Christa Pike: The Only Woman on Tennessee’s Death Row Finally Gets Her Execution Date

On September 30th, 2026, the state of Tennessee is scheduled to do something it has not done in more than 200 years. It plans to execute a woman. Her name is Christa Gail Pike. And for nearly three decades, she has been the only woman on Tennessee’s death row. She was sentenced to die at the age of 20, making her one of the youngest women ever sent to death row in the modern history of the United States.

If the execution proceeds as ordered, she will be the first woman put to death in Tennessee in roughly two [music] centuries. But to understand why the courts have refused every plea to spare her life, you have to go back 30 years to a cold January night in Knoxville to a wooded ravine and to the body of a 19-year-old girl who had come to Tennessee looking for a fresh start.

What investigators found there would become one of the most disturbing murders in the state’s history. When they first arrived, they weren’t even certain what they were looking at. A pentagram had been carved into the victim’s chest, and for a brief moment, they were fears the killing might be tied to some kind of cult.

 But the truth was, in a way, far more unsettling. The person responsible wasn’t part of a cult. She wasn’t a serial killer. She was an 18-year-old classmate. Before we go further, if stories like this one matter to you, take a second to like this video and subscribe to the channel. [music] It genuinely helps these detailed case breakdowns reach more people who care about seeing justice remembered. Now, let’s get into it.

[music] To understand how this happened, you first have to understand where it happened. In 1995, the [music] JobCore Center in Knoxville operated as a federally funded lifeline. The JobCore program had been created [music] decades earlier to give at risk young people a second chance.

 If you had dropped out of high school, come from poverty, or picked up a minor juvenile record, JobCore offered a path forward. The government provided dormitories, meals, [music] and a small stipen. In return, students worked toward their GEDs and trained in vocational trades. [music] Everything from carpentry to culinary arts to office administration.

 It was designed to pull teenagers off [music] the streets and turn them into employable adults. During the day, the campus looked something like a strict boarding school. There were schedules, structure, and supervision. But beneath that surface, the environment could be volatile. The program deliberately brought in troubled teenagers from across the country and placed them together in close quarters.

 Many of them carried heavy childhood trauma and unresolved behavioral problems. Fights broke out. Clicks formed. According to accounts from the program, some students carried razor blades or box cutters saying they wanted protection. For some young people, JobCore really was a stepping stone to something better. For others, it simply became a new place to continue [music] old patterns.

 Colleen Slmer wanted the better life. She was 19 years old, originally from Orange Park, Florida. Growing up, Colleen had faced real challenges. She had been [music] enrolled in special education classes and struggled to find her footing after high school. Her mother, May Martinez, saw Job Core as a solution, a place where the structure might finally give her daughter the stability she had never quite had.

 So, Colleen packed her bags, boarded a bus, and moved to Tennessee. She chose to study computer programming. She wanted a steady job, a steady paycheck, and a chance to make her family [music] proud. Those who knew her described her the same way again and again. She was quiet. She was trusting. She didn’t go looking for conflict. And she tended to back down when confronted.

She was a teenager trying to navigate a complicated [music] social world and that tragically made her a target. Christa Pike arrived at the Knoxville Job Corps carrying a very different history. She was born in 1976 [music] in Beckley, West Virginia, and her early years were defined by instability. Court records describe a childhood marked by neglect, poverty, and exposure to substance abuse.

 According to those records, she was born to a mother who drank [music] during the pregnancy, something her defense would later argue caused lasting damage to the part of the brain that regulates impulse and behavior. She endured abuse throughout her childhood, attempted suicide more than once, and by her early teens was already dependent on alcohol and marijuana.

 She had cycled through schools, spent time in a juvenile facility, and eventually was steered toward JobCore to earn her GED court filings note. She had once hoped to train as a nursing assistant. But her difficult background alone does not explain how she operated once she was inside the dormitories. By the accounts that emerged later, when Pike walked the halls, she demanded attention.

 Other students learned to give her space. She was known to confront people over small slights and seemed to enjoy watching others back down. It wasn’t only about anger, according to those who observed her. It was about control. At job course, Pike began dating a 17-year-old student named Teddarl Ship. Ship stood out.

 He had a documented fascination with the occult. He talked about death and dark rituals [music] and according to accounts from the program kept a makeshift shrine and spoke openly about Satanism. Together, Pike and Ship developed a shared interest in the occult. And Pike didn’t simply follow his lead. By many descriptions, she embraced a dark persona and pushed it further along with an 18-year-old acquaintance named Shadala Peterson.

