Strawberry Fields Forever: The Case of the Redhead Murders
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March 5th, 1985. Knoxville, Tennessee. A pickup truck bearing Texas plates pulls into the parking lot of Catch One, a popular strip club on the outskirts of Knoxville. Two brothers step out and head inside. Wayne and Jerry Johns are truck drivers by day and prowlers by night. They know the Catch One girls don't just dance. For the right price, they'll do anything their clients want. They enter the bar.

It's loud and dark. Drinks fly from the well. Naked girls dance on stage. One catches Jerry's eye. A 21-year-old redhead named Linda Shack. He flashes his Catch One membership card and takes a front row seat. Linda was a top-notch dancer, often pulling in $1,000 per night. It's unclear how much was thrown onto the stage and how much was earned elsewhere. Jerry leans in, infatuated with Linda.

He beckons her close and pulls out two $100 bills. He smirks and rips them down the middle. He puts two halves in his pocket. He gives the other two to Linda and says, "The rest comes after." The night rolls on. Wayne finds a girl for himself, and the brothers drive their dates to a nearby Holiday Inn. They rent adjoining rooms and have sex with their respective women.

To spice things up, Jerry brandishes a firearm and tells Linda he's an undercover Texas Ranger. She doesn't believe him, but fighting it doesn't seem wise. After sex, Linda takes a long hot bath and puts her clothes back on. Jerry walks her back to her Datsun 280Z, where she expects the other half of her money. Jerry has other ideas. He forces Linda into the passenger seat and drives the Datsun himself.

They return to the Catch-1, where Jerry's truck is still parked. In the parking lot, Jerry starts getting aggressive with Linda. He rips her shirt and binds her hands and feet. She wants to fight back, but the gun on his waist keeps her submissive. Jerry gags her and threatens to kill her if she screams. Then, he starts driving again, west on I-40, until Knoxville vanishes in the rearview mirror.

He pulls over, forces Linda out of the car, and walks her toward the trees. She asks if Jerry is going to kill her. He nods "yes" and claims that Linda has become a nuisance. Jerry likes redheads. He has always liked redheads. So when Jerry learned that Linda dyed her hair, he flew into a fit of rage. He taunts her with the pistol but decides not to shoot. Instead, he wants to make this personal.

He tears off a strip of her shirt and wraps it tightly around Linda's neck. Like a garrote, he pulls until Linda passes out. She slumps to the ground and Jerry leaves her for dead. He drives away in her Datsun, thinking he'd just gotten away with murder. And it wasn't the first time. From the late 70s to the early 90s, somebody prowling the Bible Belt kidnapped, raped, and murdered 14 women.

Police believe five of the murders are related and were likely committed by one man. They were all downtrodden young women with no immediate family in the area. They worked in strip clubs or as prostitutes, and all of them had red hair. For that reason, police between Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia dubbed them the Redhead Murders.

As of 2024, only one of the core five has been linked to Jerry Lewis Johns. As for the other nine, their killer may still be out there, or he may already be dead. Part 1: The Strawberries On September 16th, 1984, police in West Memphis, Arkansas discovered a woman's discarded body along I-40. She was wearing a sweater and nothing else, and it appeared as though she'd been dead for days.

She had no license or identifying paperwork. Nine months later, fingerprint analysis identified her as 28-year-old Lisa Nichols of West Virginia. A Florida couple came forward after hearing the news and told the police that Lisa had been staying with them shortly before her death. She was estranged from her family, and it appeared as though she was working as a prostitute. According to reports, Lisa was last seen at a highway truck stop in Arkansas,

Police believe she was attempting to hitchhike. She simply got into the wrong truck. On New Year's Day 1985, another body turned up outside Jellicoe, Tennessee. This time, it had been cast down an embankment on the side of I-75 South. Despite advanced stages of decay, police determined that Jane Doe was strangled to death three days earlier. She was a white woman with curly red hair who was between 17 and 25 years old.

She was wearing a tan pullover, a t-shirt, and blue jeans. To the police, this suggested that no sexual assault had taken place. In most, if not all, cases, an attacker won't redress their victim after raping and killing them. Sex, however, did take place at some point. Jane Doe was wrapped in a blanket that tested positive for semen. However, it being 1985, police couldn't run sophisticated DNA tests.

