The story that Tennessee is now preparing to finish did not begin in a death chamber. It began on a winter night in Knoxville with a phone that would not hold a signal and a conversation that was sold as reconciliation. On January 12, 1995, Colleen Slemmer signed out of the Knoxville Job Corps dormitory with Christa Pike, Tadaryl Shipp and Shadolla Peterson. Slemmer had been told they wanted to make peace and that there would be marijuana. Pike had become convinced that Slemmer was trying to take Shipp, her 17-year-old boyfriend. Friends of Slemmer denied it. Earlier that day, according to trial evidence, Pike had told another student she intended to kill Slemmer because she “had just felt mean that day.” They walked toward a secluded area near an abandoned steam plant on the University of Tennessee agricultural campus.

What prosecutors later proved, and what Pike has not denied in the years since, is that the offer of peace was a lure. Slemmer was attacked. The ᴀssault lasted, by Pike’s own later estimate, thirty minutes to an hour. Court records describe beating, slashing with a box cutter, and a pentagram carved into Slemmer’s chest while she was still alive, an act Shipp later said he performed. When Slemmer tried to run, she was caught and pulled back. Pike asked her, according to her own statement, whether she knew who was doing this to her. Slemmer could not answer. Pike later smashed her skull with a chunk of asphalt. A fragment of bone went into Pike’s jacket. By the next morning two university employees had found the body. Within thirty-six hours investigators had a dormitory log that showed four students leaving and only three returning, students who said Pike had bragged and displayed the fragment, and statements that closed the case with a speed that the appeals would never match.

The media found every element that turns a local murder into a national obsession: teenagers, a supposed love triangle, occult jewelry, a satanic symbol, a female defendant who looked, as one investigator later put it, sweet and proved otherwise. Pike called herself “Lil Devil.” Shipp kept paraphernalia in his room and told police he had dabbled in satanism since childhood. Detectives treated the carving as a signature even as Shipp later claimed the killing had not been planned as a ritual. The distinction never loosened the story’s grip. Pike was convicted of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy and sentenced to death in March 1996. She asked the court, through tears, if she could hug her mother before she was taken away. She was 20. Shipp, because he was 17 at the time of the crime, could not be sentenced to death and received life with the possibility of parole. Peterson, the lookout, received a lesser term. That split is one reason the case still feels unfinished to people on every side. The person who was 17 became eligible for parole.

The person who was 18 became the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. The person who was 19 never left January 12. Pike later insisted they had meant only to scare Slemmer and that the plan ran out of control. She has also been convicted, in 2001, of attempted first-degree murder for an ᴀssault on another inmate, a fact the Department of Correction still lists beside her name. The origin night remains the part the country cannot stop retelling because it contains the detail that makes the rest possible: Slemmer walked into the dark believing the fight was over. Her last successful call home had already happened. The next one failed. By the time her mother tried again, the lie about peace had already done its work.

Source: New York Post