Redhead Murders

The "Redhead murders" is a media term for a series of unsolved homicides of women and girls with reddish hair whose bodies were found abandoned along major highways in the United States between October 1978 and 1992. Cases considered potentially related have been found in Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Authorities have never determined how many perpetrators were involved or how many victims exist in total, with estimates ranging from five to fourteen. As of November 2018, four presumed victims had been identified. In 2018, the unidentified suspect was informally nicknamed the "Bible Belt Strangler" because the areas where bodies were recovered fall within the Bible Belt.

Victims whose remains have been identified include Lisa Nichols, found near West Memphis, Arkansas in 1984 and identified via fingerprints in 1985; Tina Farmer, found near Jellico, Tennessee in 1985 and identified by fingerprint in 2018; Tracy Walker, a 15-year-old from Lafayette, Indiana, whose skeletal remains were found near Jellico in 1985 and identified in 2022 through forensic genetic genealogy; Michelle Lavone Inman, found in Cheatham County, Tennessee in 1985 and identified in 2023; and Espy Pilgrim, found inside a discarded refrigerator in Knox County, Kentucky in 1985 and identified in 2018 via a DNA match with her daughter. Additional women considered possible victims — including Priscilla Ann Blevins, Karen Kaye Knippers, an unidentified Wetzel County, West Virginia Jane Doe, Lorie Pennell, Elizabeth Lamotte, an unidentified Pulaski County, Arkansas Jane Doe, Betty Lou Wisley, Stacey Lyn Chahorski, and Donna Sue Nelton — have been identified or tentatively linked over the years, though West Virginia authorities have expressed skepticism about whether the Wetzel County case is connected to the others.

One case within this group has been resolved. DNA evidence linked convicted kidnapper Jerry Leon Johns, a truck driver from Cleveland, Tennessee, to the 1984 killing of Tina Farmer. Johns had been convicted in 1987 of the kidnapping and assault of Linda Schacke, a red-haired woman he attacked in Knox County, Tennessee, two months after Farmer's death; Schacke survived and testified against him. Johns died in prison in 2015. In December 2019, a Campbell County, Tennessee grand jury determined that Johns would have been indicted for Farmer's murder had he still been alive. Separately, in 2022, the killing of Stacey Lyn Chahorski, found in Rising Fawn, Georgia in 1988, was attributed to Henry Frederick "Hoss" Wise, a trucker and stunt driver who died in a car accident in 1999.

Investigators noted in the mid-1980s that inconsistencies among the cases — including some victims found clothed and others unclothed, and varying evidence of sexual contact before death — led Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi to request FBI assistance. A separate Ohio case, the "Buckskin Girl" (later identified as Marcia King), was ruled out as a related victim in 1985. Most victims remained unidentified for years, in part because many were estranged from family or were not native to the states where their remains were found.