One in 200 million

A group of high school students.

High school students Elizabeth and 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 anymore. 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, unstable home, absent father, and a domineering mother, right handed, IQ 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 if you came after us?

I consider it gonna kill me.

Who A Yeah, this.

Is Murder one oh one, Season one, episode one one and two hundred million. I'm Jeff Shane, a television and podcast producer at KT Studios with Stephanie Leidecker, Courtney Armstrong, and Andrew Arno. In twenty twenty, I came across a story about a group of high school students who set out to investigate a series of unsolved murders in their community. It was an incredible story that here at KT Studios we felt needed to be explored further.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Is my privilege and honor to welcome you to our past conference. Now I'm a part of Michigan Campbell's sociology class. Many of you or today are asking the same question, why are we here? It starts thirty seven years ago when a man murdered unknown woman and laid her body decide in any state. Four years later, five more women. She had the same faith those women would be founded along in the states

Fact.

The older I get, the more I think about all the bad things that could happen, you know, But young people never think about that. They're just like, yeah, let's do it, you know. And I love that attitude about him. You know he let's find a serial killer, and I like, Yeah, let's do it. My name is Alex Campbell. I am forty four years old. I live in Hampton, Tennessee, but I work in elizabeth In, Tennessee et elizabeth In High School. I'm a teacher for going on twenty one years.

I do not like teaching. I love teaching.

It is the greatest job in the world. I have been described by some as a very intense person. No matter what I'm if you're going to give up hours of your life to do it, either, I want to do it really hard, as good as I can.

Right.

If it's not that important, I just won't do it.

And I think teaching is important and I love it, so I give a lot of time to it. I also think eating is important and I love it, and I give a lot of time to it. And I don't play around when I'm eating.

It's serious.

With a population of around fourteen thousand people, elizabeth In, Tennessee sits on the eastern side of the state ordering North Carolina. The people who call Elizabethan home have nothing but good things to say about their mountain town.

We're a small town. We're all kind of like family. Everybody knows each other. You kind of know where everything is and you can't really get lost.

A lot of people when I tell them I'm from Tennessee, they always say, oh, I live in Nashville, or I've been to Memphis, But those places are very different. We're in the kind of the mountainous region in the northeast, and it's a little different than the rest of the state.

It's your typical small town, small town field.

It is very very small. Our downtown looks like something out of a Hallmark. We are close to the Appalachian Trail. We have lots of beautiful lakes, lots of outdoor recreation.

Hiking, camping. It's a wonderful place. You have a lot of great neighbors.

There's a lot of community here.

Feel We have one city school they go to, so I think it's like nine hundred and something kids, and there's.

A lot of community pride. The high school is a focal point for the community.

You know, think kind of the throwback to Friday Night at football games and just since of school and community pride.

Great Our football team has won two of the last four state titles and played in another in a third one in the last four years.

Very safe, very safe.

Yes, even in.

A beautiful place like this, there are lots of secrets locked up in these mountains. That murder of Cynthia Taylor really cast a shadow over a place like this. Cynthia Taylor was a sixteen year old girl who was from our county here. She went to a local high school. I think, from what we understand, there was some rebelliousness, spend nights, weekends, days at a time with friends, and probably bullied in school as far as we can tell.

Kind of stopped going to school.

So you have a young, vulnerable girl, redheaded from East Tennessee going through a tough time. She was stabbed. She was stabbed four times. Her body was found in southern road.

You know, my whole life. People's people have talked about it. We have a lot of back roads, country roads here and people get out and right around and when you drive down roy and Creek where her body was found, people know the spot will point over there and say, yeah, that's where they found her body. And it's a it's a it's a well known story.

Most homicides in our area are usually domestic or family, so for it to be more of the serial murder that is like unheard up here.

This is kind of wives tale. My wife's grandmother or great ant or something lived down below it, and she swore later in life that she heard screamed from up that behind her house, up towards that house where they think that Cindy was murdered at She swore she thought she heard screaming that night.

