An Update

A group of high school students.

High school students Elizabethan High School students started a project to research.

A string of unsolved murders.

Their research led to the identification of the killer.

Investigators now have an answer to a thirty four year old question.

Once you start getting a few tips, or a few leads or few identifications, then the cold case isn't so cold.

In any normal there's a pretty good chance he's still alive.

Everything that the students predicted through their profile turned out to be accurate.

Redhead Killer profile mail Caucasian, five nine six, two hundred and seventy pounds, unsable home, absent father, and a domineering mother, right handed, a Q above one hundred. Most likely heterosexual.

There is no profile of this killer except for the ones the students created. Just because some of these women no longer have people to speak for them does not mean that they deserve to not.

Be so anymore. What if this guy's still alive?

Like what becomes after us?

Consider it's gonna kill me?

Yeah, I'm Alex Campbell, one of the hosts for Murder What O What? And you're listening to episode twelve Roundtable Update.

This is a.

Conversation with producer Andrew Arnaut and myself about a recent discovery on the case and a quick update to what my students are up to.

Now, it's a good thing you called, because I got the craziest story you've ever heard. I just found out something about that's related to this case. It'll just boggle your mind. I don't even know everything about it. I mean I literally just found out.

Minutes ago, but you're it.

I'm excited.

So at the end of July, the TBI identified what used to be called the Cheatham County Jane Doe of nineteen eighty five, So now we know she is Michelle Enman.

So that is a recent development.

And then I literally just found this a few minutes ago. But Michelle Weill Enman married when she was fifteen a guy named Ricky Lynn Kelly, which probably doesn't mean much to you, and it wouldn't have been anything to me until I just figured out who he was. So he in nineteen seventy eight was part of a plot to blow up the Percy Priest Dam, which is what holds the.

River back in Nashville, Tennessee. Oh wow, one hundred and fifty.

Pounds of dynamite blew up the dam, but it was not nearly.

Enough dynamite to make it fail.

But their plan was to flood all of downtown Nashville. They thought they could kill half the population of Nashville. And their goal was to go round after the destruction and loot all these businesses downstairs, I mean downtown.

So they wanted to wipe out half of the city just to loop buildings.

Yes, so they blew up, you know, one hundred fifty pounds, but that wasn't nearly enough. So they had already acquired or they were trying to acquire six hundred and fifty pounds, and they.

Were going to try to blow it up again.

But I think what happened I just read this a second ago. I think one of the guys tried to sell some of the dynamite. It ended up being an undercover FBI agent and anyway, so they got caught before they blew it tried to blow it up again. So at fifteen, that's who she married.

Wow, that's wild. Do you know anything else about her?

Well, a little bit. So he went to prison in nineteen seventy nine.

I'm still trying to figure out, you know, how long he was in prison and all that, But it seems like she was going by Munn again after he went to prison, So I don't know if the marriage was,

Was probably posing as his wife so they would let her in, Like she's about eighteen at this time.

Anyway, he must get out of jail, I guess, And yeah, he's probably out of jail. And in nineteen eighty four, they were both charged with extortion and obstruction of justice against a guy.

So that's the last.

Thing we really have of her as December nineteen eighty four. Her body was found March thirty first, nineteen eighty five, and she.

Had been dead for a while.

Let me see, Let's see if I can find it out real quick, like how she had been dead It was months probably, Isn't that crazy?

Yeah, that's wild. It's weird that a victim has their own crazy criminal history. Too.

It does, It really does. And it's like that with some of the other victims too. Anyway, she had been dead for a while.

A long while, so she probably I.

Don't really know, Like if she says they were charged with this obstruction of justice and extortion in December the eighteenth, nineteen eighty four, if she was found on March thirty first, and she had been dead for months, then it wasn't much longer, much long after December the eighteenth, nineteen eighty four when she was charged with that crime, that she would have probably gone missing and ended up dead.

Wow.

And so that's interesting now because you know, she has a habit of hanging out with some pretty unsavory characters, and so what does that mean about other people, you know, possibly being involved. But also interesting thing is Jerry Johns he was in jail. So he was in jail on March sixth for the attempt to murder of Lyndon.

So they find her body while he's in jail.

The TBI asked him they had previously asked him have you been where any of these women have been killed? And Jerry John said, well, yeah, I've been where all the bodies have been found. But I'm a truck and I drive around a lot.

So that don't mean I did it. That was his response.

And then they go to him again after they find this body and they say, well, she would have died, you know a couple months back.

Would you have been, you know, in the.

Nashville area where she was found at the time that she would have been dumped out? And he said, well, yeah, I was there she about the time when she was dumped out, but I didn't do it. Weird, So, I mean, he admitted he was where everybody was, and in this one case, he even admitted that he was there when the body would have been dumped out.

