The Devil Within

THE DEVIL ON DEATH ROW

Episode Two: The Devil in the Woods

Hours after nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer was tortured and murdered in the woods outside Knoxville, Christa Pike went to breakfast. According to trial testimony, she was carrying something almost impossible to comprehend: a fragment of Colleen’s skull, taken from the murder scene as a souvenir. Pike reportedly showed the bone to other students, pointed to blood on her shoes and openly described what had happened the night before. TDW_Pike_2

In Episode Two of The Devil on Death Row, we return to the woods to reconstruct Colleen’s final hour and examine the Satanic imagery that became inseparable from the crime. The attack lasted somewhere between thirty minutes and an hour, and when Colleen’s body was examined, investigators found a pentagram carved into her chest. But the occult connection went deeper: at Tadaryl Shipp’s later trial, another student testified that days before the murder Shipp had spoken about the need for a human sacrifice because the celestial bodies were in alignment. TDW_Pike_2

As Christa goes on trial, psychiatrists attempt to answer the question that had haunted the case from the beginning. Was this a Satanic murder, or were troubled teenagers borrowing the imagery of Satanism to give jealousy, rage and violence a darker mythology? The jury ultimately finds Pike guilty of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy, and Tennessee chooses the ultimate punishment: death by electrocution. TDW_Pike_2

The Satanic Panic taught America to believe extraordinary evil required an extraordinary explanation. Christa Pike offered something considerably more disturbing: perhaps people don't need the Devil to commit monstrous acts. Sometimes they simply borrow his language.

Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a 5-star rating and review. Watch and subscribe on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, turn on notifications, and join the conversation at @thedevilwithinpod. Stories and tips: mailto:info@eviocreative.com
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THE DEVIL ON DEATH ROW

Episode One: The Pentagram

In January 1995, nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer walked away from the Knoxville Job Corps Center with three other students. The following morning, her body was discovered on the University of Tennessee agricultural campus. She had been subjected to a prolonged attack, and carved into her chest was a symbol America had spent more than a decade learning to fear: a pentagram. TDW_Pike_1

In Episode One of The Devil on Death Row, we return to the fading years of the Satanic Panic, when allegations of secret cults, ritual abuse and devil worship had moved from horror movies into police departments, courtrooms and American living rooms. By 1995, much of that panic was beginning to collapse beneath the weight of its own extraordinary claims. Then Colleen Slemmer was murdered, and the crime contained genuinely documented Satanic imagery: Christa Pike and her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp were observed wearing pentagram necklaces, Pike had experimented with occult imagery before the murder, and a forensic psychiatrist would later testify that the crime contained “satanic elements,” while characterizing what he saw as adolescent dabbling rather than evidence of an organized cult. TDW_Pike_1

But behind the pentagrams was something considerably more human. Eighteen-year-old Christa Gail Pike had endured an unstable adolescence before arriving at Job Corps, where she became intensely attached to Shipp and convinced herself that Colleen wanted to take him away from her. The day before the murder, Pike reportedly told another student that she intended to kill Colleen. On January 12, four young people walked into the woods together, with Colleen believing they were going to smoke marijuana and settle their differences. TDW_Pike_1

The Satanic Panic taught America to search for elaborate explanations for evil. The Christa Pike story asks a more unsettling question: what happens when the symbols a culture creates to represent evil become part of the language young people use to commit it?

Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a 5-star rating and review. Watch and subscribe on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, turn on notifications, and join the conversation at @thedevilwithinpod. Have a story or tip for the show? Email mailto:info@eviocreative.com
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THE DEVIL’S LEDGER

Week of October 5, 2026

October has arrived across the Evio Universe, and before we get to the murder, monsters, fraud and assorted demonic activity, we have one request: vote. The midterms are approaching, and regardless of party, voting is how we hold elected officials accountable—or throw them out. Our longstanding policy remains simple: if you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain about shit. Ledger Oct 5

