Murder 101 - One in 200 million

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

Alex Campbell shares the story about how he came across the Redhead murders and how his class became involved in solving the chilling murder case that loomed over their town.    Follow us on Instagram @kt_studiosSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robay, and me, Simone Boyce. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side.

I'm Johnny B. Goode, the host of the podcast, Creating a Con, the story of Bitcoin. This podcast dives deep into the story of Ray Trapani and his company, Centratech. I'll explore how 320-somethings

built a company out of lies, deceit, and greed. I've been saying since a very young age that I. Listen to Creating a Con, the story of Bitcoin, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or whereverers in Hollywood are as old as the Hollywood sign itself. And while fame is the ultimate prize in Tinseltown, underneath it lies a shroud of mystery. Binge this season of Variety Confidential from Variety, Hollywood's number one entertainment news source and iHeart podcasts. Six episodes are waiting for you right now to dive into the secret history of the casting couch to explore the scandalous history of Hollywood's casting process. Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A group of high school students, high school students, Elizabethan high school students started a project to research a string of unsolved murders. Their research led to the identification of the killer. Investigators now have an answer to a 34-year-old question.

Once you start getting a few tips or a few leads or a few identifications, then the cold case isn't so cold anymore. There's a pretty good chance he's still alive. Everything that the students predicted through their profile turned out to be accurate. Redhead killer profile male Caucasian 5'9 to 6'2 180 to 270 pounds unstable home absent father and a domineering mother right-handed IQ above 100 most likely heterosexual. There is no profile of this killer except for the ones the students created. Just because some of these women no longer have people to speak for them does not mean that they deserve to not be spoken for.

What if this guy's still alive? Like, what if he comes after us? I said, are you going to kill me? And he said, yes. This is Murder 101. Season 1, Episode 1, 1 in 200 million. Episode 1, 1 in 200 million. I'm Jeff Shane, a television and podcast producer at KT Studios with Stephanie Lidecker, Courtney Armstrong, and Andrew Arnault. In 2020, I came across a story about a group of high school students who set out to investigate a series of unsolved murders in their community. It was an incredible story that here at KT Studios we felt needed to be explored further. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

It is my privilege and honor to welcome you to our press conference. I'm a part of Mr. Campbell's sociology class. Many of you today are asking the same question. Why are we here? sociology class. Many of you today are asking the same question while we're here. It starts 37 years ago when a man murdered an unknown woman and laid her body beside an interstate. Four years later, five more women shared the same fate. Those women would be found in the long interstates and highways across multiple states. The cases became cold until a few people asked, why hasn't the murderer been identified? The older I get, the more I think about all the bad

things that could happen, you know, but young people never think about that. They're just like, yeah, let's do it, you know, and I love that attitude about them, you know, hey, let's find a serial killer. Yeah, let's do it. My name is Alex Campbell. I am 44 years old. I live in Hampton, Tennessee, but I work in Elizabethan, Tennessee, Elizabethan High School. I'm a teacher for going on 21 years. I do not like teaching. I love teaching. It is the greatest job in the world.

I have been described by some as a very intense person. No matter what I'm doing, if you're going to give up hours of your life to do it, either I'm going to do it really hard and as good as I can, or if it's not that important, I just won't do it. I think teaching is important and I love it, so I give a lot of time to it. I also think eating is important and I love it and I give a lot of time to it. I also think eating is important, and I love it, and I give a lot of time to it, and I don't play around when I'm eating. It's serious. With a population of around 14,000 people,

Elizabethan, Tennessee sits on the eastern side of the state, bordering North Carolina. The people who call Elizabethan home have nothing but good things to say about their mountain town. We're a small town. We're all kind of like family. Everybody knows each other. You kind of know where everything is and you can't really get lost. A lot of people when I tell them I'm from Tennessee,

they always say, oh I lived in Nashville or I've been to Memphis, but those places are very different. We're in kind of the mountainous region in the Northeast and it's a little different than the rest of the state. This is your typical small town, small town feel. It is very, very small. Our downtown looks like something out of a Hallmark movie. We are close to the Appalachian Trail. We have lots of beautiful lakes, lots of outdoor recreation. Hiking, camping, it's a wonderful place. You have a lot of great neighbors. There's a lot of community here. We have one city school they go to. I think it's like 900 something kids. There's a lot of community here phil we have one city school they go to i think it's like 900 something kids there's a lot of community pride uh the high school is a focal point for the community you know think kind of the throwback to friday night football games

