May Martinez did not come to Nashville to meet the woman convicted of killing her daughter. She came, she has told reporters for years, because after three decades the public record is crowded with the condemned woman and almost empty of the 19-year-old who died. Colleen Slemmer was a Job Corps student in Knoxville who wore a “Computer Geek” shirt, painted school buildings, roller-skated, and, her mother says, trusted people too easily. On the evening of January 12, 1995, she told her mother on the phone that three students were bothering her. She tried to call home again later. The signal dropped. When Martinez called back around 10 or 10:15 p.m., her daughter was already gone. That dropped call is the last ordinary fact in a case that became a national object: jealousy, a false offer of peace, a wooded path on the University of Tennessee agricultural campus, a prolonged attack, a pentagram cut into the chest, a fragment of skull carried back to the dormitory and shown to other students.

Martinez has spent the years since fighting not to be turned into a footnote in that object. For sixteen years she pressed the state to return the fragment of her daughter’s skull that had been kept as evidence after Pike displayed it. She has described remains arriving in pieces, brown boxes without warning, and a courtroom moment in which the fragment was set down in front of her before she was ready. “It’s never about the victims,” she has told reporters. “It’s like Colleen was never there.” She drove eight hours from Jacksonville, Florida, for the September 30 warrant. She packed a pH๏τograph instead of a speech. An online campaign and the Justice Coalition of Jacksonville raised more than $2,500 so she would not have to choose between a mortgage payment and a seat in the witness room. Her husband, Raul Martinez, a disabled veteran on a fixed income, came with her and might have spoken. She did not intend to speak to Pike. “Saying something to her now, after all these years, that she never apologized — never even tried — or her family. What’s the point?” September is already a cruel month in that house. September 20 is Colleen’s birthday. The end of the month marks the loss of another daughter to COVID.

A dog died in mid-September. Ordinary rooms still empty without warning: a mall, a skating rink, a holiday table. She has said she wanted the sentence carried out so her daughter “finally can be resting,” and she has also said she is not sure the morning would give her the word people keep offering her, which is closure. To the argument that Pike would never again sit at a family table, she answered, “Yeah, Colleen never did either.” In the days before the warrant she told the ᴀssociated Press that every time she thinks about the case she thinks about Colleen feeling that pain and trying to get up and run. She told WKRN she hoped the morning might finally be justice, not because it would bring her daughter back, but because she believes Pike would kill again. She told The New York Times that nobody could convince her the woman had changed. PH๏τographs of Colleen were outside Riverbend on Wednesday, the ᴀssociated Press reported, while the legal day swung from a morning stay to an evening order and then to a procedure the state could not finish. The mother who had raised the money to be present for a death was present, instead, for an unfinished act. The imbalance she has described for thirty-one years did not break.

A 226-page clemency peтιтion, expert reports on adolescent brain development, a governor’s review, a Sixth Circuit stay, a Supreme Court order, a dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor: all of it attached to one name. The other name was on a pH๏τograph in a witness room, and on a fundraiser that existed because a mother on a fixed income could not otherwise afford the drive. Tadaryl Shipp, 17 at the time, received life because he was not eligible for death. A third teenager, Shadolla Peterson, received a lesser term as the lookout. The clemency machinery, the brain-science machinery, the last-minute stay, the race to midnight, all ran for only one of them. Martinez has never pretended that split was the point. The point, for her, is that the country learned the nickname, the occult jewelry, the dormitory logs, the isolation on death row, and still cannot picture the girl who painted buildings and tried to call her mother back. Whether Wednesday night gives that girl any rest is a question Martinez has already refused to answer in the language of closure. She came with the pH๏τograph. The sentence did not finish. The face in the frame is still the thing the coverage has to be forced to hold.

Source: New York Post