This week’s Creepiest Thing I Heard This Week investigates the strange online mythology forming around the upcoming supernatural horror film You Can’t Leave. Social media claims insist the filmmakers employed real occult experts to create authentic demonic rituals capable of exposing audiences to something genuinely dangerous. There’s just one problem: we couldn’t find credible evidence that any of it is true. Which raises an even better question—are we watching a modern urban legend being created in real time? Ledger Oct 5

On The Devil Within, our new three-part series The Devil on Death Row examines Christa Pike, the brutal 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, its documented Satanic imagery and its place at the dying edge of the Satanic Panic. Then we follow Pike through thirty years on death row to the extraordinary events of September 30, when Tennessee attempted to execute her with pentobarbital—and she survived. Twice. Ledger Oct 5

On Criminal Mischief, Part Two of the Tomasz Kosowski case enters the courtroom, where the plastic surgeon accused of murdering attorney Steven Cozzi makes the extraordinary decision to represent himself in a capital murder trial. Over on The Slippery, we meet former Bellum Entertainment CEO Mary Carole McDonnell and the alleged $30 million fraud built around a decidedly inconvenient detail: the enormous aerospace-family fortune she claimed to possess apparently didn't exist. Ledger Oct 5 Ledger Oct 5

Finally, This Week in Horror heads deep into the Amazon for Beware Boiuna, a good old-fashioned monster movie about a humanitarian mission that awakens a colossal serpent from Amazonian folklore—and one that has a special connection to the Evio family. Ledger Oct 5

Halloween is getting closer. The monsters are stirring. Let’s open the books.

Listen & Follow: Follow the Evio shows wherever you get your podcasts, leave a 5-star rating and review, and watch and subscribe on the Evio Creative YouTube channel with notifications turned on. Join us at @thedevilwithinpod, and we’ll see you this week across the Evio Universe.
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THE DEVIL WITHIN

GUSTAVE — Episode Three: The Hunt

For years, Patrice Faye had followed the evidence left behind by one of Africa's most notorious predators. He interviewed witnesses, mapped attacks around Lake Tanganyika, studied movements along the Rusizi River and learned the scars that distinguished one enormous Nile crocodile from every other animal in the water.

By 2002, studying Gustave was no longer enough.

Faye wanted to capture him alive.

In the final installment of our three-part investigation, The Hunt, the naturalist's obsession becomes an extraordinary field expedition. Gustave's legend has now escaped Burundi and entered the international press, bringing increasingly spectacular claims with it: hundreds of victims, gunshot wounds, attacks on massive animals and a crocodile that supposedly killed without eating. Faye himself offered a considerably more cautious estimate, saying he had documented roughly sixty deaths attributable to Gustave, perhaps fewer—a number that still could never be scientifically confirmed.

But Gustave himself was real.

His extraordinary size and distinctive scars allowed Faye to identify an individual animal moving through the enormous interconnected ecosystem of Lake Tanganyika and the Rusizi River. Capturing him alive could finally replace estimates with measurements: his true length, weight, age, physical condition and injuries could all be studied for the first time.

So Faye built a jail.

Nearly thirty feet long and weighing roughly a ton, the enormous steel cage looked more like industrial machinery than an animal trap. Cameras monitored it. Bait was placed inside. Crocodile specialist Alison Leslie joined the expedition, while filmmaker Jean-Michel Corillion documented the hunt for what would become Capturing the Killer Croc.

Eventually, something enormous approached the cage.

Then everything went wrong.

A violent storm struck. The infrared camera failed. By morning, the trap had been damaged and partially submerged—and the live goat being used as bait had vanished. Whatever happened during those missing hours was never captured on film. The cage intended to settle the mystery of Gustave had somehow produced another one.

Faye's expedition ended without its prisoner.

But Gustave didn't disappear from the story. Reports continued for years, including another reported sighting in 2009. What remained were ultimately two Gustaves: the documented animal—an exceptionally large, heavily scarred Nile crocodile photographed and filmed in the Lake Tanganyika region—and the nearly supernatural creature built around him by decades of rumor and repetition.

And then there is the final mystery.

Did Gustave ever die?

