May Martinez does not plan to walk into Riverbend carrying another legal argument.

She does not need another psychological evaluation.

Another clemency filing.

Another discussion about intravenous access.

Another explanation of what Christa Pike experienced as a child.

If Tennessee carries out Pike’s scheduled execution on September 30, 2026, May plans to bring something much simpler.

A photograph.

Colleen Slemmer’s photograph.

Thirty-one years after her daughter was murdered, May wants Colleen’s face inside the room.

She may not need to say anything.

The picture will say what she believes decades of headlines have increasingly failed to say:

Before Christa Pike became one of America’s most closely watched death-row prisoners, there was Colleen.

Before there were appeals, clemency petitions, psychological evaluations, execution protocols and arguments about pentobarbital, there was a 19-year-old woman who left Florida because she wanted to learn about computers and build a future.

And before September 30 became a date associated with a potentially historic execution, September 20 was Colleen’s birthday.

That is the part of the story May Martinez believes is being lost.

Pike was scheduled to be executed at 10:00 a.m. Central time on September 30 at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

According to the supplied material, Tennessee had already selected official media witnesses and issued rules for the execution.

Unless a court intervened, Governor Bill Lee granted clemency, or another legal development changed the schedule, the state was preparing to carry out Pike’s death sentence.

If it proceeded, Pike would become the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1819.

That historical distinction naturally generated national attention.

So did the legal questions surrounding how Tennessee intended to execute her.

Pike’s attorneys were asking Lee to commute her death sentence to life without parole.

They pointed to her age at the crime.

Her childhood.

Abuse.

Neglect.

Sexual violence.

Mental-health problems.

Trauma.

And mitigating evidence they argue was not fully presented to the jury that sentenced her to death.

Her lawyers also challenged aspects of the lethal-injection procedure, including vascular access and the possibility of physical and psychological suffering.

Those issues generated hearings.

Filings.

Expert testimony.

News stories.

And increasingly detailed public discussions about Pike’s body and what might happen to it inside Riverbend.

May saw something different happening.

With every new development, another story was being written about Christa Pike.

Colleen’s name remained in those stories.

But increasingly, May believed, it appeared only because journalists had to explain why Pike was on death row.

The victim.

The murdered woman.

The reason for the conviction.

The reason for the sentence.

May’s concern was not simply that Colleen was receiving fewer headlines.

It was that her daughter was slowly being transformed from a person into context.

Colleen had a life before January 1995.

Her name was Colleen Slemmer.

She was born September 20, 1975.

She grew up around Orange Park, Florida.

Her mother was May Martinez.

Her stepfather was Raul Martinez.

She also had family in Pennsylvania and spent Christmas 1994 there with her father.

Knoxville was not home.

Colleen went there because she was trying to create something for herself.

She was interested in computers.

According to the source, the Job Corps program available closer to her family did not provide the training she wanted.

So in the fall of 1994, she left Florida and enrolled in the federal Job Corps program in Knoxville.

She was 19.

She wanted computer-related skills.

She wanted training that might become a career.

She worked at Wendy’s.

She cared about helping people.

None of those details sounds dramatic.

That is precisely why they matter.

True-crime stories preserve the extraordinary moment in which a life was destroyed.

Families remember everything that came before it.

A job.

Christmas.

A birthday.

A subject someone wanted to study.

A decision to leave home.

A young adult trying to work out what came next.

Those ordinary details are evidence of something no autopsy can document.

A future had been underway.

Life in Knoxville apparently was not easy.

According to accounts attributed to May in the source, Colleen complained about conditions at Job Corps.

She said other students were bothering her.

She reportedly mentioned three people without identifying them to her mother.

Still, she stayed.

She had traveled to Tennessee for a purpose.

Then she went to Pennsylvania for Christmas.

After the holiday, Colleen returned to Knoxville in early January 1995.

She expected to continue her training.

Her family did not know that she had less than two weeks left to live.

Later accounts of the case would repeatedly describe tension involving Pike’s boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp.

Court records described Pike’s belief that Colleen was interested in him and connected that belief to the conflict.

But there is a distinction that becomes more significant with time.

That was Pike’s perception.

Colleen never had decades of interviews in which to explain what she thought.

She never wrote a memoir.

She never sat for psychological evaluations about what happened between the women.

She never reached middle age and looked back on Job Corps as something that happened when she was 19.

Everyone else continued aging.

Colleen did not.

The public record about Pike became enormous.

Trials.

Appeals.

Prison behavior.

Mental-health evidence.

Legal strategies.

Execution dates.

Clemency.

Medical questions.

Colleen’s public biography remained comparatively tiny.

Computers.

Wendy’s.

Job Corps.

Christmas with her father.

Florida.

Her family.

Her birthday.

And January 1995.

On January 11, according to evidence later summarized in court proceedings, Pike told another Job Corps student that she intended to kill Colleen.

The following evening, Pike, Colleen, Tadaryl Shipp and Shadolla Peterson left the Job Corps center together.

A little more than two hours later, three of them returned.

