A group of high school students.
High school students Elizabeth In 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 mal 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 desire to not be so anymore.
What if this guy's still alive?
Like what if becomes.
After us kill me?
Yes, this is Murder one oh one, Season one, Episode three starts spreading the news. I'm Jeff Sheen, a television and podcast producer at Kati Studios with Stephanie Leidecker, Courtney Armstrong, Andrew Arnold. As the semester drew to a close, high school teacher Alex Campbell discusses what the class was feeling.
I think that some people feel that helping the police or solving crimes is something that we pay the professionals to do. But what I wanted to encourage the students to understand was that everybody has an obligation in the community and everybody can help in some way. Police have a hard time solving crimes if there's no witnesses, just because they weren't adults or they weren't police officers. I want them to still understand that they could do great
work on their own. The semester was coming to a close. It was May, temperature was warm up, we just had a couple of weeks left in school. We led into the press conference stirred on them in that one victim identified Lisa Nichols, and it'd been over thirty years since she had been identified. So at this point we have two very good profiles. We have the offender profile, the criminal profile, and then we also have the victim profile, and as far as we know, nobody else has them.
So our goal was just to really get this information out to everyone, you know, and as big a way as possible.
Student Will Bowers remembers what it was like at school.
In the school, I mean it was like it was unreal, like everybody was shocking, surprised, like around. I mean, you don't hear like high schools doing something like this.
I want other students to know that they can do anything to set their mind too. Isn't the world isn't just limited to like you're a teenager, so you have work. If you work, yes, work in school. And that said, you can't go as far as you want it.
You can go.
You can do anything in life. Don't let no one stop you. There's hateful people, there's hateful teachers even but keep going no matter what.
The plan for the press conference was for the students to present their findings in a big way. A few of the students from the class were selected to present the information in the Uncovered and its significance. One of them was Junior Wild Hours.
Yeah, I was shocked that mister Campbell kicked me.
I mean I'm okay speaking outside. I mean I usually done like the pet browleies at high school, but like that, this was the first time, like I really felt like super nervous or something.
And I guess mister Campbell, since he's seen me do the fat browleyes, so you seen me done these little things, especially where I play sports and stuff like that, he knew that I was capable of doing it, which I never thought I would be. We basically made sure that I spoke correctly, made sure all my notes were on point, make sure I wasn't saying anything that that was false or anything like that. It was a process to get to where I was in front of the microphone that day.
Young people have a lot of energy, and they also have a lot of passion. If you could help kind of focus that and find something that they're passionate about and let them use the energy, they will do more than you ever.
Expected they could.
So what most people don't know is that this project actually started with students getting curious about what learning could look like and ended with students digging into something really big and bold and compelling that had a life way beyond the confines of one class.
Before we hear about the press conference, we think it's important for you to understand the origins of the original assignment. The project actually stemmed from a grant that the students had won from a company called XQ Institute. Founded in twenty fifteen. XQ Institute is the nation's leading nonprofit organization dedicated to improving school across the country.
I'm Carrie Schneider. I'm the head of editorial at XQ Institute, and we're a nonprofit that's dedicated to rethinking high school. If you stop for a second and think back to your high school experience and like what things stood out to you as the moments that were even if it was like one day or one lesson or one thing in your high school, and you were like, oh, that
was actually fun to me. Taking that one thing that you can remember about high school and making all of high school feel like that it doesn't have to be a boring, tedious march through like learn this, learn that, take the test, move on, go to the next thing. The way I met mister Campbell and all the teachers and students there was when they entered xq's National Super School Challenge, So way back in fifteen twenty sixteen, there was an open call to the country to come together
and design the high school of the future. They didn't win the full grant and the full support for building a whole new school. They did win an XQ Student Leadership Award, so they got a smaller grant and scholarships for the kids that were involved, and then support to turn their initial ideas into a wider program.
