Her rage drove her to buy a second ticket and film a viral Jacuzzi fight where she confronted the man who took her money

Vanessa Phillips thought she’d paid nearly $1,100 toward a Caribbean cruise with an acquaintance.

Then, according to Phillips, the man stopped communicating with her, her place on the reservation disappeared and her dream vacation began looking suspiciously like a scam.

A lot of people would have called the cruise line. Filed a dispute. Contacted the authorities. Maybe spent the next six months complaining to everybody willing to listen.

Phillips bought another cruise ticket.

She boarded the same MSC Seascape sailing out of Galveston, Texas, went looking for Armonte Wilson and eventually found the man she accused of taking her money.

He was sitting in a hot tub.

You really can’t make this stuff up.

So Where’s My Money?

Phillips and Wilson reportedly met on an MSC cruise in December 2025 and later made plans to sail together aboard MSC Seascape on a seven-night Western Caribbean cruise departing from Galveston on August 30, 2026.

Phillips says Wilson was looking for someone to cruise with and that she sent him payments totaling close to $1,100. She later claimed the arrangements included a “FAKE itinerary, FAKE AGENT BOOKING NUMBERS, INVOICES” and payments she had sent him.

As departure approached, Phillips says Wilson stopped responding to her and blocked her. She contacted MSC and says she discovered things were not what she’d believed them to be.

So she made an unusual decision.

Rather than stay home, Phillips bought herself a separate reservation on the same cruise.

Then she went looking for Wilson.

Phillips eventually found him relaxing in one of the ship’s hot tubs and started filming.

“So where’s my money at?” she demanded.

The confrontation quickly became heated. Wilson got out of the hot tub, left the spa area and threatened to call security while Phillips continued demanding answers.

Naturally, the video went viral.

He Said, She Said, Wait, What?

This is where the story gets considerably messier.

Wilson denies scamming Phillips.

According to his version, they had a legitimate reservation together. He says he paid for it with his credit card while Phillips reimbursed him through Venmo. Wilson says he later discovered that Phillips had disputed those payments, leaving his Venmo account suspended with a negative balance and prompting him to remove her from the cruise reservation.

Phillips tells a very different story.

She says she didn’t dispute the Venmo payments until after Wilson stopped communicating with her. She maintains that she was deceived about the reservation and provided with fake booking information.

Wilson has also said the public backlash following the viral video caused serious problems for him, including harassment and threats.

USA Today reported that both Phillips and Wilson accused the other of fraud and were considering legal action.

So who is telling the truth?

That’s precisely the problem.

A Bucket Full of Craziness

I’m skeptical about almost everything, and this story gives my skeptical little brain plenty to chew on.

Phillips’ version raises questions. If the itinerary, agent booking numbers and invoices she says she received were fake, where did they come from and why?

But Wilson’s version raises questions too. If Phillips disputed her Venmo payments before the cruise and he removed her because of those disputes, there should presumably be an electronic trail establishing when those events happened.

Venmo transactions have dates. Disputes have dates. Cruise reservations have records.

This isn’t ancient history we’re trying to reconstruct from hieroglyphics.

And yet the public is watching two radically different versions of the same vacation play out on social media.

What we do know is bizarre enough: Phillips believed she’d lost nearly $1,100, purchased another ticket for the same sailing, boarded MSC Seascape and confronted Wilson aboard the ship.

Wilson denies defrauding her.

Both accuse the other of wrongdoing.

That leaves the rest of us standing on the dock wondering what the hell happened.

The Part of This Story That Should Make Travelers Nervous

Whether Wilson ultimately did anything fraudulent is a question I can’t answer from the information currently available.

But there’s a larger lesson here that doesn’t depend on deciding who’s right.

Cruise and travel scams come in many forms, including schemes involving people who meet prospective travel companions online, offer to handle reservations and then collect money through peer-to-peer payment services.

That doesn’t mean that’s what happened between Phillips and Wilson. It does mean travelers should understand the risk of handing someone else both their money and control of their reservation.

The Federal Trade Commission specifically warns consumers to be suspicious when someone insists on payment through a payment app. The FTC also warns that payment apps can make recovering money from a scam difficult.

In other words, your vacation probably shouldn’t depend on somebody you’ve met online saying, “Don’t worry. I’ll handle everything.”

Famous last words.

Keep Control of Your Own Vacation

If you’re traveling with somebody you don’t know extremely well, book directly with the cruise line, through a legitimate travel agency or through another established booking channel whenever possible.

Know whose name controls the reservation. Get documentation directly from the cruise line or travel provider. Verify the reservation independently. Understand the cancellation rules. And be extremely cautious about sending large amounts of money to another traveler through a payment app.

A confirmation number somebody sends you isn’t necessarily the same thing as independently confirming that you have a valid reservation.

That’s a pretty important distinction when thousands of dollars and your vacation are riding on it.

So Who Was Trying to Pull a Fast One?

At this point in the Wilson-Phillips saga, which has absolutely nothing to do with the famous musical group, I don’t know.

