May Martinez has traveled from Florida to Nashville to watch her daughter’s killer die by lethal injection.
The grieving mother, whose 19-year-old daughter Colleen Slemmer was tortured and murdered in January 1995, plans to hold up a photograph of the slain teenager during Christa Pike’s scheduled execution at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on September 30. Pike, 50, is set to become the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years after Governor Bill Lee formally denied her clemency petition on Monday.
Speaking to WBIR ahead of the execution, Martinez made plain she feels only relief. “I’m very happy because she’ll never kill anyone else. Plus I want Colleen to be at rest without having constant reminders.”
Martinez has waited nearly three decades for this moment. Pike was sentenced to death in March 1996 for the premeditated killing, committed when the defendant was just 18. She and 17-year-old accomplice Tadaryl Shipp lured Slemmer into the woods, beat her for roughly 30 minutes, carved a pentagram into her chest, and killed her by smashing her head with a piece of asphalt.
The victim’s mother has found no trace of remorse in the condemned woman across the decades. “She has never reached out to me, and she is not remorseful at all… You see the pictures now, she still has that smile…,” Martinez told WBIR. She added firmly: “If she did talk to me, I wouldn’t talk to her or give her the satisfaction.”
In a 2021 interview with the same outlet, Martinez described the daily weight of her loss. “She did the crime. I think she should pay for it. I would feel better that she felt the same pain that Colleen did,” she said.
Martinez continued: “My heart breaks every single day because I keep reliving it and reliving it, and I can’t no more, and I want this to happen before I die.”
She also spoke of the relentless nature of her grief: “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about Colleen or how she died and how rough it was.”
The mother confirmed this week that she stands by those comments as the hour approaches. Her core desire remains unchanged: “I just want Christa down so I can end it, relieve my daughter, so she finally can be resting.”
Pike spent her final 24 hours in a dedicated deathwatch cell, stripped of standard privileges and under constant monitoring. State officials confirmed she declined the tradition of requesting a personalized final meal. The execution is scheduled for 11 a.m. EDT using pentobarbital.
The inmate offered a starkly different account of herself in her unsuccessful clemency petition. “I was a mentally ill 18-year-old kid. It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I’d done,” Pike wrote. “Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone’s child, sister, friend.”
She concluded her statement: “It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime.”
Martinez has rejected any suggestion that Pike has genuinely changed. The mother will be present in the witness room, photograph in hand, when the lethal injection is administered.
Pike’s final legal appeals collapsed with Governor Lee’s denial on Monday, clearing the path for the first female execution in the state since the early 19th century.