January 10, 2024 • 39 mins
Alex Campbell shares the story about how he came across the Redhead murders and how his class became involved in solving the chilling murder case that loomed over their town.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
A group of high school students.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
High school students Elizabeth and high school students started a
project to research a string of unsolved murders.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
Their research led to the identification.
Speaker 4 (00:13):
Of the killer.
Speaker 5 (00:14):
Investigators now have an answer to a thirty four year
old question.
Speaker 6 (00:18):
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.
Speaker 7 (00:34):
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.
Speaker 6 (00:47):
There is no profile of this killer except for the
ones the students created.
Speaker 7 (00:53):
Just because some of these women no longer have people
to speak for them does not mean that they deserve
to not.
Speaker 8 (00:57):
Be so anymore.
Speaker 9 (00:58):
What if this guy's still alive? Like, what if you
came after us?
Speaker 5 (01:01):
I consider it gonna kill me.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Who A Yeah, this.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
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
(01:28):
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.
Speaker 8 (01:43):
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.
(02:03):
Four years later, five more women. She had the same
faith those women would be founded along in the states
and the highways across multiple states. The cases became cold
till a few people ask why hasn't the murderer in
the day.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Fact.
Speaker 6 (02:21):
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.
(02:44):
I'm a teacher for going on twenty one years.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
I do not like teaching. I love teaching.
Speaker 6 (02:51):
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.
Speaker 10 (03:06):
Right.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
If it's not that important, I just won't do it.
Speaker 6 (03:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
It's serious.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
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.
Speaker 9 (03:32):
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.
Speaker 6 (03:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
It's your typical small town, small town field.
Speaker 11 (03:55):
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.
Speaker 6 (04:07):
Hiking, camping. It's a wonderful place. You have a lot
of great neighbors.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
There's a lot of community here.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Feel We have one city school they go to, so
I think it's like nine hundred and something kids, and there's.
Speaker 10 (04:17):
A lot of community pride. The high school is a
focal point for the community.
Speaker 8 (04:21):
You know, think kind of the throwback to Friday Night
at football games and just since of school and community pride.
Speaker 4 (04:27):
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.
Speaker 11 (04:34):
Very safe, very safe.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Yes, even in.
Speaker 6 (04:37):
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,
(04:58):
spend nights, weekends, days at a time with friends, and
probably bullied in school as far as we can tell.
I actually saw report from the school counselor and she'd
probably really.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Kind of stopped going to school.
Speaker 6 (05:12):
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.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
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.
Speaker 11 (05:40):
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.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
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.
Speaker 11 (06:08):
I think that goes to say that there's evil everywhere.
Speaker 6 (06:11):
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.
Speaker 12 (06:36):
Her murder was just one and a string of killings
later known as the redhead Murder, the red Headed.
Speaker 5 (06:42):
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.
Speaker 6 (06:57):
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
(07:18):
that would be the project that maybe we could work on.
Fan But for the last several years I been a
true crime fan.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
I blame that on my wife.
Speaker 6 (07:26):
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
(07:48):
like what the second biggest genre in America or something,
and so it does. It attracts a lot of people,
and you know, they're not going to work hard if
they're not invested.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Lane Leonard was just a freshman when he joined mister
Campbell's sociology class.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Husch Junior Will Bauers was an outgoing jock who took
the class on a whim.
Speaker 8 (08:24):
I was seventeen. Technically the class was a sociology class,
so we didn't even know exactly what we're going into.
Speaker 9 (08:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
Caylea van Dervetter was a shy junior who had no
idea what she was getting herself into.
Speaker 9 (08:46):
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.
Speaker 6 (08:53):
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
(09:13):
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
that if you have like the same signature, then you
probably have the same killer. And if you look online,
there was probably around thirteen murders that people try to
link to, these redhead murders, and there's.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
A lot of differences in some of them.
Speaker 6 (09:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
That's where we started.
Speaker 8 (09:52):
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.
Speaker 9 (10:06):
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.
Speaker 6 (10:24):
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
(10:47):
the importance or intrigued or whatever it is. And the
question to them was how do you find one person
out of two hundred million? And they just kind of
stared at me blankly for a while.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
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?
Speaker 6 (11:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Like, oh okay. So I said, look, I'm going to
test you.
