High school students help solve 40-year-old cold case murder
- Sociology class challenged to dig into case from 1980s
- Detectives later tied Jerry Johns to murder of Tina Farmer
- Student: Victims' 'stories deserve to be told’
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(NewsNation) — A nearly 40-year-old murder mystery appears to have been partially solved with the help of a Tennessee high school sociology class.
In the 1980s, police started investigating the deaths of multiple redheaded women whose bodies were found scattered around Tennessee and bordering states. The cases went cold until Elizabethton High School teacher Alex Campbell’s class decided to take another look.
In 2018, the teacher challenged his sociology class with solving the cold case involving a possible serial killer. Students gathered evidence and determined “Bible Belt Strangler” Jerry Johns was the likely killer of at least six redheaded women from 1983 and 1985.
In 2019, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation tied Johns to the murder of Tina Farmer, one of the women named in the class project.
The class isn’t stopping there. Campbell’s current students are working the case, and their quest for justice is now the subject of the iHeartRadio true crime podcast series Murder 101.
“We’re just continuing to work and see what connections can be made,” Reiley Whitson, one of Campbell’s students, told NewsNation host Dan Abrams on Thursday. “There’s progress being made every single day for these women who may not have family around anymore to speak for them, so we’ve kind of taken that role as an advocate for these women because their stories deserve to be told.”
Campbell is proud of his students for continuing to bring attention to the case.
