Speaker 1: A group of high school students.
Speaker 2: High school students Elizabeth and high school students started a
Speaker 2: project to research a string of unsolved murders.
Speaker 3: Their research led to the identification.
Speaker 4: Of the killer.
Speaker 5: Investigators now have an answer to a thirty four year
Speaker 5: old question.
Speaker 6: Once you start getting a few tips, or a few leads,
Speaker 6: or few identifications, then the cold case isn't so cold anymore.
Speaker 6: There's a pretty good chance he's still alive. Everything that
Speaker 6: the students predicted through their profile turned out to be accurate.
Speaker 7: Redhead Killer profile mail Caucasian, five nine six, two hundred
Speaker 7: and seventy pounds, unstable home, absent father, and a domineering mother,
Speaker 7: right handed, IQ above one hundred, most likely heterosexual.
Speaker 6: There is no profile of this killer except for the
Speaker 6: ones the students created.
Speaker 7: Just because some of these women no longer have people
Speaker 7: to speak for them does not mean that they deserve
Speaker 7: to not.
Speaker 8: Be so anymore.
Speaker 9: What if this guy's still alive? Like, what if you
Speaker 9: came after us?
Speaker 5: I consider it gonna kill me.
Speaker 1: Who A Yeah, this.
Speaker 3: Is Murder one oh one, Season one, episode one one
Speaker 3: and two hundred million. I'm Jeff Shane, a television and
Speaker 3: podcast producer at KT Studios with Stephanie Leidecker, Courtney Armstrong,
Speaker 3: and Andrew Arno. In twenty twenty, I came across a
Speaker 3: story about a group of high school students who set
Speaker 3: out to investigate a series of unsolved murders in their community.
Speaker 3: It was an incredible story that here at KT Studios
Speaker 3: we felt needed to be explored further.
Speaker 8: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Is my privilege and honor
Speaker 8: to welcome you to our past conference. Now I'm a
Speaker 8: part of Michigan Campbell's sociology class. Many of you or
Speaker 8: today are asking the same question, why are we here?
Speaker 8: It starts thirty seven years ago when a man murdered
Speaker 8: unknown woman and laid her body decide in any state.
Speaker 8: Four years later, five more women. She had the same
Speaker 8: faith those women would be founded along in the states
Speaker 8: and the highways across multiple states. The cases became cold
Speaker 8: till a few people ask why hasn't the murderer in
Speaker 8: the day.
Speaker 1: Fact.
Speaker 6: The older I get, the more I think about all
Speaker 6: the bad things that could happen, you know, But young
Speaker 6: people never think about that. They're just like, yeah, let's
Speaker 6: do it, you know. And I love that attitude about him.
Speaker 6: You know he let's find a serial killer, and I like, Yeah,
Speaker 6: let's do it. My name is Alex Campbell. I am
Speaker 6: forty four years old. I live in Hampton, Tennessee, but
Speaker 6: I work in elizabeth In, Tennessee et elizabeth In High School.
Speaker 6: I'm a teacher for going on twenty one years.
Speaker 1: I do not like teaching. I love teaching.
Speaker 6: It is the greatest job in the world. I have
Speaker 6: been described by some as a very intense person. No
Speaker 6: matter what I'm if you're going to give up hours
Speaker 6: of your life to do it, either, I want to
Speaker 6: do it really hard, as good as I can.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 1: If it's not that important, I just won't do it.
Speaker 6: And I think teaching is important and I love it,
Speaker 6: so I give a lot of time to it. I
Speaker 6: also think eating is important and I love it, and
Speaker 6: I give a lot of time to it. And I
Speaker 6: don't play around when I'm eating.
Speaker 1: It's serious.
Speaker 3: With a population of around fourteen thousand people, elizabeth In,
Speaker 3: Tennessee sits on the eastern side of the state ordering
Speaker 3: North Carolina. The people who call Elizabethan home have nothing
Speaker 3: but good things to say about their mountain town.
Speaker 9: We're a small town. We're all kind of like family.
Speaker 9: Everybody knows each other. You kind of know where everything
Speaker 9: is and you can't really get lost.
Speaker 6: A lot of people when I tell them I'm from Tennessee,
Speaker 6: they always say, oh, I live in Nashville, or I've
Speaker 6: been to Memphis, But those places are very different. We're
Speaker 6: in the kind of the mountainous region in the northeast,
Speaker 6: and it's a little different than the rest of the state.
Speaker 4: It's your typical small town, small town field.
Speaker 11: It is very very small. Our downtown looks like something
Speaker 11: out of a Hallmark. We are close to the Appalachian Trail.
Speaker 11: We have lots of beautiful lakes, lots of outdoor recreation.
Speaker 6: Hiking, camping. It's a wonderful place. You have a lot
Speaker 6: of great neighbors.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of community here.
Speaker 4: Feel We have one city school they go to, so
Speaker 4: I think it's like nine hundred and something kids, and there's.
Speaker 10: A lot of community pride. The high school is a
Speaker 10: focal point for the community.
Speaker 8: You know, think kind of the throwback to Friday Night
Speaker 8: at football games and just since of school and community pride.
Speaker 4: Great Our football team has won two of the last
Speaker 4: four state titles and played in another in a third
Speaker 4: one in the last four years.
Speaker 11: Very safe, very safe.
Speaker 1: Yes, even in.
