The Final Days of Christa Pike — 57 Days Until Execution, as One Family Still Waits for Justice

New tonight, the Supreme Court reviewing the state’s plan to execute the only woman on death row. Christa Pike was sentenced to death after killing and torturing Colleen Slimmer in 1995. Tennessee diagnosed Pike with PTSD due to the sexual trauma she suffered as a child. Her attorneys argue an execution carried out by an allmale team and being strapped down will trigger her PTSD.

 A judge now reviewing Pike’s case as to whether the execution would violate her constitutional rights. She is the first inmate granted an execution review after the state supreme court amended its rules surrounding executions.  September 30th, 2026. The state of Tennessee is about to do something it has not done in over 200 years. Execute a woman.

 Her name is Christa Pike. She was 18 years old when she lured a 19-year-old classmate into the woods on a freezing January night in 1995. The girl went in believing a monthsl long feud was finally over. She never came back out. What Christa put inside her jacket pocket before she walked away from that crime scene is something every person who heard about it never forgot.

And what happened next inside that courtroom and across 30 years on death row is almost impossible to believe. This case triggered one of the most legally complicated execution fights Tennessee has ever seen. And not everyone agrees justice is being served. Welcome and thank you for being here. If you are new to the channel, hit subscribe and turn on your notifications so you never miss a case.

 Now, let’s get into it. Drop your location in the comments. We read every single one. Her name was Colleen Surmer, 19 years old, originally from Orange Park, Florida, a girl who had faced more than her fair share of struggles before she ever set foot in Tennessee. Growing up, Colleen was enrolled in special education classes. School was hard.

 Finding her place after graduation was even harder. But she was not the kind of person who gave up. She kept trying. Her mother, May Martinez, heard about the Knoxville JobCore Center and believed it was exactly what her daughter needed, a structured environment, hot meals, a small weekly stipend, and a real tangible shot at a better future.

Colleen packed her bags and made the trip north. She enrolled in computer studies. She wanted a desk job, a steady paycheck. She wanted to come home one day and tell her mother she had made it. Roommates and instructors described her the same way, almost word for word. Quiet, friendly, easy to be around, also easy to take advantage of.

 Colleen did not like confrontation. When someone challenged her, she stepped back. She kept her head down and focused on her classes. She was just a girl trying to build something better for herself. She had no idea that someone on that campus had already decided she was a problem that needed to be solved. Now, let’s talk about Christa Pike.

 Christa Gail Pike was born on March 10th, 1976 in Beckley, West Virginia. She came into this world prematurely and according to court records, her mother drank alcohol throughout the pregnancy. Medical experts later testified that the drinking caused organic brain damage, including a mal foration in the specific part of the brain that controls impulses and decision-making.

 She was damaged before she ever drew her first breath. Her home life was no better. Her parents fought constantly. There was separation, infidelity, and at one point, a suicide attempt. Christa was raised largely by her grandmother in poverty in conditions that court filings described as deeply disturbing.

 She was sexually assaulted multiple times as a child by a neighbor and by family acquaintances. None of it was ever properly addressed. No real help ever came. By age 12, she was already dependent on alcohol and marijuana. She had attempted suicide. She dropped out of high school and picked up a minor juvenile record for shoplifting.

 Eventually, the system redirected her to the Knoxville Job Corps. The moment she arrived, she made herself known. She dominated other students through intimidation. She picked fights over small things. She enjoyed watching people shrink away from her. Then she met 17-year-old Tateral Ship. He wore a pentagram around his neck. He talked openly about death.

devil worship and violence. And Christa did not pull away from any of it. The person Christa Pike became inside those dorms did not appear out of nowhere. And what she was truly capable of, no one fully understood until it was far too late. It started with a rumor. Word spread through the job core dormitories that Colleen Surmer had been flirting with Tateral Ship.

 Other students who testified in court later said it was completely false. Colleen was actually afraid of ship. She went out of her way to avoid him. But Christa did not care about the truth. She had made up her mind. Colleen was a threat to her relationship and a challenge to her position on campus. That was enough. The harassment began in small ways.

