of months. I'm not talking about two years from now," unquote. A role posted on Facebook think in the people who had paid for the trip, and writing, quote, "Unfortunately, Collins' soul cannot rest until the smallster succumbs to the two doses of pentobarbital that she was given," unquote. Now, that Friday, Christa's lawyer said she was unconscious on a ventilator, and, quote, unquote, critically ill. And in a court motion, they said her arms had been swollen, burned, and blistered by the time she got to the hospital. They blamed the IV lines, believing the drug had flowed into her body rather than into her bloodstream. And on Saturday, Leigh announced that Frank Strata, the head of Tennessee's Department of Correction, would step down that month, and Strata said, resigning, was, quote, "in the best interest of Tennessee," unquote. Christa's execution was the second one in Tennessee to fail since May, after Tony Caruthers. Delayed review, Leigh chose former U.S. attorney Ed Stanton, who had reviewed an execution Leigh called off in 2022, and found that Tennessee hadn't followed its own procedure for lethal injections. Christa's lawyers had come to believe she was brain-dead, and her life support was due to be switched off that Tuesday. Instead, quote, "to the shock of everyone," unquote, "she woke up and began to speak." Spidey wasn't in the room, but he believed the first thing she said was, quote, unquote, "where am I and who are you?" She knew the state had tried to execute her, but Spidey said there was, quote, "a lot of cognitive confusion," unquote. And he also relayed that Christa asked about her team and the family of the victim. She developed pneumonia at this point, along with a blood clot in one arm. Spidey said, quote, "we don't know what, if any function, she will regain in her arms," unquote. So on Wednesday, October 7th, a Nashville judge ordered a prison official to keep all evidence from the execution, from logbooks and medical waste to the messages officials had sent. Hearing, a lawyer from the state said it would be up to the Tennessee Supreme Court to decide when or whether to set a new execution date. One of Christa's lawyers, Luke Inan, said it would be, quote, "unconsciously that the state would try to execute her again," unquote. An expert said they knew of no state or federal law that barred a second attempt after a failed one. But Jordan Stiker, who co-directs the Capital Punishment Center of the University of Texas, said that unlike others who'd faced a second attempt, Christa, quote, unquote, "bore the brunt of lethal drugs," and he would say that the most obvious way to avoid litigation over this would be for the governor to commute to the sentence, unquote. So by that Thursday, Christa could walk with some help, and she was eating again. Though her lawyer said doctors couldn't yet say what the long term effects would be. Not Saturday, October 10th, they announced she'd been released from the hospital and sent back to the women's prison she'd lived in for 30 years to keep recovering there. Now Lee leaves office in January, and the race to replace him will be decided on November 3rd. The frontrunner, US Senator Martian Blackburn, is in support of the death penalty. And after the failed execution she posted, quote, "bring back the electric chair and deliver justice for these victims swiftly." As your governor, I will do just that, unquote. And Christa's lawyers are still asking Lee for a commutation, so that she'd served life in prison without parole instead. However, the state still hasn't said whether it will try to execute her again, as of recording this right now. So through every stage of the case, May has tried to keep people's attention on Colleen. Quote, "It's never about the victims," unquote. She would say in September, quote, "it's like Colleen was never there," unquote. And before the execution, she said, quote, "the criminals get so much attention, why? She has been lost in this, she's been forgotten, other than when it's brought up like this
," unquote. And for years, she's spoken out for Colleen, quote, "I'm her voice, somebody's got a talk," unquote. And at home, May still hangs the Christmas ornaments Colleen made, and she keeps the books her daughter read as a kid. And one of Colleen's favorite T-shirts says, "computer geek," and the family had it made into a teddy bear. May said, quote, "so we have that at all times," unquote. And one of the stories her mother told was about a box of fruity pebbles. And shortly before Colleen left for job corpse, she bought the cereal with her own money. And then her sister finished the box. It became one of the last memories her sister had of her, and Celie's mother kept grieving for Colleen until her own death back in the early 2020s. Celie herself is a mother of three now, and she says her young daughter looks like Colleen, quote, "I wish I could have met her," unquote, she would say. And she asked people to remember her aunt, quote, "just keep in mind my aunt and the pain that she suffered and the times that she missed out on," unquote. Two memorial photos of Colleen were on display outside the prison. And officials said May would get both of them, and May had hoped the execution would bring her some peace and one more thing. That Colleen can always be remembered as the sweet little girl that she was. And I want to end it there on Colleen because she truly is the most important part of this story, and I don't want her to get lost in this whole case because what she went through was absolutely horrifying. And I appreciate everybody requesting that I deep dive into this case. I think we need to keep saying Collins name.
over what's her face is, but I really hope that May gets her justice for her daughter one day, whatever that happens to be. But that is it for today's case. Let me know what other cases you would like me to deep dive into. I always read the comments. And until next time, I will see you beautiful face. And please, please stay safe out there. Okay? Bye.
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