Speaker 6: A beautiful place like this, there are lots of secrets
Speaker 6: locked up in these mountains. That murder of Cynthia Taylor
Speaker 6: really cast a shadow over a place like this. Cynthia
Speaker 6: Taylor was a sixteen year old girl who was from
Speaker 6: our county here. She went to a local high school.
Speaker 6: I think, from what we understand, there was some rebelliousness,
Speaker 6: spend nights, weekends, days at a time with friends, and
Speaker 6: probably bullied in school as far as we can tell.
Speaker 6: I actually saw report from the school counselor and she'd
Speaker 6: probably really.
Speaker 1: Kind of stopped going to school.
Speaker 6: So you have a young, vulnerable girl, redheaded from East
Speaker 6: Tennessee going through a tough time. She was stabbed. She
Speaker 6: was stabbed four times. Her body was found in southern road.
Speaker 4: You know, my whole life. People's people have talked about it.
Speaker 4: We have a lot of back roads, country roads here
Speaker 4: and people get out and right around and when you
Speaker 4: drive down roy and Creek where her body was found,
Speaker 4: people know the spot will point over there and say, yeah,
Speaker 4: that's where they found her body. And it's a it's
Speaker 4: a it's a well known story.
Speaker 11: Most homicides in our area are usually domestic or family,
Speaker 11: so for it to be more of the serial murder
Speaker 11: that is like unheard up here.
Speaker 4: This is kind of wives tale. My wife's grandmother or
Speaker 4: great ant or something lived down below it, and she
Speaker 4: swore later in life that she heard screamed from up
Speaker 4: that behind her house, up towards that house where they
Speaker 4: think that Cindy was murdered at She swore she thought
Speaker 4: she heard screaming that night.
Speaker 11: I think that goes to say that there's evil everywhere.
Speaker 6: I found out that a redheaded girl being killed in
Speaker 6: the eighties beside a road in Tennessee was not uncommon.
Speaker 6: I kept noticing these redhead murderers and all the unsolved
Speaker 6: murders and Jane Do's. I didn't really understand how just
Speaker 6: this one unsolved murder would actually lead to so much
Speaker 6: more ugliness here in my state and surrounding states.
Speaker 12: Her murder was just one and a string of killings
Speaker 12: later known as the redhead Murder, the red Headed.
Speaker 5: Murder, redhead murders, a string of similar looking women dumped
Speaker 5: along the sides of major interstates. Half a dozen red
Speaker 5: headed women dumped along the sides of interstates across the
Speaker 5: country in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 6: They had never been any consensus on if all of
Speaker 6: these murders were related or if just many redheaded women
Speaker 6: over a ten year period were found in and around
Speaker 6: Tennessee and it was because of different killers what they
Speaker 6: call one off murders. So I just really became intrigued
Speaker 6: by it, and I felt like that the next semester
Speaker 6: that would be the project that maybe we could work on.
Speaker 6: Fan But for the last several years I been a
Speaker 6: true crime fan.
Speaker 1: I blame that on my wife.
Speaker 6: She really got me into the genre in forty eight
Speaker 6: Hours and Dateline and all that, and I really really
Speaker 6: liked it. And I just noticed that in my sociology class,
Speaker 6: if we ever talked about you know, serial killer or
Speaker 6: you know, psychopath, like, students just were mesmerized. They just
Speaker 6: paid more attention and they were so interested and they
Speaker 6: wanted to learn. And of course, you know, true crimes
Speaker 6: like what the second biggest genre in America or something,
Speaker 6: and so it does. It attracts a lot of people,
Speaker 6: and you know, they're not going to work hard if
Speaker 6: they're not invested.
Speaker 2: I was a freshman at the time in high school
Speaker 2: and I was still like very new. I was very shy,
Speaker 2: like I didn't have a lot of experience doing like
Speaker 2: much of anything.
Speaker 3: Lane Leonard was just a freshman when he joined mister
Speaker 3: Campbell's sociology class.
Speaker 2: All I knew was I was going to sign up
Speaker 2: for a sociology class, and my mom told me that
Speaker 2: sociology was fund for her in college and then I
Speaker 2: should try to.
Speaker 3: Husch Junior Will Bauers was an outgoing jock who took
Speaker 3: the class on a whim.
Speaker 8: I was seventeen. Technically the class was a sociology class,
Speaker 8: so we didn't even know exactly what we're going into.
Speaker 9: And at first I thought like he had like came
Speaker 9: up with this scenario, like made all the details up,
Speaker 9: and I was like, Oh, that's that's kind of cool.
Speaker 9: You know, it'll be interesting.
Speaker 3: Caylea van Dervetter was a shy junior who had no
Speaker 3: idea what she was getting herself into.
Speaker 9: But that's not what we did. It wasn't just a
Speaker 9: class assignment, it wasn't just a grade. It was like
Speaker 9: real life.
Speaker 6: What I had been using in my sociology class for
Speaker 6: several years was profiling because that really fits in with
Speaker 6: my standards about you know why people are the way
Speaker 6: they are, you know, how were they socialized, you know
Speaker 6: those type of things, and so I thought, well, I
Speaker 6: can do that unit on you know, serial killers and
Speaker 6: that type thing profiling, and maybe we could bring that
Speaker 6: in and we could look to see if any of
Speaker 6: these murders are related, because I knew enough to know
Speaker 6: that if you have like the same signature, then you
Speaker 6: probably have the same killer. And if you look online,
Speaker 6: there was probably around thirteen murders that people try to
Speaker 6: link to, these redhead murders, and there's.
