To catch the murderer: Classroom edition!
When Alex Campbell, a sociology and history teacher in Tennessee, decided to have his students solve a series of cold-case murders in the spring of 2018, he knew that when it came to identifying a suspect, I never dreamed of it. Little did he know that six years later he would be launching a true crime podcast. .
In fact, Campbell told the Post on Wednesday that law enforcement leaders have been “working on this problem for years with no results” and failed the first group of students. He said he told him to “prepare” to do so.
All the Elizabethton High School students wanted was to identify one of the women and get the word out.
“My students have never let me down. I've given them some very difficult things,” Campbell said in a phone interview. “But when they know they are helping people, they work very hard.
“They continue to inspire me.”
Now, those students are revealing their findings and sharing how they obtained the evidence in a 10-episode podcast called “Murder 101.”
In 2018, more than 20 young people tried to find a link between them and the long footprints of a red-haired white woman who had been murdered in the surrounding area.
The mysterious crime, known as the Red Head Murder, involved up to 14 victims, whose bodies were found abandoned along a major southern highway. It is believed that some of these women were prostitutes.
What Campbell's class initially set out to do was simple on paper. Her idea was to find out how many women were connected to a unique murderer.
And that first-semester sociology class agreed that six of the victims were potentially related to the same man dubbed the “Bible Belt Strangler.”
The women have since been identified as Lisa Nichols, Michelle Inman, Tina McKenney Farmer, Elizabeth Lamott, Tracy Walker, and one woman from DeSoro County remains unidentified.
As part of the class, Professor Campbell brought in former FBI behavioral analyst Scott Barker, who told students they needed to identify four things to confirm their connections: time frame, geography. , a modus operandi (commonly known as “MO”). – and a sign.
traumatic brain injury
Campbell said all six women were found between 1983 and 1985 in nearby areas and states. Three were from Tennessee, and the others were from West Virginia, Kentucky, and Arkansas. They were all killed in close combat and abandoned on the highway.
One of the women was found naked in the refrigerator, the student revealed on the podcast. The other man's body was found by a motorist after it had been decomposing for months, but it was just a skeleton. The third woman was found beaten and strangled through a guardrail and was between 10 and 12 weeks pregnant at the time.
What struck Campbell most was the “empathy” the students developed toward the women who died during the semester.
“As a teacher, you have to plan what you want your students to learn,” said he, who has worked as an educator for 23 years. “But you can't predict what the students will actually learn, and they learned much more than I ever imagined.”
Her “proudest” moment was when students started referring to the victims as the “Six Sisters.”
Even though the women's real families did not move the police, the students decided it was their job to continue fighting for justice.
“I was really impressed by the maturity of the students, that a 14- to 17-year-old would think that way,” Campbell said.
Parents also attended, including her father, a former police officer, who wanted his daughter to learn how to avoid situations similar to those the women had experienced.
But not only did Elizabethton High School students learn about the “real world,” they even identified Jerry Johns as a potential suspect. Johns was convicted in 1985 of strangling a prostitute in Knox County, Kentucky, and died in prison in 2015.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation later announced the tardy truck driver as a suspect, but gave no credit to the student or podcast producer Shane Waters, who Campbell said he took more harshly than they did.
The TBI is investigating whether Johns is connected to other Redhead murders.
Since the class is only held once a year, no students are actually working on the case at this time, but Campbell said student work in both 2018 and last semester could lead to justice. I believe.
“We truly believe that justice will be served for these women,” the teacher, who has taught at the school for 15 years, told the Post.
