“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
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