The gruesome details of death row inmate Christa Pike’s sadistic murder of a fellow student when she was 18 have resurfaced in a new documentary from The Post.
Pike, now 50, was scheduled to become the first woman executed in Tennessee on Sept. 30. Instead, she became the first prisoner in the United States to survive a lethal injection.
She was sentenced to death for torturing and killing 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in a jealous rage in Knoxville in January 1995. Pike later kept a fragment of Slemmer’s skull as a macabre souvenir.
The brutality of the crime has continued to haunt those who investigated and worked on the case.
“This case appeared in January of 1995, at the beginning of my career, and the nature of it has stayed with me throughout my entire career,” Knox County forensic anthropologist Dr. Murray Marks said in The Post’s new documentary, “No Mercy: Christa Pike Unravelled.”
Slemmer sustained horrific injuries during a 30-minute beating in a remote section of the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus, where Pike and her 17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, had lured her.
Pike ultimately killed Slemmer by striking her head with a large piece of asphalt. She then kept part of the skull as a souvenir.
Dr. Marks, who testified for the prosecution at Pike’s trial, recalled being asked to examine the missing section of bone from the left side of Slemmer’s head.
“The district attorney brought forth a little paper bag, and from that withdrew a piece of bone, and so that was presented to me,” he said.
“I took it and, you know, I took my time and made sure it fit exactly.
“I looked at the edges. It fit precisely; the edges were a perfect match. At that point, when the skull was demonstrated by me, the gallery gasped.”
Pike received the death penalty after her trial. Shipp was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole because he was a minor at the time of the crime and therefore was not eligible for execution.
Former Knoxville News-Sentinel reporter Don Jacobs, who covered the case, said Pike later wrote to Shipp to complain about receiving a death sentence.
“She did write to Mr. Shipp after she got the death penalty, and she was apparently quite mystified why she got the death penalty,” Jacobs said.
“She said, ‘I didn’t deserve that. I showed him a great deal of compassion because I didn’t let her die slowly.’”
An ambulance took Pike to the hospital after she survived two doses of pentobarbital during her botched execution at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
She remained unconscious for several days after the failed execution attempt before waking on Oct. 6.
Pike is currently being held at the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, formerly known as the Tennessee Prison for Women.
Her lawyers said last week that she is now able to speak in full sentences.
Outgoing Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee paused all remaining executions in the state this year after the fiasco and ordered an independent review.
Frank Strada, the state’s prison chief, resigned after the botched execution, saying the decision was “in the best interest of Tennesseans.”
Pike’s attorneys have asked for her sentence to be commuted, arguing that she has “endured punishment greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty.”
