Between 1983 and 1985 the bodies of at least six women were found beside interstate highways in Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, West Virginia and Mississippi, most of them left in culverts, at rest stops, in abandoned buildings and beside on-ramps. Most had reddish or auburn hair, which is what gave the case its name, and most had been strangled.
The great majority were never identified. They were, on the pattern of the evidence, women without settled addresses, hitchhiking or working truck stops along the same corridor, whose absence nobody reported. For decades several were known only by the county they were found in.
An arrest in 1985 produced a false trail. Jerry Leon Johns was convicted of the attempted murder of a woman he had strangled and left for dead in Tennessee, and was widely reported as the Redhead killer; the linkage was never made out and the killings did not fit his movements.
In 2018 a class of high school students in Elizabethton, Tennessee, working under their teacher Alex Campbell, reinvestigated the case as a project, built a database, produced a profile and pushed for renewed testing. Their work contributed to the identification of one of the victims, Elizabeth Lamotte, who had been missing from New Hampshire since 1984. The case remains unsolved.