Speaker 6 (11:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
And they're like, yeah, yeah, let us try.
Speaker 6 (11:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
So I gave him I don't know, I forget. It's
like thirty men.
Speaker 6 (12:00):
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,
(12:20):
teenagers they know when the bell's going to ring. They
got that time, they got that timed out, and so
I was like, oh, we've only got nineteen. If we
don't get one more in the next you know a
little bit like, maybe you're not the class. And I
remember one student was like they were all racking their
brains so hard, and one of them finally said, you
know another way and I.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Was like, oh.
Speaker 6 (12:41):
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
be the hardest class you've ever had. And if you
don't want to do the work and you don't want
to work on this really hard, then go down there
(13:04):
to the to the principal or whoever, and you tell
them you want to change your class because if you
don't want to work.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Hard, this is not the class for you. And believe
it or not, every.
Speaker 6 (13:14):
Student came back the next day and we got to work.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
Let's stop here for a break. We'll be back in
a moment. Murder one on one.
Speaker 8 (13:40):
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.
Speaker 9 (13:51):
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.
(14:13):
There was a lot of dead ends there in the beginning,
because this case doesn't have a lot of attention, and
I know a lot of times we were like, you know,
mister Campbell's crazy, We're never ever going to get to
the bottom of this.
Speaker 6 (14:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
And then what we.
Speaker 6 (14:40):
Try to do is create a like a target with
like an inner circle and then a periphery.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
As we went out, I.
Speaker 6 (14:48):
Said, you know, hopefully what we're going to see is
that there's some of these victims in the middle that
seem like.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Highly likely they're all related.
Speaker 6 (14:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
And so that was the goal.
Speaker 6 (15:11):
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
(15:34):
appear related were killed by one person. So what our
students really focused on was are all these murders connected
or are they looking at too many different murders. And
so what our students found was that six of them
are virtually identical.
Speaker 13 (15:52):
The Crtingdon County Jane, Don, DeSoto County, Green County Jane Doe,
Chief the County Jane, John, Campbell County Jane, the Knox
County Jane.
Speaker 6 (16:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Greatest thing in the world.
Speaker 6 (16:18):
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.
Speaker 9 (16:34):
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.
Speaker 8 (16:50):
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.
Speaker 14 (17:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
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.
Speaker 6 (17:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
How do we know if this person was intelligent or not?
Speaker 6 (17:45):
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
(18:08):
would help get them a little further down the road.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
And instead of me.
Speaker 6 (18:11):
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
(18:32):
different victims. I did give a victim to each different group.
We worked on things like profiling and socialization. We leorked
on you know, what are you supposed to get from
a home life? What do you learn from your parents?
Why is that a socializing agent, the most important socializing
agent in society?
Speaker 1 (18:49):
What happens if that goes wrong?
Speaker 6 (18:51):
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.
Speaker 9 (19:08):
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.
Speaker 13 (19:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
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.
Speaker 6 (19:52):
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
(20:14):
that was one.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
But of course that wasn't a.
Speaker 6 (20:15):
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.
Speaker 9 (20:35):
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.
(20:56):
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
how they were killed. Some of them, the medical examiner
couldn't find a cause of death, so we assumed that
they were strangled or suffocated. Some of them were too
(21:18):
decomposed to even think about how they were.
Speaker 6 (21:21):
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
(21:43):
murders that were abducted from their home. Well, that's an
outlier that you know, just one person was abducted from
their home. We didn't see that with a lot of
these others. One was an African American boy who had
reddish hair, but you know, different race, and it was
a boy, so we didn't fit and the age was off.
In one case, we had two victims in the same
(22:03):
county that were found close to each other, but one
was a child and one was an adult.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
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.
Speaker 6 (22:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Similar, for example. And so that's how they came upon
those six.
Speaker 9 (22:35):
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.
Speaker 6 (22:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
I'm not a professional profiler.
Speaker 6 (23:19):
I'm a social studies teacher who had been teaching sociology
for probe about.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Seven years at the time.
Speaker 6 (23:24):
And the only criminal profiler's behavioral analysts that I know
they worked.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
For the FBI.
Speaker 6 (23:30):
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?
Speaker 1 (23:48):
And he said, you're not gonna believe it.