 Name calling in the cafeteria, shoving in the hallways, quiet threats delivered just low enough that no staff member would hear. Colleen did what she always did. She stayed quiet. She kept her head down. She hoped it would eventually stop. It did not stop. To Christa, Colleen’s silence looked like weakness. And weakness to her was simply an invitation to push harder.

 Court records confirm that Christa stopped keeping her intentions private. She began telling other students openly that she wanted to hurt Colleen. She said it in front of Tadel Ship. She said it in front of 18-year-old Shadola Peterson. She told them both directly. She wanted to make an example of Colleen.

 Neither of them told a single staff member, not one instructor, not campus security, nobody. Colleen was never warned. And by this point, Christa was no longer interested in scaring her. She had moved past that. Now she wanted to destroy her and she was already working out exactly how to do it. This was not a crime of passion.

It was planned step by step by three people who each had a role to play. Christa Pike, 18 years old, was the one driving everything. Tadel Ship, 17, was her active partner, and Shadola Peterson, 18, agreed to serve as the lookout. Christa had already chosen the location, a wooded ravine on the edge of the University of Tennessee agricultural campus, past the green houses, past the last street light, far enough from the job center that no security guard would hear a single sound.

 The weapons were not grabbed in the heat of the moment. Court records confirm Christa went into the JobCore commercial kitchen beforehand and stole a box cutter and a meat cleaver. She came prepared. The trap was simple. Christa would walk up to Colleen, drop her aggressive tone, and offer peace. She would invite her to sneak off campus after curfew to smoke marijuana together.

 A truce between two people who had been fighting for months. Ship raised no objection. Peterson agreed to her role without hesitation. Nobody tried to back out. Nobody contacted security. Nobody warned Colleen. Three people knew exactly what was going to happen in those woods that night. Only one of them eventually told the truth and only after she was promised she would not go to prison.

 If you are finding this case as gripping as I am, hit the like button right now. It helps more people find this story. Subscribe if you have not already and drop your thoughts in the comments below. Now, back to that night in the woods. January 12th, 1995. Knoxville, Tennessee. The temperature was close to freezing, the kind of cold that makes you pull your jacket tight and walk fast.

 That evening, Crystal walked up to Colleen in the dormatory. Her voice was calm, almost friendly. She said she was tired of the fighting. She suggested they sneak off campus after curfew, go smoke marijuana together, and put the whole thing behind them. A truce. Colleen believed her. She had been waiting months for this moment.

 She put on her winter coat and followed Christa, Ship, and Peterson out of the building. The four of them walked off the Jobcore campus, past the green houses, past the last street light, and into the dark. They kept walking until they reached a wooded ravine behind the University of Tennessee agricultural steam plant.

 Isolated, completely quiet, no one around for a long way in any direction. Then the trap closed. There was no marijuana. There was no truce. Christa and ship turned on Colleen without warning. They hit her. They kicked her. When Colleen fell to the ground and tried to crawl up the embankment to escape, they grabbed her and dragged her back into the brush.

Peterson moved to the treeine and stood watch. What followed lasted approximately 30 to 45 minutes. Christa pulled out the box cutter and the meat cleaver she had stolen from the kitchen. She slashed Colleen across her arms, her legs, and her face while ship held her down. Then, according to court records, they carved a pentagram directly into Colleen’s chest.

 When investigators later found the body, that detail would lead them to initially suspect a cult was involved. Colleen begged them to stop. She asked what she had done. She pleaded for her life. Christa did not stop. When Colleen finally lay motionless on the frozen ground, Christa walked the area until she found a large chunk of asphalt.

 She picked it up, walked back, and brought it down hard on Colleen’s skull. 19-year-old Colleen Slimmer died in those woods. The blow was so forceful that a piece of her skull broke completely free from her head. Christa reached down. She picked up the bone fragment. She wiped it off. She dropped it into her jacket pocket and zipped it shut.

 Then she turned around and walked out of the woods. Most killers run. Christa Pike walked calmly back into the dorms and by morning she was showing people exactly what was inside that pocket. The three of them walked back into the jobcore dormitories and went to their rooms. No panic, no frantic behavior, no visible distress of any kind.