The only identifying markers were the freckles on her body and a burn mark on one arm. She was covered in other scars, though it's unclear if those injuries were suffered during the attack that killed her. Sadly, Jane Doe was 10 to 12 weeks pregnant when she died. She'd remain a Jane Doe until 2018, when police identified her as 21-year-old Tina Marie Farmer of Indiana. The ID helped solve other aspects of her case.

but we'll touch on those later in the story. Back in 1985, police between Arkansas and Tennessee had two redhead murders on their hands, and more bodies were about to pile up. The third body in the redhead saga was found on March 31st, 1985, off the side of I-24 in Cheatham County, Tennessee. Based on decomposition, police in Cheatham County believe she died between three and five months before they found her.

Among the only identifying factors were the strands of strawberry blonde hair still attached to her skull. Like Tina Farmer, this Jane Doe was fully clothed when she died. Police believed she was between 31 and 40 years old, but genetic testing four decades later proved them wrong. The Cheatham County Jane Doe was 23-year-old Michelle Inman of Nashville.

Genealogical DNA testing led the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to a brother living in Virginia. He confirmed that Michelle was his sister and that he hadn't heard from her in 40 years. The fourth of the core five redheads was found inside a refrigerator 220 miles east of Cheatham County, in the sleepy town of Gray, Tennessee. It was April 1st, 1985.

somebody likely reported the refrigerator as an obstruction on the side of Route 25. When police arrived and opened it, a woman's body fell out. She was naked, aside from two necklaces and a pair of mismatched socks. She had several moles on her body and a scar on her belly, suggesting a past C-section. She had foot-long red hair and light brown eyes, thus fitting the redhead murder pattern.

An autopsy claimed she was between 24 and 35 years old. Police believe she was using a citizen-band radio to solicit a ride to North Carolina. Whoever picked her up likely killed her. Gray, Kentucky is a tiny place where nothing of note ever happens. The refrigerated Jane Doe was the talk of the town, and 500 people attended her funeral.

In 2018, the Knox County Sheriff's Office identified her as Espy Pilgrim of North Carolina. They linked her DNA with that of Espy's adult daughter. According to the woman, she was only six weeks old when her mother went missing. The infant was the youngest of Espy's five children. She was found alone as a baby with no sign of her mother.

Two days later, the fifth and final body popped up in Campbell County, Tennessee. A local man discovered skeletal remains off Big Wheel Gap Road. They were near a garbage disposal site by an old abandoned mine. It was as if somebody had taken out the trash and missed. Forensics determined that Big Wheel Jane Doe had been dead for between one and four years. She was between nine and 15 years old when somebody killed her and dumped the body.

Investigators found her intact skull, along with 32 other bones. They had enough to create a facial reconstruction of the girl's appearance. Unfortunately, nobody recognized her. It wasn't until August 2022 that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, or the TBI, identified her as 15-year-old Tracy Sue Walker. She was from Lafayette, Indiana.

and her mother had reported her as a runaway twice back in 1978. According to the TBI, Tracy was last seen with a friend at the Tippecanoe Mall in Lafayette that same year. It's unclear how she wound up in Tennessee, how she died, or who she may have been with.

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Police between Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky could agree on one thing: the five Jane Does found off major Bible Belt highways were connected. Nine other bodies popped up between Mississippi, West Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, and Georgia. Some, like 17-year-old Elizabeth Lamott, fit the profile. Others were more of a reach.

For example, 19-year-old Stacy Lynn Chohorsky, who was found strangled to death in Rising Fawn, Georgia, was ultimately linked to Henry Haas Wise, a truck driver for the Western Carolina Trucking Company. Nobody cried when he burned to death in a car accident at Myrtle Beach Speedway in 1999. It's unclear if police and the other 13 redhead cases consider Haas Wise a suspect.

After hitting multiple dead ends, investigators brought the FBI in to help identify the Jane Does and narrow down the suspect list. They caught their first major break in the case when Linda Shack crawled out of a ditch and claimed somebody had tried to kill her. Jerry Johns thought Linda was dead when he drove away in her Datsun. She'd only lost consciousness. She awoke in a trench off the side of the road.