Speaker 1: A lot of differences in some of them.
Speaker 6: So it felt like we could just take the thirteen
Speaker 6: and we could go through them and the students could
Speaker 6: learn about profiling and they could figure out if they
Speaker 6: saw a link in any of the thirteen.
Speaker 1: That's where we started.
Speaker 8: We never really done anything like this in the class,
Speaker 8: so we just had to be creative with our process.
Speaker 8: Mister Campbell, he kind of directed us to where we
Speaker 8: need to be, kind of where our focuses need to be.
Speaker 9: It was kind of intimidating because you know, like these
Speaker 9: are real people, that there's still families out there who
Speaker 9: these victims belonged to. What if this guy's still alive,
Speaker 9: Like what if he comes after us? But I think
Speaker 9: mister Campbell did a great job of leading us and
Speaker 9: guiding us in a way that made it not intimidating.
Speaker 6: This type of teaching is called project based learning, where
Speaker 6: you learn through the project, and the most important part
Speaker 6: or day of project based learning is the introductory day
Speaker 6: you introduce the project because if it's not interesting, then
Speaker 6: the students are not interested the entire time. So you
Speaker 6: really want to have a good way to kind of
Speaker 6: hook the students into it, make them excited or understand
Speaker 6: the importance or intrigued or whatever it is. And the
Speaker 6: question to them was how do you find one person
Speaker 6: out of two hundred million? And they just kind of
Speaker 6: stared at me blankly for a while.
Speaker 2: Let me sit there the first day and mister Campbell
Speaker 2: has up on the board this big number, and he
Speaker 2: basically asked us the question like, out of all this
Speaker 2: big number of people, would you guys be willing to
Speaker 2: help some other people?
Speaker 6: I said, okay, So if you're give a population two
Speaker 6: hundred million, and you know it's a male, then you
Speaker 6: can automatically exclude about half the population. They have it
Speaker 6: down to one hundred million, and they were.
Speaker 1: Like, oh okay. So I said, look, I'm going to
Speaker 1: test you.
Speaker 6: I have this really cool thing that I want to
Speaker 6: do with a serial killer. But I said, I don't
Speaker 6: I don't know if this is a class to do it.
Speaker 6: You know, kids love it when you give them a
Speaker 6: good challenge. I don't you know, I got to make
Speaker 6: sure you guys are the right students to this, because
Speaker 6: this is hard work.
Speaker 1: And they're like, yeah, yeah, let us try.
Speaker 6: So I said, if you can give me twenty different
Speaker 6: ways that you can narrow this two hundred million down
Speaker 6: to one, then maybe you're the class to work on this.
Speaker 1: So I gave him I don't know, I forget. It's
Speaker 1: like thirty men.
Speaker 6: And they worked in groups, and you know, they just
Speaker 6: brainstormed all the different ways you know, age, race, heights,
Speaker 6: you know, hair color, all these different ways you can
Speaker 6: exclude people. And I think I was riding them on
Speaker 6: the board, and you know, I think they got down
Speaker 6: to about nineteen and and the bell was about ready
Speaker 6: to ring. We had about thirty seconds. And by the way,
Speaker 6: teenagers they know when the bell's going to ring. They
Speaker 6: got that time, they got that timed out, and so
Speaker 6: I was like, oh, we've only got nineteen. If we
Speaker 6: don't get one more in the next you know a
Speaker 6: little bit like, maybe you're not the class. And I
Speaker 6: remember one student was like they were all racking their
Speaker 6: brains so hard, and one of them finally said, you
Speaker 6: know another way and I.
Speaker 1: Was like, oh.
Speaker 6: Then the bell rang right and I was like, okay,
Speaker 6: well we got twenty. Maybe this is a you know,
Speaker 6: critical thinking class that can handle this. And I told them,
Speaker 6: I said, don't come back tomorrow if you're not ready
Speaker 6: to work on this. I said, this is going to
Speaker 6: be the hardest class you've ever had. And if you
Speaker 6: don't want to do the work and you don't want
Speaker 6: to work on this really hard, then go down there
Speaker 6: to the to the principal or whoever, and you tell
Speaker 6: them you want to change your class because if you
Speaker 6: don't want to work.
Speaker 1: Hard, this is not the class for you. And believe
Speaker 1: it or not, every.
Speaker 6: Student came back the next day and we got to work.
Speaker 3: Let's stop here for a break. We'll be back in
Speaker 3: a moment. Murder one on one.
Speaker 8: We really didn't know anything at first. You're talking about
Speaker 8: a case that happened. Well, now it's over forty years ago.
Speaker 8: It's basically a sight in the dark where we started from.
Speaker 9: So he gave us a sheet we call it the
Speaker 9: Redhead Bible, and it had every victim, and first we
Speaker 9: had to decide whether all the victims were connected or not.
Speaker 9: We just picked out similarities and we kind of mapped
Speaker 9: out where they were, and we got in groups about
Speaker 9: the victims and we decided who is going to be
Speaker 9: in charge of that victim and studying their case specifically.
Speaker 9: There was a lot of dead ends there in the beginning,
Speaker 9: because this case doesn't have a lot of attention, and
Speaker 9: I know a lot of times we were like, you know,
Speaker 9: mister Campbell's crazy, We're never ever going to get to
Speaker 9: the bottom of this.