 The three formed a tight, intimidating circle within the campus, and soon Pike fixed her attention on Colleen. There was no complicated reason behind it. Pike became convinced [music] that Colleen was trying to steal her boyfriend. According to later accounts, the belief may have started with something as small as a wave in a hallway.

 Rumors spread through the dorms. Yet, others who were there would say Colleen was actually frightened of ship and wanted nothing to do with him or his interests. But the facts didn’t seem to matter. In Pike’s mind, Colleen was a threat, both to her relationship and to her sense of authority. The harassment started small.

 Name calling, rumors, whispered threats. Colleen didn’t fight back. She kept her head down and hoped it would fade if she simply ignored it. According to reporting on the case, she eventually reported the harassment to school officials who looked into it and warned Pike that further complaints could get her expelled.

 Pike, for her part, reportedly played the role of the misunderstood student, denying the accusations and promising to smooth things over. But behind that performance, the hostility only grew. Pike didn’t just want to frighten Colleen anymore. And according to court testimony, she began speaking openly to Ship and Peterson about wanting to hurt her, even to kill her.

 Neither of them reported those threats. Neither warned Colleen. Instead, a plan took shape. Pike understood that a direct confrontation inside the dormitories wouldn’t work. There were cameras, staff, and too many witnesses. She needed to get Colleen away from the campus. So on the evening of January 12th, 1995, Pike approached Colleen with a completely different attitude.

 Gone was the hostility. She was calm, even friendly. She said she was tired of the drama, that she wanted to put the feud behind them. As a peace offering, she invited Colleen to slip out after curfew and smoke marijuana in the woods nearby. And Colleen, exhausted by months of fear, agreed. She was relieved. She believed the worst was finally over, that she could go back to focusing on her studies without looking over her shoulder.

 That night, temperatures in Knoxville dropped toward freezing. Colleen put on a winter coat and left with Pike, Ship, and Peterson. According to court records, the group signed out of the dormatory together and walked off the property, heading toward the University of Tennessee’s agricultural area near an old abandoned steam plant. They kept walking until they reached a secluded wooded spot.

 It was dark and completely isolated. Colleen believed they were simply stopping to smoke. She had no idea she had walked into a trap. The moment they were out of sight, everything changed. There was no truce. According to court testimony, Pike and Ship turned on Colleen and began beating her.

 When she tried to flee, scrambling to escape, she was pulled back. Prosecutors would later describe an assault that stretched on for roughly half an hour. Pike had a box cutter and a meat cleaver said to have been taken from the campus kitchen. Colleen was slashed and cut. Ship acting on his obsession with the occult carved a pentagram into her body.

 Peterson, according to the case against her, acted as a lookout, watching to make sure no one interrupted. Court records describe how Colleen begged them to stop and pleaded for her life. She was ignored. In the end, prosecutors said Pike struck her in the head with a large piece of asphalt, delivering what was believed to be the fatal blow.

 Then came the detail that would follow this case for the rest of its history. Pike kept a fragment of Colleen’s skull, and rather than hide what had happened, she carried it back to campus. Most people who commit a crime like this tried to bury it to disappear [music] into silence. Chris Pike did the opposite.

 The next morning, the life at the center resumed [music] as usual. Instructors took attendance. Colleen was marked absent, but according to court [music] records, Pike showed the skull fragment to other students and bragged about what she had done, describing the attack [music] in detail. She seemed to believe that fear alone would keep everyone quiet.

 She was wrong. Within 36 hours of the murder, the Knoxville [music] Police Department received information pointing directly at the people responsible. There was another problem for Pike as well. The dormatory signout log showed that four people had left together that night, and only three [music] had returned. Detectives went straight to the Job Core campus and brought Pike, Ship, and Peterson in for questioning.

Investigators reportedly [music] expected Pike to deny everything or to immediately ask for a lawyer. Instead, according to the record of the case, she waved her rights and confessed. On the recording, her account was calm and detailed. She admitted to the attack. She admitted to the killing. When detectives searched, they recovered [music] the skull fragment from her jacket along with other evidence tying the three of them to the crime.

 And that confession, delivered so coldly, would become the centerpiece of everything that followed. the trial, the sentence, and a legal battle that would stretch across three decades all the way to the execution date, now looming over the [music] state of Tennessee. And that confession, delivered so coldly, would become the centerpiece of everything that followed.

 It would anchor [music] the trial. It would shape the sentence. And it would fuel a legal battle that has stretched across three decades all the way to the execution date now looming over the state of Tennessee. When detectives [music] finally asked Christa Pike why she had done it, her answer was chillingly [music] simple.