When working with XQ Institute, mister Campbell did something unique. He turned to his students for guidance.
So mister Campbell presented to his students, like, look, guys, if we're going to really dig into this project stuff, what kinds of things are you interested in? And true crime things in our own community that stood out as something that the kids were interested in. He was like, cool, true crime, let's go, let's find some unsolved mysteries.
Carrie remembers the first time she heard about the project.
So, the first time I heard about this project was actually at an education conference. Mister Campbell was hosting a session on projects for teasatures and how to really connect with your students in this way. And he was in a room of probably forty or fifty teachers from across the country, and I was just kind of sitting and listening in and he just sort of dropped on the room. Oh and my students are actually solving a murder right now, you know, we're working on and you could just see
people in the room go ah. You could physically observe teachers going wait a minute what. There were definitely skeptics. So he really stood up and said, you know, just think about how much their minds are changing, and what they're learning about the world, and what this means for thinking about people differently, and what we're learning about victims' rights and what we're learning about justice, and what we're
learning about relationships and families and gender. The skeptics were kind of like, you know, I can't think of another example of the way kids can really get that much. So it's hard to argue with it when you see just how much they learned and how much they take away from it.
When she heard about the press conference, Carrie knew it was a big deal.
I remember that mister Campbell sent me an email letting me know that the press conference was happening and telling me, you know, creating a little fomo like you're not gonna be here, You're gonna have to wait until you find out the big news like everyone else. And he was so proud of his students and really excited to share the milestones that they were announcing in the press conference.
That press conference represented a big moment for realizing the value of that project and the possibility of what kids can do. It's real now, because I think it was a big transition from a class project to something they were ready to really put it out in the world.
Let's stop here for a break. We'll be back in a moment. Murder one on one. On May fifteenth, twenty eighteen, the big moment finally arrived.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Is my privilege and honor to welcome you to our prest conference. My name is William Bowers, and I'm a part of mister Campbell's sociology class. Many of you or today are asking the same question while we're here, Why are we doing this? Why do we even care about this? Well, it starts thirty seven years ago when a man murdered an unknown woman and
laid her body decided in the state. Four years later, five more women said the same faith those women would be founded along in the states and the highways across multiple states at the time of their death. The women were founded with reddish hair law enforcement at the time couldn't solve the murders due to the women never being
identified and their transitive lifestyles. The cases became cold for over thirty five years until a few people asked, why hasn't the murderer and the women have been identified yet?
Standing in front of six images of the Bible Belt stranglers victims, Junior Will Bauers spoke to roughly sixty people, including members of law enforcement, the press, and locals in the community.
We spent months learning about the Redheaded murders. We learned what a serial killer is. We looked into the lives of some of the most infamous serial killers like Ted Bundy and Richard Chase.
With the information providing and what we have learned, we were able to create an mo a, signature and the profile for the murderer. Without the hard work, grit, and determination by the students, we would never have this press conference to day. Martin Luther King Junior once said human progress it's neither automatic nor inedible. Every step towards the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle. The tires,
extortions and passionate concerns of dedicated individuals. The men and women that you see here today are dedicated to these cases.
The tireless work and effort by these individuals are the reason why these cases have been brought back.
Shane Waters also spoke.
Out of the six victims that we believe could be a part of the Redhead murders, all but one remain unidentified people. That's right, after more than thirty years, only one of these victims has a name. I felt defeated. I felt like I had no choice but to put the case down and move on to something easier. I can remember sitting at my computer about to drag this file on my desktop titled Redheads to the Trash, when I realized that this is the exact thing that is
preventing this killer from being caught. More than that, I knew that this is what the killer assumed would happen each time he targeted a new victim. I believe he assumed that society wouldn't care that these women were gone. After all, if there is no family to come forward to fight for them, surely it will not be a story worth telling. Today, I stand here along with the high school sociology class, to remind the world of these
six women. Today, we are their family. If the coward responsible for these murders is watching, I have a message for you. We will not stop. We will not forget.