So wow, it's it's just a really crazy case, you know.

Yeah, I mean it's just like the twists and turns keep on coming. Huh.

There was another Cheatham County Jane Doe in nineteen eighty one. Michelle Enman was known as the Cheatham County Jane Doe nineteen eighty five.

So there was.

Another one from eighty one that we weren't really sure if she kind of matched the mo the signature of the Bible Belt strangler because she was found a few miles away from the interstate near like a trash. I think it was the landfill or something. There were some hunters that were near that area that found this body.

She was identified just.

Like the other day, August sixteenth, So she was identified actually last month.

Yeah, so the Cheatham County. Before we even began to.

Look at her case to see if she might be related, because we had not heard about this one until a few months ago. Anyway, they identified her and she was a fifteen year old named Linda Sue Corns, and she was actually at a youth home and she evidently had run away from the youth home and then she was found a.

Few miles away. She had been dead for a while.

A matter of fact, they don't even know exactly when she was dead, when she was killed.

I mean, so do they think now that it's related to Jerry John's.

Well, I don't know that they're releasing nothing.

But this is the interesting part.

They just said, you know, an old before even they identified her, they had said they thought it was a murder. Now they didn't say why, but that, but that tells me that they just didn't find like a bone lay out there.

Oh interesting, Well, I mean, or does that tell you that they have a suspect who's still alive, so they didn't want to release anything.

I don't think.

So what I think is the way her body was found, or what was found with it, or you know, something that was done to the body made them think this wasn't an accident.

So that could be a lot of things.

That could be a ligature around her neck, that could be a bullet hole, that could be some type of you know, bunch of broken bones, you know, something like that that showed there was some type of violence that happened.

That's what I think it was.

You know, maybe she was found in a trash bag, you know, something like that, where even though she was severely decomposed, that there would be something that would tell them this was probably not an accident.

So that's the way I took it. Well.

They were saying it was most likely, you know, a suspected homicide, I think is how they worded it. But they are asking for help, you know, if anybody you know recognizes her or anything like that, remembered anything, to let them know. But the interesting part is in the TBI press release, they don't mention anything about where she lived, where she was from, where she was last seen.

I don't even think they gave her age.

So they say, oh, we really need your help identifying this girl, and so if you remember anything about this girl, here's her name, let.

Us know who.

But they didn't say anything about where she was living, where she had been. So actually, dnasolves dot com probably has done the best job in getting out information about her. They actually put a picture out, which I don't even know if tv I did that. They have a colored picture of her, and have a lot of information about where she was born, where she was living, which a girl's home, she had actually been in.

Stuff like that.

That's really helpful information.

Yeah, I mean, that's the kind of thing that jogs people's memory.

Yeah, I mean people say, oh yeah, I grew up there, Oh yeah, I remember the youth home we lived down the road. And that's the kind of thing that helps people. So I was a little surprised when they didn't release Well, maybe I wasn't surprised.

The TBI plays things.

Close to the best as far as an investigating agency goes.

That's just kind of their pattern, So maybe I wasn't super surprised.

But that is the kind of thing that helps to jog people's memories. So I hope the information is getting out in some way to help people maybe remember or something about that.

Let's stop here for a break. We'll be back in a moment. Murder one oh one.

What happened was Tennessee the Tensity grow Up Investigations got a grant of one hundred thousand dollars and this grant was to do genetic genealogies. So I think that was enough money to do eleven Jane or John.

Doe's in the state.

So they have been submitting these and I think they've gotten four of those back and actually figured out who they are.

I think two were men and then these two women here.

So as far as the victims related to that we feel are related to our case, all the ones in the state of Tennessee have now been a There is one more known as the Robertson County chain Doe. Again, that's what we just found out about. Robertson County is the county right beside Cheatham County. These are all kind of around Nashville.

They all have a.

Major interstate, a different major interstate that runs through them, and all of these bodies were found in a close proximity to the interstate. Linda Sukarn. She was found a few miles away from the interstate. The other two were found right on the interstate. So we are very interested in the Robertson County Jaine Doe.

But again we haven't really begun to even go through that, and there's a few reasons why.

I spoke with a detective in charge of that case, and he said that they originally thought it was a female, but now after some testing, they had been told it was a male.

Because it was only like parts of the skull and parts of bones.

Right, it's a lot harder to identify.

But when I looked online, it actually said that they had originally thought it was a man and now they after some testing, they thought it was a woman. And when I told him that, he said, wow, like I always thought it was the other way, So he wasn't even aware that right now they were saying this was a female.

So the only way to.

Really clear this up is to work with the anthropology department at the University of Tennessee. They have her body, and so they actually have the name of the doctor who's in charge of that case. He said when if he got time, he would try to contact them. I told him I would do it. He said, if you

In charge of that.

