‘No remorse’: Victim’s mother speaks out as Christa Pike set to be executed after 30 years

The mother of the woman Christa Pike killed has spoken out as she is due to be executed in Tennessee today following 30 years on death row. 

She is the first woman in Tennessee to be executed in 200 years. The now 50-year-old was sentenced to death on 30th March 1996 after torturing and killing her classmate in a jealous rage because she thought she was attempting to “steal” her boyfriend at the time, Tadaryl Shipp. 

Pike, who was 18 at the time, and Shipp, 17, lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer into the woods, beat her for 30 minutes, carved a pentagram into her chest and forehead and killed her by smashing her head with a large piece of asphalt. Slemmer was their classmate at the Knoxville Job Corps vocational center.

Credit: Tennessee Department of Corrections

They both confessed to the killing and were convicted of first-degree murder. Pike was sentenced to death, while Shipp was given a life sentence with the possibility of parole.

Pike is due to be executed on Wednesday, 30th September, after being denied clemency. Her lawyers argued that the 18-year-old was “suffering from severe mental ​illness” at the time, and blamed Pike’s mother drinking heavily during pregnancy for “faulty brain development,” NBC reports. 

However, Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, says Pike is finally getting what she deserves, and is travelling to Tennessee to witness her execution by lethal injection. 

Credit: WBIR

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“I’m very happy because she’ll never kill anyone else. Plus I want Colleen to be at rest without having constant reminders,” she told WBIR this week. “She [Pike] has never reached out to me, and she is not remorseful at all… You see the pictures now, she still has that smile… If she did talk to me, I wouldn’t talk to her or give her the satisfaction.”

In 2021, Martinez told WBIR: “She did the crime. I think she should pay for it. I would feel better that she felt the same pain that Colleen did.

“My heart breaks every single day because I keep reliving it and reliving it, and I can’t no more, and I want this to happen before I die. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about Colleen or how she died and how rough it was. I just want Christa down so I can end it, relieve my daughter, so she finally can be resting.” This week, Martinez told the BBC she still stands by those comments.

However, Pike claims she is remorseful for the crimes. In a statement included in her clemency petition, she said: “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I’d done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”

The 50-year-old is scheduled to be executed at 11am EDT (4pm in the UK) at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Featured image credit: Tennessee Department of Corrections and WBIR