High school class revisits cold cases
Criminal profiles impress former FBI special agent
ELIZABETHTON, Tenn. – The kids in Alex Campbell’s class stalked the serial killer like gumshoe sleuths from a paperback novel.
They traipsed around a mountain in East Tennessee looking for a murder weapon. They called the offices of district attorneys to try to get cold cases reopened.
They contacted a knot expert to look at ligature marks on victims’ necks. They held news conferences to rally public support for their work hunting a serial killer whose victims – all young women, many of whom were sex workers – were discovered in 1984 and 1985.
Since 2018, students in Elizabethton High School’s social studies classes taught by Campbell have identified victims, worked up profiles that wowed a former FBI special agent and then identified a man they have called a prolific killer.
Along the way, they did a side project that helped an innocent woman get out of prison. They even contributed to a couple of podcasts, including one called “Murder 101.”
This class project wasn’t some academic exercise. This was real life and death.
After finding answers in one case, in which they linked a long-haul trucker to a 1985 murder, the teacher and students at Elizabethton High believe they have discovered even more truth that law enforcement agencies should confirm. Campbell and his class think they’ve solved five more cases.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, however, isn’t yet ready to agree on the most recent discoveries.
“We are grateful to the students at Elizabethton High School who helped raise awareness about these cases,” Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokesperson Leslie Earhart said. “In fact, we credit them with bringing renewed public interest to those cases.”
Keeping students engaged
Campbell, 45, has taught social studies for 15 years, and science for seven years before that.
In 2017, he noticed the students in his class basically checked out the last month of school after the state’s standardized tests ended.
“Students think school Campbell said.
So he set out to keep them engaged. He was not a true crime fan. That distinction belonged to his wife, Brittney, who loved the book “Mindhunters” and never missed “Dateline,” NBC’s shows about murder and mayhem.
One day in the fall of 2017, Campbell teamed up with criminal justice teacher Ryan Presnell and they assigned their classes to write a profile of a killer. They used a real cold case murder from 1982. A woman named Cynthia Taylor had been killed and dumped by the side of the road.
“They worked so hard on those profiles,” Campbell said. He noticed how interested and engaged his class became.
The next year, he started the profiling unit with a question: Was there a serial killer active in East Tennessee in the 1980s? is over,”
His students dove in. They found more than a dozen unsolved cases, a few of which had been linked in local newspapers. Several of the cases had been called “The Red-Headed Murders.”
“The Red-Headed Murders?” Campbell remembers asking himself. “I had never heard of this.”
The students found more than a dozen unsolved cases. They narrowed their list to six that seemed very similar: young, often unidentified sex workers with red hair killed by strangulation and dumped by the side of the road.
“It’s insane,” said Marlee Mathena, 17, a senior who wasn’t in Campbell’s class but has volunteered to work on the profiles in her free time. “I’m alive 30 years later, and I feel like I know them. (The victims) seemed kind of forgotten, and a lot of the girls were close to my age.”
The students built a profile that included the unknown killer’s signature (ligature from the victim’s clothing), modus operandi (picking up women at strip clubs or truck stops), geography (near major highways across several states) and timeline (in 1984 and 1985).
They contacted knot expert Lindsey Philpott, who said the bruising on some of the victims’ necks was caused by a “granny knot.” Significantly, the killer didn’t bring a rope. He strangled the women with clothing they had been wearing.
They sent the killer profile to a real FBI investigator, and they waited.
‘Jane Doe’ gets a name
“Holy cow! This is pretty good,” said Scott Barker, 60, a retired FBI agent who, along with investigating bank robberies and public corruption, had reviewed criminal profiles before they were sent to the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia. “I would give them an A.”
With Barker’s support, the class held a news conference in 2018. They gave the killer from their profile a nickname: The Bible Belt Strangler.
They started working with Shane Waters, the host of a podcast called “Out of the Shadows.”
When Waters introduced the class of kid profilers to the world, a listener heard the profile and the stories of the victims. The listener contacted Waters and said one of the Jane Does sounded like the case of Tina Farmer, who had gone missing from Indianapolis in 1984. Tina Farmer’s body was found in Campbell County, Tennessee, just off Interstate 75.
“A Jane Doe had a name,” Campbell said.
According to Campbell, another woman, who asked that he not to identify her to the media, also came forward and said she had been strangled and dumped by the side of the road.
A man had been convicted in that case for attempted murder. He was in prison. His name was Jerry Leon Johns.
He fit the profile: A white male trucker whose movements in 1984 and 1985 put him in the same proximity as several missing women.
Then there was the confirmation: Jerry Johns’ DNA was found on a blanket from the Tina Farmer crime scene.
In an email, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said it had already linked Jerry Johns to Tina Farmer and the unnamed surviving victim in 2016.
But the TBI didn’t make their findings public until 2019.
Jerry Johns had died in prison.