and and just that sense of school and community prize great our football team has won two of the last four state titles and played in another in a third one in the last four years very safe very safe yes even in a beautiful place like this there are lots of secrets locked up in these mountains that murder of cynthia taylor really cast a shadow over a place like this cynthia taylor was a 16 year old girl who was from our county here. She went to a local high school. I think from what we understand, there was some rebelliousness. Spend nights, weekends, days at a time with friends and probably bullied in school as far as we can tell. I actually saw a report from the school counselor and she probably really kind of stopped going to school. So you have a young vulnerable girl, redheaded, from East

Tennessee going through a tough time. She was stabbed. She was stabbed four times. Her body was found inside the road. You know my whole life people have talked about it. We have a lot of back roads, country roads here and people get out and ride around and when you drive down Roaring Creek where her body was found people know the spot. They'll point over there and say, yeah, that's where they found her body. And it's a well-known story. Most homicides in our area are usually domestic or family. So for it to be more of the serial murder, that is unheard of here. This is kind of wives' tale. My wife's heard of here. This is kind of wives tale. My wife's grandmother or great aunt or something lived down below it and she swore later in life that she heard screams from up that behind her

house up towards that house where they think that Cynthia was murdered at. She swore she thought she heard screaming that night. I think that goes to show you that there's evil everywhere. I found out that a redheaded girl being killed in the 80s beside a road in Tennessee was not uncommon. I found out that a redheaded girl being killed in the 80s beside a road in Tennessee was not uncommon. I kept noticing these redhead murders and all the unsolved murders and Jane Does. I didn't really understand how just this one unsolved murder would actually lead to to so much more ugliness here in my state and in surrounding states. here in my state and in surrounding states. Her murder was just one in a string of killings later known as the Redhead Murders.

The Redheaded Murders. Redhead Murders, a string of similar-looking women dumped along the sides of major interstates. Half a dozen redheaded women dumped along the sides of interstates across the country in the 1980s. dumped along the sides of interstates across the country in the 1980s. They had never been any consensus on if all of these murders were related or if just many redheaded women over a 10-year period were found in and around Tennessee, and it was because of different killers, what they call one-off murders.

So I just really became intrigued by it. And I felt like that the next semester, that would be the project that maybe we could work on, fan. But for the last several years, I've been a true crime fan. I blame that on my wife. She really got me into the genre and 48 hours and Dateline and all that. And I really, really liked it. And I just noticed that in my sociology class, if we ever talked about, you know, serial killer or psychopaths, like students just were mesmerized.

They just paid more attention and they were so interested and they wanted to learn. And of course, you know, true crime is like the second biggest genre in America or something. And so it does. It attracts a lot of people. And you know what, they're not going to work hard if they're not invested. I was a freshman at the time in high school, and I was still like very new. I was very shy. Like I didn't have a lot of experience doing like much of anything. Lane Leonard was just a freshman when he joined Mr. Campbell's sociology class. All I knew was I was going to sign up for a sociology class, and my mom told me that sociology was fun for her in college and that I should try in high school. Junior Will Bowers was an outgoing jock who took the class on a whim.

I was 17. Technically, the class was a sociology class, so we didn't even know exactly what we were going into. And at first, I thought he had like came up with a scenario like made all the details up and I was like oh that's that's kind of cool you know it'll be interesting. Kayla Vandeverter was a shy junior who had no idea what she was getting herself into. But that's not what we did. It wasn't just a class assignment. It wasn't just a grade. It was like real life. What I had been using in my sociology class for

several years was profiling because that really fits in with my standards about, you know, why people are the way they are, you know, how are they socialized, you know, those type things. And so I thought, well, I can do that unit on, you know, serial killers and that type thing, profiling. And maybe we could bring that in and we could look to see if any of these murders are related because I knew enough to know that if you have like the same signature, then you probably have the same killer. And if you look online, there was probably around 13 murders that people try to link to these redhead murders.