Speaker 6 (23:49):
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.
Speaker 15 (24:07):
I was an agent assigned to the Knaxville Division. I
just retired this past April after thirty two years.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
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.
Speaker 15 (24:24):
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.
Speaker 10 (24:33):
With FBI agents within our division.
Speaker 15 (24:36):
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
(24:57):
what he was trying to do, that they were actually
going to try to solve these cases.
Speaker 10 (25:01):
I thought, wow, this is pretty interesting. I've never never
seen this happen.
Speaker 6 (25:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
Let's stop here for another quick break murder one on one.
Speaker 6 (25:44):
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
(26:06):
told us that it would be virtually impossible to have
more than one person killing these people.
Speaker 15 (26:11):
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.
Speaker 10 (26:29):
And so you know, these bodies are being dumped along
the interstate.
Speaker 15 (26:33):
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.
Speaker 10 (26:51):
And if you've got victims that have not been identified,
and we haven't had anybody.
Speaker 15 (26:57):
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
(27:17):
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.
Speaker 10 (27:27):
Because it doesn't.
Speaker 15 (27:29):
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
just some reason why he's picking out redheaded girls. And
(27:51):
so we just sat there for about an hour and
a half or so and just brainstormed about where I
thought they should look.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Scott Parker had an important suggestion for the class.
Speaker 15 (28:01):
Getting a profile on the victim is going to help
you along the way because if you determine.
Speaker 10 (28:07):
That, if you just say, hey, she's a victim, and you.
Speaker 15 (28:10):
Don't know anything about her background, and you don't know
where to start looking.
Speaker 10 (28:13):
So if you find out she's.
Speaker 15 (28:14):
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.
Speaker 10 (28:20):
You know, then we can maybe identify.
Speaker 15 (28:22):
Once you identify the victim, to go interview the victim's family,
find out.
Speaker 10 (28:26):
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?
Speaker 15 (28:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
Scott Parker worked with the class on the profile.
Speaker 15 (28:53):
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.
Speaker 10 (29:04):
A truck driver.
Speaker 15 (29:05):
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.
Speaker 10 (29:20):
There you go, there's your answer, right, truck driver.
Speaker 15 (29:23):
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.
Speaker 10 (29:41):
It's not because he's probably attracted to him. This might
be because he hates them for some reason.
Speaker 15 (29:46):
I A.
Speaker 10 (29:46):
It could be ex wife, ex girlfriend, and mother.
Speaker 15 (29:49):
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.
Speaker 8 (29:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Student Will Bauers describes the process of creating the profile.
Speaker 8 (30:11):
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
(30:31):
to be a truck driver. And then once we kind
of knew that, we started to roll off ideas of
we could say that this person's Caucasian because most people
that live in that specific areas are a Caucasian, and
the murders are around basically the northeast Tennessee side of
(30:53):
things as you go on to I forty, So we
kind of took that and we just kept on going
and rolling with profile. We understood it was a mail
because most of the murders were strangles, they kind of
understood that most mails usually are kind of in that
dominant killing word. They used their hands more. So we
(31:13):
kept going, and we kept on adding and kept on adding,
and by the time we got done it was about
a twenty ish page profile.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
We had.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:35):
Student Lane Leonard remembers a pivotal moment in the classes investigation.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
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
(32:00):
a trucker would have the privacy they need to potentially carry.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Out these crimes.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
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
(32:25):
found this. And mister Campbell walked over and I just
saw his eyes get wide and he was like, that's amazing,
that's perfect.
Speaker 3 (32:32):
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,
(32:53):
meaning their roots and schedules were less monitored. Scott Barker
left the class feeling impressed.
Speaker 15 (33:00):
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'd never seen a class do this before. And I
(33:21):
talked to you know, over my career, I spoke to
many classes about the Bureau or even to classes about
BAU because they were always interested after watching Criminal Minds.
And I never had a class that was doing this
type of project, and I really was.
Speaker 10 (33:35):
I was amazed.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
So what now?
Speaker 6 (33:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
Student's created and he said, sure, I'll take a look
at it.
Speaker 6 (33:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
So they worked on those.
Speaker 6 (34:16):
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.
Speaker 7 (34:32):
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.
