Phil Keith was chief of police in Knoxville for 16 years and says there is one case he has never been able to get out of his head. “I’ll remember it until the day I die”, he told Fox News Digital.
On January 12, 1995, 18-year-old Christa Pike led three fellow students from the Knoxville Job Corps Center, a vocational school for troubled young people, to lure 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer under the pretext of going to a music store and picking up marijuana hidden in a park. According to Keith, they tortured her for nearly an hour: they beat her, cut her with blades, gagged her with a hair tie, and ultimately crushed her skull with a piece of asphalt. The former police chief described the scene as “satanic” and said of Pike: “She represents pure evil”.
The woman, now 50 and the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, was scheduled to be executed on Wednesday. According to her lawyers, she survived two doses of lethal injection and has been hospitalized in critical condition ever since, on a ventilator and unconscious.