And there's a lot of differences in some of them. So I felt like we could just take the 13 and we could go through them and the students could learn about profiling and they could figure out if they saw a link in any of the 13. That's where we started. We've never really done anything like this in the class. So we just had to be creative with our doc process. And Mr. Campbell, he kind of directed us to where we need to be, kind of where our focuses need to be. It was kind of intimidating because, you know, like these are real people. There's still families out there who these victims belong to. What if this guy's still alive? Like what if he comes after us? But I think Mr. Campbell did a great job of leading us and guiding us in a way

that made it not intimidating. This type of teaching is called project-based learning, where you learn through the project. And the most important part or day of project-based learning is the introductory day. You introduce the project because if it's not interesting, then the students are not interested the entire time. So you really want to have a good way to kind of hook the students into it, make them excited or understand the importance or intrigued or whatever it is. And the question to them was, how do you find one person out of 200 million? And they just kind of stared at me blankly for a while.

We sit there the first day and Mr. Campbell has up on the board this big number. And he basically asked us the question, like, out of all this big number of of 200 million and, you know, it's a male, then you can automatically exclude about half the population. Now you have it down to 100 million. And they were like, oh, OK. So I said, look, I'm going to test you. I have this really cool thing that I want to do with a serial killer. But I said, I don't I don't know if this is the class to do it. Kids love it when you give them a good challenge. I got to make sure you guys are the right students to do this because this is hard work. And they're like, yeah, let us try. So I said, if you can give me 20 different ways that you could narrow this

$200 million down to one, then maybe you're the class to work on this. So I gave them, I don't know, I forget, like 30 minutes and they worked in groups and, you know, they just brainstormed all the different ways, you know, age, race, height, you know, hair color, all these different ways you can exclude people. And I think I was writing them on the board and, you know, I think they got down to about 19 and man the bell was about ready to ring we had about 30 seconds and by the way teenagers they know when the bell's gonna ring they got that time they got that timed out and so i was like oh we've only got 19 if we don't get one more the next you know a little bit like maybe you're not the class and i remember one student was like they were all racking their brains so hard, and one of them finally said, you know, another way,

and I was like, oh, and then the bell rang, right, and I was like, okay, well, we got 20, maybe this is a, you know, critical thinking class that can handle this, and I told them, I said, don't come back tomorrow if you're not ready to work on this. I said, this is going to be the hardest class you've ever had. And if you don't want to do the work and you don't want to work on this really hard, then go down there to the to the principal or whoever. And you tell them you want to change your class, because if you don't want to work hard, this is not the class for you. And believe it or not, every student came back the next day and we got to work. Let's stop here for a break. We'll be back in a moment. Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast

from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robay. And me, Simone Boyce. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. Thank you for taking the light, and you're going to shine it all over the world, and it makes me really happy. I never imagined that I would get the chance to carry this honor and help be a part of this legacy.

Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side. My name is Johnny B. Good, and I'm the host of the new podcast, Creating a Con, the story of Bitcoin. Over this nine-part series, I'll explore the life and crimes of my best friend, Ray Trapani. I always wanted to be a criminal. If someone's like, oh, what's your best way of making money? I'm like, oh, we should start some sort of scheme. You see, Ray has this unique ability to find loopholes and exploit them. They collected $30 million. There were headlines about it. His company, Centratech, was one of the hottest crypto startups in 2017.

It was going to change the world. Until it didn't. I came into my office, opened my email, and the subject heading was FBI request. It was only a matter of time before the truth came out. You can only fake it till you make it for so long before they find out that your Harvard degree is not so crimson. How could you sit there and do something that you know will objectively cause more harm in the world? Listen to Creating a Con, the story of Bitcoin on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Abusers in Hollywood are as old as the Hollywood sign itself. And while fame is the ultimate prize in Tinseltown, underneath it lies a shroud of mystery. Binge this season of Variety Confidential from Variety, Hollywood's number one entertainment news source, and iHeart Podcasts. Six episodes are waiting for you right now to dive into what lies beneath the glitzy image of Hollywood's golden age and all the sex, money, and murder that's been swept under the rug for decades. Using the Variety archives, each episode offers a rare glimpse into little-known casting couch stories that have long lived in the shadows. So join us as we navigate the tangled web of Hollywood's secret history

with host Tracy Patton, along with expert Variety reporters and correspondents as they discuss the secret history of the casting couch to explore the scandalous history of Hollywood's casting process. Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Murder 101. We really didn't know anything at first. You're talking about a case that happened, well, now it's over 40 years ago.

