By The Daily Wire (World News) | Created at 2026-10-02 13:01:15 | Updated at 2026-10-02 14:25:14
6 hours ago
The Tennessee police chief who oversaw the investigation into murderer Christa Pike said he was frustrated about the focus from the public on the perpetrator instead of the victim.
Former Knoxville Police Chief Phil Keith said the public’s obsession with Pike represented a growing tendency to “glorify the offender” while forgetting about the victim. Pike, who tortured and murdered 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer back in 1995, survived two rounds of lethal injection on Wednesday.
Keith said the botched execution of Pike would only shift the focus away from the horrific crime and away from the victim.
“This will, once again, shift the focus on Pike,” he told Fox News. “These cases don’t go away, and unfortunately, again, back to this kind of shift in thinking where we focus on the perpetrator more than we do the victim. Why don’t we talk about Colleen’s potential future, about her life?”
Keith said that Slemmer, who was attending the Knoxville Job Corps alongside Pike, had a lot of potential.
“It pulls at your heartstrings that this 19-year-old girl that had a lot of potential, was not aggressive, was not violent, was not mean spirited. Her life was shortened,” he said. “She was a bright young woman. She had interest in computers. She was applying herself there. She was clearly an innocent party in this.”
Slemmer was murdered after Pike and her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp invited her out into the woods. Pike cut Slemmer’s throat, struck her with a meat cleaver and a piece of asphalt before they carved a pentagram into her forehead and chest, according to court documents. Pike also kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull.
Keith said that Pike “represents pure evil.”
In other interviews, Keith said he was still troubled by what he saw overseeing the case.
“I saw quite a bit, and it’s imprinted in my brain, my memory. I’ll never forget it,” he told WVLT8. “Pike tortured this victim for nearly an hour with a box cutter, cutting her numerous times. Carving a pentagram on her chest before she crushed her skull with a piece of asphalt.”
After Wednesday’s botched execution, Keith speculated that there would not be any more executions in Tennessee for a while.
“In certain states, they don’t seem to botch executions — Texas, Florida, Alabama, South Carolina, and a number of other states. They just don’t botch them,” he said. “I’d be surprised if there are any executions in Tennessee, in the near term, if ever again.”
Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee ordered a review of the botched Pike execution and paused all executions in the state for the rest of the year. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), expected to become the state’s next governor, said she would resurrect the electric chair as the method of capital punishment once she takes office.
