The Girl Who Never Came Home: The Murder of Colleen Slemmer and the Long Search for Justice

 Image by Murder Talk Radio

 An Investigative Piece by The Inkwell Times

Thirty-one years after 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer was lured away from her Job Corps residence in Knoxville, Tennessee, her murder remains inseparable from one devastating question: What happens when the person at the center of a true-crime story is remembered only for the way she died?

On the evening of January 12, 1995, 19-year-old Colleen A. Slemmer left the Knoxville Job Corps Center with three people she knew.

She would never return.

By the following morning, Slemmer’s body had been discovered in a remote area near the University of Tennessee’s Agricultural campus. What investigators found was not simply a homicide scene. It was evidence of an extended and extraordinarily violent attack.

The investigation would eventually lead to the convictions of Christa Gail Pike and Tadaryl Shipp, while a third participant, Shadolla Peterson, became a witness for the prosecution and pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the murder.

Pike, who was 18 when Slemmer was killed, ultimately received a death sentence for premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.

But decades of coverage have often centered on Pike: her age, her behavior, her claims, her death sentence and the disturbing details of the crime.

That focus can obscure the person who was actually killed.

Her name was Colleen Slemmer.

And before she became the victim in one of Tennessee’s most notorious murder cases, she was a daughter, a young woman with plans for her future, an athlete, a babysitter and, according to her mother, someone who loved computers and being around children.

This is her story.

 Image by mindhunter.org

Who Was Colleen Slemmer?

Colleen Slemmer was 19 years old and from Orange Park, Florida.

In 1994, she enrolled in the federal Job Corps program, a vocational education and training program intended to provide young people with educational and employment opportunities.

Her mother, May Martinez, later described Colleen as energetic and active.

She ran marathons.

She roller-skated on weekends.

She babysat.

And she had an interest in computers.

In other words, she was doing what countless young people do: trying to figure out what came next.

Knoxville became part of that future.

Slemmer was living and studying at the Knoxville Job Corps Center along with other young people, including Christa Pike, Tadaryl Shipp and Shadolla Peterson.

Nothing about the ordinary details of her life suggested that January 12 would become the last day of it.

But somewhere inside that Job Corps community, a conflict had developed.

And investigators would eventually determine that Slemmer had been targeted because Pike believed she was interested in Pike’s boyfriend, Shipp.

That allegation would become the central motive presented by prosecutors.

There was one crucial problem.

Slemmer would never get the opportunity to answer it.

A Plan Begins to Take Shape

The evidence presented at Pike’s trial indicated that the killing was not an instantaneous eruption of violence.

There were indications of planning.

A fellow Job Corps student, Kimberly Iloilo, testified that Pike had spoken about killing Slemmer the day before the murder.

According to Iloilo’s testimony, Pike explicitly said she intended to kill Colleen.

That testimony became significant because it challenged any later suggestion that the violence had simply happened spontaneously.

On January 12, Slemmer left the Job Corps facility with Pike, Shipp and Peterson.

The group headed toward an isolated area near the University of Tennessee’s Agricultural campus.

According to evidence presented during the investigation, Slemmer had been led to believe that the group was going out to resolve the conflict.

Instead, she walked into a trap.

The four young people who left the Job Corps center together would not all return.

The center’s records eventually became one of the simplest but most important pieces of evidence in the investigation:

Four people left. Three came back.

Slemmer was missing.

The Attack

What happened next was reconstructed through forensic evidence, witness testimony and statements made by the people involved.

The attack was prolonged.

Slemmer was beaten and repeatedly cut and stabbed.

The medical examiner documented numerous injuries across her body, including wounds to her back, abdomen, chest, arms, face and neck.

There were defensive injuries, indicating that Slemmer had attempted to protect herself.

The medical evidence was particularly significant because investigators concluded that many of the injuries had been inflicted while she was still alive.

The Tennessee Supreme Court later summarized the prosecution’s evidence as showing that Pike assaulted Slemmer with a box cutter, a miniature meat cleaver, rocks and asphalt.

