There is a whole literature on how Krista Pike became the youngest death row inmate in the United States.
The diary was written on January 12, 1995 when the 19-year-old murdered Colleen Slemmer in the Knoxville Forest, Tennessee. And instead of trying to hide the crime, she chose to gossip about it.
Despite her young age, Krista had lived a difficult life. After all, he had left school a long time ago.
But he committed a horrific murder at a tender age, he had just grown up. And so she managed to become the youngest death row inmate in the United States.
What armed her hand? A strange alloy of pathological jealousy and satanic worship.
But as always, its history has many more aspects…
Born in March 1976 in West Virginia, Krista knew the difficult face of life from an early age. Her young mother was a girl who was more interested in fun and drugs than to raise her child properly.
As for her father, he had made it clear that he did not want any relationship with his daughter. As a result, Krista was left to grow up in her grandmother's arms.
According to the reports of the time, the biggest contribution of her mom in her life was the fact that he brought her in contact with marijuana in her adolescence.
Her grandmother died when Krista was just 12 years old and her world was shattered. Now he had to return to the house of the woman who had brought her into the world and until then they did not have much contact.
Their relationship was characterized by those afternoons they used drugs together. And from the great poverty in which they lived.
It would not take long for her to drop out of school and get involved with bad company. After all, no one was there to put her on the right track.
At one point she was caught for petty theft and spent a month in a reformatory. It was a shock to her. And so when he came out he decided to follow another path. He enrolled in a training program of the Ministry of Labor for young people, in order to become an operator of medical equipment.
He moved to Knoxville for school, but quickly turned to the old and the bad. As they characteristically said in her trial, although somewhat bitter, Pike "instead of focusing on her studies, focused on the boys".
Especially a boy, Tadaryl Shipp, with whom he became passionate to a pathological degree.
And that was it persistence which would lead to a chain of events that would lead to the murder of a girl;
Like Pike, Tadaryl Shipp did not exactly grow into feathers. Growing up by an indifferent mother, he left school early to join a gang.
At one point he saw the hardships of life he had chosen and decided to enroll in the same training program in Knoxville. He wanted to become a cook.
According to the court statements of children who studied with them, their romance blossomed immediately. And they were probably united by the attraction they both felt for the "dark arts", occultism and satanism.
And a second girl from the apprenticeship, some Shadolla Peterson, had similar concerns and would join the little satanic sect, as they liked to call their company.
And here comes our story with Colleen Slemmer, a beautiful and enthusiastic young woman who came from Florida to Knoxville to learn computer science. Her arrival was episodic from the beginning, at least for Pike.
According to the defendant herself, Slemmer "threw" herself at her boyfriend in court, trying to "steal him from her arms". Despite the fact that both the newcomer and her company denied any sexual attraction, Krista was convinced that she wanted him like crazy.
And so it would not take her long to convince both Shipp and Peterson that Slemmer had to be sacrificed to Satan. "The Devil himself asked for it," he told them characteristically.
In fact, the day before the murder, on January 11, 1995, confessed to her murderous intentions to her friend Kim Iolio, telling her that Slemmer "was very bad with me" that day.
Iolio did not believe her, considering that they were "just words". And yet.
The next night, the three young Satanists deceitfully lured Slemmer into the woods around Knoxville, promising to introduce her to the drug world.
When they got to the point they had predetermined, they let Peterson keep chilies and the pervert pair of made his move against the girl.
For the next half hour, the victim would go through a lot: they beat her savagely, carved her with knives, and even carved a pentacle on her chest.
Pike would give her the shot, hitting her on the head with a large stone. Her skull shattered and Krista even held a fragment as a macabre souvenir.
The three of them returned to their homes and continued to do normally what they did. We do not know what the outcome of the story would have been if Pike had kept her mouth shut.
He wanted you to see everyone learn about how he handled "erotic adversaryHer, as he called her. Not only did she gossip to her classmates that he had pulled her out of the waist, but she also showed the piece of her skull to make her believe her.
It was only a matter of time before the police knocked on her door. And indeed she was interrogated on January 15th. She was more than willing to confess, she seemed proud of her achievement, as the police officers wrote in their report, embarrassed.
What he said to the police shocked the public. He claimed, for example, that he wanted to send to Hell the Slemmer. Her severely abused corpse, however, showed unprecedented savagery.
Pike had an excuse for that too. He told investigators that the barbarity of the torture increased as the victim begged for his life. The more Slemmer cried and begged, the more Pike hit her. The more she prayed for help, the deeper the scars on her throat became.
Within days of the horrific crime, the three perpetrators were arrested. The line of defense chosen by her lawyers did not work. No one believed that it was her "reduced mental state" that armed her hand.
The psychiatrist Dr. Eric Engum, who was called in as an expert, said he showed no signs of "brain injury or insanity". However, he diagnosed a "very severe" borderline personality disorder, cannabis addiction and depression.
A specialist was even summoned to the trial Satanism. Dr. William Bernet claimed that despite the fact that there were "satanic features" in the murder, the incident was more indicative of a "teenage involvement with Satanism".
It was not a real satanic crime, the expert said, a real "human sacrifice to Satan", rather than a vicious act of collective aggression.
Pike's lawyers even called on members of her family to testify about how difficult it was for her to grow up with her estranged mother. Again, however, they failed to avert the death penalty.
Jurors sentenced Tadaryl Shipp to Life imprisonment, noting that the sentence can not be suspended before completing 25 years in prison. Shadolla Peterson agreed with the prosecutor and even testified as a prosecution witness at the trial.
She pleaded guilty from the beginning to complicity in murder and her sentence was suspensory. As for Krista Pike, here the jurors had a remarkably easy job: she was sentenced on March 30, 1996 to death in an electric chair after just 2,5 hours of sitting.
In June 1996, she was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the other charge against her, conspiracy to commit a felony.
To say that Krista Pike was not exactly a model prisoner is no exaggeration. Besides, he has never shown any remorse for the murder of the girl.
Worse, a few days after she was sentenced to death, she wrote one letter to Shipp who has haunted many.
"Please write to me! I miss you so much! Did you see what I go through to be good? I went and poured out her brain to die quickly, instead of letting her bleed to death and suffer more, and these @@ will burn me! "
The letter was read out in public at her second conspiracy trial and sent a shudder to the local community.
Returning to prison, we said that Pike was never a model prisoner. In August 2004 he was sentenced to a new sentence when he tried to strangle (in 2001) a prisoner (Patricia Jones) with a string.
Penitentiary authorities suspect he has formed a clique with Natasha Cornett, a notorious satanist of the USA who is serving three life sentences for the ritual murder of a couple and their 6-year-old child.
A few days after the attempted murder of the detainee, Pike called her mom and told her laughing, according to a report by "The Tennessean":
"I wrapped the cord around her neck and tried to strangle her. She fainted and fell to the floor, mom, she turned her body, foaming at the mouth, her eyes were flying out, her eyelids were jumping… ".
In March 2012, we find her again in the news taking part in an attempt to escape from prison. He was not convicted of the new crime, however, but a prison officer lost his job, playing an active role in the plot.
The latest news about Pike is coming to us relatively recently. Having exhausted all legal remedies to change her sentence, the state of Tennessee appealed to the court on 27 August 2020 to set a date for its execution.
Although her execution has not yet been scheduled, Colleen Slemmer's family said they are looking forward to the day.
Only this will do justice to the harm he did to them, they said publicly.