Rumors say yes. Evidence says we don't know. No verified carcass was recovered. No skull was conclusively identified. No scientific examination established when or where Gustave's life ended. That doesn't make him immortal. It simply means that the final chapter of his biological life was never documented.

Perhaps that's appropriate.

Because after three episodes spent asking what transformed Gustave into a monster, we arrive at a more uncomfortable possibility:

Maybe nothing did.

Maybe Gustave remained exactly what millions of years of evolution had designed him to be—patient, opportunistic, adaptable and capable of learning from the world around him.

Perhaps it was the world around him that changed.

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Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review. It remains one of the simplest and most effective ways to help new listeners discover the show.

Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss a new episode.

Follow @thedevilwithinpod for clips, archival material, episode imagery and more from the stories we investigate.

Have a story, mystery or case you think belongs on The Devil Within? Send it to info@eviocreative.com.

The Devil Within is written and hosted by Branden Morgan and produced by Evio Creative.
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THE DEVIL WITHIN

GUSTAVE — Episode Two: Built to Kill

What makes a predator perfect?

In Episode Two of our three-part investigation into Gustave, we leave Lake Tanganyika behind for a moment and travel to Tsavo, Kenya, in 1898, where two maneless male lions began pulling railway workers from their camps. The animals that became known as the Ghost and the Darkness terrorized the Uganda Railway project for months before Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson finally killed them. More than a century later, their preserved remains would give scientists something Patrice Faye never had with Gustave: a killer they could actually examine.

Then we go inside the Nile crocodile.

Calling Gustave a dinosaur isn't scientifically accurate, but crocodilians belong to an evolutionary lineage whose basic predatory strategy has survived for an extraordinary span of time. Eyes and nostrils positioned above the water allow the animal to disappear almost completely beneath the surface. A muscular tail provides explosive acceleration. Armored osteoderms protect the body. Conical teeth seize rather than chew. And when prey is too large to swallow, the infamous death roll can tear it into manageable pieces.

Everything about the design is built around one principle:

Don't waste energy.

That principle makes Gustave's story considerably stranger.

Crocodiles are ectothermic ambush predators capable of waiting extraordinary periods between meals. They don't need prolonged pursuit. They wait until an animal enters the narrow strip of geography where water meets land—and then patience becomes explosive violence. For people who depend upon Lake Tanganyika for fishing, bathing, washing and drinking water, that kill zone is also an unavoidable part of everyday life.

But Patrice Faye encountered reports of victims attributed to Gustave whose bodies were recovered or only partially consumed. That helped create the sensational legend that Gustave killed for pleasure.

The biology tells a more complicated story.

Crocodile ecologist Alison Leslie rejected the idea of a crocodilian psychopath. Attacks can be interrupted. Crocodiles can behave territorially. Large prey may be consumed over several days. And some of the deaths attributed to one famous crocodile may have belonged to entirely different animals. Faye nevertheless wondered whether decades of conflict in Burundi and neighboring Congo had provided Gustave with opportunities to scavenge human remains—and thereby learn that humans were simply another available food source. It remains a hypothesis, not an established scientific explanation.

Finally, we meet the Old Man of the Lake.

Faye estimated Gustave at approaching twenty feet long and perhaps a ton in weight. His enormous body carried distinctive scars, including wounds Faye believed came from gunfire, allowing him to distinguish Gustave from other crocodiles. After decades of survival, this wasn't simply a giant animal. It was an experienced predator capable of learning the repetitive patterns of the people living along its territory.

Perhaps Gustave wasn't terrifying because he broke the rules of nature.

Perhaps he was terrifying because he followed them perfectly.

And Patrice Faye had finally decided that understanding Gustave wasn't enough.

He was going to catch him.

LISTEN, WATCH & FOLLOW

Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review to help new listeners discover the show.

Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss a new episode.

Follow @thedevilwithinpod for episode clips, archival material and more from the stories we investigate. Have a story or case you think belongs on the show? Send it to info@eviocreative.com.

The Devil Within is written and hosted by Branden Morgan and produced by Evio Creative.
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