I think that goes to say that there's evil everywhere.

I found out that a redheaded girl being killed in the eighties beside a road in Tennessee was not uncommon. I kept noticing these redhead murderers and all the unsolved murders and Jane Do's. I didn't really understand how just this one unsolved murder would actually lead to so much more ugliness here in my state and surrounding states.

Her murder was just one and a string of killings later known as the redhead Murder, the red Headed.

Murder, redhead murders, a string of similar looking women dumped along the sides of major interstates. Half a dozen red headed women dumped along the sides of interstates across the country in the nineteen eighties.

They had never been any consensus on if all of these murders were related or if just many redheaded women over a ten year period were found in and around Tennessee and it was because of different killers what they call one off murders. So I just really became intrigued by it, and I felt like that the next semester that would be the project that maybe we could work on. Fan But for the last several years I been a true crime fan.

I blame that on my wife.

She really got me into the genre in forty eight Hours and Dateline and all that, and I really really liked it. And I just noticed that in my sociology class, if we ever talked about you know, serial killer or you know, psychopath, like, students just were mesmerized. They just paid more attention and they were so interested and they wanted to learn. And of course, you know, true crimes like what the second biggest genre in America or something,

I was a freshman at the time in high school and I was still like very new. I was very shy, like I didn't have a lot of experience doing like much of anything.

Lane Leonard was just a freshman when he joined mister Campbell's sociology class.

All I knew was I was going to sign up for a sociology class, and my mom told me that sociology was fund for her in college and then I should try to.

Husch Junior Will Bauers was an outgoing jock who took the class on a whim.

I was seventeen. Technically the class was a sociology class, so we didn't even know exactly what we're going into.

And at first I thought like he had like came up with this scenario, like made all the details up, and I was like, Oh, that's that's kind of cool. You know, it'll be interesting.

Caylea van Dervetter was a shy junior who had no idea what she was getting herself into.

But that's not what we did. It wasn't just a class assignment, it wasn't just a grade. It was like real life.

What I had been using in my sociology class for several years was profiling because that really fits in with my standards about you know why people are the way they are, you know, how were they socialized, you know those type of things, and so I thought, well, I can do that unit on you know, serial killers and that type thing profiling, and maybe we could bring that in and we could look to see if any of these murders are related, because I knew enough to know

A lot of differences in some of them.

So it felt like we could just take the thirteen and we could go through them and the students could learn about profiling and they could figure out if they saw a link in any of the thirteen.

That's where we started.

We never really done anything like this in the class, so we just had to be creative with our process. Mister Campbell, he kind of directed us to where we need to be, kind of where our focuses need to be.

It was kind of intimidating because you know, like these are real people, that there's still families out there who these victims belonged to. What if this guy's still alive, Like what if he comes after us? But I think mister Campbell did a great job of leading us and guiding us in a way that made it not intimidating.

This type of teaching is called project based learning, where you learn through the project, and the most important part or day of project based learning is the introductory day you introduce the project because if it's not interesting, then the students are not interested the entire time. So you really want to have a good way to kind of hook the students into it, make them excited or understand

Let me sit there the first day and mister Campbell has up on the board this big number, and he basically asked us the question like, out of all this big number of people, would you guys be willing to help some other people?

I said, okay, So if you're give a population two hundred million, and you know it's a male, then you can automatically exclude about half the population. They have it down to one hundred million, and they were.

Like, oh okay. So I said, look, I'm going to test you.

I have this really cool thing that I want to do with a serial killer. But I said, I don't I don't know if this is a class to do it. You know, kids love it when you give them a good challenge. I don't you know, I got to make sure you guys are the right students to this, because this is hard work.

And they're like, yeah, yeah, let us try.

So I said, if you can give me twenty different ways that you can narrow this two hundred million down to one, then maybe you're the class to work on this.

So I gave him I don't know, I forget. It's like thirty men.