(34:52):
We believe that the occupation is a trucker. Personal relationships
are possible, especially long term relative location of the residences
around the Noxville or Nashville area. The kind of vehicle
he uses is an eighteen willed semi or commercial cargo transport.
His religion could be possibly Christian. The physical wounds found
(35:12):
on the victims are defensive wounds, which could also be
on the killer. His history could be an unstable home,
absent father, and a domineering mother. He is most likely
right handed and IQ above one hundred. His sexuality is
most likely heterosexual. He has possible solicitation in his criminal history.
(35:32):
The build of the killer could be thick or stocky
and mental health. There is no history in the case
for rationale. The killer only prays on females, and serial
killers almost always target the opposite sex. Nearly all serial
killers begin their murders in their late teens in early
to middle twenties, the age in which most mental disorders
often manifest themselves.
Speaker 6 (35:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
And he said.
Speaker 6 (36:17):
I cannot as a behavioral analyst disagree with anything that
your students said they felt was true.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
I said, well, that's great, but like, what great am
I supposed to give them? Is this an eighty? Is
it a ninety?
Speaker 6 (36:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
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.
Speaker 6 (36:54):
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
(37:15):
no leads, then why would you waste all your time
on that case when there's a newer case that has
some leads and we could see some closure. So we
understood the whole cold case phenomenon. We understand why the
cases are cold. There's not a lot of data, information,
evidence whatever for them to work. So we felt that
by naming this killer, a couple of things would happen.
(37:35):
Number One, it would separate the six which we felt
were similar, from the greater number that we felt.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Didn't really have anything to do with each other.
Speaker 6 (37:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
We brainstormed.
Speaker 6 (38:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
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.
(38:41):
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.
Speaker 12 (38:57):
Hi, I am Sharon, Founder and CEO of your Mom Cares.
We're at Kids' Mental Health nonprofit founded by the moms
of athletes, actors, and musicians. Mental health can be invisible,
but the consequences may not be. Did you know that
when you're smiling or laughing, it's impossible to be sad?
At that moment. Your mom Cares us for all moms
and anyone who loves kids like a momb Please follow
(39:20):
us on Instagram at your mom Cares or learn more
about kids' mental health at your momcares dot org
A group of high school students.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
High school students Elizabeth and high school students started a
project to research a string of unsolved murders.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
Their research led to the identification.
Speaker 4 (00:13):
Of the killer.
Speaker 5 (00:14):
Investigators now have an answer to a thirty four year
old question.
Speaker 6 (00:18):
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.
Speaker 7 (00:34):
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.
Speaker 6 (00:47):
There is no profile of this killer except for the
ones the students created.
Speaker 7 (00:53):
Just because some of these women no longer have people
to speak for them does not mean that they deserve
to not.
Speaker 8 (00:57):
Be so anymore.
Speaker 9 (00:58):
What if this guy's still alive? Like, what if you
came after us?
Speaker 5 (01:01):
I consider it gonna kill me.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Who A Yeah, this.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
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
(01:28):
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.
Speaker 8 (01:43):
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.
(02:03):
Four years later, five more women. She had the same
faith those women would be founded along in the states
and the highways across multiple states. The cases became cold
till a few people ask why hasn't the murderer in
the day.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Fact.
Speaker 6 (02:21):
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.
(02:44):
I'm a teacher for going on twenty one years.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
I do not like teaching. I love teaching.
Speaker 6 (02:51):
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.
Speaker 10 (03:06):
Right.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
If it's not that important, I just won't do it.
Speaker 6 (03:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
It's serious.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
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.
Speaker 9 (03:32):
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.
Speaker 6 (03:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
It's your typical small town, small town field.
Speaker 11 (03:55):
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.
Speaker 6 (04:07):
Hiking, camping. It's a wonderful place. You have a lot
of great neighbors.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
There's a lot of community here.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Feel We have one city school they go to, so
I think it's like nine hundred and something kids, and there's.
Speaker 10 (04:17):
A lot of community pride. The high school is a
focal point for the community.
Speaker 8 (04:21):
You know, think kind of the throwback to Friday Night
at football games and just since of school and community pride.
Speaker 4 (04:27):
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.
Speaker 11 (04:34):
Very safe, very safe.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Yes, even in.