It's basically a shot in the dark where we started from. So he gave us a sheet. We call it the Redhead Bible, and it had every victim and first we had to decide whether all the victims were connected or not. We just picked out similarities and we kind of mapped out where they were and we got in groups about the victims and we decided who was going to be in charge of that victim and studying their case specifically. There was a lot of dead ends of that victim and studying their case specifically. There was a lot of dead ends there in the beginning because this case doesn't have a lot of attention. And I know a lot of times we were like, you know, Mr. Campbell's crazy.

We're never, ever going to get to the bottom of this. I went and I found the information on all of the redhead murders that people considered part of that. And so they were supposed to read up on those. And then what we try to do is create like a target with like an inner circle and then a periphery as we went out. I said, you know, hopefully what we're going to see is that there's some of these victims in the middle that seem like highly likely they're all related. And then you'll have some that are probably on the outside that you feel like, well, maybe there's some things. And then you'll probably have these others that are out here on the edge that you're like, well, I mean, they had red hair, but they're probably not related. And so that was the goal. Just begin with the 13 and let's just read about them.

And this was all just information online. It's all open source information. And, you know, let's just look at those and let's figure out, you know, do we even feel that there is a core group that are related? And then if you do, then we'll begin to pursue and we'll figure out how to tell if these victims that appear related were killed by one person. So what our students really focused on was are all these murders connected or are they looking at too many different murders and so what our students found was that six of them are virtually identical.

The Crittenden County Jane Doe. DeSoto County Jane Doe. Green County Jane Doe. Cheatham County Jane Doe. Campbell County Jane Doe. The Knox County Jane Doe. And then they start asking me to tell them, well, how do you tell if all these women were killed by the same person?

Like, how do you tell that just from a body laying beside the road? So then they actually started asking me to teach them, which is the greatest thing in the world. Many times the teacher, you're chasing them with the education, like, sit down, listen, please, I have it. But when they start saying to you, like, will you teach us how to do this? Then, you know, that's when you know you've created the right kind of atmosphere and you're not going to have any trouble. you know, that's when you know you've created the right kind of atmosphere and you're not going to have any trouble. So we started basically with just talking about the different aspects of like a murder and how police officers and the FBI find killers with modus operandi and signature and what it means to build a profile. It was to make sure of working in the period

and then sometimes we would have to do just outside homework because every day was different. So one day we would work on the profile. Another day we would look at serial killers like throughout that, but every day was different. We didn't know exactly what we were going into

and that's just kind of how Mr. Campbell is. He loves to just make every day a different experience. We continuously researched famous serial killers and all these other things, which for a sociology class, again, I was not expecting whatsoever. They didn't know they were begging me to teach them, but they said things like, Mr. Campbell, how do we know if this killer was a man or a woman? And I was like, oh, you want me to teach you? They're like, yes, please.

And so, you know, we would get into our sociology. How do we know if this person was intelligent or not? Well, we can get into our psychology and our sociology. Why would they only kill women and not kill women and men? OK, we can get into our socialization so it was really neat because i felt like i created this atmosphere where the students realized they did not know what they needed to know and so they kept asking me to teach them just like another thing that would help get them a little further down the road and instead of me

kind of having it pre-planned like i will talk about this today and this tomorrow and this the second Tuesday from now, it was more like, okay, let's see where the kids are at. Let's see what help they need. Let's see what I'm supposed to be teaching as part of my standards. And then let's see what I can teach them that will give them that piece of information that they need. Some days we read up on the different victims. I did give a victim to each different group. We worked on things like profiling and socialization. We worked on, you know, what are you supposed to get from a home life? What do you learn from your parents? Why is that a socializing agent, the most important socializing agent in society? What happens if that goes wrong? What happens if you don't get what you're supposed to get from your parents or your family? And so each one of those things that we learned, I think,

gave them just like a little piece of the puzzle that they were trying to put together to kind of bring this picture into focus. We're all teenagers, so we'd never really had the chance to work on a cold case. So I think everybody was really excited to get to do something that nobody else knows about, and we got to bring that to light. When you hear about serial killers on the news or on media outlets, you think, oh, that can never possibly happen anywhere close to me. But once it does happen close to you, it almost kind of wakes you up and makes it all seem more real.

