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Thread: Christa Gail Pike - Tennessee Death Row

  1. #21
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Pair planned to copy jail key for prison escape

    An indictment against two men, including a former correctional officer, says the two planned to make a copy of a prison key in a plot to free Tennessee's only female death row inmate.

    Donald Joseph Kohut and Justin Wesley Heflin were arrested this week in what authorities say was a foiled plot to break out Christa Gail Pike, who has been on death row since 1996 for the slaying of a Knoxville Job Corps student.

    The unsealed indictment says in January, Kohut and Heflin, who worked as a guard at the Tennessee Prison for Women where Pike is held, arranged to trace a prison key and have it copied to be used in the escape attempt.

    The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has said an escape was not imminent.

    http://www.wbir.com/news/article/212...-prison-escape
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  2. #22
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    Raritan Township man charged in Tennessee prison break plot awaits transfer

    Flemington attorney William Deni had never heard of Donald Joseph Kohut Jr. until he got a call from the county jail in Flemington.

    Kohut, a 34-year-old personal trainer living in the township, needed help, and fast. He wanted to go quickly to Tennessee to face bizarre charges that he was involved in a scheme to help a female inmate on death row escape from the Tennessee Prison for Women.

    The woman, Christa Gail Pike, 36, became the youngest woman in the United States to receive the death sentence after she was convicted of killing a teenager in 1996 in a romance-fueled slaying in which she carved a pentagram into her victim's chest and pocketed a piece of her skull as a trophy.

    A friend of Kohut had suggested Deni. When the lawyer went to jail to meet with his new client, they didn’t talk much about the charges, but according to the lawyer, Kohut called it all “a misunderstanding.”

    Deni, who was an assistant prosecutor for the county more than 30 years ago and over the years had handled countless criminal defense cases, left the jail and went to the Criminal Case Management office, where he arranged for Kohut to sign a waiver of extradition. That document allows a person charged with a crime in another state to waive the requirement that a hearing be held in the state the defendant is in, for a judge to decided that there is legal reason for the fugitive to be released to the state pressing charges.

    Kohut signed the waiver on Wednesday, March 21 and this week was waiting for Tennessee authorities to come to New Jersey and get him. Deni has been contacting attorneys in Tennessee about handling the case there.

    “He wants to get to Tennessee as soon as possible,” Deni said. As of Tuesday, Kohut was still in the Hunterdon jail.

    According to the lawyer, Kohut works as a personal trainer for people, going to their homes or offices to help them with exercise programs. He is not affiliated with a gym.

    He also has some other businesses, Deni said, but he did not know any details. During the jail visit, Kohut asked him for help in a civil case here, in which he is a defendant. It was filed by the lender of a mortgage loan. Kohut is supposed to be in court April 2 on that matter.

    Deni said he would be sending a letter to the judge, informing the court that Kohut will be unavailable.

    Officials haven’t said how Kohut met Pike, but despite the distance the friendship intensified. Last July, authorities say, Kohut began visiting Pike, sometimes making the 850-mile trek from New Jersey to Nashville twice a month.

    In January, authorities learned Kohut apparently wanted to take the relationship to another level and, with the help of a corrections officer, began hatching a plan to break Pike out of prison.

    Kohut was arrested at his home Tuesday, March 20 and charged with bribery and conspiracy to commit escape. After Tennessee authorities became aware of the escape plan, the investigation led police to Justin Heflin, a 23-year-old corrections officer who allegedly took bribes for helping with the plan, said Kristin Helm, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations.

    Heflin was indicted in February on charges of bribery, official misconduct and conspiracy.

    Heflin's father, Johnny Heflin, said his son told him that Kohut threatened him into helping with the plot. "From what I understand, the guy threatened him and said that he would kill him and his family," Johnny Heflin said.

    Kohut, a native of Belle Mead, once wrestled for Hillsborough High School, said his father, Donald Kohut Sr. The elder Kohut expressed shock at his son's alleged involvement.

