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What Are the Redhead Murders? Where Investigation Stands 30 Years Later · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: Okay, so picture this. It is nineteen eighty five, and
0:04
you are driving down this incredibly dark stretch of Interstate.
0:07
Speaker 2: Forty right, just pitch blackout there, Yeah.
0:10
Speaker 1: Exactly, pitch black. The radio is, you know, it's fading
0:13
in and out, picking up these random bursts of static
0:16
and maybe fragments of country music. And really the only
0:21
lights you see are your own headlights cutting through the dark,
0:24
and maybe the tail lights of these massive eighteen wheelers
0:28
just pushing through the night hauling freight across state lines.
0:32
Speaker 2: It's a very specific kind of isolation, honestly, it really is.
0:35
Speaker 1: It feels like this vast connected network, right, like this
0:39
concrete circulatory system that just keeps the whole country breathing.
0:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
0:44
Speaker 1: But what you do not realize, like sitting behind the
0:46
wheel in nineteen eighty five, is that this exact stretch
0:49
of road isn't just a highway no at all. It
0:52
has quietly become well the perfect high speed hunting ground
0:55
for a phantom.
0:56
Speaker 2: Because the interstate system back then essentially functioned as a
0:59
weapon of anonymity. I mean, you have this sprawling system
1:02
running through the American South and Midwest.
1:04
Speaker 1: Like Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky.
1:08
Speaker 2: Mississippi, West Virginia, all of it, and someone could move,
1:11
you know, hundreds of miles in a single night, just
1:14
totally on trecked, exactly operating in this constantly shifting jurisdiction
1:18
where literally nobody knew their face. They could pick up
1:21
vulnerable people and then just discard them miles and miles
1:25
away from where they were last seen before anyone even
1:28
realized they were gone, Yeah, long before.
1:30
Speaker 1: And that is the terrifying reality at the very heart
1:33
of our deep dive today because we are unpacking a
1:36
really massive stack of source material today regarding a string
1:40
of unsolved homicides that haunted those exact highways.
1:43
Speaker 2: Mostly from the late nineteen seventies through the early nineteen.
1:46
Speaker 1: Nineties, right, but with this really brutal, condensed peak right
1:51
around nineteen eighty four nineteen eighty five.
1:53
Speaker 2: Which is when it really caught the public's attention.
1:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, the press and law enforcement eventually gave this whole
1:58
horrific phenomenon a name that called it the Redhead murders.
2:01
Speaker 2: Because the victims were all young women found dumped along
2:05
major interstates in the Bible Belt.
2:07
Speaker 1: And the detail that just like Caught Fire. In the
2:10
headlines was that many of them supposedly shared reddish, auburn
2:14
or strawberry blonde hair, which.
2:16
Speaker 2: You know is a really compelling, horrifying hook for a
2:20
news broadcast.
2:20
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, it sells papers, right, But.
2:23
Speaker 2: As we'll see as we get into the sources, it
2:25
also inadvertently masked the true mechanisms of how these crimes
2:29
were actually being committed.
2:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, it kind of became a distraction. But our mission
2:34
today for this deep dive isn't just to recount a
2:37
cold case.
2:38
Speaker 2: No, we have a lot more to cover.
2:39
Speaker 1: We are diving into how this decades old mystery, which
2:43
was basically frozen in time inside these cardboard evidence boxes,
2:47
is finally being systematically dismantled piece together. Yeah, and the
2:50
forces driving this breakthrough are just incredibly disparate, Like you
2:54
have the absolute bleeding edge of genetic genealogy.
2:58
Speaker 2: The evolution of forensic siral.
3:00
Speaker 1: And of all things, a high school sociology.
3:03
Speaker 2: Class, which is still just wild to I know.
3:05
Speaker 1: When I first read the source material about the teenagers,
3:08
my jaw literally hit the floor. I mean, we are
3:11
talking about high school students essentially building a behavioral profile
3:16
that rivaled what the FBI was doing.
3:18
Speaker 2: It's incredible work.
3:20
Speaker 1: But okay, let's unpack this because to understand the sheer
3:23
magnitude of what these kids untangled, we have to put
3:27
ourselves in the shoes of law enforcement in the mid nineteen.
3:30
Speaker 2: Eighties, right. We have to look at the context.
3:32
Speaker 1: Imagine you're a detective in a rural county in Tennessee.
3:36
You find a victim on the side of the highway.
3:38
You have no idea who she is, none, and you
3:40
have absolutely no idea that like three hundred miles away,
3:44
a detective in Arkansas is staring at the exact same
3:48
knot tied in a ligature around another unidentified victim.
3:51
Speaker 2: The isolation of law enforcement in that era, it really
3:54
cannot be overstated. I mean, you mentioned the estimates and
3:56
the sources earlier.
3:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, the body count is all over the.
3:58
Speaker 2: Place, right, Some investing there's zero in on this really
4:01
tight cluster of maybe five or six core cases, but
4:04
then other true crime researchers expand that umbrella to eleven,
4:09
maybe even fourteen victims.
4:11
Speaker 1: This is a huge discrepancy.
4:13
Speaker 2: It is, and the fact that there is no firm
4:15
consensus on the body count, well that's the first major
4:19
clue to understanding the structural failure of the time. How
4:23
so well investigating across state lines in nineteen eighty five
4:27
was it was like trying to navigate the early days
4:30
of cell phones, you know, where every county was a
4:32
different carrier that just refused to share signal.
4:35
Speaker 1: Oh wow, that is a great analogy.
4:38
Speaker 2: So Arkansas had a piece of physical evidence, Kentucky had
4:41
a body, Tennessee had a missing person's report, but the
4:45
towers literally couldn't talk to each other.
