From Satan To Sharia: Christa Pike’s Killer Ex-Boyfriend Converts To Islam

He once dabbled in devil worship. Now he apparently prays toward Mecca.

Tadaryl Shipp, the then-teenage accomplice in the gruesome 1995 “Job Corps murder” alongside Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike, appears to have converted to Islam in prison. State records list him under the alias Abdul Khalip.

In 2016, Shipp went to federal court demanding halal meals and Islamic prayer oils behind bars, Fox News investigative reporter Michael Ruiz was first to report. He lost.

Shipp explored satanism when he was a teenager, and after the murder of Colleen Slemmer, investigators found satanic paraphernalia in his dorm room. He and Pike were also reportedly sporting matching pentagram pendants when cops slapped the cuffs on them.

Shipp, now 49, is locked up at Tennessee’s Northwest Correctional Complex. His latest mugshot, from June 2024, shows a bespectacled man with a graying beard. He’ll get another chance at parole in October 2031. The parole board turned him down at his first hearing last October, citing the seriousness of the crime.

On January 12, 1995, Shipp, then 17, and his 18-year-old girlfriend Pike lured 19-year-old classmate Slemmer to a secluded spot on the University of Tennessee’s agricultural campus in Knoxville. The jealous Pike believed Slemmer had her eyes set on her boyfriend.

What followed was a nightmare. Prosecutors say Shipp pinned Slemmer down when she tried to flee and carved pentagrams into her chest and face. Pike slashed the terrified teen dozens of times before smashing her skull with a hunk of asphalt. She then took a piece of the girl’s skull as a souvenir and showed it off to a classmate.

Retired Knoxville Police Chief Phil Keith, who spent nearly 34 years on the force, said the scene ranked among the worst he ever saw.

“It was a grotesque crime scene,” he told Fox News.

Because Shipp was a juvenile, the death penalty could not be used. He got life for first-degree murder plus 25 years for conspiracy.

Pike was sentenced to die.

A third participant, Shadolla Peterson, pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact, testified against both of her friends, and got probation.

Pike allegedly tried to strangle a fellow inmate with a shoelace in 2001 and reportedly plotted a prison break with a pen pal in 2012.

Last Wednesday, Tennessee tried to execute her, but it didn’t work.

Two doses of pentobarbital failed to kill Pike, who had asked for a different method of execution. Pike was rushed to a hospital, where she remains in critical condition.

Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee, who had rejected her clemency plea just days earlier, called the failed execution “deeply disturbing.” He ordered an independent review and halted the state’s remaining executions this year.

Pike’s lawyers are now demanding her sentence be commuted.

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, traveled to Nashville to watch Pike’s execution.