I interviewed Christa Pike 20 years ago, and meeting her will stick with me forever

A journalist who interviewed Christa Pike 20 years ago has reflected on what that was like, now that she is back in the news again. Helen Roberts spoke to the killer in 2006, after she had been found guilty of murder. 

Christa Pike was sentenced to death on March 30th 1996, after torturing and killing her classmate who she believed was attempting to “steal” her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp. 

Pike was 18 at the time, and alongside a then 17-year-old Shipp, she lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer into a woods. They beat her for 30 minutes, carved a pentagram into her chest and forehead and killed her by hitting her head with a large piece of asphalt. They both confessed to the killing, and were convicted of first-degree murder.

Now, her case is back in conversation, after Christa Pike survived her lethal injection. Pike was set to be the first woman in Tennessee to be executed in over 200 years, and the state attempted to execute her, but she survived. After two shots of lethal injection, she was rushed to hospital. At first it was unclear if she would ever wake from a coma, but now Pike is conscious and talking again. 

via Tennessee Department of Correction

Helen Roberts met Pike when she was 30, and had been serving on death row for 11 years. “It was really hard sometimes to reconcile the woman in front of me to the crime she had committed,” she said. “They were like two very separate people, I could not imagine the person I met to have been so horrifically violent.”

Working for a women’s magazine and being from Wales, Roberts flew out to the US to meet Pike. “I’d never been into a prison, let alone a maximum security prison, so I was quite nervous and a bit unsure of how it was going to go, a little bit intimidated I suppose,” she explained, as per The Metro. 

At the time, she was a similar age to Pike, and said she had been expecting to meet a “very honest, brutal woman”. This was very different to the woman she was ultimately met with, and Roberts said she and Pike did have some things in common. “I was in my mid-20s then,” said Roberts, and added: “I was a similar age [to Pike], just about, and there were some elements we connected on.”

Roberts described Pike as well put together, having similar hair to herself, and “warm and eager to please”. She said the killer made plenty of eye contact, had been giggling with her, and they were comfortable in each other’s company.

“I didn’t want her to feel intimated and, within a few minutes, she popped up onto the window ledge on her side so she could get closer to us. We didn’t have a lot of time… she knew that, and we had a lot of ground to cover,” Roberts said.

“She got straight into it, she wasn’t defensive, she wasn’t difficult, she wasn’t cagey. She answered all of my questions quite articulately and quite open, to be honest.”

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via Tennessee Department of Correction

She added: “She was eager to answer. She just came across, sometimes, as quite ordinary. I didn’t meet her with any animosity… she could obviously feel, I guess, the vibe that we were going to be very placid, and just talk.

“I wanted to meet Christa Pike just the woman, understand her life, the bad decision she made, and how she was coping living the life she was there.”

Roberts spoke to Pike about the murder she committed, and said the killer was open about it and “was very matter of fact” when describing and talking about it. 

“She had been on death row for 11 years already, and she would have spent a lot of time already on her own, a lot of processing at that time and coming to terms with what she did,” Roberts said. 

“She talked about herself as if that’s a very different person. She said she lost her mind the night she killed Colleen. She said it was like an out-of-body experience, she didn’t realise what she was doing and it’s like someone had taken over her.”

Roberts said Pike apologised to her for what she did, but said she didn’t feel as though there was anything she could do that would make up for it.  “She definitely had hope,” Roberts explained. “She knew it was either death penalty and prison for life, but she definitely wanted prison for life, and a peaceful death.”

The journalist continued: “No matter what I’ve said about Christa Pike, I am no way diminishing her crime. She deserved to be in prison, of course she did. She committed a crime, she took another woman’s life and she had to be punished for it.”

She concluded: “I can’t deny the woman I met, the woman I had in front of me and how I bonded with her and how she reacted to me and how she responded to me and my questions. She’s still a human being. There is no way I could have met her and it not have an impact on me. I think she knows she wasted her life, and I think she knows she could have done good in her life but she didn’t.”

The article written by Helen Roberts was originally published by More Magazine in 2006. For more, like The Tab on Facebook. Featured image via Helen Roberts/Metro.