And they worked in groups, and you know, they just brainstormed all the different ways you know, age, race, heights, you know, hair color, all these different ways you can exclude people. And I think I was riding them on the board, and you know, I think they got down to about nineteen and and the bell was about ready to ring. We had about thirty seconds. And by the way, teenagers they know when the bell's going to ring. They got that time, they got that timed out, and so

Was like, oh.

Then the bell rang right and I was like, okay, well we got twenty. Maybe this is a you know, critical thinking class that can handle this. And I told them, I said, don't come back tomorrow if you're not ready to work on this. I said, this is going to

Hard, this is not the class for you. And believe it or not, every.

Student came back the next day and we got to work.

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

We really didn't know anything at first. You're talking about a case that happened. Well, now it's over forty years ago. It's basically a sight in the dark where we started from.

So he gave us a sheet we call it the Redhead Bible, and it had every victim, and first we had to decide whether all the victims were connected or not. We just picked out similarities and we kind of mapped out where they were, and we got in groups about the victims and we decided who is going to be in charge of that victim and studying their case specifically.

I went and I found the information on all of the Redhead murders that people considered part of that, and so they were supposed to read up on those.

And then what we.

Try to do is create a like a target with like an inner circle and then a periphery.

As we went out, I.

Said, you know, hopefully what we're going to see is that there's some of these victims in the middle that seem like.

Highly likely they're all related.

And then you'll have some that are probably on the end outside that you feel like, well, maybe there's some things, and then you'll probably have these others that are out around the eds that you're like, well, I mean, they had red hair, but they're probably not related.

And so that was the goal.

Just begin with the thirteen and let's just read about them. And this was all just information online. It's all open source information, and you know, let's just look at those and let's figure out, you know, do we even feel that there is a core group that are related. And then if you do, then we'll begin to pursue and we'll figure out how to tell if these victims that appear related were killed by one person. So what our students really focused on was are all these murders connected

The Crtingdon County Jane, Don, DeSoto County, Green County Jane Doe, Chief the County Jane, John, Campbell County Jane, the Knox County Jane.

And then they start asking me to tell them, well, how do you tell if all these women were killed by the same person? Like, how do you tell that just from my body land beside the road. So then they actually start asking me to teach them, which is the.

Greatest thing in the world.

Many times the teacher, you're chasing them with the education, like's sit down, listen, please, I have it. But when they start saying to you, like will you teach us how to do this, then you know, that's when you know you've created the right kind of atmosphere and you're not going to have any trouble.

So we started basically with just talking about the different aspects of like a murder and how police officers in the FBI find killers with modus operandi and signature, and what it means to build a profile.

It was a mixture of working in the period and then sometimes we would have to do just outside homework because every day was different.

One day we would work on the profile, another day we would look at serial killers like throughout that, but every day was different. We didn't know exactly what we're going into, and that's just kind of how mister Campbell lives. He loves to just make every day a different experience.

We continuously researched, like saying the serial killers and all these other things, which for O a sociology class. Again, I was not expecting whatsoever.

They didn't know they were begging me to teach him, but they said things like, mister Campbell, how do we know if this killer was a man or a woman? And I was like, oh, you want me to teach you and they're like yes, please, And so you know, we would get into our sociology.

How do we know if this person was intelligent or not?

Well, we can get into our psychology and our sociology. Why would they only kill women and not kill women and men? Okay, we can get into our socialization. So it was really neat because I felt like, hey created this app sphere where the students realized they did not know what they needed to know, and so they kept asking me to teach them, just like another thing that would help get them a little further down the road.

And instead of me.

Kind of having it pre planned like I will talk about this today and this tomorrow and this the second Tuesday from now, it was more like, Okay, let's see where the kids are at, Let's see what help they need. Let's see what I'm supposed to be teaching as part of my standards, and then let's see what I can teach them that will give them that piece of information that they need. Some days we read up on the different victims. I did give a victim to each different group.

What happens if that goes wrong?

What happens if you don't get what you're supposed to get from your parents or your family? And so each one of those things that we learned, I think gave them just like a little peace. He's the puzzle that they were trying to put together to kind of bring this this picture into focus.

