On New Year's Day 1985 a body was found down an embankment off the southbound side of Interstate 75 near Jellico, Tennessee, in Campbell County, a few miles below the Kentucky line. The woman had been dead about three days. She had been strangled and bound and wrapped in a blanket. She had shoulder-length curly red hair, green eyes and freckles, a burn scar on one arm and a partial upper denture holding two false teeth, and she was ten to twelve weeks pregnant. For almost thirty-four years she had no name.
She was one of a cluster of women and girls, most with red or auburn hair, whose bodies turned up beside interstates and highways in Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia between 1983 and 1985. Some were left in culverts or storm drains, one inside a discarded refrigerator. Investigators believed most had been hitchhiking or drifting between truck stops, and few had been reported missing anywhere near where they were found. A multistate task force formed in 1985 and made no arrest. How many belong to the series has never been settled: the counts run from five to fourteen, and the widest reckonings stretch the span from 1978 to 1992.
The first of the core cases to be named was Lisa Nichols, twenty-eight, who also used the surname Jarvis. She was found on September 16, 1984, beside Interstate 40 near West Memphis, Arkansas, wearing only a sweater. She had lived in West Virginia and was estranged from her family, and her fingerprints identified her only in June 1985, after a Florida couple who had once let her stay with them came forward. Investigators thought she had left a truck stop on the interstate and tried to hitch a ride.
Three weeks after the Jellico discovery, on January 24, 1985, a truck driver saw a young woman's body twenty feet off U.S. Highway 78 near the Coldwater River bridge at Olive Branch, Mississippi. She had been strangled with a ligature, and her shoes, underwear and jacket were gone. For decades she was the DeSoto County Jane Doe; she has since been named as Lorie Pennell, twenty-two. On March 31 the skeletal remains of a red-haired woman were found beside Interstate 24 at Pleasant View, in Cheatham County, Tennessee, three to five months after her death. Genetic genealogy identified her in July 2023 as Michelle Lavone Inman, twenty-three, of Nashville.
The next day, April 1, a woman was found nude inside a white Admiral refrigerator beside Route 25 at Gray, in Knox County, Kentucky. She had been suffocated a few days before. She wore two pendants, a heart and a gold-colored eagle, and she had reportedly been asking over CB radio for a ride to North Carolina. Five hundred people came to the televised funeral the town gave her. In October 2018 a DNA match with her grown daughter, who had been six weeks old when her mother vanished, named her as Espy Regina Pilgrim of western North Carolina, a mother of five.
On April 3, 1985, a passerby found thirty-two bones, the skull among them, two hundred yards off Big Wheel Gap Road, four miles southwest of Jellico, near a strip mine. The girl had been dead one to four years, and no cause of death could be fixed. Plastic-button jewelry and a pair of size 5 boots lay nearby. In August 2022, after genealogists at Othram and analysts at the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation traced relatives in Indiana, she was identified as Tracy Sue Walker, fifteen, of Lafayette. She had last been seen at the Tippecanoe Mall with a friend in 1978, and her mother had twice reported her as a runaway.
Eleven days later, on April 14, a young woman's decomposed body was found at Greeneville, in Greene County, Tennessee. She had been beaten to death, and possibly stabbed, three to six weeks earlier, and had miscarried shortly before she died. Her hair was light brown with red highlights, enough to put her on the list. She was identified in November 2018 as Elizabeth Lamotte, seventeen, who had left a group home in Manchester, New Hampshire, on furlough on April 6, 1984, and never gone back. The DNA that named her had been taken from her family in 2017 for another purpose, a comparison in the Bear Brook murders.
Other deaths have been drawn toward the series and pushed back out. West Virginia investigators doubt that it includes the woman found naked beside Route 250 near Littleton, in Wetzel County, on February 13, 1983; she was older than the others, carefully groomed and dead of an undetermined cause, and a heavyset middle-aged man was seen near the spot. A woman of thirty to forty with blondish-red hair, found at Wrightsville, Arkansas, on April 20, 1985, is still unidentified. Karen Kaye Knippers, strangled with pantyhose in Missouri in 1981, had black hair and is linked only by method. Later cases, Betty Lou Wisley in Roane County, Tennessee, in 1987 and Stacey Lyn Chahorski in Georgia in 1988, carry the count toward the higher figures.
The one name attached to any of it is Jerry Leon Johns. About two months after the Jellico woman died, he picked up Linda Schacke in Knox County, Tennessee, choked her with a strip torn from her own T-shirt, bound her and left her for dead in a storm drain under Interstate 40 near Watt Road. She had red hair. She lived, and her testimony convicted him in 1987 of aggravated kidnapping, assault and other crimes. He died in prison in 2015.
In 2018 a sociology class at Elizabethton High School in East Tennessee, about twenty students under their teacher Alex Campbell, took up the cold cases as a semester project. They built files on the victims, drew up a profile of a single highway killer they called the Bible Belt Strangler, and held a press conference to ask for tips. On September 6, 2018, the Shelby County Sheriff's Office announced that fingerprints had identified the Jellico woman as Tina Marie McKenney Farmer, twenty-one, of Indiana, last seen in Indianapolis with a trucker said to be bound for Kentucky. She left a young daughter. Her family had reported her missing in 1984, but Indiana, which had no law requiring it, never entered her in the national databases. Later reporting credited the class with helping bring the identification about.
In 2019 DNA from semen on the blanket around Farmer's body matched Johns, and on December 18, 2019, a Campbell County grand jury found that he would have been indicted for her murder had he lived. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has said it agrees with the students that he may account for more than one of the deaths, but no other case has been closed against him, and the series remains unsolved. Campbell's classes kept working it. The 2018 group became the subject of the podcast Murder 101, and his 2024 to 2025 class, which sat down with Linda Schacke, is followed in a Prime Video docuseries of the same name released on July 13, 2026.