4:47
Speaker 1: So the data is just completely siloed. And because the
4:50
data is siloed, the pattern doesn't emerge immediately. It takes time,
4:54
a lot of time. But when it finally does emerge,
4:56
when authorities from all these different states finally managed to
4:59
sit down in a room together than the mid eighties,
5:02
the picture that forms is just devastating.
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Speaker 2: It really is.
5:05
Speaker 1: Let's look at how this chaos started to actually coalesce,
5:07
because in September nineteen eighty four, you have twenty eight
5:10
year old Lisa Nichols found along I forty in West Memphis, Arkansas,
5:14
and she's found wearing only a sweater. Now, she was
5:17
actually identified relatively quickly by June nineteen eighty five using fingerprints,
5:22
but she was estranged from her family in West.
5:24
Speaker 2: Virginia, which is a common theme we'll see.
5:27
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then a few months later, New Year's Day
5:29
nineteen eighty five, twenty one year old Tina Marie McKenny
5:33
Farmer is discovered off I seventy five in Jellico, Tennessee.
5:37
Speaker 2: And the escalation in the physical evidence with Tina Farmer
5:40
is really stark.
5:42
Speaker 1: It's awful.
5:43
Speaker 2: She was strangled, she was bound, and she was left
5:45
wrapped in a blanket. And the sources emphasized two really
5:49
critical biological details.
5:50
Speaker 1: Here, right, the first being that she was.
5:52
Speaker 2: Pregnant, yeah, about ten to twelve weeks pregnant.
5:54
Speaker 1: Yeah.
5:55
Speaker 2: And the second detail is that the blanket she was
5:57
wrapped in actually contained seminal fluid. Just huge, right, But
6:01
in nineteen eighty five, that sound of fluid was essentially
6:04
a locked vault. They couldn't do much with it yet,
6:07
but crucially it was preserved.
6:08
Speaker 1: Thank goodness they kept it, because the timeline just compresses
6:11
violently after that, it speeds up so much. April nineteen
6:14
eighty five is just a nightmare month. On April first,
6:17
a spy Regina Black. Tilgrim is found in Gray, Kentucky,
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right off Route twenty five. And the disposal method here
6:23
is well, it's just uniquely callous. She was discovered suffocated
6:28
and stuffed inside a discarded refrigerator on the side of
6:31
the road.
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Speaker 2: It's horrific.
6:32
Speaker 1: It just tossed away. And then less than two weeks later,
6:35
April fourteenth, the body of seventeen year old Elizabeth Lamott,
6:39
they called her Liz. She's found in Green County, Tennessee,
6:42
near I eighty one.
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Speaker 2: And her injuries were different.
6:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, she had suffered blunt force trauma, maybe a stab wound.
6:49
And she was also pregnant. Well, she had miscarried shortly
6:52
before her death.
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Speaker 2: Now, notice the geographic scatter here. We have Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee.
6:58
Speaker 1: It's a massive area, it is, and.
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Speaker 2: The origins of the victims were even wider, like lis.
7:03
Lamott had vanished from a group home all the way
7:06
up in Manchester, New Hampshire in nineteen eighty four.
7:08
Speaker 1: Wow, New Hampshire.
7:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, she crossed half the country before she was killed
7:12
as by Pilgrim was from western North Carolina. Tina Farmer
7:16
was an Indiana native. Last scene in Indianapolis.
7:18
Speaker 1: So they were coming from everywhere exactly.
7:20
Speaker 2: These were women in motion, which really brings us to
7:23
the core of the behavioral profile because you know, the
7:27
press focus heavily on the hair color the redhead murders.
7:32
Speaker 1: Okay, I actually have to push back on that Moniker
7:34
a bit, go for it, because looking through the forensic
7:36
profiles in our sources, it feels like a media invention
7:39
that just kind of forced a narrative. Any mean, well,
7:42
take lis Lamott for instance. The reports say she had
7:45
light brown to darkish blonde hair with like reddish highlights, right,
7:49
I mean that is a very broad spectrum to qualify
7:52
as a strict redhead. I know, human beings are hardwired
7:55
to find patterns in the static. You know, we want
7:57
things to connect.
7:58
Speaker 3: Oh totally, we love a But are we really sure
8:01
a killer was driving down the interstate, squinting through the
8:04
dark at seventy miles an hour looking specifically for strawberry
8:08
blonde hair or is it just a really common genetic
8:11
trait among a specific demographic of people.
8:13
Speaker 2: Well it's a great question, and the forensic community actually
8:17
debates this constantly, but the consensus heavily leans towards your skepticism.
8:22
Oh yeah, the hair color is widely considered a red herring,
8:26
no pun intended, honestly, Right, when you look at behavioral analysis,
8:30
a predator operating on a highway isn't primarily hunting an aesthetic.
8:36
They aren't looking for a hair color. They are hunting
8:38
of vulnerability.
8:39
Speaker 1: That makes so much more sense.
8:41
Speaker 2: The true common denominator among these women was their systemic marginalization.
8:44
Speaker 1: Right, because the sources describe them mostly as transient hitchhikers,
8:49
sex workers, women estranged from their families, runaways.
8:53
Speaker 2: Exactly, and think about it practically, why does a predator
8:56
choose a hitchhiker.
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Speaker 1: Because they're right there on the road.
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Speaker 2: That but also because there's no initial crime scene. The
9:03
victim willingly gets into the vehicle. Oh wow, Yeah, there
9:06
are no witnesses to an abduction. Yes, there's no broken
9:09
glass on the sidewalk, no screams in a parking lot.
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Speaker 1: It just looks like a normal interaction exactly.
9:14
Speaker 2: And once the door of that sleeper cap closes, the
9:17
victim is entirely isolated in what is basically a mobile
9:20
soundproof box. Is chilling, it is. And furthermore, if a
9:24
woman is estrange from her family, or she's living on
9:27
the margins of society. The reporting of a disappearance is
9:30
heavily delayed.
