May Martinez has spent more than three decades waiting. Waiting for a trial to end. Waiting for appeals to be exhausted. Waiting for a piece of her daughter’s skull to be returned so she could bury her whole. On Wednesday, she will be in Nashville, front row, watching Christa Pike die.
The mother of Colleen Slemmer, the 19-year-old Job Corps student tortured and murdered in Knoxville in January 1995, has been the quiet constant in a case that has consumed Tennessee for over thirty years. While Pike’s defenders argue about childhood trauma and adolescent brain development, Martinez has been fighting a simpler, more brutal battle: to see the sentence carried out and to finally lay her daughter to rest.
Here’s where Colleen Slemmer’s family is now, and what they’ve endured to get here.
May Martinez: The Mother Who Never Stopped Fighting
May Martinez lives in Florida, but she has spent years traveling to Tennessee for court hearings, appeals, and now, the execution. She and her husband, Raul Martinez, Slemmer’s stepfather, have been the public face of the victim’s family throughout the saga.
An online campaign raised funds to defray their travel expenses so they could be in Nashville when the state carries out its penalty on September 30. The campaign organizer said May and Raul “were unaware of the love and support their family has right now.”
Martinez has described her daughter as a sweet, helpful child who loved roller-skating and volunteered with the Special Olympics. She was studying computers at Job Corps, hoping to build a career in technology.
“She was easygoing. She was a computer geek to begin with. She and my husband would build and tear apart the computers constantly,” Martinez said. “She trusted everybody, and that was her downfall.”
The Phone Call That Ended Everything
On the night of January 12, 1995, Slemmer called her mother. The reception was bad, the call kept dropping. Martinez told her she’d call back later.
When she tried again at 9:30 p.m., the line rang unanswered. By then, Slemmer had already been lured to her death.
The next morning, Martinez returned home to Jacksonville and found a message on her answering machine from a Knoxville detective. Her husband feared the worst. He was right.
The Fight for Her Daughter’s Remains
Perhaps the most haunting detail of this case is one that has nothing to do with Pike’s guilt or her appeals.
After the murder, Pike took a fragment of Slemmer’s skull back to campus and bragged about it. That fragment became a piece of evidence, kept by the state for years.
When the family buried Slemmer, they didn’t know the skull wasn’t included in the cremated remains they received. Martinez learned months later that her daughter’s remains were incomplete.
“I don’t feel that my daughter deserves to have most of her body here and part of her body there,” Martinez said in 2001, when prosecutors finally agreed not to object to returning the skull.
She wanted to bury it with the rest of Slemmer’s remains in Pennsylvania, where Slemmer’s father had a grave plot. It took more than a decade for a court to order the return of the skull to her family.
“That was the hardest thing in the world, to watch your daughter’s skull be passed around,” Martinez said.
“Nobody Remembers Colleen”
As Pike’s execution date approached, Martinez expressed a different kind of grief: the fear that her daughter has been reduced to a footnote in a story about her killer.
“Nobody,” she said, “remembers Colleen.”
She has kept every memory of her daughter’s life: books she read, a teddy bear made from an old t-shirt of Slemmer’s, Christmas ornaments with purple lights, her favorite color.
“Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst. Colleen’s birthday was last week. She would have been 51,” Martinez said in September 2026.
Her Position on the Execution
Martinez has been unequivocal. She wants Pike to die. She has said she will be there, front row, holding up a picture of her daughter to ensure it’s the last thing Pike sees.
“It doesn’t give me satisfaction whether she’s killed or not, but if she’s alive, I know she’ll hurt someone else or kill again, so I’ll take comfort knowing she can’t,” she told the Daily Mail.
“Maybe now finally we have the justice,” she told WATE. “It may not bring my daughter back but it might save another person from getting killed because she will do it again.”
She has rejected the argument that Pike has changed. “Nobody could ever, ever convince me she’s changed,” she said.
The Bottom Line
Colleen Slemmer’s family is in Tennessee. May Martinez and her husband Raul are preparing to witness the execution of the woman who murdered their daughter. They have waited 31 years for this moment.
They have fought to recover Slemmer’s remains. They have fought for the sentence to be carried out. They have fought against being forgotten.
On Wednesday, Martinez will be front row, holding a photo of Colleen. She has said that after this, she can “start living again.” Whether that’s possible after three decades of grief is a question only she can answer.
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