We're all teenagers, so we never really had the chance to work on a cold case. So I think everybody was really excited to get to do something that nobody else knows about, and we got to bring that to a lot.

When you hear about serial killers on the news or on you know, media outlets, you think, oh, you know, that can never possibly happen anywhere close to me. But once it does happen close to you. It almost you know, kind of wakes you up and makes it all seem more real.

We didn't have a lot of information going on about this at all. This was all reported back in the nineteen eighties and not a lot of work had been done on it since, so a lot of the the information was very few and fall between. But whenever we were researching it, we were just looking up anything that related to the case.

The only thing we could use was what is known as victimology because all we had was information about the victims. We didn't have any suspects or anything like that, so we just had to look at the victims and say, what can we tell about the suspect from the victims. And one of the things that we noticed is they have reddish hair at the time of their murder, so that was one.

But of course that wasn't a.

Huge help because these are called the redhead murders for a reason. All of them had red hair, so you start to look a little deeper. They were all white females, they were all between the age of say twenty and forty. They were all relatively small, you know, those type of things.

And is the way that a killer kills. It's called modus operandi, and it's how he operates. That's how I remember it. His signature is what he does to make the crimes his so something that he leaves behind, or a specific way that he does something why he does it. When we were looking at these women and their cases, we were trying to find similarities between them. So we talked about how they had red hair or one of them had brown hair with red highlights. We talked about

Killed, so they started looking where were they found, what state was their body found in, how were they murdered, those type of things. So by the time you look at all these different aspects, those were the things that kept coming back that they were very similar. For example, there's some people that are sometimes mentioned in the Redhead murders that were abducted from their home. Well, that's an outlier that you know, just one person was abducted from

So we began to look and say, you know, or most of them who are killed children? Or are the adults? So the child was the outlier.

So the students had to go through and look at all those aspects, and a lot of that was found online, and so they had to dig that information out and say, you know, which ones appear to be all the same or similar or the person who killed them would have to be.

Similar, for example. And so that's how they came upon those six.

These women are somebody's sister, somebody's daughter, maybe even somebody's mother, and their kids or their family don't know where they're at, and I would hate to think that somebody around me could end up in that situation. So I felt very connected to the victims.

Once the kids were invested, and it seemed like this was definitely the direction they were going. I was going to need somebody who was a real expert at how do you prove that victims are related to the same killer? And with that I figured out that I probably needed to find a criminal profiler.

I'm not a professional profiler.

I'm a social studies teacher who had been teaching sociology for probe about.

Seven years at the time.

And the only criminal profiler's behavioral analysts that I know they worked.

For the FBI.

So I knew one FBI agent and he was the father of a former student, and we kind had a close relationship. I coached him in things, so I had his contact. So I called his dad and I said, Hey, would you know how I could get a hold of anybody who's a behavioral analyst in the FBI?

And he said, you're not gonna believe it.

But I went to high school with the guy. We're really good friends. We both went to the FBI, and he's a behavioral analyst and I can give you his number. So I called him and I told him about my crazy project and I told him what I needed and he said, hey, yeah, I'd be glad to work with your students.

I was an agent assigned to the Knaxville Division. I just retired this past April after thirty two years.

Scott Parker is a retired special agent from the FBI. He has thirty two years of service under his belt, and during his time on the force, he worked on numerous cases across the country.

So one of my jobs with the FBI was I was a what we called a field coordinator. What we did was we coordinated not only.

With FBI agents within our division.

But also local officers, either local or state officers within our division who were seeking assistance for an unsolved homicide or for example, a serial rapist or missing child. Of course, they've been known over the years as the profiler. So I agreed to come speak to the class. So you know, Alex and I had several conversations. He explained to me what he was trying to do, that they were actually going to try to solve these cases.

I thought, wow, this is pretty interesting. I've never never seen this happen.

He was actually willing to drive about three hours one way to come up and speak to the students. And he told us that we needed four things and if we could prove that each of these victims had these four things, then it would prove that they were related back to one person.

