Category: Commentary

 “It’s murder by numbers, one, two, three.  It’s as easy to learn as your ABC’s.”

Song by The Police

 Alex Campbell is a high school teacher in the small town of Elizabethton, Tennessee.  In the spring of 2018, he presented his Sociology class with an idea for a class project.  And it all began with an unsolved 40-year-old murder case and a potential serial killer that was never caught.  
 Proposing that they study sociological profiling through cold case murder, Mr. Campbell at first had the students focus on a young girl whose unidentified body had been found in their community in the early 1980s.  As teacher and students dug into the details of that initial case, they discovered a pattern of murders that had occurred predominately in the 1980s in Tennessee and neighboring states.  And the victims had one thing in common.  They all had red hair.
 To aid in their project, Mr. Campbell reached out to a friend and retired FBI agent.  He connected him with another agent whose specialty was behavioral analysis.  This agent was a criminal profiler, and his name was Scott Barker.  He gladly offered to help the class.  The students learned from him and got to work.
 They began by studying murderers, specifically serial killers.  Students learned how to identify related murders through the criminal’s M.O. (Modus Operandi – a criminal’s habitual way of operating), signature (unique patterns or behaviors used), time frame (when the crimes were committed), and geography (the locations of the crimes).  They found 14 redheaded victims whose bodies were discovered between 1978 and 1992 in six different states – Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.  Building a profile of the victims, it appeared six were connected.  Students began referring to them as the six sisters.  All were unidentified except for one.
 Students soon began gathering evidence and built a case file.  They poured over old newspaper articles, spoke with investigators, interviewed retired detectives, and began online sleuthing.  They held a press conference drawing attention to their efforts in an attempt to identify the victims.  The student’s work brought renewed interest from the public and law enforcement.  Over the course of the semester, the students were able to identify all six sisters.
 Students then began working on a profile of the killer.  Dubbing him the Bible Belt Strangler, they compiled a list of suspected attributes.  He was assumed to be a male Caucasian (serial killers statistically strike within their own race – all the victims were white), 5’ 9” to 6’ 2”, 180-270 lbs., raised in an unstable home with an absent father and domineering mother, right-handed, heterosexual, with an IQ above 100.  It was also determined that the killer was likely a truck driver because all the victims had been dumped along the interstate, most off of I-75 and I-40 in multiple states.
 As an interesting side note – in doing their research, the students discovered a change in trucking privacy regulations that they believed may have benefited their killer.  The Motor Carrier Act of 1980, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, deregulated the trucking industry.  It gave truckers more autonomy over the information they reported meaning routes and schedules were less monitored.
 Publicity in this case sparked renewed attention by law enforcement officials.  And the case broke wide open when overlooked DNA evidence from one of the victims identified her killer as Jerry Leon Johns, a Tennessee truck driver.  Mr. Campbell’s students had found the killer!  Amazingly he fit every one of the 17 points in the criminal profile the students had created. 
 Jerry Johns died in prison in 2015.  He had been incarcerated, serving a 73-year sentence for the assault and attempted murder of another woman in 1985.  Although yet unproven, it is believed that Jerry Johns is responsible for the murders of all the student’s six redheaded sisters.  
 As a continuation of their project, Mr. Campbell’s students compiled their findings and produced a ten-episode podcast entitled Murder 101.  It has been ranked in the top 10 crime podcasts for some time now.  You can find Murder 101 on Spotify, Audible, Apple, and more.  You can also listen to the podcast on YouTube.  It is a fascinating true crime story.  Rumor has it that a movie is soon to come.    

© 2024 Jody Dyer
typewriterweekly.com

 “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”

