Christa Pike victim's mother details 16-year battle to recover daughter's remains after brutal killing
The mother of Colleen Slemmer, the 19-year-old murdered in a notorious 1995 Tennessee killing, has revealed the harrowing details of how state institutions repeatedly mishandled her daughter’s remains, including shipping severed body parts to her home in cardboard boxes without warning.
May Martinez shared the disturbing account in the documentary Christa Pike's Last Fight to Stop Her Execution, detailing how decades of institutional insensitivity severely compounded the grief of losing her child.
Slemmer was tortured and murdered in Knoxville by fellow Job Corps student Christa Pike, then 18, who remains the only woman on Tennessee’s death row.
While Pike is currently mounting a high-profile clemency bid ahead of a scheduled execution date, Martinez revealed that her own private nightmare continued long after the 1996 trial ended.
Advert
According to Martinez, she spent 16 years fighting authorities to recover the physical evidence retained after her daughter’s autopsy and criminal proceedings.
The trauma began in the courtroom itself, where she was abruptly confronted with graphic evidence without prior preparation.
"The state of Tennessee has really failed me. They put my life upside down," Martinez said. "When I get to the courtroom and here I see my daughter's skull in front of me, that's a little hard to take."
Following years of formal correspondence, Martinez was eventually able to retrieve Colleen’s skull. However, the subsequent return of additional retained anatomical evidence from the University of Tennessee left her completely traumatized.
"After 16 years of me fighting and writing letters and going back and forth, I got Colleen’s skull back, and then Tennessee University sent me body parts in a box and they wouldn't tell you what it was," Martinez recalled.
Martinez described opening parcel deliveries only to discover various preserved sections of her daughter's body arriving piecemeal.
"The first time was her genitals. Second time was her nose and the piece on her chin," she explained. "The third one was two pieces that was here. And then I got the layer of the outer skin of the pentagram."
She added: "I didn't get no warning. I got a little brown box, opened it up, and I couldn't figure it out. It was just pieces."
The horrific oversight highlighted what observers in the documentary described as a total failure of state duty toward crime victims.
Martinez noted that when the state finally offered her trauma counseling, the therapist dismissed her grief during their first session by telling her, "Well, that's life. You have to deal with it"—prompting her and her husband to walk out immediately.
"The state should bear some responsibility," Martinez maintained, emphasizing that the trauma inflicted by institutional failures has left scars that can never be undone.
For Martinez, the pending execution represents an overdue reckoning that could finally offer a measure of closure after three decades of unyielding torment.
Rather than accepting life imprisonment or clemency for her daughter's killer, she remains steadfast that only the death penalty will deliver genuine justice. R
ejecting arguments rooted in Pike's childhood trauma, Martinez insisted: "Most kids do go through a lot of stuff and they don't go out and kill. Christa committed and admittedly committed—and that's a big thing in this case is admittedly committed—a heinous, vile, disgusting, cruel murder. So, does she deserve any different?"
Martinez made clear that Pike should be shown no leniency at the end, adding: "I don't think Christa should have any kind of privilege. She do something like that to somebody, you need to pay the price... I want to see Christa look at Colleen’s picture lasting in her mind when she dies."
Phoebe Tonks