This is a take recorded statement.

Person being interviewed is Krista C h.

R I T A gale g A I L Pike.

The I K E.

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.

Christal Eu state your full name, honey.

It's January nineteen ninety five.

An eighteen year old Krista Pike is being interviewed by Knoxville, Tennessee police detective Randy York.

Well, right, where are you?

Where are you staying right now?

What are you doing?

Not the job of course?

And how old are you?

Nineteen much?

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.

So how did you get her to go up there?

I just told her that I wonder her to come to Blackcoster what's me about?

What time?

I don't know, somewhere between eight and ten, eight and ten then what happened?

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.

We got up there and she thought, there's not really any.

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.

I said, I don't know why you can't.

Just trying to do things and their things above me, you know, try to.

Get me in trouble.

Krista confronted Colleen, accusing her of trying to get her in trouble at job Corps.

She has started going off on me.

Bitch that.

Going off, and I hit her.

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 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 is ticking louder and louder.

If killed, she'll be the first woman executed in Tennessee in two hundred years.

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.

This is Kelly Gleeson, one of Chris's attorneys.

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 she has suffered from the earliest ages.

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 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 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 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 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.

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.

This is Randy Spivey, another of Christ's attorneys.

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 see no help, No help come in.

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.

Again, it was extremely violent, it was extremely chaotic.

This is a conveyor belt into this disaster.

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.

I guess one parent homes.

Joe Mode was a teacher at job Corps.

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.

You know what was heartbreaking is if you ever felt like you reached these kids knowing they had to go back to that environment.

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.

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.

Nothing happened to him.

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.

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.

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.

You know.

And again things we heard, you know, like that they'd found a stanic altar in his room, a pistol.

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 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 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 for at least thirty minutes and only ended when Krista picked up a piece of concrete and smashed it on Colleen's head.

The brutal murder created fear and speculation among students and staff.

Please say the murder suspects were close to the victim.

The motive of the program appears to be love triangle.

So can you talk now?

Is it good?

I should retire?

Yes?

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.

I want you to describe what you recall of the scene the morning of January thirteenth, nineteen ninety five.

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.

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 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.

York says.

The police didn't find anything at the scene that pointed to a suspect.

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?

Yes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And then Detective York got some information that connected the pentagram and Satanic worship to Job Corps.

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.

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.

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.

And then what did you find that job where you said you found an altar?

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.

It didn't take long for the three teams involved to start confessing.

Really, within twenty four hours, you were getting confessions.

Yes, are you emotionally stable?

And they will talk to me boy hopefully.

Okay, do you need anything?

This is tape from an interview between Krista and Detective York two days after the murder.

All right, then, what happened?

Jesus the scrange scream up?

Can't hit her and.

Pull on the left.

A little.

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.

I was like, don't touch ma'am.

I don't want to touch ma'am.

You know I can't stand.

Let me.

I really thought I was going crazy because I've never seen myself act like that before in my life.

I been so mad before my life.

You just kind of lost control.

Yeah, okay, Christa, we are recording now.

Please state your first and last name, Christa Pike.

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.

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.

Yes, I understand and agree.

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.

Is it harder now that the Tennessee is looking at execution dates.

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.

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.

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.

Kristin has had thirty long, solitary years to think about a lot of things, including why she killed Colin.

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.

Krista Pike today seems to understand that she was set on a disastrous path long before she killed someone.

At the cusp of adulthood.

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 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 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 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.

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 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 proves that Krista was just born bad, incapable of redemption.

Do you think that you're entitled to some form of justice.

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 don't feel I'm entitled to anything.

That's a very loaded and word that I don't like.

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 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 on proof of life.

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.

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.

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 is the story of violent crime that nobody is telling.

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.

Heart executive producer Christina Everett and supervising producer Abu Zafar