9:31
Speaker 1: Right, because nobody realizes she's gone right away.
9:34
Speaker 2: Right. I mean, if a teenager who lives at home
9:36
doesn't come back from school, that triggers a massive search
9:39
by five zero doo pm that same day.
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Speaker 1: Oh, definitely, helicopter is the whole thing.
9:44
Speaker 2: But a woman hitchhiking across state lines, she might not
9:49
be reported missing for months, if ever.
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Speaker 1: Which gives the killer a massive headstart, a huge head start.
9:56
Speaker 2: By the time a body is found, the trail is
9:58
just completely cold.
10:00
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for the investigation? This
10:02
brings a street into the cold case era because you
10:04
have this multi state task force that actually gets convened
10:07
in nineteen eighty five and the FBI is brought into consult.
10:11
They have the maps, they have the pushpins showing this
10:13
terrifying cluster of bodies along the I forty and I
10:16
seventy five corridors.
10:18
Speaker 2: They see the geographic web.
10:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the prevailing theory at the time, which makes
10:21
total sense, is a long haul truck driver.
10:24
Speaker 2: It's the most logical conclusion.
10:26
Speaker 1: Right, someone who can blend into the landscape perfectly. They
10:29
pick up a woman at a truck stop in Indiana,
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murder her in the cab, and dump her body in
10:34
Tennessee before the sun even comes up.
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Speaker 2: And that theory was incredibly robust because the trucking industry
10:41
in the nineteen eighties, especially post deregulation, it was this
10:45
incredibly high volume, decentralized environment.
10:49
Speaker 1: It was like the Wild West out there on the
10:51
highways pretty much.
10:52
Speaker 2: You had thousands of independent owner operators running massive distances,
10:57
and they didn't have the satellite tracking or the electronic
11:00
logging devices or the GPS that fleets have today.
11:02
Speaker 1: Because there's no digital footprint none.
11:04
Speaker 2: A driver could easily just falsify a paper logbook to
11:07
hide his location.
11:08
Speaker 1: But even with a solid theory like that, the technological
11:11
roadblocks they faced were just massive, oh insurmountable in some ways,
11:15
Like when I was looking into the forensic capabilities of
11:17
nineteen eighty five from our sources, it is staggering how
11:20
little they actually had to work with.
11:22
Speaker 2: It really was the dark ages of forensics.
11:24
Speaker 1: Put yourself in the position of the detective holding that
11:27
blanket from Tina Farmer's crime scene. You have seminal fluid. Now, today,
11:32
that's a salt case. You swab it, you run.
11:34
Speaker 2: It, boom, Right, it's wrapped up in a week.
11:36
Speaker 1: But in nineteen eighty five, what are you actually doing
11:38
with it?
11:39
Speaker 2: In nineteen eighty five, you are relying heavily on very
11:42
basic sorology, specifically ABO blood typing.
11:47
Speaker 1: Okay, so just basic ABO blood groups.
11:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, And even then it only worked if you were
11:52
lucky and the perpetrator was what they call a secretor.
11:55
Speaker 1: A secret What does that mean?
11:57
Speaker 2: It means their blood type antigens are actually present in
12:00
their other bodily fluids, like their saliva or semen. So
12:03
say the killer is a secretor. The lab analyzes the
12:07
fluid on the blanket and says, okay, detective, the killer
12:09
has Typo blood.
12:11
Speaker 1: Which is statistically speaking, the most common blood type on
12:14
the entire planet. Exactly roughly forty to forty five percent
12:17
of the human population has Typo blood. So the lab
12:21
essentially calls the detective and says, good news, we narrowed
12:24
your suspect pulled down to half the men in America, which.
12:26
Speaker 2: Is totally useless for identifying a single person.
12:29
Speaker 1: It's entirely exclusionary. Right, you can prove someone didn't do
12:32
it if they have type A, but you cannot pinpoint
12:35
who actually did it.
12:36
Speaker 2: Exactly the problem and this technological limitation it cascaded into
12:41
literally every other facet of the investigation takes fingerprints.
12:44
Speaker 1: For example, oh Man, the fingerprint situation was a mess.
12:48
Speaker 2: It really was. They could lift prints from the victims
12:50
to try and identify them. But afis the automated fingerprint
12:54
identification system. It was still in its infancy, and it
12:58
was incredibly fragmented.
12:59
Speaker 1: Because nothing was digitized or connected.
13:02
Speaker 2: Right. A local precinct in Kentucky just had these metal
13:05
file cabinets full of paper fingerprint cards. So if a
13:10
woman from Indiana was found dead in Tennessee, her prints
13:13
weren't magically crossing state lines in a computer to find
13:15
a match.
13:16
Speaker 1: You'd have to physically mail them.
13:17
Speaker 2: Yes, they have required the manual physical mailing of fingerprint
13:21
cards between police agencies based on sheer guesswork, like Hey,
13:24
maybe she's from Ohio, let's mail these to Columbus.
13:27
Speaker 1: It's like trying to put together a ten thousand piece
13:30
puzzle where five different people hold different handfuls of pieces
13:34
and none of them are allowed to look at the
13:36
box that.
13:37
Speaker 2: Is exactly what it was like, And dental records were
13:40
even more frustrating.
13:41
Speaker 1: Because they need a baseline right exactly.
13:43
Speaker 2: The sources point out that dental records are completely useless
13:46
if you don't have a suspected identity to begin with.
13:49
You can take a perfect plaster impression of a Jane Doe's.
13:53
Speaker 1: Teeth, but you have nothing to compare it to.
13:56
Speaker 2: Right unless someone walks into the local precinct and says,
13:59
I think this victim might be my sister and her
14:02
childhood dentist was doctor Smith in Indianapolis, you have absolutely
14:06
nothing to check that impression against. It's just a piece
14:08
of plaster sitting on a shelf in an evidence.