Colleen did not.

The next morning, a University of Tennessee grounds worker found her body near the agricultural campus.

The medical evidence documented extraordinary violence.

There were extensive cuts.

Bruising.

Defensive injuries.

Massive blunt-force trauma.

Colleen’s skull had been fractured in multiple places.

Evidence indicated that she remained alive during at least part of the assault.

Witness testimony and court records described her attempting to escape and pleading for the violence to stop.

The attack lasted roughly 30 minutes to an hour.

Pieces of asphalt were used as weapons.

A pentagram was cut into her body.

The fatal injuries came from blunt-force trauma to the head.

Eventually, even the medical examiner’s method of individually identifying the injuries became overwhelmed by their number.

Those facts explain why the murder became notorious.

But what happened afterward ensured the case would remain unusually difficult for Colleen’s family.

Pike reportedly talked about the killing.

And investigators eventually recovered one piece of physical evidence that would become inseparable from the public memory of the case.

A fragment of Colleen’s skull.

According to the source, Pike showed other Job Corps students a piece of skull she said she had taken from the scene.

Investigators later recovered a bone fragment from a jacket associated with Pike.

Forensic examination matched it to the missing area of Colleen’s reconstructed skull.

For investigators, the fragment was evidence.

For prosecutors, it helped connect Pike directly to the killing.

For a jury, it became part of the proof presented in a murder case.

But for May Martinez, it was something entirely different.

It was her daughter.

That difference would matter for years.

May has said it took approximately 16 years before Colleen’s skull was returned to the family.

She has also said the particular fragment retained as evidence was later lost.

That latter point should be kept precisely where the source places it: it is May’s account.

The supplied material does not independently establish exactly what happened to the fragment after it was retained as evidence.

But the larger experience described by May is clear.

Her daughter’s physical remains became entangled with the legal life of the case.

The state needed evidence.

The family wanted Colleen back.

Both realities could exist simultaneously.

For the justice system, retaining evidence can be necessary because convictions remain subject to review.

For a mother, that same evidence is part of the body of the child she is trying to bury and mourn.

That collision between procedure and grief is almost impossible to capture in a case number.

A skull fragment can be an exhibit.

It can also be someone’s daughter.

That is why the following three decades created two radically different timelines.

The murder happened in one night.

The legal consequences continued for more than 30 years.

Appeals followed.

Pike at one point sought to abandon further appeals and accelerate the process.

Litigation later continued.

While incarcerated, she was convicted in connection with a violent attack on another prisoner.

Authorities also investigated an escape plot involving a correctional officer.

Every development created another date.

Another filing.

Another headline.

Another reason for Colleen’s family to return mentally to January 1995.

The courts had to ask whether Pike’s conviction and sentence remained legally valid.

May was living through a completely different kind of review.

The evidence did not become old evidence to her.

The injuries did not become historical facts.

The skull did not become merely an exhibit.

The murdered 19-year-old did not become a case citation.

That difference explains some of May’s frustration with the final litigation surrounding Pike’s execution.

For years, May had been forced to confront what happened to Colleen’s body.

Now much of the legal and public conversation was examining what might happen to Pike’s body.

Could Tennessee establish IV access?

Would Pike’s veins create difficulty?

Could lethal injection produce serious pain?

Could her PTSD make the execution process psychologically harmful?

Should Tennessee alter the procedure?

Those are legitimate legal questions.

A government does not lose its constitutional obligations because a crime was exceptionally brutal.

A condemned prisoner retains legal rights.

May’s frustration does not erase them.

But the contrast is emotionally stark.

May spent decades knowing how extensively her daughter was injured.

Then, as the execution approached, she watched public attention focus intensely on whether the woman convicted of killing Colleen might suffer.

For a court, those subjects can be separated.

For Colleen’s mother, separation is much harder.

And that leads to a problem extending far beyond this case.

What happens when the offender becomes more famous than the victim?

True crime naturally gravitates toward the person whose behavior is difficult to understand.

Why did she do it?

What was her childhood like?

What diagnosis did she receive?

Did she feel remorse?

What happened in prison?

Did she change?

What did her lawyers argue?

What will her final meal be?

What will she say before death?

How will the execution work?

Each new question generates another story about the offender.

The victim cannot generate new developments.

Colleen cannot respond to Pike’s clemency petition.

She cannot be interviewed about the conflict at Job Corps.

She cannot tell journalists what she hoped to accomplish with computer training.

She cannot describe what she wanted at 25.

Or 30.

Or 40.

Or 50.

The offender continues producing a public biography because she remains alive.

The victim’s biography stops.

That is the imbalance May is confronting.

Pike’s attorneys are asking Tennessee to look backward.

They want the governor to examine the circumstances that shaped Pike before the murder—abuse, trauma, instability, mental illness and mitigation they say the original jury did not fully understand.

May is also asking people to look backward.

But she wants them to look in another direction.

Before the autopsy.

Before the crime-scene photographs.

Before the trial.

Before the skull fragment became evidence.

Look at Colleen.

