Some stories fade with time.
This one refuses to.

Nearly 30 years after one of Tennessee’s most chilling murders, the name Christa Gail Pike still sends a shiver through anyone who remembers the headlines. In 1995, Knoxville was just a college town full of young people trying to build a future — including three teens inside the Knoxville Job Corps program whose lives were about to collide in a way no one could have imagined.

Christa was only 18. A girl carrying years of trauma, abandonment, and untreated mental illness. She wasn’t studying for exams or planning college like most teens her age — she was simply trying to survive her own past. Inside Job Corps, she met 17-year-old Tadaryl Shipp, another troubled kid. And studying beside them was 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a young woman just trying to rebuild her life.

But jealousy — wild, irrational, and rooted in Christa’s deepest wounds — began to twist everything. She convinced herself Colleen liked Tadaryl. There was no evidence. No flirtation. Nothing. But trauma has a way of bending reality, and Christa’s fear grew into obsession.

On January 12, 1995, that obsession turned deadly.

Christa lured Colleen into the woods “to talk.” What happened next became one of the most brutal crimes in Tennessee history — an attack so shocking that even seasoned detectives struggled to describe it. And later, during questioning, Christa laughed as she spoke. A detail the public would never forget.

The courts moved quickly. Christa was sentenced to death at 20 years old — the youngest woman on death row in America. And after decades of appeals, Tennessee made a historic decision:

👉 Her execution is scheduled for September 30, 2026.
If it happens, she will be the first woman executed in the state in more than 200 years.

Today, she is 49. Quieter. Reflective. A woman shaped by decades behind bars. But nothing can undo what happened in those woods.

And now, a question hangs over Tennessee:

Is this justice… or a tragedy repeating itself?