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

So the first thing is we wanted to establish an mo for the killer, and then we wanted to look at geography to see if they were linked by geography. Then we want to look at time to make sure they were linked by time, and then we wanted to look at the victims themselves to see if they matched. If you can get those four things together, the profiler told us that it would be virtually impossible to have more than one person killing these people.

They were just firing off questions and so what I had to do is just go over the case with me. Tell me what they were looking at, tell me the things that they had done so far. And then I just sat there and we kind of just brainstormed, and I gave them some ideas on where I thought they should go, how I thought they should proceed.

And so you know, these bodies are being dumped along the interstate.

So my first thought to the kids was, Hey, if I was in your shoes and I was investing in this investigating this case as a detective, my first thought would be because these these bodies are being dumped on the side of an interstate, my gut feeling and the experience tells me it's a truck driver.

And if you've got victims that have not been identified, and we haven't had anybody.

Support anyone as missing, chances are that these victims or what I would call a high risk victim either aither that run away from home or b and could be both run away in or be there involved in prostitution, possibly the truck stop, and it's a crime of opportunity. He may he may meet a hitchhiker, he may meet a meet a girl a truck stop or a rest stop, picture up kills her and then dumps her body on the side of the road.

Because it doesn't.

Seem to be like that it's really planned out to try to hide the bodies. It just seems like it's really it's just it's just a crime of opportunity. Chances are whoever's doing this probably either have a girlfriend or ex girlfriend that was redheaded, ex wife or wife it was redheaded, or mother that was red headed. Because there's

Scott Parker had an important suggestion for the class.

Getting a profile on the victim is going to help you along the way because if you determine.

That, if you just say, hey, she's a victim, and you.

Don't know anything about her background, and you don't know where to start looking.

So if you find out she's.

A a runaway or be she's been working as a processing truck stops, I think that's a clue that, hey, here's where we need to go with this.

You know, then we can maybe identify.

Once you identify the victim, to go interview the victim's family, find out.

Where she was, what she was doing. Did you have a relationship with anybody? Was she seeing anyone? Was she dating anyone? You know? Did she have problems with anyone?

All these different questions that you can ask to find out to build a profile of this victim, because that's very important. Building a profile on your victim, to me, is just as important as building a profile on the suspect. And so they started building these profiles are the victims.

Scott Parker worked with the class on the profile.

And then we just refined it a little bit to try to make it smaller and say, hey, you know, one, you got to also look at the victim into you know, my main thing was, frankly, believe it's.

A truck driver.

But I would just say, hey, use your common sense. If you keep finding all these victims on the side of the road, give me some ideas who you could think of to do. And of course they would say, oh, it could have been a could have been a plumber, it could have been a you know. Of course somebody would say oh, it could have been a truck driver, and I went, you know, ding ding ding, thank you.

There you go, there's your answer, right, truck driver.

But they were coming up with all these different answers, and I'm thinking, well, they've really had thought about this. I mean, they're really trying hard to come up with a profile. They're thinking, hey, it's got to be somebody's attracted to redheaded women. For example, when I said, no, maybe somebody that hates redheaded women, right, and that's why he's killing these women.

It's not because he's probably attracted to him. This might be because he hates them for some reason.

I A.

It could be ex wife, ex girlfriend, and mother.

They were come up with all kinds of things, and I kept saying, now you got to refinding a little bit, try to narrow the focus a little bit.

We started to talk about how we wanted to do this profile, because first we had to understand the person that we're looking for as a serial killer.

Student Will Bauers describes the process of creating the profile.

We looked at how the murders were placed. So we looked at from I seventy five and I forty. That was where most of the murders were off, just offset of those two interstates, So we knew it had to be somebody that could drive in those between those areas of work between those areas, so we knew it had

We had.

In our profile discovered that we thought that the serial killer could have been a trucker because of the great distances between where the victims' bodies were found, even though they shared the similarities of a similar killer.

Student Lane Leonard remembers a pivotal moment in the classes investigation.

