September 10, 2025 • 24 mins
Months after two teens enroll at Knoxville’s JobCorps program, one is dead and the other is charged with murdering her.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is a take recorded statement. Person being interviewed is
Krista C h.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
R I T A gale g A I L Pike.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
The I K E.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
This in regards to the death of Colleen C L
l e E N Slimmer s L E M M
E R, who was also a job course student whose
body was found on Friday thirteen, nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Christal Eu state your full name, honey.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
It's January nineteen ninety five. An eighteen year old Krista
Pike is being interviewed by Knoxville, Tennessee police detective Randy York.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Well, right, where are you?
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Where are you staying right now?
Speaker 5 (00:54):
What are you doing?
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Not the job of course? And how old are you?
Speaker 6 (01:00):
Nineteen much?
Speaker 4 (01:01):
Eighteen year old Christa is accused of brutally murdering a
teenage girl named Colleen Slimmer. They were both living at
job Corps, a residential program for troubled kids in Knoxville.
Krista was picked up by police soon after Colleen's body
was found in the clearing of a wooded area.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
So how did you get her to go up there?
Speaker 7 (01:20):
I just told her that I wonder her to come
to Blackcoster what's me about?
Speaker 3 (01:25):
What time?
Speaker 7 (01:26):
I don't know, somewhere between eight and ten, eight and
ten then what happened?
Speaker 4 (01:32):
Christa said that she and Colleen didn't get along, that
Colleen was bullying her. She asked Colleen to go for
a walk with her, that the two of them could
go and smoke wheed in the park. But when they
got there, things changed in an instant.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
We got up there and she thought, there's not really any.
Speaker 7 (01:49):
Weed up here is And I just wanted to talk
to you. I want you to tell me why you're
doing all this stuff to me, you know, And I've said,
you know, I've been under a lie test from everything
that's been going on.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
I said, I don't know why you can't.
Speaker 7 (02:05):
Just trying to do things and their things above me,
you know, try to.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Get me in trouble.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Krista confronted Colleen, accusing her of trying to get her
in trouble at job Corps.
Speaker 7 (02:15):
She has started going off on me.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Bitch that.
Speaker 8 (02:20):
Going off, and I hit her.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
Krista Pike hit Colleen until she killed her, and for
thirty years, Krista has sat in prison. The only woman
on Tennessee's death Row, the youngest woman ever sentenced to
death in America's modern era, and for almost thirty years,
lawyers have appealed Christa's conviction and sentence on any number
(02:51):
of grounds, that she was denied a fair trial, that
she suffered unimaginable childhood abuse, that so many years after
the crime, she's a different person, a caring, remorseful person
who doesn't deserve to die. So far, none of those
arguments have worked, and the clock counting down Christa's life
(03:12):
is ticking louder and louder. If killed, she'll be the
first woman executed in Tennessee in two hundred years.
Speaker 9 (03:20):
Where we're at right now is one of the scariest
places to be because the state has asked for an
execution date for Christa.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
This is Kelly Gleeson, one of Chris's attorneys.
Speaker 9 (03:29):
I just would be devastated if we're not able to
prevail somehow. She is a warm, loving, compassionate person. She
deserves to live. She doesn't deserve to die for all
the reasons that we've got in front of the Tennessee
Supreme Court right now, in terms of her youth, her
undiagnosed severe mental illness, the severe abuse and trauma that
(03:53):
she has suffered from the earliest ages.
Speaker 4 (04:00):
My name is Sarah Trelevin, and I was drawn to
Christa's story because it poses so many questions about the
capacity for change, even in the worst possible circumstances, about
how we let people languish in prison for decades, and whether,
after so much time, we're even punishing the same person
we initially condemned. The determination to kill Christa makes me
(04:24):
wonder how we determine, from a systemic and moral perspective,
whose life no longer has value, who we consider fundamentally unrestorable,
and what it means to earn the right to keep living.
This is Unrestorable Season two. Proof of Life, an original
podcast from Anonymous Content and iHeartRadio. When Krista Pike was
(04:58):
a fifteen year old kid in North Carolina, she busted
into a community center with a friend and stole some candy.
Christa was already on a rough road. She projected innocence
with her big mop of curly red hair and pale
complexion just a smattering of pepescanacne, but she was prickly
and defiant, prone to outbursts of rage. She had long
(05:20):
been in trouble for skipping school, running away, taking drugs.
She spent periods of time living on the streets in
volatile relationships. She was raped by a stranger at sixteen,
not the first time she was sexually assaulted. Her parents
were long divorced and neither showed much interest in her.
Her mother drank too much. From her earliest years, Christ
(05:43):
was treated like baggage, a burden. No one seemed to
care if she had what she needed, and at fifteen,
after being caught trying to steal that candy, she was
charged with breaking and entering and eventually sent to a
juvenile facility. She was there for over a year.