A pentagram was also carved into Slemmer’s chest.

The symbolism became one of the most repeated details in media coverage of the case.

But investigators and prosecutors did not need the symbolism to establish what happened.

The physical evidence already told a devastating story.

Slemmer fought back.

She was alive through much of the attack.

And eventually, the injuries to her head proved fatal.

The Tennessee Supreme Court upheld Pike’s conviction, finding that the jury had sufficient evidence to convict her of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy. The court also upheld the finding that the murder involved torture or serious physical abuse beyond that necessary to cause death.

The Evidence That Followed Them Home

The investigation moved quickly.

Slemmer’s body had been discovered by two University of Tennessee physical-plant employees the following morning.

The crime scene contained evidence that investigators could use to reconstruct what had happened.

But one of the most disturbing pieces of evidence would be found away from the scene.

A fragment of Slemmer’s skull was discovered inside a black leather jacket associated with Pike.

A forensic anthropologist later matched the fragment to a missing portion of Slemmer’s skull.

The discovery transformed something investigators already suspected into physical evidence connecting Pike to the aftermath of the killing.

It was also an object that would remain at the center of Slemmer’s family’s grief for decades.

Because the fragment wasn’t returned to her family.

It remained in evidence.

A Mother Asked for Her Daughter Back

For May Martinez, the case never became something that belonged to history.

It remained personal.

Her daughter was gone.

But part of her daughter was still being held by the state.

In 2006, Martinez asked the court for the return of the skull fragment so that Colleen could finally be buried with it.

Her request was not about the killer.

It was about Colleen.

“I really don’t give a damn what happens to Christa,” Martinez said at the time. “I want my daughter — all of her.”

The statement captures one of the most unusual and painful consequences of the case.

Colleen had been buried without her head because investigators retained it as evidence during the legal proceedings. News Sentinel reporting from Pike’s 1996 trial documented that the medical examiner removed Slemmer’s head for examination and that she was ultimately buried without it.

For a mother already forced to live with the circumstances of her daughter’s death, the continued separation of her daughter’s remains became another wound.

 Image by fity.club

The Crime Wasn’t About the Pentagram

The pentagram became one of the defining images associated with the case.

So did the skull fragment.

So did the age of Pike.

Those details made the case unusually sensational in the years that followed.

But focusing too heavily on them risks turning Slemmer into a prop in somebody else’s story.

The pentagram did not kill Colleen.

A person did.

The skull fragment did not define Colleen’s life.

It was something taken from her after she had already been subjected to unimaginable violence.

And Christa Pike’s age does not tell us who Colleen was.

What does?

Her mother’s memories.

She was active.

She loved roller-skating.

She ran.

She babysat.

She loved computers.

She was 19 years old and trying to build a future.

Those details may seem ordinary.

That is precisely why they matter.

Most murder victims aren’t famous before their deaths.

They are ordinary people whose lives intersect with extraordinary violence.

The Investigation Exposed More Than One Participant

The case did not end with Pike.

Tadaryl Shipp, Pike’s boyfriend, was also charged and ultimately convicted in connection with Slemmer’s murder. He was 17 at the time of the killing.

Shadolla Peterson was also charged. She later pleaded guilty to being an accessory after first-degree murder and received a sentence involving parole. 

The different outcomes reflected different roles and circumstances presented to the courts.

But for Slemmer’s family, three people were connected to the night their daughter never came home.

There was another important aspect of the investigation: the crime did not remain hidden for long.

Pike spoke about the murder after it happened.

Witnesses described her discussing what had occurred.

And investigators eventually obtained confessions and physical evidence that corroborated significant portions of the prosecution’s case.

The murder that had begun in an isolated area ultimately became a case built from multiple independent pieces of evidence.

What the Court Decided

In March 1996, Pike was convicted of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.

The jury found two aggravating circumstances that allowed the death penalty:

• that the murder was especially heinous, atrocious or cruel because it involved torture or serious physical abuse beyond that necessary to cause death; and
• that the murder was committed for the purpose of avoiding, interfering with or preventing a lawful arrest or prosecution.