 She said Colleen had been acting tough and she wanted to prove she was tougher. According to the investigators in the room, she never once asked about Colleen’s family. She never asked whether the girl she had left in those woods might somehow have survived. Her attention from beginning to end stayed fixed on herself. Armed with her confession, police moved quickly to [music] build a case that would leave no room for doubt.

 They executed search warrants at the dormitories. And what they recovered was dam blood stained clothing, the meat cleaver, the box cutter, and taken directly from Pike’s [music] own pocket, the fragment of Colleen Slmer’s skull she had chosen [music] to keep. All three teenagers, Pike, Tedal Ship, and Shadala [music] Peterson, were arrested and charged with firstdegree murder.

 The sheer brutality of the crime stunned the city of Knoxville. Local news carried the [music] story for weeks, and the details only grew harder to absorb with each new report. In early 1996, Christa Pike stood trial. From the outside, the prosecution’s case looked airtight. This was not a case built on guesswork or thin [music] circumstantial threads.

Prosecutors had the murder weapons. They had the physical evidence. And most damning of all, they had Pike’s own voice recorded on tape, calmly describing [music] what she had done. During the trial, that confession was played for the jury. Sitting in the gallery was May Martinez, Colleen’s mother, forced to listen [music] as her daughter’s killer described the murder without a trace of panic in her voice.

According to those present, the recording captured Pike laughing as she recounted it. Pike’s defense team did not try to deny that she was there or that she took part. Instead, they asked the jury to look at where she had come from. They argued that she was the product of severe, unrelenting childhood trauma.

 They pointed to the neglect, the abuse, and the untreated mental health struggles that had shadowed her since birth. They argued that damage done to her developing brain had left her without the full capacity to grasp the weight of her actions. It was a genuine attempt to explain the unexplainable, but the jury did not accept it as a reason to spare her.

 They waited [music] against the premeditation. They waited against the fake peace offering that had lured Colleen into the dark. They waited against the prolonged deliberate nature of the assault. It took them only a few hours to return a verdict. Christa Pike was found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

 On March 30th, 1996, the sentence came down. At just 20 years old, Christa Pike became the youngest woman on death row in the United States. Her accompllices, however, would walk very different paths. To Daryl’s ship had been 17 at the time of the killing. Because he was legally a juvenile, he could not be sentenced to death.

 [music] He received a life sentence with the possibility of parole somewhere far down the line. Shadala Peterson’s outcome was more startling still. Prosecutors treated her role [music] as that of a lookout and she cooperated fully with investigators. In exchange, she was allowed to plead to a lesser charge.

 She served no prison time and eventually walked free. That disparity, one woman condemned to die, one man imprisoned for life, and one accomplice released left Colleen’s family with a wound that never fully closed. May Martinez responded the only way she could. She began what would become a decadesl long vigil, attending appeal hearing after appeal hearing, parole meeting after [music] parole meeting, refusing to let the courts or the public forget the daughter she had lost.

 For most people, a death sentence feels like the final chapter. For Christa Pike, it was [music] nothing of the sort. When someone is sentenced to death, the public often assumes the story is over. In reality, the appeals process can stretch [music] on for decades. And through those long years, Pike did not fade quietly into [music] the routine of prison life.

 She was held at a women’s facility in Nashville. And as the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, she lived under tight security. Yet, even there, she found ways to operate. In August 2001, she approached a fellow inmate named Patricia Jones. According to prison authorities, Pike wrapped a shoelace around the woman’s neck and tried to strangle her inside the unit.

 Correctional officers intervened before Jones was killed. Pike was tried and convicted [music] of attempted murder, and more time was added to a sentence she was already unlikely to outlive, but violence was not her only instrument. While sitting on death row, Pike developed a pattern that prison investigators would come to describe as calculated manipulation.

She began writing letters to men on the outside. Some were admirers who had followed her case. Others had never met her at all. In those letters, she cast herself as misunderstood. A young woman failed and victimized by the justice system. Some of the men came to believe she loved them. Some sent her money.

 At least one became convinced he was rescuing an innocent woman. Investigators believe Pike was doing something far more deliberate, studying each man and telling every one of them precisely what he wanted to hear. According to those investigators, some of those relationships were about far more than companionship.

 Over time, they became part of a longunning effort to get her out of prison. And in 2012, that effort took its most serious form. Pike turned her attention to a male correctional officer who worked in her housing unit. In any prison, guards and inmates see each other every single day. They talk. Familiarity builds. Boundaries get tested.