One of my classmates, Will Bauers. He discovered that there was like a trucking regulation that had been like passed in the nineteen eighties right before the killings had started that like deregulated some of like the privacy laws of truckers. It was a law that would have deregulated trucking to a trucker would have the privacy they need to potentially carry.

Out these crimes.

And that was a huge fund because that gave our theory of that the serial killer was a trucker more high, you know, more ground to stand on because of the fact that they weren't monitored as heavily as they were in the decade prior. He just found that on a whim, like he was researching, and we were all just second class on our own, like doing our own research. And then he just raised his hand and was like, I

The Motor Carrier Act of nineteen eighty de regulated trucking. The Act substantially reduced government control of the industry, making it easier for new carriers to enter the industry, eliminating certain restrictions placed on regulated carriers and encouraging greater price competition among carriers. For our purposes, though, it's significant because it gave truckers more autonomy over what information they reported,

And so when I went into class, I mean they were just on pins and needles. I mean they had lists of questions I ask. Each student had things written out. You know, I probably could have stayed two days and still be talking because they just kept asking questions over and over and over again. So I thought, man, they're really into it. I've never seen anything like that happened before.

I was amazed.

So what now?

Once they had the profile, then I had another problem. I couldn't grade it because I'm not a profile greater. I needed somebody who knew something about criminal profiling, who creates criminal profiles. So I reached back out to the FBI Behavior analyst and I said, would you help me grade this if the.

Student's created and he said, sure, I'll take a look at it.

So the students worked really hard and they create a profile and it had seventeen characteristics of this killer. We broke up into groups and each group had a different part. They were working on age of the killer, raised the killer, religious, affiliation of the killer, all these different parts.

So they worked on those.

And when they submitted it to me and we put it into a one document, I said, you know, are you ready for me to give it to the profiler because he's going to grade it. And if he says this is terrible work, I guess we're all going to fail. And they're like, no, no, we feel good.

Redhead killer profile. The sex is male, Caucasian. Day of birth no longer than nineteen sixty two, no later than nineteen thirty six. Height is five nine to sixty two, a weight of one eighty two two hundred and seventy pounds. The killer lives or works around Interstate forty Knoxville, Tennessee region. We believe that the occupation is a trucker. Personal relationships are possible, especially long term relative location of the residences

So there is no profile all of this killer except for the ones the students created. It's a packet of information which shows how these six crimes are linked. So we sent it to him and he got back to me in a couple of days and he said, man, I think the work is really good.

And he said.

I cannot as a behavioral analyst disagree with anything that your students said they felt was true.

I said, well, that's great, but like, what great am I supposed to give them? Is this an eighty? Is it a ninety?

And he said, I don't know what number it is, but he said, just give him an A. They deserve an A. So hey, they all got an A on the profiling section. But now we had another.

Problem because whenever he comes back and says, well, yeah, you created a profile, but you know what, I feel that it's really good. So now you have this investigative tool that nobody else has.

But every one of these are cold cases, and what good does a profile do if people aren't using it to try to help solve the crime. So the students felt like a couple of things needed to happen. Number One, we needed to bring these cases back up. I mean, let's be honest. Police are many times overwhelmed with the amount of cases they have to work, and if there's no leads, then why would you waste all your time on that case when there's a newer case that has

Didn't really have anything to do with each other.

And then it would also hopefully bring some attention media attention back to the case. So we had to come up with a sexy name, and the students went through this. They had some different ideas.

We brainstormed.

We invited the media down one day, you know, some local media, and we kind of pitched some of the different ideas. We were kind of torn between three or four. But it seemed that when the media heard the names, they were like that one around there, and of course it was the Bible Bell Strangler.

More on that next time. Murder one oh one is executive produced by Stephanie Leidecker, Alex Campbell, Courtney Armstrong, Andrew Arnot and me Jeff Shane. Additional producing by Connor Powell and Gabriel Castillo, Editing by Jeff Towah, Music by Vanakor 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.

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