14:10
Speaker 1: Locker, which creates this ultimate paralysis, and homicide investigation doesn't
14:16
it the unidentified victim.
14:17
Speaker 2: It's the hardest case to clear.
14:19
Speaker 1: Because when you have a Jane Doe, the timeline of
14:21
the crime basically doesn't exist. You have no known associates
14:25
to go interview, You have no last seen locations to
14:27
canvas right.
14:28
Speaker 2: You don't know where she worked, who she owed money to,
14:31
who she was dating.
14:32
Speaker 1: Nothing, And homicide investigations are built by working backward from
14:36
the victim's life. If you don't know the life, you
14:39
cannot phrase the path of the ghosts who.
14:41
Speaker 2: Took it precisely. And then if we connect this to
14:44
the bigger picture, you have to add the societal roadblocks
14:47
on top of the technological way.
14:48
Speaker 1: We talked about how these women were marginalized.
14:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, the sources explicitly note the massive stigma surrounding sex
14:55
workers and hitchhikers in the nineteen eighties society, and sadly
15:00
sometimes the official language used in police reports of that era,
15:04
really minimized the urgency of these crimes.
15:07
Speaker 1: It's so tragic to read. There was this pervasive attitude
15:10
of you know, she put herself in that situation.
15:12
Speaker 2: It was a catastrophic combination. You had technological inability on
15:16
one hand and systemic apathy on the other. The interstate
15:19
system provided the perfect hunting ground. The trucking boon provided
15:23
the camouflage.
15:24
Speaker 1: The scientific limitations provided the shield, and.
15:26
Speaker 2: Societal indifference provided the ultimate cover.
15:29
Speaker 1: It's just a perfect storm for a serial killer.
15:32
Speaker 2: It really is. So Inevitably, the multi stay task forces
15:35
eventually dissolved. They just didn't have the actionable intelligence or
15:40
the public pressure to sustain the resources.
15:43
Speaker 1: So the cases just went into those cardboard boxes we mentioned,
15:46
shoved onto shelves and basements across the South, just gathering
15:50
dust for decades. And they sat there for over thirty years.
15:55
I mean, it is maddening to think about the families
15:57
who spent three decades sitting by the phone ring if
16:00
their daughter was living in a new city or lying
16:02
in a ditch.
16:03
Speaker 2: It's a very unique kind of torture for those families.
16:05
Speaker 1: But here is where the narrative pivots, and it pivots hard.
16:08
Yes it does, because the dust on those boxes wasn't
16:11
blown off by you know, a grizzled cold case detective
16:15
having a late night epiphany over a glass of whiskey.
16:17
Speaker 2: No, not at all.
16:18
Speaker 1: It was blown off by teenagers.
16:19
Speaker 2: The twenty eighteen Elizabethtin High School sociology class.
16:23
Speaker 1: Yes, I want to dig so deep into this because
16:26
this is my favorite part of the source material. We
16:28
usually hear about high school sociology projects involving, i don't know,
16:31
pafeteria seating dynamics or surveys on social media usage.
16:35
Speaker 2: Right, standard high school stuff.
16:37
Speaker 1: But Alex Campbell, this teacher at Elizabethton High in Tennessee,
16:41
he decides his students are going to tackle a multi
16:44
state serial killer cold case.
16:46
Speaker 2: It's so ambitious.
16:47
Speaker 1: How do a group of seventeen and eighteen year olds
16:49
actually move the needle on something that the FBI couldn't
16:53
crack in nineteen eighty five.
16:54
Speaker 2: Well, they did it by applying modern data visualization and
16:57
organizational rigor to public available, yet heavily fragmented information.
17:03
Speaker 1: So they didn't have secret files.
17:05
Speaker 2: No, these students didn't have access to classified police files
17:08
or crime scene photos. What they had were historical newspaper archives,
17:13
missing persons databases, and modern mapping.
17:16
Speaker 1: Software like Google Maps and stuff.
17:18
Speaker 2: Exactly. They started by simply plotting the geographic coordinates of
17:21
every suspected Redhead murder victim along the interstate system.
17:24
Speaker 1: And when you map it out visually using tools that
17:27
simply didn't exist in nineteen eighty five, the patterns become
17:29
impossible to ignore. Right.
17:31
Speaker 2: Yes, they focus heavily on the Interstate forty corridor, and
17:35
from there they built a behavioral profile.
17:37
Speaker 1: These high schoolers built a profile, They really did.
17:40
Speaker 2: They analyzed the distances between the dump sites, the estimated
17:44
time of death versus the time of discovery, and the
17:47
proximity to major truck stops in waystations.
17:49
Speaker 1: That is so smart.
17:51
Speaker 2: They mathematically modeled the drive times to deduce that a
17:55
long haul trucker running very specific regional routes was the
17:59
mosttistically probable offender.
18:01
Speaker 1: Wow.
18:02
Speaker 2: But honestly, their most brilliant move wasn't just the data analysis.
18:06
It was understanding the power of narrative.
18:08
Speaker 1: Right because they basically rebranded the phantom. They coined the
18:11
term Bible belt strangler, which is.
18:14
Speaker 2: An absolute master stroke in public relations, because law enforcement
18:18
operates on evidence, sure, but the public operates on story, and.
18:21
Speaker 1: Redhead Murders was kind of falling apart as the story exactly.
18:24
Speaker 2: It was a fractured, confusing moniker that had lost its
18:27
heat decades ago. By naming the suspected defender the Bible
18:30
belt strangler, the students gave the media a terrifying cohesive hook.
18:35
Speaker 1: They gave him an identity.
18:37
Speaker 2: They held press conferences, they built dossier's, they handed out materials.
18:41
They essentially shamed the broader public into paying attention to
18:44
these forgotten women again.