Senior Mason Peterson made an impassioned plea to the public.
So we need the public's help. We need you to be aware of this case. We need you to share this case around with any info that we are giving you or what you already know. We need you to find people that may know something we don't. Then the people with this information should contact the police. There's no doubt that someone saw something and thought it was probably nothing or it's not that important. It could be something, whether big or small. It could lead to a big break.
We want to help remember and identify the victims because it helps the police find what correlations their victims have with their perpetrator and bring him closer to justice. We also want to help the police find the Bible belt stranglers so he can be held accountable for his actions.
Finally, mister Campbell spoke.
During the course of this semester, the students have worked with professional profiler and members of law enforcement community, and these asperts explained to us that if you have the same mo and the same offender, signature in the same geographical area in the same period of time, then it's
almost assuredly the same person responsible. So as a class, we began to look at each of the rough league dozen cases that are oftentimes referred to as the Redhead murders that took place from nineteen seventy eight until two thousand and one. But there were six of these murders that stood out because they were so similar, so our
students began to focus on these. These murders occurred between nineteen eighty and eighty five, and the bodies were discovered between nineteen eighty three and eighty five, so we knew that we had six murders occurring in the same time period.
So then we looked at geographic location and we found the same six murders, three in Tennessee, Campbell, Cheatham, and Green County, plus one in Wetzel County, West Virginia, with one just across the border in Knox County, Kentucky, and finally another one just across the border in West Memphis, Arkansas. They were all linked because of not just geographic proximity, but because they were connected by highways and interstates along
the Knoxville Nashville Corridor. After concluding that we had the same location, same time period, same mo and same signature, we enlisted the help of professionals in evaluating our work. We consulted and they agreed with us that these six murders are most likely the work of one person. So since these murders happened around Tennessee and what is oftentimes referred to as the Bible bbble Belt, and most of the victims were strangled or suffocated, we have decided to
name this serial killer the Bible Belt strangler. Today, we're making these documents publicly available to the media and the public, including the eight page psychological profile. Sadly, murder has been around as long as humanity. People think they can commit such acts and get away from the prying eyes of public.
And they'll never be seen. They'll think there'll be no witnesses.
They think they're too good at their craft, they think they're too smart. But often when some time is passed, they feel like they're never going to be caught. But the monster we now seek took the lives of six women that we feel he intentionally targeted because they were out on the rown alone with no family and no friends. Their lives were most likely stolen from them in the dark back parking, loss of truck stops and rest areas, and then dumped along lonely highways at night where he
thought no one would see him. And he's eluded justice for almost forty years. But the Bible Belt Stranglers wrong. He made a mistake. Somebody saw something, somebody's heard something. The blood of these six women that was spilled into the overgrown hedges of our nation's highways and interstates has gone unnoticed for way too long. And today we are here to recognize these voices and give them justice for
which they're still crying out. We want the media to hear their cry as well, so the people out there with the information that law enforcement needs to identify these victims and solve these crimes can come forward. So, Bible Belt Strangler, we know you're out there. We know that somebody has information to help find you and hold you accountable. And after today, everyone knows that we're looking for you. And today everyone knows that we are our sisters keepers,
because we're like family. And this time, no matter how hard you squeeze your evil hands, you will never be able to silence their crimes.
Now years later, mister Campbell reflects on the press conference and its impact on not just the students, but the case as a whole.
Right before will and it's a different ones. Stepped to the microphone. I said, I just want you to know if the Bible Belt strangler is still alive, he's probably watching right now.
Now go out there and do the press conference. And they looked at me like, oh, that was terrible, why did you do that?