We didn't have a lot of information going on about this at all. This was all reported back in the 1980s and not a lot of work had been done on it since. So a lot of the information was very few and far between. But whenever we were researching it, we were just looking up anything that related to the case. The only thing we could use was what is known as victimology, because all we had was information about the victims. We didn't have any suspects or anything like that. So we just had to look at the victims and say, what can we tell about the suspect from the victims? And one of the things that we noticed is they have reddish hair at the time of the murder.

And one of the things that we noticed is they have reddish hair at the time of their murder. So that was one. But of course, that wasn't a huge help because these are called the redhead murders for a reason. All of them had red hair. So you start to look a little deeper. They were all white females. They were all between the age of, say, 20 and 40. They were all relatively small, you know, those type things. An MO is the way that a killer kills. It's called modus operandi and it's how he operates. That's how I remember it. His signature is what he does to make the crimes his. So something that he leaves behind or a specific way that he does something, why he does it. When we were looking at these women and their cases, we were trying to find similarities between

them. So we talked about how they had red hair or one of them had brown hair with red highlights. We talked about how they were killed. Some of them, the medical examiner couldn't find a cause of death. So we assumed that they were strangled or suffocated. Some of them were too decomposed to even think about how they were killed. So they started looking, where were they found? What state was their body found in? How were they murdered? Those type of things. So by the time you look at all these different aspects, those were the things that kept coming back that they were very similar. For example, there are some people that are sometimes mentioned in the redhead murders that were abducted from their home. Well, that's an outlier that, you know, just one person was abducted from their home. We didn't see that with a lot of these others.

person was abducted from their home we didn't see that with a lot of these others one was an african-american boy who had reddish hair but you know different race and it was a boy so we didn't fit and the age was off in one case we had two victims in the same county that were found close to each other but one was a child and one was an adult so we began to look and say you know are most of them who are killed children are they they adults? So the child was the outlier. So the students had to go through and look at all those aspects. And a lot of that was found online. And so they had to dig that information out and say, you know, which ones appear to be all the same or similar. Or the person who killed them would have to be similar, for example.

And so that's how they came upon those six. them would have to be similar, for example. And so that's how they came upon those six. These women are somebody's sister, somebody's daughter, maybe even somebody's mother, and their kids or their family don't know where they're at. And I would hate to think that somebody around me could end up in that situation. So I felt very connected to the victims. So I felt very connected to the victims. Once the kids were invested, and it seemed like this was definitely the direction they were going, I was going to need somebody who was a real expert at how do you prove that victims are related to the same killer. And with that, I figured out that I probably needed to find a criminal profiler i'm not a professional profiler i'm a social studies teacher who had been teaching

sociology for about seven years at the time and the only criminal profilers behavioral analysts that i know they work for the fbi so i knew one f FBI agent and he was the father of a former student and we kind of had a close relationship. I coached him and things. So I had his contact. So I called his dad and I said, Hey, would you know how I could get ahold of anybody who's a behavioral analyst in the FBI? And he said, you're not going to believe it. But I went to high school with a guy. We're really good friends. We both went to the FBI. And he's a behavioral analyst. And I can give you his number.

So I called him and I told him about my crazy project and I told him what I needed. And he said, hey, yeah, I'd be glad to work with your students. I was an agent assigned to the Knoxville division. I just retired this past April after 32 years. Scott Barker is a retired special agent from the FBI. He has 32 years of service under his belt, and during his time on the force, he worked on numerous cases across the country. So one of my jobs with the FBI was I was what we called a field coordinator. What we did was we coordinated not only with FBI agents within our division, but also local officers, either local or state officers within our division who

were seeking assistance when an unsolved homicide or, for example, a serial rapist or missing child. Of course, they've been known over the years as the profiler. So I agreed to come speak to the class. So, you know come speak to the class. So, you know, Alex and I had several conversations. He explained to me what he was trying to do, that they were actually going to try to solve these cases. I thought, wow, this is pretty interesting. I've never seen this happen. He was actually willing to drive about three hours one way to come up and speak to the students.

