Updated October 1st 2026.

On Wednesday morning, about an hour before the State of Tennessee was set to execute Christa Pike, a federal appeals court stopped it. This is the story of how she got there, and of the nineteen-year-old girl thirty years of headlines mostly forgot.

It's a Thursday night in January of 1995, and May Martinez's phone is ringing in Orange Park, Florida. It's her daughter, Colleen, calling from Knoxville, Tennessee, five hundred miles up the interstate, where she's living at a Job Corps center in an old Holiday Inn on Dale Avenue. The call keeps breaking up. So May hangs up and calls her back.

Colleen's gone out.

At about eight o'clock that night, four students signed out at the front desk of that building and walked off toward the University of Tennessee. A couple of hours later, three of those names came back in.

This is Colleen's story, told from where her mother stood: a bad phone connection, a sign-out book, a trial, a deal the jury never heard about, three kids from one building sent to three very different places, and thirty years of waiting for the rest of that phone call.

Recorded on September 30, 2026, the day of the stay. Things may have moved since.

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Content note: this episode describes the killing of a nineteen-year-old woman, quotes a jailhouse letter in crude language, and refers to claims of childhood sexual abuse made in court filings. I don't dwell on any of it, but some details are hard to hear. If that's not for you today, sit this one out. There'll be another one.

ON THE BLOG — Everything I found for this episode is posted at Section29.com: the court opinions, a map of the walk from Dale Avenue to the university, and a timeline of the whole case, from that phone call to this week. There's a good deal there I didn't have room for.

IF YOU KNOW SOMETHING — If you knew Colleen, or you were at the Knoxville Job Corps center on Dale Avenue in 1994 or 1995, or you know what happened to that front-desk sign-out book or the Knoxville police file, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out at Section29.com. And if you have a forgotten case you'd like me to dig into, send it along. I'm always looking for the next one.

A NOTE ON THE AUDIO — I narrate every episode of this show myself. I use AI tools in the edit to clean that narration up: levels, noise, the rough edges you get recording in a room that isn't a studio. The voice is mine and the read is mine. The software just makes it easier to listen to.

MUSIC — Music by TrackTribe, copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com

FIND THE SHOW — Blog: Section29.com · YouTube: Section29 · Facebook: Forgotten True Crime

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