Speaker 6 (04:37):
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,
(04:58):
spend nights, weekends, days at a time with friends, and
probably bullied in school as far as we can tell.
I actually saw report from the school counselor and she'd
probably really.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Kind of stopped going to school.
Speaker 6 (05:12):
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.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
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.
Speaker 11 (05:40):
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.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
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.
Speaker 11 (06:08):
I think that goes to say that there's evil everywhere.
Speaker 6 (06:11):
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.
Speaker 12 (06:36):
Her murder was just one and a string of killings
later known as the redhead Murder, the red Headed.
Speaker 5 (06:42):
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.
Speaker 6 (06:57):
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
(07:18):
that would be the project that maybe we could work on.
Fan But for the last several years I been a
true crime fan.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
I blame that on my wife.
Speaker 6 (07:26):
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
(07:48):
like what the second biggest genre in America or something,
and so it does. It attracts a lot of people,
and you know, they're not going to work hard if
they're not invested.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Lane Leonard was just a freshman when he joined mister
Campbell's sociology class.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Husch Junior Will Bauers was an outgoing jock who took
the class on a whim.
Speaker 8 (08:24):
I was seventeen. Technically the class was a sociology class,
so we didn't even know exactly what we're going into.
Speaker 9 (08:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
Caylea van Dervetter was a shy junior who had no
idea what she was getting herself into.
Speaker 9 (08:46):
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.
Speaker 6 (08:53):
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
(09:13):
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
that if you have like the same signature, then you
probably have the same killer. And if you look online,
there was probably around thirteen murders that people try to
link to, these redhead murders, and there's.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
A lot of differences in some of them.
Speaker 6 (09:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
That's where we started.
Speaker 8 (09:52):
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.
Speaker 9 (10:06):
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.
Speaker 6 (10:24):
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
(10:47):
the importance or intrigued or whatever it is. And the
question to them was how do you find one person
out of two hundred million? And they just kind of
stared at me blankly for a while.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
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?
Speaker 6 (11:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Like, oh okay. So I said, look, I'm going to
test you.
Speaker 6 (11:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
And they're like, yeah, yeah, let us try.
Speaker 6 (11:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
So I gave him I don't know, I forget. It's
like thirty men.
Speaker 6 (12:00):
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,
(12:20):
teenagers they know when the bell's going to ring. They
got that time, they got that timed out, and so
I was like, oh, we've only got nineteen. If we
don't get one more in the next you know a
little bit like, maybe you're not the class. And I
remember one student was like they were all racking their
brains so hard, and one of them finally said, you
know another way and I.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Was like, oh.
Speaker 6 (12:41):
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
be the hardest class you've ever had. And if you
don't want to do the work and you don't want
to work on this really hard, then go down there
(13:04):
to the to the principal or whoever, and you tell
them you want to change your class because if you
don't want to work.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Hard, this is not the class for you. And believe
it or not, every.
Speaker 6 (13:14):
Student came back the next day and we got to work.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
Let's stop here for a break. We'll be back in
a moment. Murder one on one.
Speaker 8 (13:40):
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.
Speaker 9 (13:51):
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.
(14:13):
There was a lot of dead ends there in the beginning,
because this case doesn't have a lot of attention, and
I know a lot of times we were like, you know,
mister Campbell's crazy, We're never ever going to get to
the bottom of this.
Speaker 6 (14:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
And then what we.
Speaker 6 (14:40):
Try to do is create a like a target with
like an inner circle and then a periphery.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
As we went out, I.
Speaker 6 (14:48):
Said, you know, hopefully what we're going to see is
that there's some of these victims in the middle that
seem like.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Highly likely they're all related.
Speaker 6 (14:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
And so that was the goal.
Speaker 6 (15:11):
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
(15:34):
appear related were killed by one person. So what our
students really focused on was are all these murders connected
or are they looking at too many different murders. And
so what our students found was that six of them
are virtually identical.
Speaker 13 (15:52):
The Crtingdon County Jane, Don, DeSoto County, Green County Jane Doe,
Chief the County Jane, John, Campbell County Jane, the Knox
County Jane.
Speaker 6 (16:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Greatest thing in the world.
Speaker 6 (16:18):
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.
Speaker 9 (16:34):
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.
