‘No remorse, almost giddy’: Ex-police chief recalls Christa Pike’s chilling reaction to classmate’s murder

Former Knoxville police chief Phil Keith has revealed that Christa Pike was “ruthless, without any remorse, almost giddy” while recounting the brutal details of the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in January 1995. Keith was asked in a new documentary on Pike’s crime and how she behaved during the interrogation. In January 1995, 18-year-old Christa Pike and her co-defendant, Tadaryl Shipp, tortured and killed their Job Corps classmate Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville.

She was back in news in September when the state of Tennessee severely botched her execution procedure. They administered two full doses of the lethal drug pentobarbital but she did not die. She remained conscious, distressed, and breathing. Nearly a week later, she miraculously regained full consciousness.

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What Former Knoxville police chief revealed?

Keith revealed she didn't show remorse even while describing gory details of using of a box cutter and the carving of an inverted pentagram. He recalled that she seemed to be bragging about what had happened. Speaking to The Post, Keith said he was accustomed to witnessing gruesome crime scenes, but the brutality of Slemmer’s murder was different. He recalled being shocked by the scene and said he could see from the expressions of two seasoned homicide investigators, who had decades of experience between them, that they were disgusted by what they had witnessed.

“I heard somebody that was ruthless, without any remorse, almost giddy,”Keith recalled. “You know, she was describing what took place, like, almost the sense that she was bragging about it.” Pike lured Slemmer to her death in a fit of jealousy because she suspected the victim wanted to steal her 17-year-old boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp.

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“I was accustomed to seeing that kind of gore, if you will, but the brutality was different,” he told The Post. “You know, the visual scene of it, it was so shocking, and I could tell, when I first walked up – there’s two seasoned guys there, they got 50 or 60 years of homicide investigations under their belt, and I could tell, looking at their eyes and just their expressions, that they were disgusted with what they saw.”