Kurt Vonnegut

 I have mentioned before in this column that in my formative years I attended a low-budget private school.  It was an interesting place to absorb an education, but while we were taught well, school could be sometimes dangerous.  It’s fun to remember.  And it is amusing to think that now my classmates, and all of us in that generation, are fully entrenched in all aspects of our society.  We grew up, got old, and started to run things.  It’s amazing we survived.  
 The 1970s were a different time, unusual in many ways.  But it was a good time to live and be in high school.  We had some of the best music – Led Zeppelin, Steely Dan, Aretha and Stevie, Chicago, Elton and Eagles.  Sure, we had turbulence – Vietnam, Watergate, the big oil embargo, and the perilous administration of Jimmy Carter.  But overall, those were pretty good years, until we met John Travolta and disco took over.
 One recurring episode that I well remember from these high school days was bowling in P.E. class.  This story may offend the safety conscious sensibilities of some readers, but as I said before, the 70s were a different time.  
 Prior to the beginning of our bowling adventures, our school administrators, for some undisclosed reason, had made the decision to buy a large, used panel van.  Not a regular van, but one of those large, walk-in step vans, kind of like a UPS truck.  It was an old Chevy or GMC model from the late 50s or early 60s.  Under peeling white paint, you could read the faded letters on the side revealing that it had been a Tom’s Peanut delivery van in its former life.  We called it the Peanut Van.
 I was in a very small P.E. class at the time.  There were only seven or eight of us miscreants in this group.  We were a bit of a motley crew, and maybe not the students you would want to leave unsupervised.  
 On occasion, our teacher, Mr. King, needed a break.  I’m not sure what he did on these days off, maybe he just put his feet up with a bag of Cheetos in the breakroom, we were never sure.  But here is what would happen.  As we poured out of the locker room, clad only in our blue gym shorts and white tee shirts, running towards the basketball courts, Mr. King would casually toss the keys to the Peanut Van at one kid in our group and instruct us to go bowling…by ourselves.  He would send us, this group of 15 and 16-year-old boys, driving a beat-up used van, by ourselves in the big city (okay, pretty big town – we weren’t out in the country), to the bowling alley across town.  Most often, Dave Faulk was the driver.  I think he was 16 then and probably had his driver’s license.  He was fearless.  He drove a Corvair to school, those cars that Ralph Nader warned us about.  They were “unsafe at any speed” and would blow up and burn all the occupants alive inside if you hit anything.  You had to be brave to drive a Corvair (the entire Faulk family drove those cars).  
 At Mr. King’s command we piled in the Peanut Van and Dave would take the wheel.  We were off like drunken sailors on shore leave.  Dave was a good driver, but I can remember being thrown around quite a bit in the back of the van (no seats) as we weaved through traffic at high speed. 
 At the bowling alley, we needed $1.25.  You could bowl three games for a dollar.  Shoe rental cost 25 cents.  Sometimes we were able to score some nachos or chili fries, if any of the guys had extra money.  And the bowling was fun, especially unsupervised.  We had to keep score manually and use those small golf pencils.    
 All too soon our games were finished.  We headed back to school, racing through traffic to beat the bell.  We had nary an accident or issue during any of our bowling trips.  We were never pulled over by the police.  We never received a speeding ticket.  Pedestrians were avoided and no accidents reported.  I think we kept the sliding side doors open on these bowling runs, but none of us fell out of the van, not even once.  We all survived.  And school was fun.
 I still like to bowl…  

© 2024 Jody Dyer
typewriterweekly.com

“In politics stupidity is not a handicap.”
Napoleon Bonaparte

 It has become popular of late for pontificating politicians (and others) to decry and condemn our uniquely American Electoral College system.  Every four years, as the presidential election approaches, citizens are assaulted with continuing arguments from low IQ political pundits who insist that the Electoral College is outdated.  They argue that we need to opt for a strictly popular vote when we elect our next president.  I would argue that this is at the least misguided, at worst evidence of a parasitic mind.  Why does the Electoral College matter?  Let me explain… 
 Rather than holding one national presidential election every four years, in essence, we have 50 individual state elections (plus one extra for the District of Columbia).  Each state holds its own election for president.  As a group, the people in Texas get to decide on who they want for president.  It is the same for the folks in Kansas and Oklahoma and California and Vermont.  States differ.  We have a diverse population.  The priorities and concerns of those in the urban Northeast or coastal California may be different than those in the Midwest or the deep South.  Without the Electoral College, states with smaller populations like Wyoming, Vermont, and Alaska would have no voice when we elect our president.  Larger states like Texas, New York, and California could control elections.  The Electoral College was instituted so that every state, and every voter in every state, matters.  That is the simple answer.
 Our Founding Fathers intentionally designed the American government to prevent a tyrannical minority from controlling the majority.  We have three branches of government with baked in checks and balances. There is division of power between the federal and state governments, constitutional limits on the government’s power, and a differing composition of representatives in Congress.  And we have the ingenious Electoral College.  
 Many bow-tie wearing comb-over politicians in both parties

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