Speaker 10 (06:00):
She's in this juvenile detention center that she does not
like and will tell you she doesn't like, but that
she self sabotages over and over again to stay in
it because she knows, this is what I need to do.
The choice to go to job Corps is the same thing.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
This is Randy Spivey, another of Christ's attorneys.
Speaker 10 (06:18):
She chooses to go to job Corps with the sense
that this may be her last chance to kind of
straighten things out for herself, and so like there are
efforts all along the way to try to turn the
ship that she is making to try to deal with
all the stuff that has been done to her in
one way or the other. And you just need to
(06:39):
see no help, No help come in.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
Job Corps was a program for kids who need help
getting on the right path, to learn a skill to
get their ged. At eighteen, Krista wanted to be a
nurse to help other people, but that's not what happened.
Job Corp was an there. This is Kelly Gleason, one
of Chris's attorneys.
Speaker 9 (07:03):
Again, it was extremely violent, it was extremely chaotic. This
is a conveyor belt into this disaster.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
Job Corps was referred to in a local paper as
a crime school. Teenage kids with difficult backgrounds discipline issues
were all living in dorms together with little supervision. Tell
me about the backgrounds of these kids, Like, what kind
of kids were ending up in job Corps.
Speaker 11 (07:26):
I guess one parent homes.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
Joe Mode was a teacher at job Corps.
Speaker 11 (07:30):
They came from one parent homes. Maybe you know, mother
or father who are alcoholics or you know, into drugs,
maybe in and out of prison. And that that's, you know,
not across the board. Because there was a lot of
great kids that maybe came from good homes but still
needing a second chance. Maybe they messed up in school,
because that happens, you know, even with the best of families.
(07:52):
You know what was heartbreaking is if you ever felt
like you reached these kids knowing they had to go
back to that environment.
Speaker 4 (07:59):
Job Corps was suppose to provide a pathway to real
world skills like nursing or building maintenance or clerical work,
but students at Job Corps reported violence and gang activity.
Some kids carried weapons. Even the teachers were afraid.
Speaker 11 (08:13):
I had problems with the kid where he was in
the class talking about what he wanted to do to
my wife. He knew where we lived, had the address,
my name, first name, and I had to walk out,
and I walked down the hall and turned around just
in time to see a broom go flying past me.
He had thrown it like a spear to go thick room.
(08:35):
Nothing happened to him.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
By Christmas, of Christa's first semester at Job Corps, she
would tell her family that she was desperate to come home,
but she stayed for one Home wasn't much better, and
there was also her boyfriend to Darryl Joe Mode remembers him.
Speaker 11 (08:55):
If he did come to class, he'd come in either
hire or hungover. So you know, I ended up writing
a lot of disciplinary reports on him.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
Christa later reported that to Daryl was abusive and controlling. Mode.
Says that teachers heard he had beaten up one girl
at job Corps and gotten another pregnant, but that wasn't all.
Speaker 8 (09:13):
You know.
Speaker 11 (09:13):
And again things we heard, you know, like that they'd
found a stanic altar in his room, a pistol.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
But to Christa, to Darryl was everything. She told people
she was terrified of losing him, that he was her
only protector, the only person that really cared about her,
And she became convinced that nineteen year old Colleen Slammer
was trying to take to Darryl away from her. Colleen
was from Florida. She had curly, long blonde hair and
(09:41):
an easy smile. She was studying computers. On the evening
of January eleventh, nineteen ninety five, Christa told another job
course student that she was going to kill Colleen, that
she just felt mean that day. The next evening, January twelfth, Krista,
her boyfriend to Dare, and a third teenager named Shaidola
(10:02):
Peterson lured Colleen into the woods. There, Krista and to
Darryl taunted Colleen, ripping her shirt off. They beat her
and slashed her with a box cutter and carved a
pentagram into Colleen's chest. Christa snapped at Colleen to stop crying,
to stop begging for her life. The torture went on
(10:24):
for at least thirty minutes and only ended when Krista
picked up a piece of concrete and smashed it on
Colleen's head.
Speaker 11 (10:33):
The brutal murder created fear and speculation among students and staff.
Speaker 6 (10:36):
Please say the murder suspects were close to the victim.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
The motive of the program appears to be love triangle.
Speaker 5 (10:52):
So can you talk now?
Speaker 11 (10:54):
Is it good?
Speaker 5 (10:54):
I should retire?
Speaker 9 (10:55):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (10:55):
Okay, this is Beth Carris. She's speaking with Randy Yorke
RETI hired Knoxville Police officer and lead detective on Christa's case.
Beth is a legal analyst and investigative journalist based in
New York City, and this is the third podcast we've
made together.