    "There's got to be some kind of misunderstanding to this whole thing," he said in a telephone interview. "There's got to be more to this."

    http://www.nj.com/hunterdon-county-d...ed_in_ten.html
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  3. #23
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    Former guard appears in court on charges in plot to break out Tenn. female death row inmate

    A former correctional officer was in court Wednesday on charges related to a plot to break out Tennessee's lone female death row inmate, Christa Gail Pike.

    Justin Heflin, of Chattanooga, was indicted last month on bribery, official misconduct, conspiracy to commit escape and facilitation to commit escape. The former correctional officer at the Tennessee Prison for Women is accused of taking money and gifts from another man, Donald Kohut, of Flemington, N.J., to help in a scheme to let Pike escape.

    Heflin, who has been released on bond, did not speak during his arraignment in Nashville on Wednesday, but his attorney, James R. Potter, of Clarksville, said his client reserved entering a plea.

    Kohut, who was arrested last week in New Jersey, has not yet been extradited to Tennessee.

    http://www.therepublic.com/view/stor...w-Escape-Plot/
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  4. #24
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Disturbing Information Released About Death Row Inmate

    Did convicted killer Christa Pike use her "charm" to hatch a plot to bust her out of Tennessee's Death Row?

    Newly released information revealed that the two men facing charges in the plot to get Pike out of jail weren't the only men interested in her during her stay on death row.

    23-year-old Justin Heflin, a former correctional officer at the Tennessee Prison for Women, and 34-year old Donald Kohut, a New Jersey man, who frequently visited Pike in prison were arrested in connection with the plot to free her.

    Another man, who identifies himself as Pike's former fiancé, Eric Gein, said Pike had a certain "southern charm". In an interview with Inside Edition, Gein says that he and Pike exchanged love letters while she was in prison, and some of them were disturbing.

    In one letter Pike said she has "this great need to be physical with another human being. Be it good or evil ... whether "To hold a child or to slit a grown man's abdomen open and watch his guts fall to the ground".

    Pike is on death row for the 1995 torture slaying of Colleen Slemmer. She also attempted to murder a fellow female inmate in 2004.

    http://www.newschannel5.com/story/17...ath-row-inmate
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  5. #25
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Death Row Inmate Seeks Post Conviction Relief

    Death row inmate Christa Pike spent the day in court hoping to convince a judge to throw out one of her murder convictions.

    Pike was in court Monday seeking a post-conviction relief of the 25 year sentence she got for trying to kill a fellow inmate while on death row. Pike was charged with trying to kill fellow inmate Patricia Jones.

    Jones took the stand to tell her side of the story.

    Officials said that even if Pike could get that conviction thrown out, she would still be facing the death penalty for the torture and murder of a woman in 1994.

    The judge decided to finish up today's hearing at a later date.

    http://www.newschannel5.com/story/17...viction-relief
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  6. #26
    Member Newbie allfourjacks's Avatar
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    Here is a site I found with info about the letters and more on the moms take on all of this. Its dated the 23rd of March, 2012. The link is:

    http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2012/ma...r/?partner=RSS
    "It's ok to do for others knowing they won't do anything for you"

  7. #27
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    NJ Man Brought To Nashville For Alleged Escape Plot

    One of the men accused of planning an escape plot to break out the only woman on Tennessee's death row has been brought to Nashville.

    Donald Kohut, 34, was booked in the Davidson County jail Thursday night, after being extradited from New Jersey.

    Kohut is a New Jersey-native who frequently visited death row inmate Christa Pike in prison.

    Kohut, and Justin Heflin, a former guard at the Tennessee Prison for Women, were charged last month, for trying to help Pike escape.

    Pike was only 20 when she was sentenced to death in 1996 for the brutal murder of Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville in 1995. Pike is also serving time for allegedly trying to strangle a fellow inmate, Patricia Jones, to death with a shoe lace in 2004.

