Show notes
THE DEVIL ON DEATH ROW
Episode Two: The Devil in the Woods
Hours after nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer was tortured and murdered in the woods outside Knoxville, Christa Pike went to breakfast. According to trial testimony, she was carrying something almost impossible to comprehend: a fragment of Colleen’s skull, taken from the murder scene as a souvenir. Pike reportedly showed the bone to other students, pointed to blood on her shoes and openly described what had happened the night before. TDW_Pike_2
In Episode Two of The Devil on Death Row, we return to the woods to reconstruct Colleen’s final hour and examine the Satanic imagery that became inseparable from the crime. The attack lasted somewhere between thirty minutes and an hour, and when Colleen’s body was examined, investigators found a pentagram carved into her chest. But the occult connection went deeper: at Tadaryl Shipp’s later trial, another student testified that days before the murder Shipp had spoken about the need for a human sacrifice because the celestial bodies were in alignment. TDW_Pike_2
As Christa goes on trial, psychiatrists attempt to answer the question that had haunted the case from the beginning. Was this a Satanic murder, or were troubled teenagers borrowing the imagery of Satanism to give jealousy, rage and violence a darker mythology? The jury ultimately finds Pike guilty of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy, and Tennessee chooses the ultimate punishment: death by electrocution. TDW_Pike_2
The Satanic Panic taught America to believe extraordinary evil required an extraordinary explanation. Christa Pike offered something considerably more disturbing: perhaps people don't need the Devil to commit monstrous acts. Sometimes they simply borrow his language.
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