Speaker 5 (11:10):
I want you to describe what you recall of the
scene the morning of January thirteenth, nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
Colleen was killed on the evening of the twelfth, but
she was discovered by a groundsworker at the University of
Tennessee early on the morning of the thirteenth.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
There's an area called Tison Park and it's the jogging
trail that goes to the University of Tennessee, and a
lot of people walk it and run it. It's a
real remote area. When I arrived at the scene, then
I was led back to where the body was located in.
Whoever did it apparently pulled her off of the trail
(11:47):
back into there a large dirt bank there piled up
and they had pulled her back into the base of it,
and there was clothes hanging from tree limbs and stuff
where they've tossed her clothes.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
York says. The police didn't find anything at the scene
that pointed to a suspect.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
But I sent the body to the Morgan University of Tennessee,
and on my way back to the police station, I
got a call to come to ut right away. They
had cleaned up the body and they found a panogram
carved on her chest. Are you familiar with a pentagram?
Speaker 5 (12:23):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (12:24):
In nineteen ninety five, the American South was still in
the grips of what was called Satanic panic, baseless conspiracy
theories about cult activities and devil worshiping daycares and weird
ritualistic abuse of children and animals.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
Okay, they found it, and so I thought it was
kind of odd because I had just gone to the
Satanic and Deviate cul School in Jacksonville, Florida for a week,
and so I knew right away for what it was.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
This satanic cult school Detective York attended was a workshop
for law enforcement. It wasn't uncommon for detectives to go
to the these kinds of programs to help them identify
Satanic elements and the crimes they investigated.
Speaker 5 (13:05):
So when the emmy called and said we found this
pentagram carved on her chest, that must have really pictured curiosity.
Since you had just been in Florida.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
Yeah, I still had all that on my mind. But
when I saw the pentagram, I knew what it was.
It was involved in Satanic worship.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
And then Detective York got some information that connected the
pentagram and Satanic worship to Job Corps.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
I think it's around three or three thirty that next morning,
I got a call that they had gotten a call from,
but someone whose daughter was scared because she was in
the job core, and there was a bunch of kids
that was involved in Satanism, and so anyway, then I
realized that this could be a Job Corps student.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
Job Corpse students had sign out sheets, so Detective York
asked to see the sheets for the night his youngvictim
was killed. Four students signed out that evening, but only
three signed back in the fourth Colleen Slummer his victim.
The others now his suspects.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
I started going room to room interviewing him, and I
found bloody evidence in the rooms and satanic altar and
other things that led me to believe that they were
my applying suspects.
Speaker 5 (14:24):
And then what did you find that job where you
said you found an altar?
Speaker 3 (14:27):
To Daryl Shiff he had an altar set up in
his room in the closet. It had a Satanic Bible
and had a little statue of the equivalent to Saint
Peter who would guard the gates of Hale. It was
a statue of that character. So that's how I tied
it all in together.
Speaker 4 (14:48):
It didn't take long for the three teams involved to
start confessing.
Speaker 5 (14:52):
Really, within twenty four hours, you were getting confessions.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yes, are you emotionally stable? And they will talk to
me boy hopefully. Okay, do you need anything?
Speaker 4 (15:08):
This is tape from an interview between Krista and Detective
York two days after the murder.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
All right, then, what happened?
Speaker 7 (15:15):
Jesus the scrange scream up?
Speaker 5 (15:18):
Can't hit her and.
Speaker 8 (15:22):
Pull on the left.
Speaker 9 (15:26):
A little.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
Christa blasted her pent up rage, blaming Colleen forgetting her
in trouble at job corps, for making up gossip and
lies about her. She told the detective about how she
started hitting Colleen while Colleen tried to defend herself, and.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
I was like, don't touch ma'am.
Speaker 7 (15:43):
I don't want to touch ma'am. You know I can't stand.
Speaker 9 (15:48):
Let me.
Speaker 7 (15:49):
I really thought I was going crazy because I've never
seen myself act like that before in my life.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
I been so mad before my life. You just kind
of lost control.
Speaker 12 (15:58):
Yeah, okay, Christa, we are recording now.
Speaker 8 (16:12):
Please state your first and last name, Christa Pike.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
In August twenty twenty four, Beth and I went down
to Knoxville to investigate this story. We met with a
lot of people, including all four of Christa's attorneys, and
we visited the scene of the crime, but we couldn't
get permission to speak to Krista.
Speaker 13 (16:29):
To thank you, Christa. By participating in this Q and
A session today March twenty fifth, twenty twenty five, you
acknowledge that this recording may be used in connection with
the podcast currently known as Unrestorable Season two. If you
understand and agree, please repeat yes, I understand and agree.
Speaker 8 (16:50):
Yes, I understand and agree.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
Death row inmates are often functionally barred from speaking to
the media, so Christa's lawyer, Kelly, offered to talk to
her on our behalf.