    The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said there was never an imminent threat of escape.

    http://www.newschannel5.com/story/17...ed-escape-plot
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  8. #28
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    Female death row inmate to challenge conviction

    The inmate at the center of a death row escape plot was expected back in court Thursday to fight a 2004 conviction for the attempted murder of another inmate on a maximum security cell block.

    Christa Pike, 36, says she received ineffective counsel, officials said. Pike's attorney, Nashville lawyer Graham Prichard, has declined to comment.

    Pike used a shoestring to try to choke inmate Patricia Jones to death after another female started a fire in the prison to distract the guards. Jones, who is also serving time for murder, liked to taunt Pike about her upcoming execution by making electric chair sounds, according to court testimony.

    Pike claimed she was only defending a friend in prison Jones had threatened. Pike's friend was Natasha Cornett, the ringleader in a group of Kentucky teenagers that abducted a family at an east Tennessee rest stop before killing the parents and one of their children.

    A judge sentenced Pike to serve an additional 25 years after a trial where prosecutors played telephone conversations prison officials secretly recorded where the inmate told her mother she planned to attack Jones.

    "The conversations really paint Christa Pike as someone who is cold and calculating and willing to kill someone else who gets in her way," Nashville prosecutor Kathy Morante said.

    Pike was sentenced to death in a separate case, the 1995 murder of fellow Knoxville Job Corps student Colleen Slemmer, and currently is Tennessee's only woman on death row.

    Morante said that even though Pike was already serving a death sentence, the state had to prosecute her for trying to kill the inmate, if only to send a message that dangerous behavior in prison won't be tolerated.

    "You can't let it just become a Wild West situation where the state says, 'You're just on your own and do whatever you want and there won't be any sanctions.'"

    Last month, authorities said two men were indicted in a plot to free Pike. The men, one of them a former prison guard and the other a personal trainer from New Jersey, have been accused of plotting to make a copy of a prison key to help Pike escape.

    Pike, who lived in West Virginia and North Carolina before coming to Tennessee, now is being held in solitary confinement, prison officials said.

    The recent indictment put all the focus back on Pike again, said Slemmer's mother.

    "She has gotten so much attention," May Martinez said. "My daughter literally begged for her life for 45 minutes while Christa was chopping her into pieces."

    In the 1995 killing that put Pike on death row, prosecutors have said the motive for the murder was jealousy because of a love triangle involving Slemmer and Pike's then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp.

    They lured the 19-year-old Slemmer to a remote area of the University of Tennessee campus and beat and stabbed her for at least 30 minutes before bashing her head in with a piece of asphalt. They carved a pentagram into Slemmer's chest before she died, and afterward Pike, who was 18 at the time, took a piece of the victim's skull as a souvenir.

    Martinez, of Orange Park, Fla., said Pike has free reign at the prison, getting her hair, nails and makeup done and getting nearly anything she wants.

    Pike has had a long history of problems in prison, racking up 38 disciplinary infractions since April of 1997.

    She's been disciplined repeatedly for drug possession, assault and mutilation. Officials did not provide details about the mutilation, but records dating back to 2004 show Pike seduced a guard. Authorities made the discovery after finding letters indicating the pair had developed a romantic relationship after the guard resigned from his post, said Dorinda Carter, a spokeswoman for the prison system.

    Also while in prison, Pike wrote love letters to Johnny Lee Fryman, a Satan-worshipping inmate in Ohio who killed a 21-year-old waitress in his "sorcery room" before severing her body parts.

    http://www.necn.com/04/12/12/Female-...a326cc045ba62c
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  9. #29
    Passed away. Rob's Avatar
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    They need to stop letting Christa play the system and execute her. I'm ashamed of Tennessee's lack of 'balls' these days. Christa will be a threat as long as she is living and breathing. I just pray she doesn't sit on DR long enough that some bleeding heart governor pardons her. Who knows, after 30 years or so, she might be a "changed woman."

  10. #30
    Administrator Michael's Avatar
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    I second your opinion Rob. It´s a shame what´s going on there.
    No murder can be so cruel that there are not still useful imbeciles who do gloss over the murderer and apologize.

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