And he told us that we needed four things. to come up and speak to the students. And he told us that we needed four things. And if we could prove that each of these victims had these four things, then it would prove that they were related back to one person. Let's stop here for another quick break. Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new kind of daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, Let's stop here for another quick break. you're going to shine it all over the world. And it makes me really happy. I never imagined that I would get the chance to carry this honor and help be a part of this legacy. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search

The Bright Side. My name is Johnny B. Good, and I'm the host of the new podcast, Creating a Con, the story of Bitcoin. Over this nine-part series, I'll explore the life and crimes of my best friend, Ray Trapani. I always wanted to be a criminal. If someone's like, oh, what's your best way of making money? I'm like, oh, we should start some sort of scheme. You see, Ray has this unique ability to find loopholes and exploit them. They collected $30 million. There were headlines about it. His company, Centratech, was one of the hottest crypto startups in 2017. It was going to change the world. Until it didn't. I came into my office, opened my email, and the subject heading was FBI request.

It was only a matter of time before the truth came out. You can only fake it till you make it for so long before they find out that your Harvard degree is not so crimson. How could you sit there and do something that you know will objectively cause more harm in the world? Listen to Creating a Con, the story of Bitcoin, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Abusers in Hollywood are as old as the Hollywood sign itself. app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever youHeart podcasts. Six episodes are waiting for you right now to dive into what lies beneath the glitzy image of Hollywood's golden age and all the sex, money, and murder that's been swept under the rug for decades. Using the Variety archives, each episode offers a rare glimpse into little-known casting couch stories that have long lived in the shadows.

So join us as we navigate the tangled web of Hollywood's secret history with host Tracy Patton, along with expert Variety reporters and correspondents as they discuss the secret history of the casting couch to explore the scandalous history of Hollywood's casting process. Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Murder 101. So the first thing is we wanted to establish an M.O. for the killer. And then we wanted to look at geography to see if they were linked by

geography. Then we want to look at time to make sure they were linked by time. And then we wanted to look at the victims themselves to see if they matched. If you can get those four things together, the profiler told us that it would be virtually impossible to have more than one person killing these people. They were just firing off questions. And so what I had to do is just go over the case with me, tell me what they were looking at, tell me the things that they had done so far. And then I just sat there and we kind of just brainstormed and I gave them some ideas on where I thought they should go, how I thought they should proceed. And so, you know, these bodies are being dumped along the interstate. So my first thought to the kids was, hey, if I was in your shoes and I was

investigating this case as a detective, my first thought would be because these bodies are being dumped on the side of an interstate, my gut feeling and experience tells me it's a truck driver. My gut feeling and experience tells me it's a truck driver. And if you've got victims that have, A, not been identified or you haven't had anybody report anyone is missing, chances are that these victims are what I would call a high-risk victim. Either, A, they've run away from home, or B, and could be both runaway and or B, they're involved in prostitution, possiblyitution possibly the truck stop and it's a crime of opportunity he may he may meet a hitchhiker he may need to meet a girl at truck stop or a rest stop picks her up uh kills her and then dumps her body on the side of the road because it it it doesn't seem to be like that it's really planned out to try to hide the bodies. It just seems like it's really, it's just a crime of opportunity. Chances are whoever's doing this

probably either have a girlfriend or ex-girlfriend that was redheaded, an ex-wife and wife that was redheaded or a mother that was redheaded because there's just some reason why he's picking out redheaded girls. And so we just sat there for about an hour and a half or so and just brainstormed about where I thought they should look. Scott Barker had an important suggestion for the class. Getting a profile on the victim is going to help you along the way because if you determine that you're, if you just say, hey, she's a victim and you don't know anything about her background and you don't know what to look. So if you find out she's a runaway or basically has been working as a prostitute and truck stops, I think that's a clue that, hey, here's where we need to go with this. You know, then we can maybe identify once you identify the victim to go interview the victim's family, find out where she was, what she was doing.