Maybe Phillips’ allegations will eventually be substantiated. Maybe Wilson’s explanation will be. Maybe additional records will reveal that this was a spectacularly ugly financial dispute between two people who each believed the other had wronged them.

Or maybe there’s another twist coming.

What I don’t think we should do is declare either person guilty based solely on a viral video.

The Internet isn’t a courtroom, and a guy sitting in a hot tub looking uncomfortable while somebody demands $1,100 from him isn’t evidence of fraud.

It is, however, one hell of a visual.

Whatever ultimately happened between Vanessa Phillips and Armonte Wilson, their very public MSC Seascape showdown offers travelers one extremely useful lesson: Never hand somebody else complete control of your money and your vacation if you can possibly avoid it.

Because if the whole thing goes sideways, you may find yourself buying another cruise ticket just to hunt down your missing $1,100.

And knowing my luck, the guy would be in the hot tub.

An Enraged Woman Claims She Was Conned Out of $1,100 in a Cruise Scam was originally published in CrimeBeat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Colleen Slemmer was killed over a boy she may never have wanted. Tomorrow, Tennessee is set to execute one of her killers

Is a 17-year-old boy worth killing for?

What was it about Tadaryl Shipp that made Christa Pike believe another young woman might take him away from her? And did 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer even want him?

I haven’t found evidence that she did. Colleen’s own mother denies that there was any love triangle among the three Job Corps students studying together in Knoxville, Tennessee.

But jealousy reared its ugly head on January 12, 1995. Pike and Shipp both brutally attacked Colleen after first luring her off campus to party.

During the assault Colleen begged to be released. But she never was. Her body was found the very next day.

The love triangle that may never have existed

Thirty-one years later, as Tennessee prepares to execute Pike, I keep returning to one chilling question. How did Pike’s fear of losing a boyfriend become a reason to take Colleen’s entire future away from her?

For that matter, why did Pike also destroy her and Shipp’s life in the process?

It many sound like a familiar true crime story. Two young women wanted the same boy, and one killed the other to eliminate her competition. But that version begins with an assumption about Colleen that may be false.

Pike told investigators that Colleen had been trying to get her boyfriend and badmouthing her in the process. That establishes what Pike said she believed. It does not establish what Colleen felt about Pike and Shipp or what actions she took.

Accounts of the case have repeatedly called the murdered victim a “romantic rival,” as though the label had been proved. I have not found conclusive evidence that Colleen was pursuing Shipp.

The Tennessee Supreme Court opinion records Pike’s allegation, not an independent finding about Colleen’s romantic life.

The phrase “love triangle” gives everyone a role in a drama they supposedly chose. It also makes Shipp sound like a prize at its center.

It’s important to note that Shipp was no bystander. He joined Pike in the attack and was convicted in Colleen’s murder. Shadolla Peterson, another Job Corps student, was also with them that night and later testified for the prosecution. The court record and recent reporting establish their different roles and sentences.

Colleen may never have thought of herself as Pike’s rival. Now she can’t correct the story told about her.

A young woman with plans of her own

Colleen grew up in Orange Park, Florida. Her mother, May Martinez, remembers that her easygoing, trusting daughter loved roller skating, volunteering with the Special Olympics and wanting a career working with computers.

According to her mom, Colleen and her husband enjoyed taking computers apart and putting them back together. May called her easygoing and trusting.

Colleen was attending the Knoxville Job Corps Center, a vocational program separate from the University of Tennessee at the suggestion of her grandfather.

She lived at its residence on Dale Avenue. The attack took place on the university’s agricultural campus. The university’s historical account makes that distinction clear.

May told the AP that Colleen called home on the night she died, but the connection kept dropping. I can’t read that detail without thinking about all the ordinary mother daughter calls they should have had after it. Colleen had turned 19 just months earlier. She was learning a skill, figuring out her life, and making plans that had nothing to do with Pike’s boyfriend.

What the evidence says about losing control points to Pike’s mental and emotional issues.

Can trauma explain what Pike did?

Pike told police she intended to fight Colleen, not murder her. In her recorded statement, she described an attack that spiraled into prolonged violence after she lost control. Her lawyers now argue that untreated PTSD, bipolar disorder, brain impairment, and severe childhood abuse affected her ability to stop. Their clemency petition lays out that argument in detail.

As a survivor of childhood violence, I take Pike’s history of abuse seriously. I preach kindness, compassion, and empathy. I believe in redemption. Her experiences of sexual violence and neglect should not disappear because her crime was horrific.

But neither should a diagnosis become a magic wand that makes what happened to Colleen on January 12 disappear.

The weapons came with her

The evidence of planning is difficult to square with a fight that simply escalated. A fellow student testified that Pike said the day before the murder that she intended to kill Colleen. Pike brought a box cutter and a small meat cleaver when the group left Job Corps. Why would Pike bring those items to a planned fist fight?

Pike confessed that she coaxed Colleen to go to a music store with her. Then she led her prospective victim toward the university campus with a story about marijuana hidden nearby.

During the attack, Pike stepped away to check whether anyone else was present before returning. Colleen repeatedly tried to escape and begged to be let go. But Pike continuing the assault until Colleen was dead.