Speaker 13 (17:01):
Is it harder now that the Tennessee is looking at
execution dates.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
At the time of this conversation, Tennessee had recently announced
an end to the state's moratorium on executions. The pause
was triggered by a series of botched lethal injections, but
now Tennessee is planning to move forward with new protocols,
and Christa's execution is echine closer.
Speaker 8 (17:23):
It's really hard to sit back and know that there's
like a list and a line of people waiting to die,
and thinking of how many are there before you and
who's next? In line, and how many are left before Europe?
And you know, well, there's eight before me, there's four.
(17:47):
Now that half dates, there's four left. How many months
are there? It's it's ridiculous. It shouldn't be. It shouldn't
be this way. That shouldn't be a process. You shouldn't
have to think of how many people have to die
before you have to die.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
Kristin has had thirty long, solitary years to think about
a lot of things, including why she killed Colin.
Speaker 8 (18:11):
It was hard for me. It was hard because as
a teenager and when this happened, I just didn't care.
I didn't care. I didn't care about her, I didn't
care about myself. I didn't care that I took someone's life.
Speaker 4 (18:31):
Krista Pike today seems to understand that she was set
on a disastrous path long before she killed someone. At
the cusp of adulthood.
Speaker 8 (18:38):
I was so just angry within myself and at home
at me. I never thought I had potential to be
anything anyway. I never thought my life would amount to
anything anyway. So it didn't really mean anything to me
at the time that I had just flushed all that
(19:02):
and now growing up and growing into myself, and I
can look back and see that we were all just
really screwed up kids. We were all going through things
that no one understood that we weren't getting the correct
(19:26):
help for. And you know, she needed help like I did,
and she wasn't getting it. I needed help like she did,
and I wasn't getting it. And I'm sure my co
defendants did also. We were all just really in a
bad situation. And it breaks my heart now knowing that
(19:49):
I took someone's sister, I took someone's daughter, I took
someone's friends. Like she had a whole world of her
own that I just jerked her out. And there's a
big anti spot there where she could be shining right now,
and she's not.
Speaker 4 (20:21):
The murder of Colleen Slammer was a media sensation. The
age of the defendants, their personal backgrounds and history of
problematic childhoods, coupled with the satanic elements and absolute brutality
of the crime, made for salacious and constant headlines, and
among the many awful details that emerged in the case
regarding Colleen's terrifying last moments, the public learned something else
(20:45):
that Christa had taken a souvenir of the killing. That
one act, maybe even more than the murder itself, seemed
to condemn Christa in the public imagination. It turned her
into the main villain, someone unstoppably dangerous, and to many
it seems like evidence of some kind of natural wrath
(21:09):
proves that Krista was just born bad, incapable of redemption.
Speaker 12 (21:14):
Do you think that you're entitled to some form of justice.
Speaker 8 (21:18):
I don't think I'm entitled to anything. I don't think
I'm entitled to anything. I feel like things in my
case could have been handled better. I feel like things
in my childhood could have been handled better. But I
(21:42):
don't feel I'm entitled to anything. That's a very loaded
and word that I don't like.
Speaker 4 (21:49):
But Christa says that she's changed and entitled or not,
she's now asking for a second chance. She and her
attorneys are making a desperate case that she deserves to live.
The fight to have her death sentence overturned raises questions
about who deserves our empathy, about how we benefit from
a narrative of good versus evil, and the persistent idea
(22:10):
that monsters walk among us. Does the criminal justice system
meaningfully allow for rehabilitation for perpetrators to accept responsibility, find
remorse and become better people, or do we insist that
they remain villains, rejecting the change that many prove capable
of because it somehow makes us feel safer. Coming up
(22:36):
on proof of life.
Speaker 14 (22:38):
People can be like, Okay, she was young. Okay, maybe
we just give her a laugh about parole and she
can live her best Lafe Bahambars doing whatever she can
be productive member of prison society. The piece of skull.
You're not coming back from that.
Speaker 15 (22:53):
In the South, Christa's life was just this locomotive of violence, instability,
lack of connection, lack of people she could trust, rely on,
feel loved, and then the train went off the tracks.
Speaker 6 (23:12):
If there's nothing else that I've learned in the nearly
thirty five years that I've been defending people on death row,
it is that there are no evil people. There are
people who do evil things, but those people are deeply human,
They are deeply flawed, and they are very damaged. That
(23:33):
is the story of violent crime that nobody is telling.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
Unrestorable is executive produced and hosted by me, Sarah Chilevin,
and Beth Carris. Our producer is Kathleen Goldhear mixing and
sound design by Reza Daia for Anonymous Content. Jessica Grimshaw
is our executive producer, Jennifer Sears is our executive in
charge of production, and nick Yannas is our legal council.
