Journalist Recalls Her 2006 Death Row Meeting With Christa Pike

Twenty years ago, Welsh journalist Helen Roberts sat across from a convicted killer on death row and found herself struggling to square the woman in front of her with the crime she had committed. That meeting has resurfaced now that Christa Pike is back in headlines, this time for surviving her own execution… Continue Reading ⬇️

Roberts interviewed Pike in 2006 for a women’s magazine, eleven years into Pike’s death sentence. Now, after a lethal injection attempt left Pike in a coma from which she has since woken, Roberts has reflected on what it was like to meet the woman behind one of Tennessee’s most notorious murder cases.

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The murder of Colleen Slemmer

Christa Pike was sentenced to death on March 30, 1996, for the torture and killing of her classmate Colleen Slemmer, 19. Pike believed Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp.

Pike was 18 at the time and Shipp was 17. Together they lured Slemmer into a wooded area, beat her for roughly 30 minutes, and carved a pentagram into her chest and forehead before killing her by striking her head with a large piece of asphalt. Both confessed and were convicted of first-degree murder.

Meeting Christa Pike on death row

Roberts met Pike when the killer was 30 and had already spent 11 years on death row. She had expected, she said, to meet a very honest, brutal woman. Instead she found someone warm and eager to please, who made plenty of eye contact and giggled during their conversation.

Roberts, who was flying into a maximum security prison for the first time, admitted she felt nervous and a little intimidated going in. She and Pike were close in age, and Roberts said there were elements the two of them connected on.

Within minutes, Pike climbed onto the window ledge on her side of the divide so she could sit closer, aware that the two women didn’t have much time and had a lot of ground to cover.

Pike, Roberts said, wasn’t defensive or difficult. She answered every question articulately and openly, coming across at times as quite ordinary rather than the brutal figure Roberts had braced herself for.

Pike’s account, and an apology

When the conversation turned to the killing itself, Roberts said Pike spoke about it matter-of-factly, as though describing someone else entirely. By then she had spent over a decade alone with what she had done.

Pike told Roberts she had lost her mind the night she killed Colleen Slemmer, describing it as an out-of-body experience, as though someone else had taken over and she hadn’t realised what she was doing.

Roberts said Pike apologised to her for what she had done, though she didn’t feel there was anything that could 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.”

Roberts’ reflections

“No matter what I’ve said about Christa Pike, I am no way diminishing her crime,” Roberts said. “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.”

“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,” Roberts said. “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.”