“You’re a little whore
who deserves to be
punished. I’m the
Devil’s daughter, and
tonight I’ll drink your
blood!”
she was half-naked. But she slipped in
the mud and fell to the ground. Shipp,
who had been watching the affray, picked
her up and carried her into some bushes.
But it wasn’t sex that awaited her. It was
the other two girls, Christa and Shadolla,
more threatening than ever.
Christa stuffed a bandana into
Colleen’s mouth and then for the next
hour Colleen was stabbed and slashed
hundreds of times with a meat cleaver
and a box cutter that Christa had
brought with her.
As Colleen lay on the ground bleeding
from her multiple wounds Christa
taunted her: “You’re a little whore who
deserves to be punished. I’m the Devil’s
daughter, and tonight I’ll drink your
blood!”
O
n Saturday, January 14th, 1995
officers went to the abandoned
steam mill and found Colleen’s mutilated
body. Her death was horrific enough,
with the satanic symbol on her breasts,
her cut throat, and the multiple stab
wounds, but when her killer was revealed
as another girl student it seemed almost
too shocking to be true.
The truth came out when other
students from the local Job Corps centre
began ringing the police. Names were
named, and Christa, Shadolla Peterson
and Tadaryl Shipp were brought in for
questioning.
At first, they denied all knowledge of
the murder. Then they were separated,
and the investigators made them repeat
their stories over and over again. The
cracks appeared, and the obvious lies
seeped through the cracks.
At last they gave in and confessed, and
the detectives pieced together a scenario
that seemed straight out of a snuff
movie. Christa was taken back to the old
steam mill and all the detritus that lay
around it, where the police videotaped a
re-enactment of her in the murder.
Meanwhile, the disturbing idea that
lay behind the gruesome murder was
revealed to investigators when they
searched the suspects’ rooms. In Christa’s
quarters they found a satanic bible and a
figurine of Satan. In Shipp’s room they
found a pentagram necklace. And in
Christa’s leather jacket pocket they found
that piece of Colleen’s skull.
Detective Randy York turned the piece
of skull over in his hand. Was it just a
macabre memento? Some late-night
research into satanic crime scenes swiftly
enlightened him.
He learned that Satanists believe that
a body has to be whole for its soul to
escape. By keeping the skull fragment in
her possession, Christa believed she held
the soul captive. She truly was the Devil’s
daughter.
She was also now completely
cooperative. She was happy to tell
Detective York what had happened down
by the old steam mill.
“When I slashed Colleen’s face, a voice
told me to go ahead and kill her,” she
said nonchalantly. “The voice repeatedly
told me to do it, until I finally gave in.”
“Is this a confession?” the detective
asked her.
Christa nodded her head. “Yes,” she
replied.S
he made a statement in which she
said she and Colleen had been having
problems for some time. She claimed to
have woken one night to find Colleen
standing over her with a knife.
“She was trying to get my boyfriend
and she’s been running her mouth
everywhere,” Christa told the detective.
“She deliberately provoked me because
she knew that I would be terminated
from the Job Corps programme the next
time I got into a fight with her.
“I didn’t plan to kill her. I intended
only to fight her and let her know to leave
me the hell alone.”Christa carved the flesh on
the back of her victim using a
razor-like box-cutter bladeAbove, Tyson Park, Knoxville.
Colleen was lured here by Christa.
Right, her broken and mutilated
half-naked body as it was
discovered on January 14th, 1995centre and return two hours later minus
Colleen, and had thought nothing of it.
But that evening Christa went to Kim’s
room at the centre. “I killed Colleen, like
I said I would,” she announced. She then
produced the bloodstained fragment of
Colleen’s skull as proof, and described
in detail how she had performed the
murder.
Kim would later say that while Christa
was recounting the butchery, she was
dancing around in a circle, smiling and
singing, “la, la, la.”
“I threw a big piece of asphalt at her
head,” Christa told Kim. “When it broke
into pieces I threw those at her as well. I
used a meat cleaver to cut her back and a
box cutter to cut her throat.”
Next day Kim asked her what she had
done with the piece of the victim’s skull.
Christa replied: “It’s in my pocket, and
I’m eating breakfast with it.”
Christa told another student, Stephanie
Wilson, the same story, pointing to
brown spots on her shoes and saying,
“That ain’t mud on my shoes, that’s
blood.” She showed her grisly trophy,
which she had wrapped in a napkin, to
Stephanie as well.
“I slashed her throat six times and beat
her on the head with a rock,” Christa told
Stephanie. “Her brains and blood were
pouring out.”
For whatever reason, neither Kim nor
Stephanie reported Christa’s claims to
anyone. But the story was out; it took
wings, and it flew straight into Knoxville
police headquarters.Methodically she carved a pentagram- a five-pointed star associated with the
occult – deeply into the student’s bare
breasts.
Colleen died slowly. Christa leaned
over her, taunting her with the words,
“Colleen, do you know who’s doing this
to you?” to make sure her victim knew
her voice before she died.
Incredibly Colleen was still alive. She
died only when her attackers smashed
her skull with chunks of asphalt. As the
skull split, Christa fished a piece of it
out of the gaping open hole in her head
and slipped the blood-soaked fragment
into her jacket pocket. Leaving the body
where it lay, the attackers went to a
nearby service station to change their
bloodstained clothes.
Next day all was normal at the Job
Corps centre. Kim Iloilo, to whom
Christa had confided her killing plan,
had seen the quartet leave the Job Corps