(24:00):
Heart executive producer Christina Everett and supervising producer Abu Zafar
This is a take recorded statement. Person being interviewed is
Krista C h.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
R I T A gale g A I L Pike.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
The I K E.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
This in regards to the death of Colleen C L
l e E N Slimmer s L E M M
E R, who was also a job course student whose
body was found on Friday thirteen, nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Christal Eu state your full name, honey.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
It's January nineteen ninety five. An eighteen year old Krista
Pike is being interviewed by Knoxville, Tennessee police detective Randy York.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Well, right, where are you?
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Where are you staying right now?
Speaker 5 (00:54):
What are you doing?
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Not the job of course? And how old are you?
Speaker 6 (01:00):
Nineteen much?
Speaker 4 (01:01):
Eighteen year old Christa is accused of brutally murdering a
teenage girl named Colleen Slimmer. They were both living at
job Corps, a residential program for troubled kids in Knoxville.
Krista was picked up by police soon after Colleen's body
was found in the clearing of a wooded area.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
So how did you get her to go up there?
Speaker 7 (01:20):
I just told her that I wonder her to come
to Blackcoster what's me about?
Speaker 3 (01:25):
What time?
Speaker 7 (01:26):
I don't know, somewhere between eight and ten, eight and
ten then what happened?
Speaker 4 (01:32):
Christa said that she and Colleen didn't get along, that
Colleen was bullying her. She asked Colleen to go for
a walk with her, that the two of them could
go and smoke wheed in the park. But when they
got there, things changed in an instant.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
We got up there and she thought, there's not really any.
Speaker 7 (01:49):
Weed up here is And I just wanted to talk
to you. I want you to tell me why you're
doing all this stuff to me, you know, And I've said,
you know, I've been under a lie test from everything
that's been going on.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
I said, I don't know why you can't.
Speaker 7 (02:05):
Just trying to do things and their things above me,
you know, try to.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Get me in trouble.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Krista confronted Colleen, accusing her of trying to get her
in trouble at job Corps.
Speaker 7 (02:15):
She has started going off on me.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Bitch that.
Speaker 8 (02:20):
Going off, and I hit her.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
Krista Pike hit Colleen until she killed her, and for
thirty years, Krista has sat in prison. The only woman
on Tennessee's death Row, the youngest woman ever sentenced to
death in America's modern era, and for almost thirty years,
lawyers have appealed Christa's conviction and sentence on any number
(02:51):
of grounds, that she was denied a fair trial, that
she suffered unimaginable childhood abuse, that so many years after
the crime, she's a different person, a caring, remorseful person
who doesn't deserve to die. So far, none of those
arguments have worked, and the clock counting down Christa's life
(03:12):
is ticking louder and louder. If killed, she'll be the
first woman executed in Tennessee in two hundred years.
Speaker 9 (03:20):
Where we're at right now is one of the scariest
places to be because the state has asked for an
execution date for Christa.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
This is Kelly Gleeson, one of Chris's attorneys.
Speaker 9 (03:29):
I just would be devastated if we're not able to
prevail somehow. She is a warm, loving, compassionate person. She
deserves to live. She doesn't deserve to die for all
the reasons that we've got in front of the Tennessee
Supreme Court right now, in terms of her youth, her
undiagnosed severe mental illness, the severe abuse and trauma that
(03:53):
she has suffered from the earliest ages.
Speaker 4 (04:00):
My name is Sarah Trelevin, and I was drawn to
Christa's story because it poses so many questions about the
capacity for change, even in the worst possible circumstances, about
how we let people languish in prison for decades, and whether,
after so much time, we're even punishing the same person
we initially condemned. The determination to kill Christa makes me
(04:24):
wonder how we determine, from a systemic and moral perspective,
whose life no longer has value, who we consider fundamentally unrestorable,
and what it means to earn the right to keep living.
This is Unrestorable Season two. Proof of Life, an original
podcast from Anonymous Content and iHeartRadio. When Krista Pike was
(04:58):
a fifteen year old kid in North Carolina, she busted
into a community center with a friend and stole some candy.
Christa was already on a rough road. She projected innocence
with her big mop of curly red hair and pale
complexion just a smattering of pepescanacne, but she was prickly
and defiant, prone to outbursts of rage. She had long
(05:20):
been in trouble for skipping school, running away, taking drugs.
She spent periods of time living on the streets in
volatile relationships. She was raped by a stranger at sixteen,
not the first time she was sexually assaulted. Her parents
were long divorced and neither showed much interest in her.
Her mother drank too much. From her earliest years, Christ
(05:43):
was treated like baggage, a burden. No one seemed to
care if she had what she needed, and at fifteen,
after being caught trying to steal that candy, she was
charged with breaking and entering and eventually sent to a
juvenile facility. She was there for over a year.
