May Martinez is preparing to leave Jacksonville, Florida, and drive more than eight and a half hours to Nashville so she can stand inside the witness process for the woman convicted of murdering her daughter. Colleen Slemmer was nineteen when she was killed on January 12, 1995, on a pathway on the University of Tennessee Agricultural campus after being lured from the Knoxville Job Corps. Pike was eighteen. Two other teenagers were involved. Only Pike received a death sentence. Thirty-one years later, Martinez has told Tennessee reporters that she intends to hold up a pH๏τograph of Colleen so the room cannot pretend the victim was never there. “It’s never about the victims,” she has said. “It’s like Colleen was never there.” That sentence has become the unofficial counterweight to the legal campaign now surrounding Pike. Martinez has also said she will not speak to Pike.

Her husband may say something. She will not. In her account, Pike never apologized and Pike’s family never reached out in a way that mattered. After three decades, conversation has no purpose. The pH๏τograph does. The calendar around the execution has its own cruelty for the family. September 20 is Colleen’s birthday. The end of the month also marks years since Martinez lost another daughter. The state has scheduled the lethal injection for September 30 at 10 a.m., ten days after the birthday Colleen never lived to see past nineteen. Martinez has said she wants the chapter closed and that she is not sure closure will arrive even if the sentence is carried out. She has also described a second ordeal that most of the public never absorbed: the long fight to recover her daughter’s remains from insтιтutions that kept pieces of Colleen as evidence and, in Martinez’s telling, later sent body parts home in unmarked packages.

She has said she spent sixteen years writing letters and arguing with authorities before she received Colleen’s skull. In later interviews and in a documentary released ahead of the execution date, she described opening brown boxes without warning and finding fragments she could not immediately identify. She has said the first package contained genitals, another the nose and a piece of the chin, another sections of skin that included the pentagram carved into her daughter’s chest. Whether every item was handled exactly as she remembers remains a matter of insтιтutional record and family testimony, but the core fact is not disputed in recent reporting: the state kept remains for years, the mother had to fight to bury her child completely, and the fragment Pike took from the scene became a grim emblem of a case that never receded. Martinez has rejected the argument that Pike’s age or childhood trauma should spare her.

“Most kids do go through a lot of stuff, and they don’t go out and kill,” she has said. Colleen’s father, Raul, has said he wants to see the execution happen so the final chapter can close. Those statements sit beside a national conversation that has often treated Pike as the rare woman on death row, the first possible female execution in Tennessee since the early nineteenth century, and a defendant whose lawyers now emphasize rape, neglect, brain damage, and decades of isolation. Martinez’s answer is that the victim is still being crowded out of her own case. The publicity, she argues, keeps returning to the condemned woman while Colleen remains a name attached to a crime scene. That is why the pH๏τograph matters. It is not a prop. It is the mother’s attempt to force the witness room, and anyone watching from outside it, to look at the person who did not get thirty years of appeals, expert reports, clemency peтιтions, or a governor’s last review. If September 30 proceeds, Martinez will be in Nashville as the only woman on Tennessee’s death row is taken into the chamber. If it does not proceed, she will still be the mother who spent more than half her adult life waiting for a system that kept her daughter’s case open and, for years, kept her daughter’s remains as well.

Source: New York Post