Death Row Inmate Christa Pike’s Chilling Trophy: A Murder Victim’s Skull Fragment Kept as Execution Nears

According to the Tennessee Supreme Court, “On January 11, 1995, Pike, a student at the Job Corps Centre in Knoxville, told her friend Kim Iloilo, who was also a student at the facility, that she intended to kill another student, Colleen Slemmer, because she ‘had just felt mean that day.'”

“The next day, January 12, 1995, at approximately 8 p.m., Iloilo observed Pike, along with Slemmer, and two other Job Corps students, Shadolla Peterson and Tadaryl Shipp, Pike’s boyfriend, walking away from the Job Corps centre toward 17th Street.”

Pike lured Slemmer out by convincing her they were making a trip to a local Blockbuster video store. Instead, however, she and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat their classmate, slashed her throat, and engraved satanic symbols on her body.

“At approximately 10:15 p.m., Iloilo observed Pike, Peterson, and Shipp return to the Centre. Slemmer was not with them,” the report continued. “Later that night, Pike went to Iloilo’s room and told Iloilo that she had just killed Slemmer and that she had brought back a piece of the victim’s skull as a souvenir.”

Pike then showed Iloilo the piece of skull and told her that she had “cut the victim’s throat six times, beaten her, and thrown asphalt at the victim’s head,” the report states. “Pike told Iloilo that the victim had begged them to stop cutting and beating her, but Pike did not stop because the victim continued to talk.”

Pike told Iloilo that she had thrown a large piece of asphalt at the victim’s head, and when it broke into smaller pieces, she had thrown those at the victim as well. She also told her friend that a meat cleaver had been used “to cut the victim’s back and a box cutter had been used to cut her throat.”

“Finally, Pike said that a pentagram had been carved onto the victim’s forehead and chest.

Iloilo said that Pike was dancing in a circle, smiling, and singing “la, la, la” while she confessed the details of the murder.

“When Iloilo saw Pike at breakfast the next morning, she asked Pike what she had done with the piece of the victim’s skull,” the report summarized. “Pike replied that it was in her pocket and then said, ‘And, yes, I’m eating breakfast with it’.”

Pike would be the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1819 and the first person executed who was 18 at the time of the crime in Tennessee since the death penalty was reinstituted in 1997.

With time running out, her attorneys have said they will continue to press for a lesser sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“Christa was just 18 years old at the time of the crime, had endured a childhood of horrific rape, s-xual and physical abuse, suffered from serious undiagnosed mental illness, and was sentenced before we understood what we know today about adolescent brain development and the profound effects of childhood trauma,” Pike’s attorneys said in a statement.

“Even the State was prepared before Christa’s 1996 trial to resolve this case with a sentence of life without parole. It is deeply troubling that 18-year-old Christa, suffering from untreated mental illness and unable to comprehend the consequences that lay ahead, was not counseled by her attorneys at the time to accept that offer.”