Speaker 6: I went and I found the information on all of
Speaker 6: the Redhead murders that people considered part of that, and
Speaker 6: so they were supposed to read up on those.
Speaker 1: And then what we.
Speaker 6: Try to do is create a like a target with
Speaker 6: like an inner circle and then a periphery.
Speaker 1: As we went out, I.
Speaker 6: Said, you know, hopefully what we're going to see is
Speaker 6: that there's some of these victims in the middle that
Speaker 6: seem like.
Speaker 1: Highly likely they're all related.
Speaker 6: And then you'll have some that are probably on the
Speaker 6: end outside that you feel like, well, maybe there's some things,
Speaker 6: and then you'll probably have these others that are out
Speaker 6: around the eds that you're like, well, I mean, they
Speaker 6: had red hair, but they're probably not related.
Speaker 1: And so that was the goal.
Speaker 6: Just begin with the thirteen and let's just read about them.
Speaker 6: And this was all just information online. It's all open
Speaker 6: source information, and you know, let's just look at those
Speaker 6: and let's figure out, you know, do we even feel
Speaker 6: that there is a core group that are related. And
Speaker 6: then if you do, then we'll begin to pursue and
Speaker 6: we'll figure out how to tell if these victims that
Speaker 6: appear related were killed by one person. So what our
Speaker 6: students really focused on was are all these murders connected
Speaker 6: or are they looking at too many different murders. And
Speaker 6: so what our students found was that six of them
Speaker 6: are virtually identical.
Speaker 13: The Crtingdon County Jane, Don, DeSoto County, Green County Jane Doe,
Speaker 13: Chief the County Jane, John, Campbell County Jane, the Knox
Speaker 13: County Jane.
Speaker 6: And then they start asking me to tell them, well,
Speaker 6: how do you tell if all these women were killed
Speaker 6: by the same person? Like, how do you tell that
Speaker 6: just from my body land beside the road. So then
Speaker 6: they actually start asking me to teach them, which is the.
Speaker 1: Greatest thing in the world.
Speaker 6: Many times the teacher, you're chasing them with the education,
Speaker 6: like's sit down, listen, please, I have it. But when
Speaker 6: they start saying to you, like will you teach us
Speaker 6: how to do this, then you know, that's when you
Speaker 6: know you've created the right kind of atmosphere and you're
Speaker 6: not going to have any trouble.
Speaker 9: So we started basically with just talking about the different
Speaker 9: aspects of like a murder and how police officers in
Speaker 9: the FBI find killers with modus operandi and signature, and
Speaker 9: what it means to build a profile.
Speaker 8: It was a mixture of working in the period and
Speaker 8: then sometimes we would have to do just outside homework
Speaker 8: because every day was different.
Speaker 14: One day we would work on the profile, another day
Speaker 14: we would look at serial killers like throughout that, but
Speaker 14: every day was different. We didn't know exactly what we're
Speaker 14: going into, and that's just kind of how mister Campbell lives.
Speaker 14: He loves to just make every day a different experience.
Speaker 2: We continuously researched, like saying the serial killers and all
Speaker 2: these other things, which for O a sociology class. Again,
Speaker 2: I was not expecting whatsoever.
Speaker 6: They didn't know they were begging me to teach him,
Speaker 6: but they said things like, mister Campbell, how do we
Speaker 6: know if this killer was a man or a woman?
Speaker 6: And I was like, oh, you want me to teach
Speaker 6: you and they're like yes, please, And so you know,
Speaker 6: we would get into our sociology.
Speaker 1: How do we know if this person was intelligent or not?
Speaker 6: Well, we can get into our psychology and our sociology.
Speaker 6: Why would they only kill women and not kill women
Speaker 6: and men? Okay, we can get into our socialization. So
Speaker 6: it was really neat because I felt like, hey created
Speaker 6: this app sphere where the students realized they did not
Speaker 6: know what they needed to know, and so they kept
Speaker 6: asking me to teach them, just like another thing that
Speaker 6: would help get them a little further down the road.
Speaker 1: And instead of me.
Speaker 6: Kind of having it pre planned like I will talk
Speaker 6: about this today and this tomorrow and this the second
Speaker 6: Tuesday from now, it was more like, Okay, let's see
Speaker 6: where the kids are at, Let's see what help they need.
Speaker 6: Let's see what I'm supposed to be teaching as part
Speaker 6: of my standards, and then let's see what I can
Speaker 6: teach them that will give them that piece of information
Speaker 6: that they need. Some days we read up on the
Speaker 6: different victims. I did give a victim to each different group.
Speaker 6: We worked on things like profiling and socialization. We leorked
Speaker 6: on you know, what are you supposed to get from
Speaker 6: a home life? What do you learn from your parents?
Speaker 6: Why is that a socializing agent, the most important socializing
Speaker 6: agent in society?
Speaker 1: What happens if that goes wrong?
Speaker 6: What happens if you don't get what you're supposed to
Speaker 6: get from your parents or your family? And so each
Speaker 6: one of those things that we learned, I think gave
Speaker 6: them just like a little peace. He's the puzzle that
Speaker 6: they were trying to put together to kind of bring
Speaker 6: this this picture into focus.
Speaker 9: We're all teenagers, so we never really had the chance
Speaker 9: to work on a cold case. So I think everybody
Speaker 9: was really excited to get to do something that nobody
Speaker 9: else knows about, and we got to bring that to
Speaker 9: a lot.