Scared and confused, she climbed up to the interstate and flagged the first trucker she saw. She was understandably fearful of getting in someone else's car, but what choice did she have? Thankfully, her benefactor was a kind man who was happy to help. Linda told the police everything: that Jerry had paid her for sex, attacked her, left her for dead, and had stolen her car. She even recalled the room number at the Holiday Inn.

When police arrived, they spotted the brother's truck in the parking lot. That's when Jerry appeared in the stolen Datsun. He spotted the cops and hit the gas, leading to a high-speed chase up I-40. Jerry ultimately crashed, and police took him into custody. They found his gun inside the sports car alongside two halves of $200 bills.

On his person, police found the Holiday Inn room key, about $750 in cash, and his membership card to catch one. "He was very cocky and wouldn't admit to anything," one detective said. Whenever police asked about a motive, Jerry kept his mouth shut. Jerry went to trial in 1987.

By then, police had already ruled out his involvement in the Redhead murders. Friends and family members went to bat for Jerry, claiming he was a good man who cared about his children. They said Jerry and his wife had fallen on hard financial times and were mounting the loss of their young son, if that's true. Why did Jerry have an active membership at a Knoxville strip club? Why was he ripping up $100 bills and using them to court dancers?

The jury didn't buy his sob story. They found him guilty of attempted murder, aggravated kidnapping, and armed robbery. He was sentenced to 73 years in prison, meaning he'd most likely die there. And he did. In 2015, Jerry Leon Johns passed away at 67 years old. A year later, TBI Special Agent Brandon Elkins retrieved the blanket found wrapped around Tina Farmer's body.

He submitted it for testing, and DNA from the intact semen sample came back as a match for Jerry John's. In 2019, a grand jury in Campbell County, Tennessee, ruled that, if Jerry were still alive, he would have been indicted for Tina Farmer's murder based on the DNA evidence. One murder was solved, 13 were still ice cold. There was good reason to believe Jerry John had something to do with at least four of them, but nothing could prove it.

A group of Tennessee high school students wanted to change that. Part 3: Murder 101 Alex Campbell is a sociology teacher at Elizabethton High School in Carter County, Tennessee. In 2018, he had an interesting and radical idea for a spring semester project. He'd see if his students could solve a 40-year-old murder.

Despite living in Tennessee all his life, Campbell had never heard of the Redhead murders. The case fascinated him as he learned more. He knew his sociology students would love the idea, assuming their parents were okay with it. Thankfully, they were. Their first task was determining if the Redhead murders were the work of one man or that of many one-off killers. To them, and the police, there were distinguishable patterns in six of the 14 murders.

They believed that whoever killed Tina Farmer likely killed Lisa Nichols, Michelle Inman, Elizabeth Lamott, Tracy Walker, and an unidentified Jane Doe in DeSoto County, Mississippi. The DeSoto Jane Doe was later identified as 22-year-old Lori Pinnell, who was found murdered in Olive Branch, Mississippi, on January 24th, 1985.

Her body was spotted roughly 20 feet from the highway by a passing trucker early that morning. Her shoes, underwear, and jacket were missing, and it appeared as though she'd been strangled with a ligature and sexually assaulted. The students used everything they learned in class to build the only known profile of the redhead murderer. This killer was a heterosexual white male between 5 feet 9 inches and 6 feet 2 inches.

He weighed between 180 and 270 pounds, big enough to overpower his victims. He likely came from an unstable home, his mother was domineering, and his father was largely absent. He's right-handed and has an IQ above 100. The murders that fit the pattern and profile stopped after 1985, when Jerry was arrested for assaulting Lisa Schack. Therefore, any murders after 1985 were committed by somebody else.

If they're correct, Jerry Leon Johns is their suspect. And the redhead killer is dead and buried. If they're wrong, he may still be out there. Mr. Campbell hopes that his students' work and the follow-up podcast, Murder 101, will help solve the decades-old case. As of 2024, law enforcement is still trying to connect Jerry to the other redhead murders.

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