Honestly, we will never know for sure what turns a man into a monster. Is it the way their families treat them? Is it their criminal nature? If you want an answer to these questions, you have to know that the story below will not give you a single clue. The story below is about a criminal who loves being one. Meet Christa Gall Pike.
Christa was not an easy child to bring up and, according to her mother, she was one of those stubborn kids that would do anything to make it all about them. She didn’t live with her mother and the only person she was close to was her alcoholic grandmother, who died in 1988 when Christa Gall Pike started living between her mother’s and her father’s house. But there was a problem: she hated both of her parents. Christa’s mother dated a man who hit her, and her father had had another child whom Pike loved to beat and sexually abuse. That child was her sibling, and she was 2 years old.
Yes, criminality was in Christa’s blood, and she started using drugs before her 14th birthday. According to her mother, Colleen, she grew marijuana by the age of 9, and when she turned 14, Christa left her family home to live with a friend. Note that by the age of 14 she had already attempted to commit her first murder when her mother’s boyfriend hit her, and she attacked him with a knife before calling the police. However, not even one of her family members thought about offering help to Pike, despite the signs of criminal and abnormal behavior. In 1995, Pike dropped out of school.
While attending a seminar on finding a job, Christa told a friend of hers, Kim Iloilo, that she was going to kill one of the people in the room, because she “just felt mean that day.” Iloilo thought that her friend was just kidding, but the truth is that on January 11, 1995, Christa Gall Pike killed Colleen Slemmer, 19.
She was happy. She felt complete, and everything had gone as it was planned right from the beginning. She had killed, and, later that night, she visited Kim Iloilo’s cubicle to describe how she had done it. According to Iloilo, while Pike was describing the killing process, she was moving around the room in an ecstatic dance. The very next day, Pike told another student the same story, and she did not hesitate to show a piece of Colleen’s skull she carried with her, just to prove herself true.
Only two days after her murder, Colleen Slemmer’s body was found in a greenhouse and its condition was worse that any human being can ever imagine. Her face was crushed, her torso was full of scars and symbols, and her neck was, literally, shredded while parts of her body were just “not there.” The forensic surgeon could not count the number of the wounds and officially reported that they “were too many to count.” Sadly, Colleen was not dead while Christa Pike was torturing her, and she only left her last breath after a hit to the head.
Christa confessed her guilt describing the way she allured her and defaced her body. In her 46-page-long testimony, Christa noted that both of the girls liked the same boy and that Colleen was the first to threaten her some days before. Pike told her victim that they would hang out in the woods to smoke some marijuana, and, as soon as they arrived there, she started hitting her. Christa’s boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, and a close friend, Shadolla Peterson, helped her complete her work keeping Colleen still.
We will never know what made Christa Pike kill since tests suggested that she was “of sound mind and memory,” and the only thing that may had caused her problematic behavior may be her drug addiction causing her some borderline personality disorder.
But Christa is not mentally ill. She just doesn’t care that killing is a criminal offense and, after her imprisonment, she tried to strangle to death one of her inmates.
Today, Christa is 39 years old, and she is waiting for the death penalty since she is the youngest woman to be sentenced to death in the United States during the post-Furman period. We will never know what went wrong with her, and the truth is that she does not want us to. She still doesn’t care. She never will.