Speaker 10 (06:00):
She's in this juvenile detention center that she does not
like and will tell you she doesn't like, but that
she self sabotages over and over again to stay in
it because she knows, this is what I need to do.
The choice to go to job Corps is the same thing.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
This is Randy Spivey, another of Christ's attorneys.
Speaker 10 (06:18):
She chooses to go to job Corps with the sense
that this may be her last chance to kind of
straighten things out for herself, and so like there are
efforts all along the way to try to turn the
ship that she is making to try to deal with
all the stuff that has been done to her in
one way or the other. And you just need to
(06:39):
see no help, No help come in.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
Job Corps was a program for kids who need help
getting on the right path, to learn a skill to
get their ged. At eighteen, Krista wanted to be a
nurse to help other people, but that's not what happened.
Job Corp was an there. This is Kelly Gleason, one
of Chris's attorneys.
Speaker 9 (07:03):
Again, it was extremely violent, it was extremely chaotic. This
is a conveyor belt into this disaster.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
Job Corps was referred to in a local paper as
a crime school. Teenage kids with difficult backgrounds discipline issues
were all living in dorms together with little supervision. Tell
me about the backgrounds of these kids, Like, what kind
of kids were ending up in job Corps.
Speaker 11 (07:26):
I guess one parent homes.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
Joe Mode was a teacher at job Corps.
Speaker 11 (07:30):
They came from one parent homes. Maybe you know, mother
or father who are alcoholics or you know, into drugs,
maybe in and out of prison. And that that's, you know,
not across the board. Because there was a lot of
great kids that maybe came from good homes but still
needing a second chance. Maybe they messed up in school,
because that happens, you know, even with the best of families.
(07:52):
You know what was heartbreaking is if you ever felt
like you reached these kids knowing they had to go
back to that environment.
Speaker 4 (07:59):
Job Corps was suppose to provide a pathway to real
world skills like nursing or building maintenance or clerical work,
but students at Job Corps reported violence and gang activity.
Some kids carried weapons. Even the teachers were afraid.
Speaker 11 (08:13):
I had problems with the kid where he was in
the class talking about what he wanted to do to
my wife. He knew where we lived, had the address,
my name, first name, and I had to walk out,
and I walked down the hall and turned around just
in time to see a broom go flying past me.
He had thrown it like a spear to go thick room.
(08:35):
Nothing happened to him.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
By Christmas, of Christa's first semester at Job Corps, she
would tell her family that she was desperate to come home,
but she stayed for one Home wasn't much better, and
there was also her boyfriend to Darryl Joe Mode remembers him.
Speaker 11 (08:55):
If he did come to class, he'd come in either
hire or hungover. So you know, I ended up writing
a lot of disciplinary reports on him.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
Christa later reported that to Daryl was abusive and controlling. Mode.
Says that teachers heard he had beaten up one girl
at job Corps and gotten another pregnant, but that wasn't all.
Speaker 8 (09:13):
You know.
Speaker 11 (09:13):
And again things we heard, you know, like that they'd
found a stanic altar in his room, a pistol.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
But to Christa, to Darryl was everything. She told people
she was terrified of losing him, that he was her
only protector, the only person that really cared about her,
And she became convinced that nineteen year old Colleen Slammer
was trying to take to Darryl away from her. Colleen
was from Florida. She had curly, long blonde hair and
(09:41):
an easy smile. She was studying computers. On the evening
of January eleventh, nineteen ninety five, Christa told another job
course student that she was going to kill Colleen, that
she just felt mean that day. The next evening, January twelfth, Krista,
her boyfriend to Dare, and a third teenager named Shaidola
(10:02):
Peterson lured Colleen into the woods. There, Krista and to
Darryl taunted Colleen, ripping her shirt off. They beat her
and slashed her with a box cutter and carved a
pentagram into Colleen's chest. Christa snapped at Colleen to stop crying,
to stop begging for her life. The torture went on
(10:24):
for at least thirty minutes and only ended when Krista
picked up a piece of concrete and smashed it on
Colleen's head.
Speaker 11 (10:33):
The brutal murder created fear and speculation among students and staff.
Speaker 6 (10:36):
Please say the murder suspects were close to the victim.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
The motive of the program appears to be love triangle.
Speaker 5 (10:52):
So can you talk now?
Speaker 11 (10:54):
Is it good?
Speaker 5 (10:54):
I should retire?
Speaker 9 (10:55):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (10:55):
Okay, this is Beth Carris. She's speaking with Randy Yorke
RETI hired Knoxville Police officer and lead detective on Christa's case.
Beth is a legal analyst and investigative journalist based in
New York City, and this is the third podcast we've
made together.