18:45
Speaker 1: And it completely worked. The media coverage just exploded. But
18:49
I think it's crucial to point out, based on our sources,
18:52
that these kids weren't playing vigilantes. There weren't like out
18:56
kicking down doors or harassing suspects. They were functioning as
19:01
this incredible, unpaid intelligence analysis unit for law enforcement.
19:06
Speaker 2: That's a perfect way to describe it.
19:07
Speaker 1: They took the noise, they organized it into a clear signal,
19:11
and they handed that signal over to the authorities, which
19:14
generated massive new tips and forced agencies to finally re
19:17
examine the physical evidence.
19:19
Speaker 2: And the timing of this student led renaissance was just
19:22
flawlessly serendipitous. Why is that Because right as these teenagers
19:26
were forcing the public to look at the I forty
19:28
corridor again, in twenty eighteen, a massive teconic shift was
19:33
happening in forensic.
19:34
Speaker 1: Science, the DNA tech.
19:36
Speaker 2: Yes, the science finally caught up to the evidence that
19:39
was sitting in those boxes.
19:40
Speaker 1: Let's get into the mechanics of this, because I think
19:42
people hear the word DNA and they think it's just
19:44
you know, a magic wand you wave over a bone
19:46
and a printer spits out a driver's license.
19:48
Speaker 2: It's definitely not that simple, right.
19:50
Speaker 1: The science used in nineteen ninety five is vastly different
19:53
from the science used in twenty eighteen. When I was
19:55
reading the sources about genetic genealogy, the distinction between str
20:00
as an SNP is completely blew my mind.
20:02
Speaker 2: It's the fundamental difference between the DNA profiling of the
20:06
late nineties and what we use today. It changed everything.
20:09
Speaker 1: So explain STRs first, what are they so?
20:12
Speaker 2: For decades, law enforcement used STRs that stands for short
20:15
tandem repeats. This is what the FBI's famous code is
20:18
system is built on.
20:19
Speaker 3: Okay.
20:19
Speaker 2: Str analysis looks at a very small number of specific
20:23
markers in your DNA, usually about twenty markers. It is
20:27
fantastic for a direct one to one.
20:29
Speaker 1: Match, like matching a suspect to a crime scene exactly.
20:32
Speaker 2: Yes, I have your blood from a crime scene and
20:33
I have a cheek swab from you. I can use
20:36
STRs to match them perfectly.
20:37
Speaker 1: But there's a catch, a huge catch.
20:39
Speaker 2: If your DNA isn't already in the database because you've
20:42
never been arrested or profiled, an STR profile is basically useless.
20:46
It can't tell me who your cousins are, it can't
20:48
tell me where your ancestors are from. It's a completely
20:51
closed loop.
20:52
Speaker 1: Which totally explains why so many Jane does stayed unidentified
20:55
even after DNA testing became common in the two thousands. Right, Yes,
21:00
had their DNA, they extracted it, but because the Jane
21:02
Does had never been arrested, they weren't in codis, so
21:06
the computer just blinked no match for twenty years.
21:09
Speaker 2: Precisely, you hit the nail on the head. But genetic genealogy,
21:13
the new method relies on SNPs single nucleotide polymorphisms SNPs.
21:18
Instead of looking at just twenty markers like CODY'STAES, laboratories
21:22
like Authrum analyze hundreds of thousands of markers across the
21:26
entire genome.
21:26
Speaker 1: Hundreds of thousands.
21:28
Speaker 2: Yes, they extract DNA from say a thirty five year
21:31
old degraded bone fragment. They rebuild this massive, comprehensive genetic profile,
21:37
and then they upload it to consumer genealogy databases like the.
21:41
Speaker 1: Ones people used to build their family trees online exactly,
21:44
and the mechanism of how they actually rebuild the DNA
21:46
is fascinating. The sources mentioned the biological degradation that happens
21:50
over time.
21:50
Speaker 2: It's a huge hurdle.
21:52
Speaker 1: Because a bone sitting in the dirt in Tennessee for
21:54
a year or a blanket sitting in a non climate
21:57
controlled evidence locker for thirty years. It's subjected to bacteria
22:02
uvolite humidity.
22:03
Speaker 2: It destroys the biological material, right.
22:06
Speaker 1: The DNA is literally shattering into microscopic pieces. But these
22:10
modern labs use computational algorithms to take millions of these
22:14
shattered puzzle pieces and essentially stitch them back together into
22:19
a readable genome.
22:20
Speaker 2: It's a computational miracle, really. And once that rebuilt genome
22:24
is uploaded to a genealogy database, the friends of genealogist
22:27
aren't looking for a direct.
22:28
Speaker 1: Match to the victim, because the victim isn't in there.
22:30
Speaker 2: Right, They're looking for distant cousins. They measure shared DNA
22:34
in units called centim organs centimorgan yeah yeah, And if
22:37
they find, say a third cousin who shares a specific
22:40
amount of centim organs with the Jane, do they start
22:43
building massive, sprawling family trees backward.
22:46
Speaker 1: In time, working backwards from the cousin exactly.
22:49
Speaker 2: They find the common great great grandparents from like the
22:51
eighteen hundreds, and then they trace every single descendant forward
22:55
in time to the nineteen eighties.
22:56
Speaker 1: Just looking for a missing branch, looking for.
22:58
Speaker 2: A branch of the family tree where a young woman
23:01
simply stopped existing in the public record. No merriage certificate,
23:05
no tax returns, no death certificate. She just vanished.
23:09
Speaker 1: That is staggering. Forensic architecture just increactlys revolutionized the field,
23:14
and it relies entirely on centralized databases. This is where
23:17
NAMUSE comes in right, The National Missing and Unidentified Person System.
23:22
Speaker 2: NAMUSE is critical to this whole story.
