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THE DEVIL ON DEATH ROW
Episode One: The Pentagram
In January 1995, nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer walked away from the Knoxville Job Corps Center with three other students. The following morning, her body was discovered on the University of Tennessee agricultural campus. She had been subjected to a prolonged attack, and carved into her chest was a symbol America had spent more than a decade learning to fear: a pentagram. TDW_Pike_1
In Episode One of The Devil on Death Row, we return to the fading years of the Satanic Panic, when allegations of secret cults, ritual abuse and devil worship had moved from horror movies into police departments, courtrooms and American living rooms. By 1995, much of that panic was beginning to collapse beneath the weight of its own extraordinary claims. Then Colleen Slemmer was murdered, and the crime contained genuinely documented Satanic imagery: Christa Pike and her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp were observed wearing pentagram necklaces, Pike had experimented with occult imagery before the murder, and a forensic psychiatrist would later testify that the crime contained “satanic elements,” while characterizing what he saw as adolescent dabbling rather than evidence of an organized cult. TDW_Pike_1
But behind the pentagrams was something considerably more human. Eighteen-year-old Christa Gail Pike had endured an unstable adolescence before arriving at Job Corps, where she became intensely attached to Shipp and convinced herself that Colleen wanted to take him away from her. The day before the murder, Pike reportedly told another student that she intended to kill Colleen. On January 12, four young people walked into the woods together, with Colleen believing they were going to smoke marijuana and settle their differences. TDW_Pike_1
The Satanic Panic taught America to search for elaborate explanations for evil. The Christa Pike story asks a more unsettling question: what happens when the symbols a culture creates to represent evil become part of the language young people use to commit it?
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