 Colleen’s body was still lying in that ravine. The next morning, campus life resumed as normal. Students went to class. Instructors took attendance. Colleen was marked absent. Security began making routine checks, phone calls, a walkthrough of the grounds. Nothing urgent yet. No one at the administrative level had any idea what had happened the night before.

 Down in Florida, May Martinez was going about her day. She had no reason to worry. Not yet. Back on campus, Christa went to the cafeteria and sat down for breakfast. Then she reached into her jacket pocket. She pulled out the piece of Colleen’s skull and placed it on the table. She showed it to the students sitting around her. She laughed.

 She walked them through the entire assault. The weapons, the carving, the final blow, describing it all like she was telling a story she was proud of. She wanted people to know what she had done. She believed that if they were afraid of her, they would stay quiet. She was not shaking. She was not sorry.

 The only people in the world who knew the full truth were sitting in that cafeteria, and one of them was passing around a piece of a 19-year-old girl’s skull like it was a souvenir. Christa’s plan to buy silence with fear lasted less than 2 days. Within 36 hours of the murder, the Knoxville Police Department received an anonymous phone call.

 A JobCore student, terrified but unwilling to stay quiet, told detectives everything. Who did it? how it happened and exactly where the people responsible were sleeping that night. Detectives drove straight to the campus. No announcement, no warning to administration. They pulled Christa Pike, Tatterel Ship, and Shadola Peterson out separately and brought them in for questioning.

 Investigators had also found Colleen’s body in the ravine. The pentagram carved into her chest immediately raised questions. At that early stage, police were not yet sure what kind of crime they were dealing with. Cult involvement was not ruled out. Then they sat Christa Pike down in the interrogation room. They expected her to deny everything.

 They expected her to ask for a lawyer. Instead, she waved her Miranda rights and started talking. The audio recording captured every word. Her voice was steady, unhurried, detailed. She admitted to the slashing. She admitted to carving the pentagram. She admitted to picking up the asphalt and bringing it down on Colleen’s skull.

 When detectives asked her why, her answer was simple. She said Colleen had been acting tough. She wanted to show her who was tougher. Court records confirm she never once asked whether Colleen had survived. She showed no visible distress. From the moment she sat down to the moment she was done talking, her focus remained almost entirely on herself.

 The confession was damaging, but confessions can be challenged in court. What investigators found next could not be. Detectives executed search warrants across the job core dormitories. What they recovered confirmed every detail of Christa’s recorded statement. blood soaked clothing, the meat cleaver, the box cutter, and directly from the pocket of Christ Pike’s own jacket, the piece of Colleen Surmer’s skull.

 The case was now airtight. All three, Christa Pike, Tateral Ship, and Shadola Peterson were arrested and charged with firstdegree murder. Local news led with the story for days. The brutality of what had happened to a 19-year-old girl in those woods shook the city of Knoxville deeply. On campus, the atmosphere shifted completely.

 Students who had been shown the skull fragment in the cafeteria. Students who had heard Christa openly talk about what she was planning. They were now living with the full weight of what they had witnessed and said nothing about. Shadola Peterson made a decision quickly. She cooperated with investigators and agreed to testify for the state.

 Tadal ship’s age, 17 at the time of the murder, became a significant legal factor that would shape the outcome of his case. And in Florida, May Martinez got the call no mother should ever receive. She traveled to Tennessee and sat with the truth of what her daughter’s final 45 minutes had looked like. That knowledge never left her. It still hasn’t.

 In early 1996, Christa Pike went to trial in Tennessee. The prosecution built their case on three things. The taped confession in her own voice, the physical evidence recovered from her jacket pocket and her dormatory, and the live testimony of Shadola Peterson, who sat in that courtroom and told the jury exactly what she had witnessed in those woods.

 The defense did not deny that Colleen SL was murdered. Instead, they asked the jury to consider who Christa Pike was before that night. A child born with organic brain damage caused by her mother’s drinking during pregnancy. A girl who had been sexually abused multiple times and never received proper help. A teenager living with untreated bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Neurologist Dr.

 Jonathan Pinkinis testified that Christa’s brain had a physical mal foration in the area responsible for impulse control. Her ability to regulate her own behavior had been compromised from birth. The jury listened carefully. Then they looked at the facts, the fake truce, the weapons stolen days in advance, the location she had scouted.