Speaker 13: When you hear about serial killers on the news or
Speaker 13: on you know, media outlets, you think, oh, you know,
Speaker 13: that can never possibly happen anywhere close to me. But
Speaker 13: once it does happen close to you. It almost you know,
Speaker 13: kind of wakes you up and makes it all seem
Speaker 13: more real.
Speaker 2: We didn't have a lot of information going on about
Speaker 2: this at all. This was all reported back in the
Speaker 2: nineteen eighties and not a lot of work had been
Speaker 2: done on it since, so a lot of the the
Speaker 2: information was very few and fall between. But whenever we
Speaker 2: were researching it, we were just looking up anything that
Speaker 2: related to the case.
Speaker 6: The only thing we could use was what is known
Speaker 6: as victimology because all we had was information about the victims.
Speaker 6: We didn't have any suspects or anything like that, so
Speaker 6: we just had to look at the victims and say,
Speaker 6: what can we tell about the suspect from the victims.
Speaker 6: And one of the things that we noticed is they
Speaker 6: have reddish hair at the time of their murder, so
Speaker 6: that was one.
Speaker 1: But of course that wasn't a.
Speaker 6: Huge help because these are called the redhead murders for
Speaker 6: a reason. All of them had red hair, so you
Speaker 6: start to look a little deeper. They were all white females,
Speaker 6: they were all between the age of say twenty and forty.
Speaker 6: They were all relatively small, you know, those type of things.
Speaker 9: And is the way that a killer kills. It's called
Speaker 9: modus operandi, and it's how he operates. That's how I
Speaker 9: remember it. His signature is what he does to make
Speaker 9: the crimes his so something that he leaves behind, or
Speaker 9: a specific way that he does something why he does it.
Speaker 9: When we were looking at these women and their cases,
Speaker 9: we were trying to find similarities between them. So we
Speaker 9: talked about how they had red hair or one of
Speaker 9: them had brown hair with red highlights. We talked about
Speaker 9: how they were killed. Some of them, the medical examiner
Speaker 9: couldn't find a cause of death, so we assumed that
Speaker 9: they were strangled or suffocated. Some of them were too
Speaker 9: decomposed to even think about how they were.
Speaker 6: Killed, so they started looking where were they found, what
Speaker 6: state was their body found in, how were they murdered,
Speaker 6: those type of things. So by the time you look
Speaker 6: at all these different aspects, those were the things that
Speaker 6: kept coming back that they were very similar. For example,
Speaker 6: there's some people that are sometimes mentioned in the Redhead
Speaker 6: murders that were abducted from their home. Well, that's an
Speaker 6: outlier that you know, just one person was abducted from
Speaker 6: their home. We didn't see that with a lot of
Speaker 6: these others. One was an African American boy who had
Speaker 6: reddish hair, but you know, different race, and it was
Speaker 6: a boy, so we didn't fit and the age was off.
Speaker 6: In one case, we had two victims in the same
Speaker 6: county that were found close to each other, but one
Speaker 6: was a child and one was an adult.
Speaker 1: So we began to look and say, you know, or
Speaker 1: most of them who are killed children? Or are the adults?
Speaker 1: So the child was the outlier.
Speaker 6: So the students had to go through and look at
Speaker 6: all those aspects, and a lot of that was found online,
Speaker 6: and so they had to dig that information out and say,
Speaker 6: you know, which ones appear to be all the same
Speaker 6: or similar or the person who killed them would have
Speaker 6: to be.
Speaker 1: Similar, for example. And so that's how they came upon
Speaker 1: those six.
Speaker 9: These women are somebody's sister, somebody's daughter, maybe even somebody's mother,
Speaker 9: and their kids or their family don't know where they're at,
Speaker 9: and I would hate to think that somebody around me
Speaker 9: could end up in that situation. So I felt very
Speaker 9: connected to the victims.
Speaker 6: Once the kids were invested, and it seemed like this
Speaker 6: was definitely the direction they were going. I was going
Speaker 6: to need somebody who was a real expert at how
Speaker 6: do you prove that victims are related to the same killer?
Speaker 6: And with that I figured out that I probably needed
Speaker 6: to find a criminal profiler.
Speaker 1: I'm not a professional profiler.
Speaker 6: I'm a social studies teacher who had been teaching sociology
Speaker 6: for probe about.
Speaker 1: Seven years at the time.
Speaker 6: And the only criminal profiler's behavioral analysts that I know
Speaker 6: they worked.
Speaker 1: For the FBI.
Speaker 6: So I knew one FBI agent and he was the
Speaker 6: father of a former student, and we kind had a
Speaker 6: close relationship. I coached him in things, so I had
Speaker 6: his contact. So I called his dad and I said, Hey,
Speaker 6: would you know how I could get a hold of
Speaker 6: anybody who's a behavioral analyst in the FBI?
Speaker 1: And he said, you're not gonna believe it.
Speaker 6: But I went to high school with the guy. We're
Speaker 6: really good friends. We both went to the FBI, and
Speaker 6: he's a behavioral analyst and I can give you his number.
Speaker 6: So I called him and I told him about my
Speaker 6: crazy project and I told him what I needed and
Speaker 6: he said, hey, yeah, I'd be glad to work with
Speaker 6: your students.
Speaker 15: I was an agent assigned to the Knaxville Division. I
Speaker 15: just retired this past April after thirty two years.
Speaker 3: Scott Parker is a retired special agent from the FBI.