23:24
Speaker 1: We talked earlier about how siloed nineteen eighty five was.
23:27
NAMUSE basically became the digital bridge for all these disconnected agencies.
23:32
Speaker 2: It finally allowed a coroner in Kentucky to upload a
23:35
dental record or reconstructed DNA profile, and a desperate mother
23:39
in North Carolina to upload her missing daughter's details, and
23:43
the system would instantly connect them.
23:44
Speaker 1: The convergence of all these things, the students media campaign,
23:48
the advent of SMP based genetic genealogy, and the centralization
23:52
of NamUs it triggered an absolute avalanche of identification starting
23:56
in twenty eighteen.
23:56
Speaker 2: It was unprecedented in cold case history.
23:59
Speaker 1: Let's walk through the caste scate of names being restored.
24:01
Because the speed of this once the dam broke.
24:03
Speaker 2: Is incredible, it happened so fast.
24:05
Speaker 1: September twenty eighteen, Tina Farmer is identified. Now. The source
24:09
notes hers was actually achieved through fingerprints after a tip
24:13
connected her to a missing person's listing, which.
24:16
Speaker 2: Proves that public engagement and media pressure still works. The
24:19
student's campaign directly helped there exactly.
24:22
Speaker 1: But then just weeks later, in October twenty eighteen, a
24:26
spy pilgrim the woman found in the refrigerator she is
24:29
identified in Hers was DNA right. This was a direct
24:32
DNA match to her daughter, who had never ever stopped
24:36
searching for her mother.
24:37
Speaker 2: Just think about the emotional weight of that, a daughter
24:39
spending her entire life wondering if she was abandoned or
24:42
if her mom ran away, finally getting the definitive, tragic
24:46
answer through a microscopic strand of DNA.
24:49
Speaker 1: It's heartbreaking, but it's closure, and it continued. In November
24:53
twenty eighteen, Elizabeth Lamott, the seventeen year old from the
24:56
New Hampshire group home. She was identified via genetic genealogy
25:00
three identifications in three months, and the technology didn't just
25:03
stop in twenty eighteen. The sources show a continued timeline
25:06
of success over the next few.
25:07
Speaker 2: Years, right, they kept working.
25:09
Speaker 1: In the other cases, Tracy Suwalker, whose partial remains were
25:12
found near Jellico in April nineteen eighty five, She was
25:15
finally identified in twenty twenty two. She was a fifteen
25:18
year old girl from Indiana, just a kid. And then
25:21
Michelle Levone Inman found as skeletonized remains in March nineteen
25:25
eighty five near I twenty four identified in twenty twenty three.
25:30
Five women, five women stripped of their identities for decades,
25:34
finally got their names back.
25:36
Speaker 2: And getting their names back was a monumental victory for
25:39
human dignity first and foremost. But from an investigative standpoint,
25:43
it did something just as critical. What's thatpp It provided
25:46
a starting line. Because once you have a name, you
25:49
have a geography.
25:50
Speaker 1: Ah, you have the victim's life back exactly.
25:52
Speaker 2: You know Tracy was in Indiana, you know Liz was
25:55
in New Hampshire. You can now subpoena old employment records.
25:58
You can interview surviving friends and you can start tracking
26:01
their final movements to see exactly where their paths intersected
26:04
with the interstate system.
26:05
Speaker 1: You can trace the ghost, yes, but knowing who the
26:07
victims were only answered half the mystery right. The lingering,
26:10
terrifying question remained. Who is the monster driving the.
26:14
Speaker 2: Track the Bible built strangler exactly?
26:17
Speaker 1: And this is where the deep dive takes us to
26:19
the prime suspect and a woman who survived the unthinkable
26:23
to leave a blueprint for his capture.
26:26
Speaker 2: The ultimate breakthrough goes back to Tina Farmer and that
26:29
blanket from nineteen.
26:30
Speaker 1: Eighty five the seminal fluid.
26:32
Speaker 2: Yes, that biological time capsule that was preserved for over
26:36
thirty years. By twenty eighteen, forensic scientists were finally able
26:41
to extract a complete str profile from it.
26:44
Speaker 1: Because the tech had gotten good enough to read the
26:46
degraded sample exactly.
26:47
Speaker 2: They ran it through COTIS, the database of convicted offenders,
26:51
and they got a correct hit. The DNA belonged to
26:53
a man named Jerry Leon Johns.
26:55
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack Jerry Leon Johns, because on paper, this
26:59
guy is the exact boogeyman the Elizabeth Hayton students had profiled.
27:02
Speaker 2: He fits it perfectly.
27:03
Speaker 1: He was a long haul truck driver. He lived in
27:05
the Cleveland, Tennessee area during the nineteen eighties, which puts
27:08
him right in the geographic epicenter of the I seventy
27:11
five and I forty corridors where these bodies.
27:13
Speaker 2: Were being dumped right in the hunting ground.
27:15
Speaker 1: But investigators in twenty eighteen couldn't interrogate him because Jerry
27:18
Leon Johns had already died in prison in twenty fifteen.
27:21
Speaker 2: And the reason he was in prison is where the
27:23
narrative becomes incredibly frustrating, yet so crucial to understanding his methodology.
27:29
It's infuriating John's was serving time for conviction secured in
27:32
nineteen eighty seven, and the details of that nineteen eighty
27:36
five crime are an absolute carbon copy of the Redhead murders.
27:40
Speaker 1: It is chilling to read the sources on this. In
27:42
nineteen eighty five, Johns picks up a woman named Linda Shack,
27:46
and the sources explicitly state she was a red haired woman.
27:50
Speaker 2: Fits this supposed pattern perfectly.
27:52
Speaker 1: He attacks her in the cab of his truck. He
27:54
binds her, he strangles her with a piece of her
27:57
own clothing. I think it was a torn shirt, yes,
28:00
and he dumps her body in a storm drain near
28:02
Interstate forty, just leaving her for dead.