Speaker 5 (11:10):
I want you to describe what you recall of the
scene the morning of January thirteenth, nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
Colleen was killed on the evening of the twelfth, but
she was discovered by a groundsworker at the University of
Tennessee early on the morning of the thirteenth.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
There's an area called Tison Park and it's the jogging
trail that goes to the University of Tennessee, and a
lot of people walk it and run it. It's a
real remote area. When I arrived at the scene, then
I was led back to where the body was located in.
Whoever did it apparently pulled her off of the trail
(11:47):
back into there a large dirt bank there piled up
and they had pulled her back into the base of it,
and there was clothes hanging from tree limbs and stuff
where they've tossed her clothes.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
York says. The police didn't find anything at the scene
that pointed to a suspect.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
But I sent the body to the Morgan University of Tennessee,
and on my way back to the police station, I
got a call to come to ut right away. They
had cleaned up the body and they found a panogram
carved on her chest. Are you familiar with a pentagram?
Speaker 5 (12:23):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (12:24):
In nineteen ninety five, the American South was still in
the grips of what was called Satanic panic, baseless conspiracy
theories about cult activities and devil worshiping daycares and weird
ritualistic abuse of children and animals.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
Okay, they found it, and so I thought it was
kind of odd because I had just gone to the
Satanic and Deviate cul School in Jacksonville, Florida for a week,
and so I knew right away for what it was.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
This satanic cult school Detective York attended was a workshop
for law enforcement. It wasn't uncommon for detectives to go
to the these kinds of programs to help them identify
Satanic elements and the crimes they investigated.
Speaker 5 (13:05):
So when the emmy called and said we found this
pentagram carved on her chest, that must have really pictured curiosity.
Since you had just been in Florida.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
Yeah, I still had all that on my mind. But
when I saw the pentagram, I knew what it was.
It was involved in Satanic worship.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
And then Detective York got some information that connected the
pentagram and Satanic worship to Job Corps.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
I think it's around three or three thirty that next morning,
I got a call that they had gotten a call from,
but someone whose daughter was scared because she was in
the job core, and there was a bunch of kids
that was involved in Satanism, and so anyway, then I
realized that this could be a Job Corps student.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
Job Corpse students had sign out sheets, so Detective York
asked to see the sheets for the night his youngvictim
was killed. Four students signed out that evening, but only
three signed back in the fourth Colleen Slummer his victim.
The others now his suspects.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
I started going room to room interviewing him, and I
found bloody evidence in the rooms and satanic altar and
other things that led me to believe that they were
my applying suspects.
Speaker 5 (14:24):
And then what did you find that job where you
said you found an altar?
Speaker 3 (14:27):
To Daryl Shiff he had an altar set up in
his room in the closet. It had a Satanic Bible
and had a little statue of the equivalent to Saint
Peter who would guard the gates of Hale. It was
a statue of that character. So that's how I tied
it all in together.
Speaker 4 (14:48):
It didn't take long for the three teams involved to
start confessing.
Speaker 5 (14:52):
Really, within twenty four hours, you were getting confessions.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yes, are you emotionally stable? And they will talk to
me boy hopefully. Okay, do you need anything?
Speaker 4 (15:08):
This is tape from an interview between Krista and Detective
York two days after the murder.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
All right, then, what happened?
Speaker 7 (15:15):
Jesus the scrange scream up?
Speaker 5 (15:18):
Can't hit her and.
Speaker 8 (15:22):
Pull on the left.
Speaker 9 (15:26):
A little.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
Christa blasted her pent up rage, blaming Colleen forgetting her
in trouble at job corps, for making up gossip and
lies about her. She told the detective about how she
started hitting Colleen while Colleen tried to defend herself, and.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
I was like, don't touch ma'am.
Speaker 7 (15:43):
I don't want to touch ma'am. You know I can't stand.
Speaker 9 (15:48):
Let me.
Speaker 7 (15:49):
I really thought I was going crazy because I've never
seen myself act like that before in my life.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
I been so mad before my life. You just kind
of lost control.
Speaker 12 (15:58):
Yeah, okay, Christa, we are recording now.
Speaker 8 (16:12):
Please state your first and last name, Christa Pike.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
In August twenty twenty four, Beth and I went down
to Knoxville to investigate this story. We met with a
lot of people, including all four of Christa's attorneys, and
we visited the scene of the crime, but we couldn't
get permission to speak to Krista.
Speaker 13 (16:29):
To thank you, Christa. By participating in this Q and
A session today March twenty fifth, twenty twenty five, you
acknowledge that this recording may be used in connection with
the podcast currently known as Unrestorable Season two. If you
understand and agree, please repeat yes, I understand and agree.
Speaker 8 (16:50):
Yes, I understand and agree.
Speaker 4 (16:53):
Death row inmates are often functionally barred from speaking to
the media, so Christa's lawyer, Kelly, offered to talk to
her on our behalf.