Speaker 3: He has thirty two years of service under his belt,
Speaker 3: and during his time on the force, he worked on
Speaker 3: numerous cases across the country.
Speaker 15: So one of my jobs with the FBI was I
Speaker 15: was a what we called a field coordinator. What we
Speaker 15: did was we coordinated not only.
Speaker 10: With FBI agents within our division.
Speaker 15: But also local officers, either local or state officers within
Speaker 15: our division who were seeking assistance for an unsolved homicide
Speaker 15: or for example, a serial rapist or missing child. Of course,
Speaker 15: they've been known over the years as the profiler. So
Speaker 15: I agreed to come speak to the class. So you know,
Speaker 15: Alex and I had several conversations. He explained to me
Speaker 15: what he was trying to do, that they were actually
Speaker 15: going to try to solve these cases.
Speaker 10: I thought, wow, this is pretty interesting. I've never never
Speaker 10: seen this happen.
Speaker 6: He was actually willing to drive about three hours one
Speaker 6: way to come up and speak to the students. And
Speaker 6: he told us that we needed four things and if
Speaker 6: we could prove that each of these victims had these
Speaker 6: four things, then it would prove that they were related
Speaker 6: back to one person.
Speaker 3: Let's stop here for another quick break murder one on one.
Speaker 6: So the first thing is we wanted to establish an
Speaker 6: mo for the killer, and then we wanted to look
Speaker 6: at geography to see if they were linked by geography.
Speaker 6: Then we want to look at time to make sure
Speaker 6: they were linked by time, and then we wanted to
Speaker 6: look at the victims themselves to see if they matched.
Speaker 6: If you can get those four things together, the profiler
Speaker 6: told us that it would be virtually impossible to have
Speaker 6: more than one person killing these people.
Speaker 15: They were just firing off questions and so what I
Speaker 15: had to do is just go over the case with me.
Speaker 15: Tell me what they were looking at, tell me the
Speaker 15: things that they had done so far. And then I
Speaker 15: just sat there and we kind of just brainstormed, and
Speaker 15: I gave them some ideas on where I thought they
Speaker 15: should go, how I thought they should proceed.
Speaker 10: And so you know, these bodies are being dumped along
Speaker 10: the interstate.
Speaker 15: So my first thought to the kids was, Hey, if
Speaker 15: I was in your shoes and I was investing in
Speaker 15: this investigating this case as a detective, my first thought
Speaker 15: would be because these these bodies are being dumped on
Speaker 15: the side of an interstate, my gut feeling and the
Speaker 15: experience tells me it's a truck driver.
Speaker 10: And if you've got victims that have not been identified,
Speaker 10: and we haven't had anybody.
Speaker 15: Support anyone as missing, chances are that these victims or
Speaker 15: what I would call a high risk victim either aither
Speaker 15: that run away from home or b and could be
Speaker 15: both run away in or be there involved in prostitution,
Speaker 15: possibly the truck stop, and it's a crime of opportunity.
Speaker 15: He may he may meet a hitchhiker, he may meet
Speaker 15: a meet a girl a truck stop or a rest stop,
Speaker 15: picture up kills her and then dumps her body on
Speaker 15: the side of the road.
Speaker 10: Because it doesn't.
Speaker 15: Seem to be like that it's really planned out to
Speaker 15: try to hide the bodies. It just seems like it's
Speaker 15: really it's just it's just a crime of opportunity. Chances
Speaker 15: are whoever's doing this probably either have a girlfriend or
Speaker 15: ex girlfriend that was redheaded, ex wife or wife it
Speaker 15: was redheaded, or mother that was red headed. Because there's
Speaker 15: just some reason why he's picking out redheaded girls. And
Speaker 15: so we just sat there for about an hour and
Speaker 15: a half or so and just brainstormed about where I
Speaker 15: thought they should look.
Speaker 3: Scott Parker had an important suggestion for the class.
Speaker 15: Getting a profile on the victim is going to help
Speaker 15: you along the way because if you determine.
Speaker 10: That, if you just say, hey, she's a victim, and you.
Speaker 15: Don't know anything about her background, and you don't know
Speaker 15: where to start looking.
Speaker 10: So if you find out she's.
Speaker 15: A a runaway or be she's been working as a
Speaker 15: processing truck stops, I think that's a clue that, hey,
Speaker 15: here's where we need to go with this.
Speaker 10: You know, then we can maybe identify.
Speaker 15: Once you identify the victim, to go interview the victim's family,
Speaker 15: find out.
Speaker 10: Where she was, what she was doing. Did you have
Speaker 10: a relationship with anybody? Was she seeing anyone? Was she
Speaker 10: dating anyone? You know? Did she have problems with anyone?
Speaker 15: All these different questions that you can ask to find
Speaker 15: out to build a profile of this victim, because that's
Speaker 15: very important. Building a profile on your victim, to me,
Speaker 15: is just as important as building a profile on the suspect.
Speaker 15: And so they started building these profiles are the victims.
Speaker 3: Scott Parker worked with the class on the profile.
Speaker 15: And then we just refined it a little bit to
Speaker 15: try to make it smaller and say, hey, you know, one,
Speaker 15: you got to also look at the victim into you know,
Speaker 15: my main thing was, frankly, believe it's.
Speaker 10: A truck driver.
Speaker 15: But I would just say, hey, use your common sense.
