The murder victim in the case of the woman whose execution was botched was a 19-year-old student named Colleen Slemmer.
Slemmer was killed on Jan. 12, 1995, after Christa Pike and two other students lured her to a secluded area near the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville.
According to court records, Slemmer was beaten, stabbed and slashed during the attack. A pentagram was carved into her chest, and Pike struck her in the head with a piece of asphalt. An autopsy determined she died from blunt force injuries to the head.
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Her grieving mother told WBIR she wants to ensure that after 31 years, people remember her even as the attention is on the woman convicted in her killing.
“I wanna think about Colleen being there and saying, ‘Thank you, mom,’ you know, I’m her voice,” said May Martinez, Slemmer’s mother.
She remembers her daughter’s laugh, her working on the computer and the early-morning shrimping trips she took with her stepfather.
Martinez says the decades since her daughter’s death have been filled with reminders, birthdays, holidays and small memories, memories that can get pushed aside when the attention moves back to the person convicted.
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“The criminals get so much attention. Why? She has been lost in this. ... She’s been forgotten, other than when it’s brought up like this.”
So when we asked Martinez what she wanted people to know about colleen, she talked about her daughter, not about the case.
“Colleen was a very friendly child, loved roller skating. She did a lot of work with autistic kids, kids that was in wheelchairs, she would feed them every day at lunchtime, take time out of her lunch from school and take them down,” Martinez said.
Christa Pike was 18 when she was sentenced to death for the torture and murder of Slemmer, who was her classmate.
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