Speaker 8 (16:50):
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.
Speaker 14 (17:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
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.
Speaker 6 (17:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
How do we know if this person was intelligent or not?
Speaker 6 (17:45):
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
(18:08):
would help get them a little further down the road.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
And instead of me.
Speaker 6 (18:11):
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
(18:32):
different victims. I did give a victim to each different group.
We worked on things like profiling and socialization. We leorked
on you know, what are you supposed to get from
a home life? What do you learn from your parents?
Why is that a socializing agent, the most important socializing
agent in society?
Speaker 1 (18:49):
What happens if that goes wrong?
Speaker 6 (18:51):
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.
Speaker 9 (19:08):
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.
Speaker 13 (19:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
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.
Speaker 6 (19:52):
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
(20:14):
that was one.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
But of course that wasn't a.
Speaker 6 (20:15):
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.
Speaker 9 (20:35):
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.
(20:56):
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
how they were killed. Some of them, the medical examiner
couldn't find a cause of death, so we assumed that
they were strangled or suffocated. Some of them were too
(21:18):
decomposed to even think about how they were.
Speaker 6 (21:21):
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
(21:43):
murders that were abducted from their home. Well, that's an
outlier that you know, just one person was abducted from
their home. We didn't see that with a lot of
these others. One was an African American boy who had
reddish hair, but you know, different race, and it was
a boy, so we didn't fit and the age was off.
In one case, we had two victims in the same
(22:03):
county that were found close to each other, but one
was a child and one was an adult.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
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.
Speaker 6 (22:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Similar, for example. And so that's how they came upon
those six.
Speaker 9 (22:35):
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.
Speaker 6 (22:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
I'm not a professional profiler.
Speaker 6 (23:19):
I'm a social studies teacher who had been teaching sociology
for probe about.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Seven years at the time.
Speaker 6 (23:24):
And the only criminal profiler's behavioral analysts that I know
they worked.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
For the FBI.
Speaker 6 (23:30):
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?
Speaker 1 (23:48):
And he said, you're not gonna believe it.
Speaker 6 (23:49):
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.
Speaker 15 (24:07):
I was an agent assigned to the Knaxville Division. I
just retired this past April after thirty two years.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
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.
Speaker 15 (24:24):
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.
Speaker 10 (24:33):
With FBI agents within our division.
Speaker 15 (24:36):
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
(24:57):
what he was trying to do, that they were actually
going to try to solve these cases.
Speaker 10 (25:01):
I thought, wow, this is pretty interesting. I've never never
seen this happen.
Speaker 6 (25:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
Let's stop here for another quick break murder one on one.
Speaker 6 (25:44):
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
(26:06):
told us that it would be virtually impossible to have
more than one person killing these people.
Speaker 15 (26:11):
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.
Speaker 10 (26:29):
And so you know, these bodies are being dumped along
the interstate.
Speaker 15 (26:33):
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.
Speaker 10 (26:51):
And if you've got victims that have not been identified,
and we haven't had anybody.
Speaker 15 (26:57):
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
(27:17):
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.
Speaker 10 (27:27):
Because it doesn't.
Speaker 15 (27:29):
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
just some reason why he's picking out redheaded girls. And
(27:51):
so we just sat there for about an hour and
a half or so and just brainstormed about where I
thought they should look.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Scott Parker had an important suggestion for the class.
Speaker 15 (28:01):
Getting a profile on the victim is going to help
you along the way because if you determine.
Speaker 10 (28:07):
That, if you just say, hey, she's a victim, and you.
Speaker 15 (28:10):
Don't know anything about her background, and you don't know
where to start looking.
Speaker 10 (28:13):
So if you find out she's.
Speaker 15 (28:14):
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.
Speaker 10 (28:20):
You know, then we can maybe identify.
Speaker 15 (28:22):
Once you identify the victim, to go interview the victim's family,
find out.
Speaker 10 (28:26):
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?
Speaker 15 (28:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
Scott Parker worked with the class on the profile.
Speaker 15 (28:53):
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.
Speaker 10 (29:04):
A truck driver.
Speaker 15 (29:05):
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.
Speaker 10 (29:20):
There you go, there's your answer, right, truck driver.
Speaker 15 (29:23):
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.
