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Tennessee’s failed attempt to lethally inject 30-year death row inmate Christa Pike Wednesday evening has not only put her execution in jeopardy, it may lead to the state taking capital punishment off the table altogether, according to the former Knoxville police chief who oversaw her arrest in the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995.
“I’ll be surprised if there are any executions in Tennessee in the near term, if again, ever,” Phil Keith, who led Knoxville’s police department from 1988 until 2004, told Fox News Digital.
Pike attracted national attention in the days before her scheduled execution on Sept. 30 with a last-minute appeal, a petition for clemency and requests for alternate modes of capital punishment and a team of all-female executioners. Then the botched attempts to lethally inject her became the dominant story.
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An undated portrait photograph of Colleen Slemmer provided by her mother. (May Martinez/Special to the News Sentinel)
All of that took attention away from the victim, Keith said.
“Why don’t we talk about Colleen’s potential future, about her life, you know, do a deep dive on her family, talk about what she was trying to do?” he asked during an interview with Fox News Digital Thursday.
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Pike and Slemmer met in a vocational school for youths from difficult backgrounds, the Job Corps Center, he explained. And while Pike exhibited signs of a career criminal, Slemmer was a teen who kept out of trouble and was focused on improving her circumstances, he said.
Christa Gail Pike is seen during her trial for the murder of Colleen A. Slemmer March 18, 1996, in Knox County Criminal Court. (USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect)
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“She was a bright young woman,” he said. “She had interest in computers. She was applying herself there. She was clearly an innocent party in this, she was not involved in any of the violence that went on at Job Corps.”
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University of Tennessee forensic anthropologist Dr. Murray Marks testifies about the wounds to Colleen A. Slemmer’s skull during Christa Gail Pike’s murder trial in Knox County Criminal Court on March 25, 1996. (USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect)
Slemmer was shy and focused on her studies, he said.
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“She was just a child that was trying to, that had been through a troubled early life and was trying to get her life on track,” the chief said. “Her mom was, was clearly a big supporter of her, but there were some limitations there.”
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Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, did not respond to Fox News Digital’s attempts to reach her Thursday.
Pike and two others — her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp and a friend named Shadolla Peterson — lured Slemmer to a park to beat, slash and torture her for up to an hour.
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Christa Gail Pike was scheduled to be executed on September 30, 2026. (Tennessee Department of Correction via AP)
“Pike was the catalyst,” Keith said. “She was the one that was planning out all the events, the luring, all that sort of thing.”
Keith said Pike showed “no remorse” in the interrogation room after an attack that a psychiatrist later said involved “satanic elements” at trial.
She even kept a piece of Slemmer’s fractured skull as a trophy, showing it off to other classmates before her arrest. Shipp, who stopped Slemmer from running away and held her down, later carved pentagrams into her chest and face.
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“She represents pure evil,” he said of Pike.