Crime
Pike became jealous of fellow student Colleen Slemmer, 19. She thought Slemmer was trying to "steal" her boyfriend from her. Though friends of Slemmer deny the accusations, Pike was set on a vendetta. Along with friend, Shadolla Peterson, 18, Pike planned to lure Slemmer to an isolated, abandoned steam plant close by on the University of Tennessee Campus.
On January 12, 1995, Pike, Shipp, Peterson, and Slemmer signed out of the dormitory and proceeded to the woods where Slemmer was told they wanted to make peace by offering her some marijuana. Upon arrival at the secluded location Slemmer was attacked by the other three. Per later court testimony, for the next 30 minutes she was taunted, beaten, and slashed, and a pentagram was carved in her chest. Finally, Pike smashed Slemmer's skull with a large chunk of asphalt paving, killing her. Pike kept a piece of her victim's skull.
Pike began to show off the piece of skull around the school and within 36 hours the three were arrested. The log book showed that the four of them left together and only three returned. They also found the piece of skull in Pike's jacket pocket. Their rooms were searched and a Satanic Bible was found in Shipp's room. Pike insisted they were merely trying to scare her and it got out of control.
Read more about this topic: Christa Pike
Famous quotes containing the word crime:
“Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
To render with thy precepts less
The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen Man with his own mind;”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.”
—Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)