Speaker 10 (29:41):
It's not because he's probably attracted to him. This might
be because he hates them for some reason.
Speaker 15 (29:46):
I A.
Speaker 10 (29:46):
It could be ex wife, ex girlfriend, and mother.
Speaker 15 (29:49):
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.
Speaker 8 (29:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Student Will Bauers describes the process of creating the profile.
Speaker 8 (30:11):
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
(30:31):
to be a truck driver. And then once we kind
of knew that, we started to roll off ideas of
we could say that this person's Caucasian because most people
that live in that specific areas are a Caucasian, and
the murders are around basically the northeast Tennessee side of
(30:53):
things as you go on to I forty, So we
kind of took that and we just kept on going
and rolling with profile. We understood it was a mail
because most of the murders were strangles, they kind of
understood that most mails usually are kind of in that
dominant killing word. They used their hands more. So we
(31:13):
kept going, and we kept on adding and kept on adding,
and by the time we got done it was about
a twenty ish page profile.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
We had.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:35):
Student Lane Leonard remembers a pivotal moment in the classes investigation.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
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
(32:00):
a trucker would have the privacy they need to potentially carry.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Out these crimes.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
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
(32:25):
found this. And mister Campbell walked over and I just
saw his eyes get wide and he was like, that's amazing,
that's perfect.
Speaker 3 (32:32):
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,
(32:53):
meaning their roots and schedules were less monitored. Scott Barker
left the class feeling impressed.
Speaker 15 (33:00):
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'd never seen a class do this before. And I
(33:21):
talked to you know, over my career, I spoke to
many classes about the Bureau or even to classes about
BAU because they were always interested after watching Criminal Minds.
And I never had a class that was doing this
type of project, and I really was.
Speaker 10 (33:35):
I was amazed.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
So what now?
Speaker 6 (33:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
Student's created and he said, sure, I'll take a look
at it.
Speaker 6 (33:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
So they worked on those.
Speaker 6 (34:16):
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.
Speaker 7 (34:32):
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.
(34:52):
We believe that the occupation is a trucker. Personal relationships
are possible, especially long term relative location of the residences
around the Noxville or Nashville area. The kind of vehicle
he uses is an eighteen willed semi or commercial cargo transport.
His religion could be possibly Christian. The physical wounds found
(35:12):
on the victims are defensive wounds, which could also be
on the killer. His history could be an unstable home,
absent father, and a domineering mother. He is most likely
right handed and IQ above one hundred. His sexuality is
most likely heterosexual. He has possible solicitation in his criminal history.
(35:32):
The build of the killer could be thick or stocky
and mental health. There is no history in the case
for rationale. The killer only prays on females, and serial
killers almost always target the opposite sex. Nearly all serial
killers begin their murders in their late teens in early
to middle twenties, the age in which most mental disorders
often manifest themselves.
Speaker 6 (35:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
And he said.
Speaker 6 (36:17):
I cannot as a behavioral analyst disagree with anything that
your students said they felt was true.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
I said, well, that's great, but like, what great am
I supposed to give them? Is this an eighty? Is
it a ninety?
Speaker 6 (36:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
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.
Speaker 6 (36:54):
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
(37:15):
no leads, then why would you waste all your time
on that case when there's a newer case that has
some leads and we could see some closure. So we
understood the whole cold case phenomenon. We understand why the
cases are cold. There's not a lot of data, information,
evidence whatever for them to work. So we felt that
by naming this killer, a couple of things would happen.
(37:35):
Number One, it would separate the six which we felt
were similar, from the greater number that we felt.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Didn't really have anything to do with each other.
Speaker 6 (37:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
We brainstormed.
Speaker 6 (38:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
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.
(38:41):
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.
Speaker 12 (38:57):
Hi, I am Sharon, Founder and CEO of your Mom Cares.
We're at Kids' Mental Health nonprofit founded by the moms
of athletes, actors, and musicians. Mental health can be invisible,
but the consequences may not be. Did you know that
when you're smiling or laughing, it's impossible to be sad?
At that moment. Your mom Cares us for all moms
and anyone who loves kids like a momb Please follow
(39:20):
us on Instagram at your mom Cares or learn more
about kids' mental health at your momcares dot org
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