Speaker 15: If you keep finding all these victims on the side
Speaker 15: of the road, give me some ideas who you could
Speaker 15: think of to do. And of course they would say, oh,
Speaker 15: it could have been a could have been a plumber,
Speaker 15: it could have been a you know. Of course somebody
Speaker 15: would say oh, it could have been a truck driver,
Speaker 15: and I went, you know, ding ding ding, thank you.
Speaker 10: There you go, there's your answer, right, truck driver.
Speaker 15: But they were coming up with all these different answers,
Speaker 15: and I'm thinking, well, they've really had thought about this.
Speaker 15: I mean, they're really trying hard to come up with
Speaker 15: a profile. They're thinking, hey, it's got to be somebody's
Speaker 15: attracted to redheaded women. For example, when I said, no,
Speaker 15: maybe somebody that hates redheaded women, right, and that's why
Speaker 15: he's killing these women.
Speaker 10: It's not because he's probably attracted to him. This might
Speaker 10: be because he hates them for some reason.
Speaker 15: I A.
Speaker 10: It could be ex wife, ex girlfriend, and mother.
Speaker 15: They were come up with all kinds of things, and
Speaker 15: I kept saying, now you got to refinding a little bit,
Speaker 15: try to narrow the focus a little bit.
Speaker 8: We started to talk about how we wanted to do
Speaker 8: this profile, because first we had to understand the person
Speaker 8: that we're looking for as a serial killer.
Speaker 3: Student Will Bauers describes the process of creating the profile.
Speaker 8: We looked at how the murders were placed. So we
Speaker 8: looked at from I seventy five and I forty. That
Speaker 8: was where most of the murders were off, just offset
Speaker 8: of those two interstates, So we knew it had to
Speaker 8: be somebody that could drive in those between those areas
Speaker 8: of work between those areas, so we knew it had
Speaker 8: to be a truck driver. And then once we kind
Speaker 8: of knew that, we started to roll off ideas of
Speaker 8: we could say that this person's Caucasian because most people
Speaker 8: that live in that specific areas are a Caucasian, and
Speaker 8: the murders are around basically the northeast Tennessee side of
Speaker 8: things as you go on to I forty, So we
Speaker 8: kind of took that and we just kept on going
Speaker 8: and rolling with profile. We understood it was a mail
Speaker 8: because most of the murders were strangles, they kind of
Speaker 8: understood that most mails usually are kind of in that
Speaker 8: dominant killing word. They used their hands more. So we
Speaker 8: kept going, and we kept on adding and kept on adding,
Speaker 8: and by the time we got done it was about
Speaker 8: a twenty ish page profile.
Speaker 1: We had.
Speaker 2: In our profile discovered that we thought that the serial
Speaker 2: killer could have been a trucker because of the great
Speaker 2: distances between where the victims' bodies were found, even though
Speaker 2: they shared the similarities of a similar killer.
Speaker 3: Student Lane Leonard remembers a pivotal moment in the classes investigation.
Speaker 2: One of my classmates, Will Bauers. He discovered that there
Speaker 2: was like a trucking regulation that had been like passed
Speaker 2: in the nineteen eighties right before the killings had started
Speaker 2: that like deregulated some of like the privacy laws of truckers.
Speaker 2: It was a law that would have deregulated trucking to
Speaker 2: a trucker would have the privacy they need to potentially carry.
Speaker 1: Out these crimes.
Speaker 2: And that was a huge fund because that gave our
Speaker 2: theory of that the serial killer was a trucker more high,
Speaker 2: you know, more ground to stand on because of the
Speaker 2: fact that they weren't monitored as heavily as they were
Speaker 2: in the decade prior. He just found that on a whim,
Speaker 2: like he was researching, and we were all just second
Speaker 2: class on our own, like doing our own research. And
Speaker 2: then he just raised his hand and was like, I
Speaker 2: found this. And mister Campbell walked over and I just
Speaker 2: saw his eyes get wide and he was like, that's amazing,
Speaker 2: that's perfect.
Speaker 3: The Motor Carrier Act of nineteen eighty de regulated trucking.
Speaker 3: The Act substantially reduced government control of the industry, making
Speaker 3: it easier for new carriers to enter the industry, eliminating
Speaker 3: certain restrictions placed on regulated carriers and encouraging greater price
Speaker 3: competition among carriers. For our purposes, though, it's significant because
Speaker 3: it gave truckers more autonomy over what information they reported,
Speaker 3: meaning their roots and schedules were less monitored. Scott Barker
Speaker 3: left the class feeling impressed.
Speaker 15: And so when I went into class, I mean they
Speaker 15: were just on pins and needles. I mean they had
Speaker 15: lists of questions I ask. Each student had things written out.
Speaker 15: You know, I probably could have stayed two days and
Speaker 15: still be talking because they just kept asking questions over
Speaker 15: and over and over again. So I thought, man, they're
Speaker 15: really into it. I've never seen anything like that happened before.
Speaker 15: I'd never seen a class do this before. And I
Speaker 15: talked to you know, over my career, I spoke to
Speaker 15: many classes about the Bureau or even to classes about
Speaker 15: BAU because they were always interested after watching Criminal Minds.
Speaker 15: And I never had a class that was doing this
Speaker 15: type of project, and I really was.
Speaker 10: I was amazed.
Speaker 1: So what now?
Speaker 6: Once they had the profile, then I had another problem.
Speaker 6: I couldn't grade it because I'm not a profile greater.