But really, when I stepped to the microphone I spoke to the Bible belt strangler, I was full of so much emotion and I didn't think it would be that way. You know, again, I'm removed from these murders and these cases and I didn't know them, but I almost started crying. I could just feel the emotion, just feeling me, and you know, to realize that there are people out there and they deserve to be brought to justice, and that I could literally be speaking of them, they could be
watching me on the live stream. It was kind of surreal experience that really maybe more emotional than I thought I would be. I was worried about the students. You know, they're young, they're used to speaking in public, but I probably should have been worried about myself. I think the closer they got into the case and looking at the case, they realized that they might actually be able to change something.
I think, especially young people today, feel like if they do work, they want something to come out of it, and I believe that this press conference made them feel like that in the future something good could come from their work.
That press conference really put the kids out there. Wasn't adults speaking with kids in the background, but it was really representative of the kind of belief that mister Campbell has in his students and Elizabethton has in their high school, and the belief that XQ has in the potential of young people and the potential of educators to create these
environments for students. I think for mister Campbell and for those kids, it was a moment of real vulnerability and a moment to really put themselves out there in a way to say they believed in what they had done, and they believed in the power of their research and the power of their position and the power of their findings. And for us, that was a big moment for us at XQ to go, yes, this is what we mean. This is what rethinking high school looks like. This is
exactly what young people can do. Now, let's make sure it's not just one class in one high school in one town in Tennessee, but it's happening for kids everywhere.
You can find more about XQ Institute at XQ America, across all socials.
All these TV stations are running the story and it got a lot of attention. Matter of fact, it got so much attention it went national. We got in Oxygen True Crime today. Like all these these people were covering it.
A group of Elizabethan High School students started a project to research a string of unsolved murders from thirty years ago.
For three decades, the mystery had remained unsolved. Six redheaded women strangled and left on the side of a highway. Only one victim's name was even known. That's when a group of elizabeth In High School students started their research.
A group of high school student detectives are investigating a series of unsolved killings.
Students from elizabeth And High School presented their research on what is known as the Redhead Murders. Over the last semester, the students have studied several cold cases spanning the South. The cases all have several things connecting them, including the victim's hair color. Students created a profile of the suspected killer and named him the Bible Belt strangler.
Students in Elizabethton had a class where they investigated these murders.
I think this media attention really did a lot to bring eyes back to the case and help, you know, make the cases not so cold. So what happened was the students had tried to bring.
The case back up. It had this media blitz, It'd been featured all over the nation.
They have a name for the killer, they have a way to separate the six out from the rest of the victims.
People start calling the TBI, and they start.
Calling the local police agencies, and they start saying, well, you know, what does this mean.
Are we looking at other cases? Are these related to any others?
Could she have been killed, you know, by the same person as somebody else? And I think it just it just really got a media firestorm really going, and it brought up a lot of attention back to these cases. Once you start getting a few tips or a few leads, or you know, a few identifications, then the cold case isn't so cold.
Anymore.
There's a huge true crime whatever you call them, what citizen sleuth kind of community out there.
They And so what happened was there was a lady who spent a lot of time on these kind of missing persons websites and Jane go kind of websites. So she heard the podcast that the students were featured on, and she thought, huh, here's six victims. Here's six bodies, and they look like this.
They're this age, there're this weight, this height, whatever.
And then she was also looking at these missing person websites and she noticed that a missing person she felt matched up with this victim. It was shortly after they disappeared, so she actually said, I think that this missing person may be here, Jane Doe to Campbell County Jain Doe, and that tip was submitted to the TBI, and pretty soon the TBI was traveling to Indiana to find her relatives and take DNA swaps, and sure enough, it did turn out to be that missing person.
Let's stop here for another quick break murder.
One on one, A woman who thinks Jane Doe is her mother is sharing her story hoping it'll give identity to the woman left dead inside of a discarded fridge.
Many believe the person who killed the Jane Doe also killed six other redheaded women. All but one of those are also unidentified. He's called the Bible Belt strangler and he's never been caught.
Well.
I saw the headline that said, you know one of redhead murders victims identified.
That's when it got really intense.
