Phil Keith, who served as Knoxville’s police chief from 1988 to 2004, says he still cannot shake the memory of one of the city’s most brutal murder cases more than three decades after it happened.
“I’ll remember this case to the day I die,” Keith told Fox News Digital Thursday, describing what he called a “satanic” crime scene.
The victim was 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, who was tortured, mutilated and killed by classmates from the Knoxville Job Corps Center, a vocational school for troubled youths. The attack was led by Christa Pike, who was 18 at the time. Pike and her co-defendants lured Slemmer to a wooded area under the pretense of going to retrieve marijuana stashed in a park.
“She represents pure evil,” Keith said of Pike.
According to Keith, Slemmer was tortured for nearly an hour — beaten, cut and gagged before her attackers crushed her skull with a piece of broken asphalt. When she tried to run, she was held down. When she pleaded for her life, she was slashed with blades. When she cried out, she was gagged with a hair tie.
Pike, now 50, reportedly kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull and showed it to classmates before her arrest. Her boyfriend at the time, also convicted in the killing, carved pentagrams into Slemmer’s chest and face. He was 17 at the time of the murder and was spared the death penalty because of his age.
Court records show that an expert testifying at trial described the killing as involving “satanic elements” as well as “collective aggression,” a phenomenon in which a group becomes emotionally aroused to the point of engaging in extremely violent behavior.
A University of Tennessee groundskeeper who discovered Slemmer’s remains testified that he initially believed he had stumbled upon an animal carcass, before realizing through the blood that he was looking at a person’s clothing, according to court records.
“[The images] are as vivid today as the day I saw them,” Keith said. “All I have to do is shut my eyes, and I can see everything.”
Keith said that if the Knoxville Police Department had access to the kind of post-trauma counseling available today, it might have helped investigators cope with what they saw. “We didn’t have therapy services or counseling or anything at that time, and we, I wish we had, because these images will never be erased,” he said.
A botched execution
Pike had been scheduled for execution this past Wednesday. The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals briefly stayed the execution amid a last-minute appeal, but the Supreme Court lifted that stay, clearing the way for lethal injection to proceed.
After two doses of pentobarbital, Pike remained alive. She spent Thursday in critical condition at an undisclosed hospital, according to her attorneys, who said Friday that she was unconscious and on a ventilator.
“Christa remains critically ill and is receiving medical care for the devastating effects of Wednesday night’s events,” attorneys Stephen Ferrell and Luke Ihnen said in a statement Friday. “She is critically ill, unconscious, intubated and receiving breathing assistance through a ventilator. She is being treated for the serious effects of the pentobarbital administered during the execution attempt, including significant injuries to both arms.”
What happens next in Pike’s case remains unclear.
Randy Spivey, one of Pike’s attorneys, said during a news briefing Thursday that Slemmer’s mother was on Pike’s mind in the hours before the scheduled execution.
“I cannot imagine what this was like for the family of Ms. Slemmer, or anyone who loves that family or is close to that family — or anyone who loves Christa or is close to Christa,” Spivey said. “This is awful, and this kind of thing should never happen again.”