Interesting.

I mean, I can't even get anybody to answer the phone or anything. So I was also told that that was not unusual.

There's other people that have tried to work with them, and they say sometimes it's just nearly impossible to get somebody to answer back.

So we don't even know if that's a male or a female, but.

It appears that it's actually a female, so we need to investigate a little more in that case.

And this is even more if this is possible.

It's even more outlandish than the last one. Is that one of the surviving victims sent me some newspaper clippings that she started to keep after she was attacked, and she actually had a case there from Cock County, Tennessee.

So she actually had this newspaper.

Clipping and it said that they had found a redheaded victim beside the interstate there, and so I couldn't find anything on it. It had been months and months, and they actually the end the story it said they thought it was a woman who was missing from Cock County, but they checked the general records and it was not her. So they didn't know who this person was. And it was the sheriff speaking to the newspaper in this story. So I couldn't find her as far as like a

So he said he would.

Check around, he would talk to some people, he'd look, and he said that they didn't have anything on this in their records, which is unusual.

Caught County is a very rural county.

They probably averaged about one murder a year, and they have a dead person beside the road, and they had.

Her for going on a year. They had been checking dental records.

I mean, there's stories in the newspaper about it, and yet there's no record at the sheriff's office.

So anyway, he's been helpful. The sheriff.

He tried to contact, I believe like the chief deputy at the time, and he was trying to get a hold of him to see if he knew anything about it, but he said he was having difficulty contacting him. And so there's another redheaded victim found beside an interstate in East Tennessee at about the right time.

However, there's no record of this murder.

And so the thing that gets me is in America just a few decades ago, you could be murdered and there would be no evidence of it a few decades later, Like, I don't understand how that happens.

Yeah, that doesn't really make any sense.

Little sensing was when I talked to some detectives down there, he said, well, that's crazy, you know, And I sent him that. He said, can you send me the newspaper story, I said, Steord, so send it to him. And he said that he had never heard of that either. He would look into it. And he said that what you know, an older cop or somebody had talked to told him is they thought this person was actually that it's near the state line with North Carolina, and actually she was found like on two miles.

Or something from the state line, so it's pretty close.

And he said that what he was told was that they believed that she was from the North Carolina side, and the murder happened there, and you know, she was probably dumped on their side. But when I called, there's only three agencies that would really be kind of close on the North Carolina side. I called every one of them and talk to the most likely one, the one that's right across the border, and she said that she

That's awfully suspicious.

Yes, And so that's when I called. I said, I'm just going to call the sheriff.

It's so funny that our school resource officer here at the time when he went to the academy. Actually, the sheriff from that county was one of his training officers, and I was just talking to the resource officer about it, and he said, man, he's a really nice guy. He said, you know, I think if you called him, he'd probably talked to you.

So he has been he's been very nice. He's tried to help.

But it's just it's interesting that there's no records even, I mean, where's the body's toward, you know what, like they were comparing dental records.

The sheriff at that time knew about it. Of course he's dead now.

Yeah, so clearly they have to have something.

Yeah, And so I asked him, I said, where do you think the body is? And he said he assumed that it was at the University of Tennessee Anthropology Center because that's where all those bodies went. And of course we're never going to get an answer from them about if they even have the body. And this all goes back to what a TBI detective who worked on the Redhead murders case back in the eighties told me, or Shane Waters, when we were looking into this month years

Just never gonna find them. So this is maybe just one of those examples.

Let's stop here for another quick break murder one on one.

I wonder if you do you have any of those students who worked on the original project who were at the university, and they can go check show up in person. I feel like that's the only way sometimes to get answers.

I actually have a student who was on that that case. She might have even been interviewed for the show, but yeah, I think you did. And she's down there, and I need to reach out to her because she's down there and she's she's a she's a very confident, she's a wonderful young lady. I could just see her going down there and saying, Hey, we need to have a talk.

You know, what's going on with the girls. What's going on with you since you know, since we've last chatted.

So the girls are well. Riley.

I think people know that she was injured over the summer, very sadly in basketball camp, so she's probably not gonna be able to play any basketball this year man and this was her senior year. You know, she was really looking forward to that. And I know that's troubling. That's that's hard on a young lady. You know, she's she's doing a lot of studies at home, she's got a

To the students.

And so the groups actually looked at the different parts. For example, you would have to have to be a serial coller, you have to have antisocial personality, disorder.

To be an organized killer, you're going to have.

A certain type of family history, you will be a narcissist, those type things. So in order to keep Jerry Johns as the prime suspect, we needed to get information back from detectives if they agreed with us that he did fit all these things he would need.

To fit to be the Bible Belt strangler.

And the detectives after the presentation agreed that yes, the students had found plenty of evidence to convince them that he did have antisocial personality disorder, he did have the family history of a serial killer, he did have narcissistic personality disorder, et cetera.