28:05
Speaker 2: He executed the exact same mo the binding, the ligature,
28:08
strangulation using the victim's own clothing, the discarding of the
28:11
body as roadside debris along a major trucking artery.
28:15
Speaker 1: But Jerry Leon John's made one fatal miscalculation.
28:18
Speaker 2: Linda Shag didn't die.
28:20
Speaker 1: She survived. She woke up in that storm drain, she
28:23
crawled out, and she testified against him in open.
28:26
Speaker 2: Court, which takes unbelievable courage.
28:28
Speaker 1: Her incredible bravery is what put him in a cell
28:30
in nineteen eighty seven for aggravated kidnapping and assault. And
28:34
by surviving, she gave law enforcement the exact blueprint of
28:38
how he operated.
28:39
Speaker 2: And because of that undeniable similarity to the Shack attack,
28:43
combined with the irrefutable DNA match from Tina Farmer's blanket,
28:46
a Campbell County grand jury convened in December twenty nineteen.
28:50
Speaker 1: Even though he's dead.
28:51
Speaker 2: Yes, they review the evidence posthumously, and they concluded that
28:56
if Jerry Leon Johns were still breathing, he would have
28:59
been formal indicted for the first degree murder of Keina Farmer.
29:02
Speaker 1: It's a massive validation of the evidence. But I have
29:06
to stop here. There is a massive point of friction
29:09
in this timeline. Oh, I know you're going to say,
29:11
I mean, I know anyone listening to this is probably
29:13
screaming at their speakers right now. He was arrested in
29:15
nineteen eighty five and convicted in nineteen eighty seven for
29:18
binding and strangling a red haired woman and dumping her
29:21
on Interstate forty. During that exact same window of time,
29:25
multiple other women, some with reddish hair, are being found
29:28
bound and strangle on the exact same highway system.
29:31
Speaker 2: The exact same area.
29:32
Speaker 1: How on earth did law enforcement not connect Jerry Leon
29:35
John's to the redhead murders back then? I mean, how
29:38
does a guy go to prison for the exact same
29:40
crime in the exact same area and nobody taps the
29:44
homicide detectives on the shoulder and says, hey, we might
29:47
have your guy.
29:48
Speaker 2: It is infuriating in hindsight, it really is. But we
29:51
have to force ourselves back into the siloed reality of
29:55
nineteen eighty seven policing that we talked about earlier.
29:57
Speaker 1: The cell towers not talking exactly.
30:00
Speaker 2: There was no algorithm connecting the dots. There was no centralized,
30:03
digitized database that flashed a red light on a monitor
30:06
when similar mos occurred across county.
30:08
Speaker 1: Lines, it was all paper and phone calls.
30:11
Speaker 2: Yes, John's was arrested, tried, and convicted in Knox County
30:14
for the shake assault, but Tina Farmer was found in
30:17
Campbell County. Lisa Nichols was all the way over in.
30:19
Speaker 1: Arkansas, different jurisdictions, entirely right.
30:22
Speaker 2: The multi state task Force was already losing funding and
30:25
momentum by then. If the specific detective in Knox County
30:29
working the Shake assault didn't personally pick up a telephone
30:32
and call the Campbell County Sheriff's office to compare notes
30:35
on ligature notts, the connection simply died in a filing cabin.
30:39
Speaker 1: The cell towers weren't talking to each other. They had
30:42
the killer in custody, but they didn't know they were
30:44
holding the missing puzzle piece for a serial killer case, which.
30:47
Speaker 2: Brings us to a highly complex debate in the source
30:50
material because John's criminal history, his access to a commercial truck,
30:55
his routes, and the definitive DNA link to Tina Farmer
31:00
make him the strongest name suspect associated with the entire series.
31:04
Speaker 1: He's the only real name we have.
31:06
Speaker 2: Right, and the students at Elizabethton High argued strongly that
31:10
the geographic and temporal clustering makes it highly plausible that
31:14
John's was the Bible Belt strangler responsible for the broader
31:18
cluster of victims.
31:19
Speaker 1: It provides narrative closure. You know, you have a monster,
31:21
you have a name. He died in a cage. The
31:22
story is over, it's clean. But John's took his secrets
31:26
to the grave. Does the forensic science actually prove he
31:30
acted alone? Or is the truth much messier?
31:33
Speaker 2: The truth is almost always messier. And this is where
31:36
we have to confront the lingering doubts. Because the Tennessee
31:39
Bureau of Investigation, the TBI, has maintained an incredibly strict,
31:43
cautious stance on this whole thing.
31:45
Speaker 1: They aren't just closing all the cases.
31:47
Speaker 2: No, according to the sources, the TBI has only officially
31:51
linked Jerry Leon John's to the murder of Tina Farmer
31:54
and the assault on Linda Shack.
31:56
Speaker 1: Just those two.
31:57
Speaker 2: Just those two.
31:58
Speaker 1: Yeah.
31:58
Speaker 2: They have not announced any positive of DNA or definitive
32:01
forensic links tying John's to a spy pilgrim, Lislamott, Lisa Nichols,
32:06
or any of the.
32:06
Speaker 1: Others, and Honestly, when you dig into the mechanics of
32:09
the crimes, you can see why they are pumping the brakes.
32:12
Speaker 2: You can see the inconsistency.
32:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, strip away the whole Redhead media narrative and look
32:16
at the clinical forensic reality. The causes of death are
32:20
wildly inconsistent.
32:21
Speaker 2: They really are. Tina Farmer and Linda Shack were ligature strangulations.
32:25
That is a very specific, hands on, intimate method of killing, right.
32:29
But look at Lislamott. She suffered blunt force trauma to
32:32
the head and a possible stab wound. That is a rapid,
32:36
frantic bludgeoning attack. It's totally different energy.
