Just Felt Mean That Day: Christa Pike and the Knoxville Job Corps Murder

0:00 [MUSIC] Colleen Slimmer could take a computer apart and put it back together. And she had a t-shirt that said computer geek to prove it. She moved more than 500 miles from home for a job program in Knoxville, Tennessee. A classmate there decided that Colleen was after her boyfriend. And she told another student, she just felt mean that day. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] You could give Colleen Slimmer a computer and she could take it all apart.

1:03 She put it back together again and she was proud of that. So proud that she would wear this shirt that said computer geek on it. She grew up in Orange Park, Florida. Her stepdad Raul was the guy that she worked on computers with. Her mom's name is May and Colleen was the big sister in that house. Her family remembers an easygoing girl who was always smiling. She was into roller skating and bowling and surfing. Plus the old family games. At lunch, she liked to go help the kids with disabilities and autism. And she volunteered at Special Olympics events. Her grandfather is the one who brought up job core. It's a federal program where if you're young and short on money, you can live at the center and get schooling and job training.

1:47 And Colleen picked the one up in Knoxville, Tennessee, so that she could study computer technology. She left home on Halloween in 1994. She was 19 years old. Knoxville is more than 500 miles from Orange Park. The Knoxville Center was on Dale Avenue, close enough that you could walk over to Tyson Park. Or onto the University of Tennessee's Agricultural campus. Another student there, Christa Pike, was 18. She was working on her GED and training to be a nursing assistant. And her boyfriend was a student named Tadarol Ship, who was 17. Most of what you hear about how Christa grew up came from her own family on the witness stand.

2:28 Her mom, Karissa, admitted to heavy drinking and to smoking marijuana around her. An aunt told the jury about a time that Christa was a toddler having seizures bad enough to put her in the hospital, while her mom stayed at the bar. Her dad, Glenn, testified that he kept picking his new wife and family over her. And at one point, he signed adoption papers that never win anywhere. Christa spends a lot of her childhood with her dad's mother, who was the one person she was the closest to. And when that grandmother died in 1988, Christa tried to kill herself. And her mom admitted that she never got her much help. Decades later, Christa's lawyers put together records of sexual abuse going back to when she was in preschool.

3:12 And the state told the court that it did not contest that history. Days before Colleen died, a student named Kip O'Hara heard Tadarol say that he needed a human sacrifice because the celestial bodies were aligned. And Kip said Tadarol was holding a Ouija board while he explained it. And you'd have to ask Tadarol what the Ouija board was adding to the astronomy. Nobody really knows. Christa had decided Colleen was after Tadarol and running her mouth about her. And nobody knows if that was really true either. On the 11th of January, Christa told a classmate named Kim she was going to kill Colleen. Some remembered her saying she just felt mean that day.

3:55 Kim did not go to the police. Colleen called her mom around 6 o'clock the next evening. Her mother May says that Colleen told her three students were bothering her. Sometime that day, a student named Daniel Wayland ran into Christa and Tadarol and another student, Shadola Peterson, while they were out looking for Colleen. One of them said that when they found her, she was dead. Colleen didn't remember which one said it. He just knows that it was said. Christa had a box cutter on her and a miniature meat cleaver. And she got Colleen to come along by saying there was marijuana stashed in Tyson Park and they could walk toward the blockbuster music store, which at the time was a blockbuster where you bought CDs.

4:38 The four of them ended up by the steam plant on the UT Aged campus. Christa confronted Colleen about Tadarol and started hitting her. It went on for 30 minutes to an hour. Colleen tried to get away more than once. Tadarol admitted to tripping her once. Another time when she ran off, he caught her and brought her back. Christa cut her with the box cutter. Tadarol told police that Shadola hit her and cut Colleen too. And Shadola has said that she never touched her. So there are multiple versions of this same story. But Colleen was definitely the whole time begging them to let her go. She said she'd walk home to Florida and wouldn't come back for her things.

5:19 And again, her home in Florida is 500 miles away. Christa told the police that it was harder to hurt Colleen while Colleen was talking. And she kicked her more. Colleen did eventually die from being hit in the head with rocks or pieces of asphalt. Tadarol admitted that he carved a pentagram into her chest and told the police that the idea of sacrifice came to him only partway through. And afterward, they dragged Colleen to the trees and hit her clothes nearby. That same night, Christa told Kim that she'd killed Colleen and showed her as proof a piece of Colleen's skull. And I don't know what you're supposed to do when you're 18 in a classmate pulls a piece of bone out of a pocket and confesses to killing someone.