Pike was sentenced to death.

The Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and death sentence in 1998. 

Thirty Years Later, the Family Was Still Living With It

Time does not necessarily make a violent death easier for the people left behind.

It changes everything around the grief.

Children grow older.

Parents age.

Birthdays continue to arrive.

Anniversaries come and go.

But the person who should have been there remains permanently 19.

In 2025, WVLT spoke with Martinez as Shipp appeared before the Tennessee Board of Parole.

She described the continuing pain of remembering her daughter’s remains being treated as evidence.

She also remembered the daughter behind the case file.

Colleen loved doing things.

She loved children.

She was active.

She had a life that had nothing to do with becoming a famous murder victim.

That interview came three decades after Colleen’s death.

Thirty years.

And Martinez was still fighting for justice.

The Second Victim: A Family Sentenced to a Lifetime of Grief

Every murder has consequences beyond the person whose death appears on the certificate.

Families become secondary victims of violence.

They lose birthdays, holidays, future grandchildren, weddings, conversations and ordinary moments that can never be recreated.

In Colleen’s case, her family also had to endure the public retelling of her death.

Again and again.

The crime was described in newspapers.

The details appeared in court.

The case became a subject of documentaries, podcasts and online discussions.

Christa Pike became a recognizable name.

Colleen’s name was often attached to hers.

That imbalance is one of the uncomfortable realities of true crime.

The person who commits the crime can become more famous than the person who died.

For Slemmer’s family, however, the story was never about a notorious killer.

It was about a missing daughter who should have come home.

A Murder That Was Never a Mystery

There are cases where investigators spend decades wondering who killed someone.

Colleen Slemmer’s case was different.

The investigation rapidly identified those involved.

Physical evidence connected the defendants to the crime.

Witnesses described statements made before and after the murder.

Forensic evidence documented the violence.

And Pike was ultimately convicted by a jury.

The question that remains isn’t really who killed Colleen?

The legal system answered that.

The more enduring questions are different:

Who was Colleen before she became a victim?

What did she want from life?

What would she have become?

And how does a family carry a 31-year-old grief when the person they lost never gets older?

The Death Sentence and What Comes Next

Christa Pike remains on Tennessee’s death row.

In October 2025, the Tennessee Supreme Court set her execution for September 30, 2026. If carried out, Pike would become the first woman executed by Tennessee in roughly two centuries. She is currently the only woman on Tennessee’s death row.

The approaching execution date has brought the case back into public attention.

Pike’s attorneys have continued to challenge the death sentence, including arguments concerning her age at the time of the crime and her mental health and history of abuse. Those arguments are part of Pike’s legal story.

But they should not erase another reality:

Colleen Slemmer was also 19.

She was young.

She had a future.

And unlike Pike, she never received the opportunity to grow older, to change, to make mistakes, to build relationships, to discover who she would become or to live long enough to leave behind the person she was at 19.

The law may ultimately decide what happens to Pike.

But no court can restore what happened to Colleen.

Remembering Colleen

It is easy to remember a person through the circumstances of their death.

Especially when the death was violent.

But Colleen Slemmer deserves more than that.

She was not a pentagram carved into a chest.

She was not a skull fragment held in an evidence room.

She was not merely “Christa Pike’s victim.”

She was Colleen.

A daughter.

A young woman from Florida.

A Job Corps student.

A runner.

A roller-skater.

A babysitter.

A computer enthusiast.

A 19-year-old trying to make something of her life.

And a young woman whose future was taken from her in a secluded corner of Knoxville on a January night in 1995.

Her murder became one of Tennessee’s most notorious cases.

Christa Pike became the name most people associated with it.

But notoriety belongs to the perpetrator.

Memory belongs to the victim.

More than three decades later, Colleen’s family continues to live with the consequences of what happened.

Her mother has continued speaking her daughter’s name.

And perhaps that is the most important part of any true-crime story:

Not how notorious the killer became.

Not how shocking the crime was.

Not how many times the case was retold.