So that was the first part.

The part we're doing now because we're still working with Scott Barker, who's now the retired FBI behavior analyst, and he told us that he wanted to see the victimology, so basically, look at the victims. When you look at the victims, that should leads you to things like a timeline, geography,

Let me tell you about the promise I made to her.

And I told him even if the cops couldn't keep going or didn't have the resources like I was going to continue. And so he says, look, we do have a drawing of a person that we think could be involved, and maybe a vehicle.

So he said, you know, could.

I buy a billboard and just put the person the drawing and then maybe like this car and just see if we get any hits.

And I'd like to know how much a billboard is.

And so the company said, you can't buy a billboard from us, but we will donate one. And I think this case was actually like in the Midwest, like Kansas or Oklahoma or something. Can you believe the guy was living in like Connecticut or something. And somebody saw the billboard and said, hey, I think I know that guy, and sure enough they saw the case. This is kind of a famous case. The girl was killed as she worked at a swimming pool. Ali Kemp, that was her name.

She was in Kansas. She was in Kansas.

So anyway, the students saw it and they said, mister Campbell, has there ever been any billboards or anything to try to help generate some interest or And I was like, you know what, far as I know, there never has been. And I said, look, I don't think that's ever been tried. And so they said, can you get us a meeting with a billboard executive or something, and so I said.

Let's try it.

So I reached out to a billboard company, a national billboard company who does have billboards in all the areas.

Where the victims were found.

And so they're going to be presenting to some executives from the billboard company and they're going to be telling.

The story of their victims.

So just like the father said, let me tell you a story about my daughter and what happened. What I wanted the students to learn from that was that these women, although many of them had difficult lives, and they were, you know, involved in a lifestyle at the time that obviously was difficult and maybe contributed.

To the difficult situation they were being put in.

They were somebody's kid, right, they were somebody's mom. They had good times in their life. This was the low point of their life, I'm sure. And so they said, mister Campbell, we would like to just present about who these women are. That although yes they might have been a runaway, or yes, they might have struggled with addiction, or yes they might have been in sex trade, these were still women. These were still children, some of them young women, and they still have people that loved them.

So they're gonna be telling that story to those executives here in about another month or so.

I think that's a terrific idea.

Yeah, so I'm they're excited about it. I think if one thing teenagers get, it's kind of like being judged and being I mean, you know, because you know, there's a lot of peer pressure and social media these days and friends in school, and they're judged on a lot of things looks.

And hairstyle and cars and how they talk.

And I think they really get that and that some of these women that they were just judged.

I mean, well, the problem is they're frozen in time. Right.

They were killed at the lowest point of their life, and so because of that, they never had a chance.

To recover or to get out of that lifestyle and move on.

So they've been frozen in this time period where they were at the low point of their life. And you know, so that's how they're always going to be remembered. For example, example, Lisa Nichols when she was killed and they identified her. This was in the eighties, and they went through the detectives and they said.

Man, tell us who Lisa Nichols is.

And although Lisa Nichols had children and brothers and sisters and mom and dad and all this other stuff. The guy said, oh, we know who Lisa Nichols is. She has the second longest prostitution record in the state, and that is kind of and another detective said, to say she has a drug problem is to.

Say, like my car has a gas problem.

So you know, the students see these things, they understand how they get labeled, and that's how they kind of continue on.

But they wanted to show like the totality of the person that they were. So I'm excited about that work.

And then we plan, we hope to present a case. After Riley and Marley presented to the former assistant DA and the homicide detective and stuff last spring, they really felt the case that Jerry Johns probably killed Elizabeth Lamott the Green County Jane Doo was really strong. They felt that was maybe the strongest case because of some of the evidence that we had uncovered. So I think what we're going to try to do is present that to

Really have that.

Can we look at this again, you know, at least it's on them to do that.

So maybe something in the DA's.

Office, you know, in Green County that that's what we're hoping to do.

Wow, that's amazing. You really got a lot done, and these kids are working on such like rewarding amazing projects.

I agree, and that is so much better than me standing up here talking about it.

Murder one oh one is executive produced by Stephanie Leidecker, Alex Campbell, Courtney Armstrong, Andrew Arnaut, and me Jeff Shane. Additional producing by Connor Powell and Gabriel Castillo, Editing by Jeff Twa, Music by Vanikor Music. Murder one oh one is a production of iHeart Radio and Katie Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

This is Alex Campbell, co host of Murder one oh one. We hope you're enjoying season one. We asked that if you know anything that could help police solve these cases, that you contact the appropriate agencies with any information you feel can help with their work to bring justice to these women. And their families. But we also asked that if you feel you can help us continue to tell these stories, that you reach out to us with any