32:40
Speaker 1: And then look at s By Pilgrim. She was suffocated
32:42
and placed inside a refrigerator.
32:44
Speaker 2: Exactly. While serial offenders certainly can and do evolve their
32:48
methodologies based on environment or opportunity, a shift from ligature
32:53
strangulation to blunt force drama to confined space suffocation is well,
32:58
it's a massive leap plus us.
33:00
Speaker 1: The sources point out that some of the cases originally
33:02
thrown under the Redhead Murder's umbrella back in the eighties,
33:05
specifically some bodies found in Georgia and Arkansas, they have
33:08
actually been resolved recently through DNA.
33:11
Speaker 2: It wasn't John's.
33:12
Speaker 1: No, they were the work of entirely different, unconnected offenders.
33:15
Speaker 2: This is a perfect example of what behavioral analysts call
33:18
the umbrella effect in true crime.
33:21
Speaker 1: The umbrella effect.
33:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is basically a psychological defense mechanism. When faced
33:26
with chaotic, random violence across a massive geographic area human beings,
33:30
and that includes investigators in the media, we try to
33:33
force unconnected tragedies into a single grand narrative.
33:36
Speaker 1: We want it to be one guy, exactly.
33:39
Speaker 2: We want there to be one Bible built strangler, because
33:42
one monster is easier to process than the terrifying reality
33:47
that the interstate system was swarming with multiple unconnected predators
33:51
operating simultaneously in the same dark ecosystem.
33:54
Speaker 1: That is way scarier.
33:55
Speaker 2: It is, so put yourself in the shoes of the
33:58
TBI investigators today. If you attribute all these murders to
34:02
Jerry Leon John's simply because it's convenient and it clears
34:05
the board, and you are wrong. You are providing false
34:08
comfort to those families.
34:09
Speaker 1: And you are letting the real killers remain free.
34:12
Speaker 2: Exactly. You can't close a homicide based on a high
34:15
school project's geographic probability model. No matter how brilliant that
34:19
model is, you need the hard science.
34:21
Speaker 1: And that cautious integrity is vital. The families want full accountability,
34:25
of course, but they deserve the truth, not just a
34:27
convenient scapegoat.
34:28
Speaker 2: Right. So, the current status of the Redhead murders is
34:31
best described as partially resolved but still highly active.
34:34
Speaker 1: The TBI hasn't closed the books.
34:36
Speaker 2: No, their cold case unit is still actively seeking tips,
34:40
and their contact information remains public for.
34:42
Speaker 1: These cases, which leaves us grappling with the emotional toll
34:46
on the families. The sources describe this agonizing dichotomy of
34:50
relief and frustration.
34:51
Speaker 2: It's such a heavy burden.
34:53
Speaker 1: There is profound relief that they finally have answers about
34:56
what happened to their daughters, their sisters, their mothers. The
35:00
ambiguous grief, you know that not knowing if they were
35:03
alive or dead. That is finally over.
35:05
Speaker 2: But there is deep, permanent frustration that full justice may
35:09
be out of reach.
35:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, there will be no trial for Tina Farmer's murder,
35:13
Jerry Leon John's can never be interrogated about the others.
35:16
Speaker 2: It is a fractured resolution. But if we synthesize everything
35:20
we've unpacked today, the trucking culture of the eighties, the
35:22
evolution of DNA, the dedication of that high school classroom.
35:25
The overarching theme is the immense power of persistence, so
35:30
much persistent persistence by the families who kept submitting DNA
35:33
to name us, persistence by the evidence clerks who didn't
35:36
just throw away a blanket in nineteen ninety five to
35:38
make room on a shelf, And persistence by civilians who
35:41
refuse to let these marginalized women be forgotten by.
35:44
Speaker 1: History because they were treated as disposable in life. They
35:48
were discarded on the side of a highway and minimized
35:50
by society. But this modern combined effort has finally given
35:54
them dignity in death.
35:56
Speaker 2: They aren't Jane Does anymore.
35:57
Speaker 1: No, they are Tina and Spy and Liz and Lisa
36:01
and Tracy and Michelle.
36:03
Speaker 2: And the investigative tools forged in the crucible of these
36:06
specific cases, the refinement of SNP genealogy, the public private partnerships,
36:11
the civilian data analysis. These are now the standard operating
36:15
procedures being used to clear cold cases globally.
36:18
Speaker 1: The legacy of these women is actively helping to identify
36:21
others today. It really is, and it forces you to
36:23
look toward the future. I mean, think about the mechanics
36:26
of what Alex Campbell's sociology class did. A group of
36:29
teenagers used basic twenty eighteen mapping software and PUSIC records
36:34
to connect dots that the fragmented police jurisdictions of the
36:37
nineteen eighties completely missed.
36:39
Speaker 2: They did what the FBI couldn't do at the time.
36:41
Speaker 1: They built a narrative that broke the case open. Now
36:44
fast forward today, Look at the technology we have at
36:47
our fingertips right now.
36:48
Speaker 2: It's growing exponentially.
36:49
Speaker 1: If a classroom of high schoolers could do that manually
36:52
in twenty eighteen, what is going to happen in the
36:54
next five years when we unleash advanced artificial intelligence on
36:58
the thousands of unconnected Dusty Jane Doe files still sitting
37:02
in basements across the country.
37:03
Speaker 2: Wow.
37:04
Speaker 1: When AI can cross reference every missing person's report, every
37:08
dental anomaly, every cent morgan of DNA, and every geographic
37:12
transit log in milliseconds, completely immune to the jurisdictional blindness
37:17
that hampered the detectives of the nineteen eighties, It would
37:19
connect everything instantly are we on the verge of a
37:22
cold case Renaissance, where the very concept of an unsolved
37:25
mystery becomes a relic of the past, something to think about.