Speaker 6: I needed somebody who knew something about criminal profiling, who
Speaker 6: creates criminal profiles. So I reached back out to the
Speaker 6: FBI Behavior analyst and I said, would you help me
Speaker 6: grade this if the.
Speaker 1: Student's created and he said, sure, I'll take a look
Speaker 1: at it.
Speaker 6: So the students worked really hard and they create a
Speaker 6: profile and it had seventeen characteristics of this killer. We
Speaker 6: broke up into groups and each group had a different part.
Speaker 6: They were working on age of the killer, raised the killer, religious,
Speaker 6: affiliation of the killer, all these different parts.
Speaker 1: So they worked on those.
Speaker 6: And when they submitted it to me and we put
Speaker 6: it into a one document, I said, you know, are
Speaker 6: you ready for me to give it to the profiler
Speaker 6: because he's going to grade it. And if he says
Speaker 6: this is terrible work, I guess we're all going to fail.
Speaker 6: And they're like, no, no, we feel good.
Speaker 7: Redhead killer profile. The sex is male, Caucasian. Day of
Speaker 7: birth no longer than nineteen sixty two, no later than
Speaker 7: nineteen thirty six. Height is five nine to sixty two,
Speaker 7: a weight of one eighty two two hundred and seventy pounds.
Speaker 7: The killer lives or works around Interstate forty Knoxville, Tennessee region.
Speaker 7: We believe that the occupation is a trucker. Personal relationships
Speaker 7: are possible, especially long term relative location of the residences
Speaker 7: around the Noxville or Nashville area. The kind of vehicle
Speaker 7: he uses is an eighteen willed semi or commercial cargo transport.
Speaker 7: His religion could be possibly Christian. The physical wounds found
Speaker 7: on the victims are defensive wounds, which could also be
Speaker 7: on the killer. His history could be an unstable home,
Speaker 7: absent father, and a domineering mother. He is most likely
Speaker 7: right handed and IQ above one hundred. His sexuality is
Speaker 7: most likely heterosexual. He has possible solicitation in his criminal history.
Speaker 7: The build of the killer could be thick or stocky
Speaker 7: and mental health. There is no history in the case
Speaker 7: for rationale. The killer only prays on females, and serial
Speaker 7: killers almost always target the opposite sex. Nearly all serial
Speaker 7: killers begin their murders in their late teens in early
Speaker 7: to middle twenties, the age in which most mental disorders
Speaker 7: often manifest themselves.
Speaker 6: So there is no profile all of this killer except
Speaker 6: for the ones the students created. It's a packet of
Speaker 6: information which shows how these six crimes are linked. So
Speaker 6: we sent it to him and he got back to
Speaker 6: me in a couple of days and he said, man,
Speaker 6: I think the work is really good.
Speaker 1: And he said.
Speaker 6: I cannot as a behavioral analyst disagree with anything that
Speaker 6: your students said they felt was true.
Speaker 1: I said, well, that's great, but like, what great am
Speaker 1: I supposed to give them? Is this an eighty? Is
Speaker 1: it a ninety?
Speaker 6: And he said, I don't know what number it is,
Speaker 6: but he said, just give him an A. They deserve
Speaker 6: an A. So hey, they all got an A on
Speaker 6: the profiling section. But now we had another.
Speaker 1: Problem because whenever he comes back and says, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: you created a profile, but you know what, I feel
Speaker 1: that it's really good. So now you have this investigative
Speaker 1: tool that nobody else has.
Speaker 6: But every one of these are cold cases, and what
Speaker 6: good does a profile do if people aren't using it
Speaker 6: to try to help solve the crime. So the students
Speaker 6: felt like a couple of things needed to happen. Number One,
Speaker 6: we needed to bring these cases back up. I mean,
Speaker 6: let's be honest. Police are many times overwhelmed with the
Speaker 6: amount of cases they have to work, and if there's
Speaker 6: no leads, then why would you waste all your time
Speaker 6: on that case when there's a newer case that has
Speaker 6: some leads and we could see some closure. So we
Speaker 6: understood the whole cold case phenomenon. We understand why the
Speaker 6: cases are cold. There's not a lot of data, information,
Speaker 6: evidence whatever for them to work. So we felt that
Speaker 6: by naming this killer, a couple of things would happen.
Speaker 6: Number One, it would separate the six which we felt
Speaker 6: were similar, from the greater number that we felt.
Speaker 1: Didn't really have anything to do with each other.
Speaker 6: And then it would also hopefully bring some attention media
Speaker 6: attention back to the case. So we had to come
Speaker 6: up with a sexy name, and the students went through this.
Speaker 6: They had some different ideas.
Speaker 1: We brainstormed.
Speaker 6: We invited the media down one day, you know, some
Speaker 6: local media, and we kind of pitched some of the
Speaker 6: different ideas. We were kind of torn between three or four.
Speaker 6: But it seemed that when the media heard the names,
Speaker 6: they were like that one around there, and of course
Speaker 6: it was the Bible Bell Strangler.
Speaker 3: More on that next time. Murder one oh one is
Speaker 3: executive produced by Stephanie Leidecker, Alex Campbell, Courtney Armstrong, Andrew
Speaker 3: Arnot and me Jeff Shane. Additional producing by Connor Powell
Speaker 3: and Gabriel Castillo, Editing by Jeff Towah, Music by Vanakor Music.
Speaker 3: Murder one oh one is a production of iHeart Radio
Speaker 3: and Katie Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
Speaker 3: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 3: favorite shows.
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