 45 minutes of deliberate torture. Deliberations lasted only a few hours. guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy. On March 30th, 1996, Christa Gail Pike was sentenced to death by electrocution. She was 20 years old, the youngest woman on death row in the United States at the time. The sentencing gap was immediate and stark. Tadil Ship, who was 17 at the time of the murder, received life in prison with the possibility of parole.

 Shidola Peterson, who cooperated fully, received probation and walked free. Christa Pike received death. May Martinez sat in that courtroom. She heard the verdict. She heard the sentence. And from that day forward, she made a promise to herself. She would attend every single appeal hearing until the state carried out what it had promised her daughter.

 She has kept that promise for 30 years. Christa Pike was sent to the Tennessee Prison for Women in Nashville. She was the only woman on Tennesseee’s death row and for nearly three decades, she lived in a cell roughly the size of a parking space with almost no meaningful human contact. But isolation did not make her less dangerous.

 In August 2001, Christa approached a fellow inmate named Patricia Jones inside the prison unit. She wrapped a shoelace around Jones’s neck and attempted to strangle her to death. Officers intervened in time. Jones survived. Christa was convicted of attempted murder and received an additional 25 years added to her sentence.

 In the years that followed, she developed a pattern of writing letters to men outside prison, carefully crafting a version of herself that made them feel she was misunderstood and wrongly treated by the justice system. By 2012, that pattern became something far more serious. Christa manipulated a correctional officer named Donald Damst into a romantic relationship.

 Using a contraband cell phone smuggled into her cell, she connected with an outside accomplice named Justin Heflin from New Jersey. The plan was detailed. Damast would leave specific security doors unlocked during his shift, and Heftlin would arrive with a getaway vehicle and weapons. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation intercepted their communications, tracked the money transfers, and moved in before the plan could be carried out.

 Both men were arrested. Christa’s cell was raided. The phone was seized. Almost 20 years after the murder, she was still finding new ways to cause harm from behind bars. In September 2024, after nearly 28 years in functional solitary confinement, her legal team reached a settlement with the state. For the first time, she was allowed shared meals, a job assignment, and limited time with the general prison population.

Then came the date that changed everything, September 30th, 2026. The Tennessee Supreme Court set it as her execution date. If carried out, Christa Pike will be the first woman executed in Tennessee in over 200 years and the only person in the state’s modern era put to death for a crime committed at 18, 19, or 20 years old.

Her legal team launched an immediate challenge. Tennessee now uses a single drug protocol, an injection of pentobarbatl. Her attorneys argue that due to a blood clotting condition called thrombocytosis, the drug will cause her lungs to fill with fluid rapidly, making her experience what they describe in court filings as drowning in her own blood before her heart stops.

 They also raised the fact that she has very small veins, making IV access difficult. They pointed to her documented history of sexual abuse by men, arguing that an allmale execution team carrying out the procedure violates her constitutional rights. And they argued that her Buddhist faith entitles her to have a spiritual adviser present, something the current protocol does not allow.

 The Tennessee Supreme Court took those arguments seriously enough to appoint a special master, senior judge Mark Ward, to hold a multi-day constitutional hearing on whether the planned execution can legally proceed. The courts are still deciding. The date is still set. Let’s go back to the beginning of this story.

 A 19-year-old girl from Orange Park, Florida, packed her bags and traveled to Tennessee because she wanted a desk job, a steady paycheck, and a chance to make her mother proud. She never made it home. Colleen SL has been gone for 30 years. Her mother, May Martinez, has spent every one of those years showing up to every appeal hearing, every parole review, every legal proceeding, refusing to let the state forget her daughter’s name.

Christa Pike is now 50 years old. She has already lived longer than Colleen ever got the chance to. The JobCore program was built to give at risk young people a second chance. It became the place where one girl’s second chance was taken away permanently by another student who threw hers away completely. At what point in this story did Colleen Sleur’s fate become inevitable? Drop your answer in the comments.

 I genuinely want to know what you think. And if this case moved you, hit that like button, subscribe, and ring the notification bell. The next case is already in production, and you do not want to miss it. Thank you so much for watching. It means everything.