Those two requests do not have to cancel each other out.

A justice system can examine a defendant’s history without denying a victim’s humanity.

A journalist can accurately explain mitigation without treating the murder victim as a narrative accessory.

And acknowledging Colleen does not, by itself, answer whether Pike should be executed.

The death-penalty question remains separate.

May’s own position is clear in the source.

She supports Pike’s death sentence.

She believes Pike should be held fully accountable.

At the same time, May has acknowledged that an execution will not restore Colleen.

Nothing Tennessee does to Pike can reverse January 1995.

No court ruling can bring a 19-year-old woman home.

No execution can return the years Colleen never lived.

May and Raul Martinez nevertheless intended to travel from Florida to Tennessee if Pike’s execution proceeded.

Even that journey carried a cost.

Raul is described in the source as a disabled veteran.

The couple lives on a fixed income.

Their trip would require approximately 10 to 11 hours of driving each way.

Gas.

Food.

A hotel.

Care for animals left at home.

According to their account, the financial burden was serious enough that they were prepared, if necessary, to delay a mortgage payment for a month.

A local organization helped raise money for May.

That detail strips away the abstraction surrounding a nationally discussed execution.

For journalists, September 30 is an assignment.

For lawyers, it is a deadline.

For Tennessee, it is an operation.

For May and Raul, it means calculating whether they can afford the gasoline and hotel rooms necessary to be present for what may be the final official act arising from Colleen’s murder.

Thirty-one years later, the crime is still costing the family something.

September makes the timing even more difficult.

Colleen was born September 20.

Pike’s execution was scheduled for September 30.

Ten days.

If Colleen had lived, she would turn 51 in 2026.

That number reveals what photographs cannot.

Publicly, Colleen remains a young woman from the 1990s.

Her mother does not.

May has aged through every appeal.

Every hearing.

Every postponement.

Every anniversary.

Every September birthday.

Colleen’s photographs never change.

There should have been others.

Photographs at 25.

At 30.

At 40.

At 50.

Maybe photographs from a career involving computers.

Maybe another career entirely.

Relationships.

Friends.

Arguments.

Birthdays.

Phone calls home.

Perhaps children.

Perhaps not.

Those possibilities cannot responsibly be turned into claims about the life Colleen definitely would have lived.

They are possibilities precisely because murder removed her ability to choose among them.

That is what the number 51 represents.

Not a hypothetical biography.

Lost possibility.

The appeals received three decades.

Colleen did not.

And that brings the story back to the photograph.

If the execution proceeded and May was permitted to witness it, she intended to carry Colleen’s picture.

According to the source, May suggested she might not need to speak to Pike.

From her perspective, the apology or acknowledgment she wanted had never arrived in the way she needed it.

After 31 years, another conversation might change nothing.

So she would bring Colleen instead.

There is an unavoidable symbolism in that choice.

In 1995, prosecutors presented evidence that Pike carried a physical fragment of Colleen away from the crime scene.

In 2026, Colleen’s mother planned to carry her daughter’s image into the place where Tennessee intended to end Pike’s life.

One was evidence taken from a murder scene.

The other was a mother’s attempt to make sure the murdered young woman remained visible at the conclusion of the case.

The photograph would not determine whether the execution was constitutional.

It would not answer Pike’s clemency arguments.

It would not resolve America’s debate over capital punishment.

And it would not bring Colleen home.

It would do something smaller.

It would put her face back into the room.

That may be the most important distinction in this entire story.

Pike’s childhood can matter.

Her trauma can be examined.

Her age can be considered.

Her mental health can be evaluated.

Her attorneys can challenge the execution procedure.

Governor Bill Lee can consider clemency.

Courts can examine constitutional claims.

May Martinez can support the death sentence.

Others can oppose it.

None of those positions requires Colleen to disappear.

Victim-centered reporting does not mean suppressing facts favorable to a defendant.

It does not mean deciding the punishment before examining the evidence.

It means remembering that the victim possessed a biography independent of the crime.

Colleen was not born in January 1995.

She did not exist merely to become the victim in Christa Pike’s case.

She was born September 20, 1975.

She grew up around Orange Park.

She worked at Wendy’s.

She was interested in computers.

She left Florida because she wanted training that could lead somewhere.

She spent Christmas with her father.

Then she returned to Knoxville believing she had more life ahead of her.

She was wrong.

Not because she failed.

Not because her plans were unrealistic.

But because someone else violently ended her ability to make them real.

Thirty-one years later, the justice system was still deciding what the state should ultimately do with Christa Pike.

May Martinez was trying to preserve something more basic.

Her daughter’s identity.

Before Christa Pike was a death-row inmate whose execution method became national news, Colleen Slemmer was alive.

Before September 30 became part of Tennessee history, September 20 belonged to Colleen.

And if May walked into Riverbend carrying that photograph, she would not need it to answer the legal questions surrounding Christa Pike.

She would carry it because after three decades of everyone discussing the woman who survived that January night, May wanted the room to contain the face of the young woman who did not.