Did she have a relationship with anybody? Was she seeing anyone? Was she dating anyone? Did she have problems with anyone? All these different questions that you can ask to find out, to build a profile of this victim, because that's very important. Building a profile on your victim, to me, is just as important as building a profile of the suspect. And so they started building these profiles of the victims. Scott Barker worked with the class on the profile. And then we just refined it a little bit to try to make it smaller and say, hey, you know, one, you got to also look at the victim. And two, you know, my main thing was, frankly, believe it's a truck driver. But I would just say, hey, use your common sense. If you keep finding all these victims on the side of the road, give me some ideas who you could think to do. And of course, they would say, oh, it could have been a plumber.

Of course, somebody would say, oh, it could have been a truck driver. And I went, ding, ding, ding. Thank you. There you go. There's your answer, right? Truck driver. But they were coming up with all these different answers. And I'm thinking, well, they really had thought about this. I mean, they are really trying hard to come up with a profile. They're thinking, hey, it's got to be somebody that's attracted to redheaded women, for example. And I said, no, it may be somebody that hates redheaded women, right? And that's why he's killing these women. It's not because he's probably attracted to them. This might be because he hates them for some reason. It could be ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, mother. They were coming up with all kinds of things. And I kept saying, no, you've got to refine it a little bit.

Try to narrow the focus a little bit. We started to talk about how we wanted to do this profile. Because first we had to understand the person that we're looking for as a serial killer. Student Will Bowers describes the process of creating the profile. We looked at how the murders were placed. So we looked at from I-75 and I-40, that was where most of the murders were off, just offset of those two interstates. So we knew we had to be somebody that could drive in those, between those areas, or work between those areas of work between those areas so we knew it had to be a truck driver and then once we kind of knew that we started to

roll off ideas of we we could say that this person's Caucasian because most people that live in that specific areas are Caucasian and the murders are around basically the northeast Tennessee side of things as you go on to I-40. So we kind of took that and we just kept on going and rolling with our profile. We understood it was a male because most of the murders were strangles. We kind of understood that most males usually are kind of in that dominant killing where they use their hands more. So we kept going and we kept on adding and kept on adding. And by the time we got done, it was about a 20-ish page profile. We had in our profile discovered that we thought that the serial killer could have been a trucker because of the great distances between where the victim's bodies were found, even though they shared the similarities of a similar killer.

Student Lane Leonard remembers a pivotal moment in the class's investigation. One of my classmates, Will Bowers, he discovered that there was like a trucking regulation that had been like passed in the 1980s right before the killings had started, that deregulated some of the privacy laws of truckers. It was a law that would have deregulated trucking to where a trucker would have the privacy they need to potentially carry out these crimes. And that was a huge find because that gave our theory of that the serial killer was a trucker more high, you know, more ground to stand on because of the fact that they weren't monitored as heavily as they were in the decade prior.

He just found that on a whim. Like he was researching and we were all just like in class on our own, like doing our own research. And then he just raised his hand and was like, I found this. And Mr. Campbell walked over and I just saw his eyes get wide. And he was like, that's amazing. That's perfect. The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 deregulated trucking. The act substantially reduced

government control of the industry, making it easier for new carriers to enter the industry, eliminating certain restrictions placed on regulated carriers and encouraging greater price competition among carriers. For our purposes, though, it's significant because it gave truckers more autonomy over what information they reported, meaning their routes and schedules were less monitored. Scott Barker left the class feeling impressed. And so when I went in the class, I mean they were just on pins and needles. I mean they had a list of questions to ask me. Each student had things written out. You know, I probably could have stayed two days and still be talking

because they just kept asking questions over and over and over again. So I thought, man, they're really into it. I'd never seen anything like that happen before. I'd never seen a class do this before and I've talked to, you know, over my career, I spoke to many classes about the Bureau or even to classes about BAU because they were always interested after watching Criminal Minds. And I'd never had a class that was doing this type of project. And I really was. I was amazed. So what now? Once they had the profile, then I had another problem.

I couldn't grade it because I'm not a profile grader. I needed somebody who knew something about criminal profiling, who creates criminal profiles. So I reached back out to the FBI behavior analyst, and I said, would you help me grade this if the students create it? And he said, sure, I'll take a look at it. So the students worked really hard, and they created a profile, and it had 17 characteristics of this killer. We broke up into groups, and each group had a different part they were working on. Age of the killer, race of the killer, religious affiliation of the killer, all these different parts. So they worked on those.