The jury found Pike guilty of premeditated first-degree murder, and the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld that verdict. She received the death penalty.

The medical examiner found extensive cutting wounds and determined that blunt force injuries to Colleen’s head caused her death. She testified that Colleen was alive and probably conscious when those injuries were inflicted.

Pike later showed off what she bragged was a piece of Colleen’s skull. Investigators recovered a fragment from her jacket that fit the forensic reconstruction. Those details are in the court opinion.

They matter because “rage” can sound like a moment. Colleen endured much more than a moment.

Pike was also convicted of attempted first-degree premeditated murder after choking fellow prisoner Patricia Jones unconscious with a boot lace in 2001. Jones survived.

Pike argued that she was protecting another inmate, but the jury rejected that defense. The additional 25-year sentence ran concurrently with her death sentence. The 2013 appellate opinion recounts the testimony and conviction.

Why does the other woman become the enemy?

Jealousy didn’t begin with Pike, and it belongs to no single gender. For centuries, a relationship could determine a woman’s financial security, social standing, and her children’s prospects. In some legal systems, women’s independent rights within marriage were sharply limited. Historians also warn that women’s actual lives were more varied than the formal laws suggest.

That history helps explain why losing a partner could carry high stakes. But of course it doesn’t explain a murder committed in Tennessee in 1995. Historical work on coverture offers one part of that longer story.

The more immediate pattern is painfully familiar. Someone fears losing a partner. Instead of examining the partner’s choices, she decides another woman is trying to steal her guy. The alleged rival becomes a threat even if she never volunteered for the role or has a clue she’s there.

A great example of this type of jealousy was the case of the “Long Island Lolita.” In 1992, teen Amy Fisher shot her secret lover’s unaware wife, Mary Jo Buttofoco, because of reported jealousy.

Research on romantic jealousy and aggression examines perceived threats and the social conditions around them. It doesn’t suggest that jealousy routinely leads to murder.

A review of jealousy and violence provides a very useful reference point. Most of the literature I found focuses on intimate partners rather than attacks on alleged romantic rivals.

That distinction is the heart of Colleen’s story. Pike’s fear may have been real to Pike. The rivalry may not have been real to Colleen.

We can ask why women are taught to see other women as competitors without turning Colleen into a participant in a competition she may never have entered.

Justice, revenge, and the woman who cannot answer

Pike is scheduled to be executed in Tennessee on September 30. Governor Bill Lee has declined to grant clemency. A stay request is still pending before the U.S. Supreme Court as of September 29. The execution may not occur if the court intervenes, but the questions won’t even go away.

Pike’s supporters argue that an 18-year-old with severe trauma and untreated mental illness should spend the rest of her life in prison instead of being executed. Shipp, who was 17 at the time, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. Colleen’s mother staunchly supports carrying out Pike’s sentence.

May told the AP that her daughter never had the chance to grow up. Both women’s ages matter to the arguments being made now, but only one of them lived to turn 50. The AP’s interview sets out the competing positions.

Is an execution justice for Colleen? Or is it revenge for what happened to her? People can disagree deeply about the death penalty and still agree that Pike’s childhood abuse was real, that the evidence of her crime was devastating, and that May deserves to speak for her daughter without having her grief explained away.

Whatever happens tomorrow, an execution cannot give Colleen the career she hoped for or the years she should have lived. It can’t answer whether she ever wanted Shipp. We don’t need that answer to understand the injustice of making her an “other woman” in the story of her own murder.

Colleen Slemmer was a person before she became somebody’s alleged rival. That is where her story should begin, and where it should remain.

References

Associated Press. (2026, September 28). Tennessee is set to execute a woman for the first time in 200 years.

Death Penalty Information Center. (2026). Mercy for Christa Pike: Petition for executive clemency.

First Coast News. (2026, September 3). 31 years of fighting: Colleen Slemmer’s parents say they’ll skip mortgage to watch her killer die.

Supreme Court of Tennessee. (1998, October 5). State v. Pike, 978 S.W.2d 904.

Supreme Court of Tennessee. (2026, September 23). Order denying Christa Pike’s request for a stay of execution.

Supreme Court of the United States. (2026). Christa Gail Pike v. Tennessee, application for stay of execution, №26A414.

Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals. (2011, April 25). Christa Gail Pike v. State of Tennessee, No. E2009–00016-CCA-R3-PD.

Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals. (2013, September 30). Christa Gail Pike v. State of Tennessee, No. M2012–01640-CCA-R3-PC.

University of Tennessee Libraries, Volopedia. (n.d.). Job Corps student murdered on agriculture campus.

Rachel Wade and Sarah Ludemann, 2009 Wade was convicted of murdering Ludemann amid a documented conflict involving a young man.It shows how quickly coverage can make the relationship the headline and the dead young woman a character in somebody else’s drama. This case has its own facts and should not be treated as a replica of Colleen’s.

Colleen Slemmer: Was the Alleged “Other Woman” Unfairly Blamed? was originally published in CrimeBeat on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.