The Campbell County Jane Doe has now been identified as Tina Marie McKenny. Like McKenny, four of the other five victims were Jane doe'es. The autopsy suggested that she was strangled.
I want you ought to know this is Tina laying here, and she does matter, and she deliver her and she didn't abandon her. And she does have a family.
She had us, Tinas, and he took her from me.
Shane Waters ended up speaking to Tina's sister, Liza Plummer.
She was still that quiet little kid that sat in that corner and nicest can be. She was naive. Our life was hell at home.
The family inquired about Farmer. They were told that she didn't want to come back with them, and she had left with the truckers, said to be headed to Kentucky. The family did not believe that story. Her family reported her missing to the authorities at this time, Yet authorities in Indiana did not enter her international databases. The state did not have a law common to many other states, requiring law enforcement to enter unidentified victims into this database.
Tina's sister Liza told the story the last time she saw Tina.
Tina was nineteen.
I was turned eighteen, and that's when her and dad got into it. And my dad he was just be honest, a mean ass, that's just how he was, and Tina cried. I went inside. Me and Dad had some words, and we went out into the van and slept in Scott's band that was my boyfriend then, and I woke up the next morning. Tina left me note saying she didn't want to make trouble to me and Dad, and she
just left. So I'm fearing that she probably went across the street, used the phone booth and called someone to come and get her.
Eliza recalls realizing that something truly bad had happened to her sister. Tina.
I used to.
Always tell I said now the minute Dad passed on, I know it's a terrible thing to said then my dad left us earth she would have came back. And when my dad was gone and she didn't come back, on kneed Tina was gone. I've been on this since I think two thousand and four, hard, really hard on it, and I just got bits and pieces here and there.
No one from the investigation has been in touch with you to let you know anything.
No, they put it the nath REGs.
They've paid aneath rig.
I think the most thing about this for me, though, is had the police worked into this back then, they would have heard the story, probably found her.
Maybe linked together, yeah, linked.
Tina's neighbor at the time, a woman named Tammy, was also present and said something that couldn't be ignored.
Dicky said, and Geneva, she was saying to you that she had run off with a truck driver.
He told us, Yeah, that she had run off with the truck driver. When I go buy interstates, I break.
I stand truck driver, I break.
Because no one know.
But see, the stories are in my head.
They're never going to leave my head.
Is you know she mattered, she was here, she was fine.
The truck driver revealed was an eerie callback to what the FBI analyst and the students had predicted.
You know, these bodies are being done along the interstates. First thought to the kids was, Hey, if I was in your shoes and I was an investigator's case. As a detective, my first thought would be because these bodies are being dumped on the side of NY State by a gut feeling and experience tells me if it's.
A truck driver.
But we knew it had to be a truck driver.
He's pretty stocky, you know, truck driver type.
He's a truck driver.
Soon the most shocking twist would come to late.
Good afternoon. I am Jared E. Fler, the elected District Attorney for Tennessee's eighth Judicial District, of which Campbell County is a part of. On January the first, nineteen eighty five, an unidentified female body was discovered murdered along Interstate seventy five and Campbell County, Tennessee. At that time, an investigation was launched by the TBI to determine two things, the identity of the unknown female and who was responsible for
her death. Yesterday, the results of that investigation were presented to the Campbell County Grand Jury.
The grand jury.
Found that the unidentified body was that of Tina Marie Farmer of Marion County, Indiana. Additionally, the grand jury found that there was a fiship proof to believe that Jerry Johns of Cleveland, Tennessee caused her death.
More on that next time. Murder one oh one is executive produced by Stephanie Leidecker, Alex Campbell, Courtney Armstrong, Andrew Arnold and me Jeff Shane. Additional producing by Connor Powell and Gabriel Castillo, Editing by Jeff Twa and Davey Cooper Wasser. Music by Vanacor Music. Murder one oh one is a production of iHeartRadio and Katie's Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.