 According to the case against him, Pike drew that officer into a romantic relationship. They passed notes and spoke in the moments other guards weren’t watching. And over time, she persuaded him to consider helping her get past the facility’s secured doors. [music] But an escape from inside required someone on the outside.

 Through a web of correspondence, Pike connected with a man from out of state. And using a contraband cell phone smuggled into her cell, she began coordinating a plan. According to investigators, the roles were carefully divided. The outside man was to travel to Tennessee, obtain a vehicle, and acquire weapons. The officer was to help her slip past the security doors during [music] a scheduled shift.

 And once she was beyond the walls, a driver would be waiting to carry her away. The scheme developed over months. Money changed hands. Details about guard rotations and security routines were shared. What Pike did not know was that the plan had already begun to unravel. The Tennessee Bureau of [music] Investigation intercepted the communications.

 Agents monitored the money transfers, tracked the movements of her outside contact, and listened [music] as the plot took shape. They let it develop just far enough to secure indictments and then they moved in before anyone could act. The correctional officer was arrested and lost his job. The outside accomplice was apprehended.

 Pike’s cell was raided and the contraband phone seized. [music] The investigation had proven something remarkable and deeply unsettling. Nearly two decades after her conviction, Christa Pike was still actively directing criminal activity from within [music] one of the state’s most secure facilities. Because of that continued behavior, prison officials kept her in extreme isolation for years afterward.

Eventually, [music] her legal team filed a suit, arguing that the prolonged isolation amounts to unconstitutional solitary confinement. [music] In late 2024, the state settled, granting her somewhat more time out of her cell. But by then, a far larger reckoning was drawing near. The landscape of capital punishment in Tennessee had shifted dramatically.

 For years, executions in the state had effectively been paused. [music] Tennessee had come under intense scrutiny over its lethal injection procedures following [music] a series of deeply troubled executions, and the governor ordered a full review of the protocols. The [music] death chamber went quiet.

 Then that review was completed. The Department of Correction revised its procedures. [music] The state secured the drugs it needed and the attorney general’s office began pressing hard to move forward with inmates [music] who had exhausted their standard appeals. Christa Pike’s name rose to the very top of that [music] list.

 On September 30th, 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court granted the state’s [music] request and set a firm date. She was scheduled to be executed on September 30th, 2026. If it is carried out, she will become the first woman executed [music] in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Confronted with an actual date on the calendar, Pike’s attorneys launched a final legal campaign.

 They have petitioned the governor for clemency, asking him to commute her sentence to life in [music] prison. They argue that executing someone for a crime committed at 18 runs against modern understandings [music] of how the adolescent brain develops. and they point again to the vast gap between her fate and that of Tataril ship.

 Their central effort, however, is a lawsuit challenging the method itself. Tennessee now relies on a single drug, Pintobatl, to carry out executions. Pike’s lawsuit argues that using it on her would amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Her attorneys claim she has a documented medical condition affecting her blood and that the drug would trigger a reaction causing her lungs to rapidly fill with fluid.

 In effect, they argue she would experience the sensation of drowning on the gurnie before the drug stopped her heart. The state firmly disputes this, insisting the protocol is both lawful and humane. State attorneys also note a legal wrinkle. Because Pike’s crime occurred before a cutoff in state law, she retains the right to choose the electric chair instead.

 If she truly fears the injection, they argue she has an alternative available to her. The courts are now weighing those competing [music] arguments. The attorney general’s office maintains that the time for appeals has run out, pointing to the 30 years Colleen’s family has already waited in citing the 2001 strangulation attempt and the 2012 escape plot as evidence that Pike cannot be safely managed even under maximum security.

 Should the federal courts dismiss the challenge to the drug protocol, the remaining legal avenues will close and the state will be cleared to proceed. JobCore was built on a simple belief that a change of surroundings could change a young person’s future. For Colleen Slmer, it was meant to be the start of a new life. For Christa Pike, [music] it became the place where she committed the crime that would come to define the rest of hers.

More than 30 years after Colleen walked into those woods, believing a long, frightening feud had finally ended, Tennessee is preparing to carry out the sentence handed down in 1996. Whether that execution ultimately goes forward will be decided in a courtroom. But the facts of what happened that night are no longer in dispute.

 A young woman who came looking for a second chance never made it home. And nothing the courts decide now can give Colleen Slammer back the life she never had the chance to live. If this crime story moved you, take a moment to like this video and subscribe to the channel so that the cases we cover and the people at the heart of them are never quietly forgotten.