For more than three decades, Colleen Slemmer has been remembered largely through the circumstances of her death. Now, as the execution of the woman convicted of killing her has been halted at the last moment, renewed attention has turned to who Slemmer was before she became the victim at the centre of one of Tennessee's most notorious murder cases.
Slemmer was 19 when she died in Knoxville, Tennessee, in January 1995. Christa Pike, then 18, tortured and killed her in an isolated area near the University of Tennessee campus. A jury convicted Pike of first-degree murder and sentenced her to death.
