In 2018, Elizabethton High School student teacher Alex Campbell challenged his students to see if they could figure out if the Redhead murders are sometimes called the Bible Belt Murders.
There were 14 unsolved murders with a similar M.O. Campbell gets help from a former FBI agent teaching the young people about profiling a case. The students of Elizabethton High School start to see a potential pattern emerge in six of the potential murders.
In looking at the background of the murders, they started New Year’s Day 1985, the body of a young female with reddish hair was found strangled, wrapped in a blanket, and tossed down an embankment off the southbound side of I-75 near Jellico, Tennessee. Due to decomposition, authorities believe she was killed about 72 hours before her body was found, 10-12 weeks pregnant when she was murdered.
The identification of Tina McKenney Farmer of Indiana helped the investigation move forward quickly. The evidence from the crime scene was tested and a match was found. The DNA matched Jerry Johns, convicted in the 1987 attempted murder of a woman he kidnapped, strangled, and then dumped along I-40.
Linda Schacke met Jerry Johns in a club in West Knoxville, Tennesee. The 36-year-old trucker seems like a nice guy until he pulls a gun, and forces her at gunpoint to drive to a wooded area off the interstate where he rips her shirt and uses part of it to strangle her. Johns then tosses the strangled and bound woman on the inside of a storm drain under I-40.
Like Tina Famer and many others, Linda Schacke has red hair, Unlike the others, Linda Schacke survives the attack. When Jerry Johns was convicted of the attack on Schacke, he was considered a suspect in some homicides, but there was never enough evidence. However, even though Tina Marie McKenney Farmer was positively identified by fingerprint identification, there was DNA left behind in the blanket she was wrapped up in after she was killed. 2019,
DNA evidence identified convicted kidnapper Jerry Leon Johns as the man who killed Tina Marie McKenney Farmer in December 1984. Johns died in prison in 2015. On December 18, 2019, a grand jury in Campbell County, Tennessee, ruled that Johns would have been indicted for murder in Farmer’s death if he were still alive.
The students of Elizabethton High School continue to investigate and believe they have developed some strong evidence that shows whoever killed McKenney-Farmer, probably killed Lisa Nichols, Michelle Inman, Elizabeth Lamotte, Tracy Walker, and even a still unidentified Jane Doe in Desoto County.
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[Feature Photo: Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman/Family Handout]