6:04 But the next morning, Christa showed another student a bone fragment and said that the stains on her shoes were Colleen's blood. Nobody who Christa talked to called the police before Colleen was found. A UT grounds worker found Colleen around 8 o'clock that morning. That afternoon, Christa went to the Job Corps office about an ID card and left her jacket in there. Security handed it to the police. There was a piece of skull in the pocket. And a UT anthropologist matched it to a gap in Colleen's skull. Christa gave the detectives a detailed statement early on January 14. To Darrell, he talked to and the blood on his clothes matched Colleen's DNA.

6:47 The Job Corps Center closed soon after. Christa's trial started in March of 1996. The jury heard her recorded confession and her lawyers called a psychologist who said that she had a very severe borderline personality disorder and lost control that night. The jury convicted her of premeditated first degree murder and conspiracy. They found she tortured Colleen and killed her to avoid arrest. And they sentenced Christa to death. To Darrell was 17 years old that night. In Tennessee, you have to be at least 18 at the time of the crime to get the death penalty. A jury convicted him in 1997 and he got life.

7:28 The judge stacked 25 more years on top of that for conspiracy. Shadola's murder charge got dropped in a plea deal. The prosecutor said the evidence could prove she was there. So she pled guilty to being an accessory after the fact and testified against to Darrell at his trial. And she got six years of probation on top of credit for the time that she'd already spent in jail. Christa spent decades on appeals and every court turned her down. During a fire evacuation at the women's prison in 2001, she strangled another inmate with a shoelace until the woman passed out. That in itself added another 25 years. Not that it mattered because she was already sentenced to death.

8:09 Tennessee set Christa's execution for September 30, 2026. And you probably saw her face on the news that week. Governor Bill Lee turned down her request for clemency. May and Raul raised money from donors to make a trip up from Florida. Headed north, the same route that Colleen went when she left home for Knoxville. May went there hoping to see the sentence carried out. After hours of last minute court fights, the state gave Christa two doses of Pinto Barber Tall. She kept breathing. Somebody at the prison called for an ambulance at 840 and told the dispatcher the person is not yet deceased. A Nashville TV station reported that the worker who called didn't have the security code dispatch uses to verify prison calls.

8:54 And dispatch supervisors decided that it was a fake call. And if you're like me, you had no idea until now that you needed a password to get an ambulance into a prison. It took about half an hour for prison officials to confirm that the call was in fact real. Christa ended up in the hospital on a ventilator. Her lawyers say doctors came to believe that she was brain dead and she was about to come off of life support. The next morning she woke up and one of her lawyers believes her first words were, "Where am I and who are you?" Governor Lee paused the state's next execution and ordered an outside review. As I'm telling you this right now, Christa is back in the women's prison in Nashville, where she's been since October 10.

9:38 Her attorneys say her arms are badly damaged and she's having trouble with memory and concentration. And her doctors told them it could take months before anybody knows for sure whether any of that damage is permanent. Her attorney's theory is that the IV failed and the drug went into the tissue of her arms. The review at this point of course has not released any findings. But they want her sentence changed to life without parole. There has been no new execution date set. Her next court date in one of her cases is October 23rd. Tadarrel is also still in prison with his next parole review in 2031.

10:24 Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder. Bingeable True Crime Stories. Hello. I'm Joe. I'm the host. And this is a story that I've covered in the past on the podcast. But because of the recent events, the botched execution, I thought it needed to be updated. I think that people needed to be reminded what she did to get on death row to begin with. Her coldness. Callus and the brutality of the crime that she committed. And again on this podcast, I've talked about how I don't like the death penalty. I'm not in favor of the death penalty. I think that if you've done something like this, it should be an automatic life without parole. That being said, I do understand the other side of that.

11:06 I understand the thinking of people that are pro-death penalty. Now, I do think that people get over zealous about the death penalty and it's borderline evil the way that people talk about it. How some people just almost get a joy out of the fact that someone's on death penalty and they're so excited about someone being killed. That behavior to me is disgusting. I just personally think that if you kill someone, the punishment should be a punishment. Spinning the rest of your natural life in prison without any chance of getting out is the punishment. But if you kill them, the punishment stops. It's just the end of it. Not to mention the fact that that's a human being that you're killing.

11:46 I know to get on death row, you have to do some heinous vile stuff. I understand that. Not to bring religion into it, but God created that person. Who are you to decide that they need to die? And you're punishing a person for killing someone by killing them. It seems a little contradictory to my brain. That's why I'm not for it. But again, like I said, I understand the other side of it too. Okay, I had zero intentions of getting into death penalty talk, but it just kind of came out. So here we are. Hey, if you're a new listener to this podcast, make sure you hit subscribe wherever you're listening right now and go to 10minuteMurder.com. There you're going to find several things, a blog where you can follow the show on social media as well as how you can contact me.

12:31 That's all at 10minuteMurder.com. And that's going to do it. That's your episode for today. Thank you again for listening to 10 Minute Murder.