Speaker 13 (17:01):
Is it harder now that the Tennessee is looking at
execution dates.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
At the time of this conversation, Tennessee had recently announced
an end to the state's moratorium on executions. The pause
was triggered by a series of botched lethal injections, but
now Tennessee is planning to move forward with new protocols,
and Christa's execution is echine closer.
Speaker 8 (17:23):
It's really hard to sit back and know that there's
like a list and a line of people waiting to die,
and thinking of how many are there before you and
who's next? In line, and how many are left before Europe?
And you know, well, there's eight before me, there's four.
(17:47):
Now that half dates, there's four left. How many months
are there? It's it's ridiculous. It shouldn't be. It shouldn't
be this way. That shouldn't be a process. You shouldn't
have to think of how many people have to die
before you have to die.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
Kristin has had thirty long, solitary years to think about
a lot of things, including why she killed Colin.
Speaker 8 (18:11):
It was hard for me. It was hard because as
a teenager and when this happened, I just didn't care.
I didn't care. I didn't care about her, I didn't
care about myself. I didn't care that I took someone's life.
Speaker 4 (18:31):
Krista Pike today seems to understand that she was set
on a disastrous path long before she killed someone. At
the cusp of adulthood.
Speaker 8 (18:38):
I was so just angry within myself and at home
at me. I never thought I had potential to be
anything anyway. I never thought my life would amount to
anything anyway. So it didn't really mean anything to me
at the time that I had just flushed all that
(19:02):
and now growing up and growing into myself, and I
can look back and see that we were all just
really screwed up kids. We were all going through things
that no one understood that we weren't getting the correct
(19:26):
help for. And you know, she needed help like I did,
and she wasn't getting it. I needed help like she did,
and I wasn't getting it. And I'm sure my co
defendants did also. We were all just really in a
bad situation. And it breaks my heart now knowing that
(19:49):
I took someone's sister, I took someone's daughter, I took
someone's friends. Like she had a whole world of her
own that I just jerked her out. And there's a
big anti spot there where she could be shining right now,
and she's not.
Speaker 4 (20:21):
The murder of Colleen Slammer was a media sensation. The
age of the defendants, their personal backgrounds and history of
problematic childhoods, coupled with the satanic elements and absolute brutality
of the crime, made for salacious and constant headlines, and
among the many awful details that emerged in the case
regarding Colleen's terrifying last moments, the public learned something else
(20:45):
that Christa had taken a souvenir of the killing. That
one act, maybe even more than the murder itself, seemed
to condemn Christa in the public imagination. It turned her
into the main villain, someone unstoppably dangerous, and to many
it seems like evidence of some kind of natural wrath
(21:09):
proves that Krista was just born bad, incapable of redemption.
Speaker 12 (21:14):
Do you think that you're entitled to some form of justice.
Speaker 8 (21:18):
I don't think I'm entitled to anything. I don't think
I'm entitled to anything. I feel like things in my
case could have been handled better. I feel like things
in my childhood could have been handled better. But I
(21:42):
don't feel I'm entitled to anything. That's a very loaded
and word that I don't like.
Speaker 4 (21:49):
But Christa says that she's changed and entitled or not,
she's now asking for a second chance. She and her
attorneys are making a desperate case that she deserves to live.
The fight to have her death sentence overturned raises questions
about who deserves our empathy, about how we benefit from
a narrative of good versus evil, and the persistent idea
(22:10):
that monsters walk among us. Does the criminal justice system
meaningfully allow for rehabilitation for perpetrators to accept responsibility, find
remorse and become better people, or do we insist that
they remain villains, rejecting the change that many prove capable
of because it somehow makes us feel safer. Coming up
(22:36):
on proof of life.
Speaker 14 (22:38):
People can be like, Okay, she was young. Okay, maybe
we just give her a laugh about parole and she
can live her best Lafe Bahambars doing whatever she can
be productive member of prison society. The piece of skull.
You're not coming back from that.
Speaker 15 (22:53):
In the South, Christa's life was just this locomotive of violence, instability,
lack of connection, lack of people she could trust, rely on,
feel loved, and then the train went off the tracks.
Speaker 6 (23:12):
If there's nothing else that I've learned in the nearly
thirty five years that I've been defending people on death row,
it is that there are no evil people. There are
people who do evil things, but those people are deeply human,
They are deeply flawed, and they are very damaged. That
(23:33):
is the story of violent crime that nobody is telling.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
Unrestorable is executive produced and hosted by me, Sarah Chilevin,
and Beth Carris. Our producer is Kathleen Goldhear mixing and
sound design by Reza Daia for Anonymous Content. Jessica Grimshaw
is our executive producer, Jennifer Sears is our executive in
charge of production, and nick Yannas is our legal council.
(24:00):
Heart executive producer Christina Everett and supervising producer Abu Zafar
Hosts And Creators
Beth Karas
Sarah Treleaven
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