And when they submitted it to me, we put it into one document. I said, you know, are you ready for me to give it to the profiler? Because he's going to grade it. And if he says this is terrible work, I guess we're all going to fail. And they're like, no, no, we feel good. Redhead Killer Profile. Redhead killer profile. The sex is male, Caucasian. Date of birth, no longer than 1962, no later than 1936.

Height is 5'9 to 6'2, a weight of 180 to 270 pounds. The killer lives or works around Interstate 40, Knoxville, Tennessee region. We believe that the occupation is a trucker. Personal relationships are possible, especially long term. The relative location of the residence is around the Knoxville or Nashville area. The kind of vehicle he uses is an 18-wheeled semi or commercial cargo transport. His religion could be possibly Christian. The physical wounds found on the victims are defensive wounds which could also be on the killer. His history could be

an unstable home, absent father, and a domineering mother. He is most likely right-handed and IQ above 100. His sexuality is most likely heterosexual. He has possible solicitation in his criminal history. The build of the killer could be thick or stocky. And mental health, there is no history in the case. For rationale, the killer only preys on females. And serial killers almost always target the opposite sex. Nearly all serial killers begin their murders in their late teens and early to middle 20s, the age in which

most mental disorders often manifest themselves. So there is no profile of this killer except for the ones the students created. It's a packet of information which shows how these six crimes are linked. So we sent it to him and he got back to me in a couple days, and he said, man, I think the work is really good. And he said, I cannot, as a behavioral analyst, disagree with anything that your students said they felt was true. I said, well, that's great, but what grade am I supposed to give them? Is this an

80 is it a 90 you know and he said I don't know what number it is but he said just give them an A they deserve an A so hey they all got an A on the on the profiling section but now we had another problem because whenever he comes back and says well yeah you created a profile but you know what I feel that it's really good. So now you have this investigative tool that nobody else has, but every one of these are cold cases, and what good does a profile do if people aren't using it to try to help solve the crime? So the students felt like a couple things needed to happen. Number one, we needed to bring these cases back up. I mean, let's be honest, police are many times overwhelmed with the amount of cases they have to work.

And if there's no leads, then why would you waste all your time on that case when there's a newer case that has some leads and we could see some closure? So we understood the whole cold case phenomenon. We understand why the cases are cold. There's not a lot of data, information, evidence, whatever, for them to work. old, there's not a lot of data, information, evidence, whatever for them to work. So we felt that by naming this killer, a couple of things would happen. Number one, it would separate the six, which we felt were similar from the greater number that we felt didn't really have anything to do with each other. And then it would also hopefully bring some attention, media attention back to the case. So we had to come up with a sexy name.

And the students went through this. They had some different ideas. We brainstormed. We invited the media down one day, some local media, and we kind of pitched some of the different ideas. We were kind of torn between three or four, but it seemed that when the media heard the names, they were like, that one right there. And of course, it was the Bible Belt Strangler. More on that next time. Murder 101 is executive produced by Stephanie Lidecker, Alex Campbell, Courtney Armstrong, Andrew Arno, and me, Jeff Shane. Additional producing by Connor Powell

and Gabriel Castillo. Editing by Jeff Twa. Music by Vanacore Music. Murder 101 is a production of iHeartRadio and KT Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more.

I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side. I'm Johnny B. Good, the host of the podcast Creating a Con, The Story of Bitcoin. This podcast dives deep into the story of Ray Trapani and his company, Centratech. I'll explore how 320-somethings built a company out of lies, deceit, and greed. I've been saying since a very young age that I was going to be a millionaire.

If someone's like, oh, what's your best way of making money? I'm like, oh, we should start some sort of scheme. Listen to Creating a Con, the story of Bitcoin, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Abusers in Hollywood are as old as the Hollywood sign itself. And while fame is the ultimate prize in Tinseltown, underneath it lies a shroud of mystery. Binge this season of Variety Confidential from Variety,

Hollywood's number one entertainment news source and iHeart podcasts. Six episodes are waiting for you right now to dive into the secret history of the casting couch to explore the scandalous history of Hollywood's casting process. Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.