Redhead murders
The Redhead murders is the media epithet used to refer to a series of unsolved homicides of redheaded females in the United States between October 1978 and 1992, believed to have been committed by an unidentified male serial killer. The murders believed to be related have occurred in states including Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The murders may have continued until 1992. The victims, many remaining unidentified for years, were usually women with reddish hair, whose bodies were abandoned along major highways in the United States. Officials believe that the women were likely hitchhiking or may have engaged in prostitution.
Authorities are unsure how many people were responsible for these murders, if they were all performed by the same perpetrator, and how many victims there have been. It is believed that there may have been a total of five to fourteen victims. Of the presumed victims, four were identified by November 2018. The suspect was informally called the "Bible Belt Strangler" in 2018, because the territory where the bodies were found was part of the Bible Belt.
Victims
Lisa Nichols
On September 16, 1984, the body of a woman later identified as 28-year-old Lisa Nichols, who also used the last name of Jarvis, was found along Interstate 40 near West Memphis, Arkansas. She was wearing only a sweater. She was found to have lived in West Virginia. Authorities were not able to identify and contact her family members for some time, indicating that Nichols was estranged from them. She was not identified until June 1985, nine months after she was murdered. She was identified through fingerprints. She was identified by a couple from Florida, who had allowed her to stay with them for a period of time. Nichols may have been murdered after leaving a truck stop along the highway and may have attempted to hitchhike.Tina Farmer
On January 1, 1985, the bound body of a woman was found near Jellico, Tennessee, in Campbell County, down an embankment off the southbound side of Interstate 75. The remains were in an advanced state of decomposition, as she had been killed approximately 72 hours before. The victim, who was strangled to death, was Caucasian, and had shoulder-length curly red hair. Her age was estimated to be between 17 and 25, but possibly as old as 30. The victim was found clothed, in a tan pullover, a shirt, and jeans. Additionally, she had been wrapped in a blanket, which was later found to have seminal fluid on it. The woman had green eyes, freckles, and various scars ; she was 10 to 12 weeks pregnant when she died. She had a partial upper denture holding two false teeth. It is believed that she was between 5'1" and 5'4" in height when she died and was approximately.On September 6, 2018, the Shelby County Sheriff's Office announced that the victim had been identified by fingerprint as Tina Marie McKenney Farmer of Indiana. She was 21 at the time of her death and was last seen in Indianapolis, Indiana, accompanied by a trucker said to be headed to Kentucky. Farmer had one daughter prior to disappearing in 1984. She was reported missing by her family at the time, yet authorities in Indiana did not enter her into national databases. The state did not have a law, common to many other states, requiring law enforcement to enter unidentified victims into this database.
In 2019, DNA evidence identified convicted kidnapper Jerry Leon Johns as the man who killed Tina Farmer in December 1984. Johns, who died in prison in 2015, was previously convicted in 1987 of aggravated kidnapping, assault, and other crimes in the attack on a woman, Linda Schacke, who he had picked up in Knox County, Tennessee, two months after Farmer's disappearance and death. Schacke survived the attack, after she was bound, strangled, and dumped along Interstate 40. Her testimony assisted in putting Johns behind bars. Like Farmer, Schacke had been choked with a piece of cloth ripped from her T-shirt, bound, and left for dead inside a storm drain under Interstate 40, near Watt Road. Like Farmer, and the other potential victims of the Redhead Murders, Schacke also had red hair. On December 18, 2019, a grand jury in Campbell County, Tennessee, ruled that Johns would have been indicted for murder in Farmer's death if he were still alive.
Tracy Walker
On April 3, 1985, the skeletonized partial remains of a young girl were discovered about 200 yards off Big Wheel Gap Road, four miles southwest of Jellico, Tennessee in Campbell County near a strip mine. She was believed to have been dead between one and four years. Her age was estimated between 9 and 15. She was found by a passerby.The cause of death is undetermined, which does not rule out homicide. Thirty-two bones, including her skull, were recovered from the scene. Her skull was complete enough to permit a facial reconstruction attempt. A necklace and bracelet made of plastic buttons were found nearby, as well as a pair of size 5 boots and a few scraps of clothing. These items may or may not belong to her. Her hair and eye color are unknown. Her age range is below the median for the other victims, but the circumstances of her death may connect her to them.
Recent forensic analysis of the victim's remains indicated she was not native to the area where she was discovered. The tests showed she was likely born in Florida or central Texas and had later lived in the Midwest, Rocky Mountain states, the Southwest, or the Pacific Coast.
On August 30, 2022, she was identified as 15-year-old Tracy Sue Walker of Lafayette, Indiana. The connection was made after Othram Laboratories located a possible family member in the Lafayette area and TBI intelligence analysts located several relatives there, who confirmed they had a relative who disappeared in 1978. Tracy's mother had twice reported her as running away from their Eisenhower Court home in Lafayette. Tracy was last seen at Tippecanoe Mall with a friend sometime in 1978. DNA samples were taken and submitted to CODIS, from which the UNTCHI identified Walker's remains.
Michelle Lavone Inman
On March 31, 1985, the skeletonized body of a red-haired female was found in Pleasant View, Cheatham County, Tennessee. She was believed to have died between three and five months previously from an unknown cause. However, her case is possibly linked to the redhead murders because her remains were found at the side of Interstate 24 between mile markers 29 and 30.Unlike some of the other victims, she was wearing clothing: a shirt, sweater, pants and underwear. She was white, between five feet and tall. Her weight could not be determined. An examination of her teeth showed that the victim had some evidence of crowding and overlapping in her mouth. This woman was believed to be between the ages of 31 and 40 at the time of her death. In July 2023 she was identified by the Tennessee Bureau of Identification and Othram, Inc. as 23-year-old Michelle Lavone Inman of Nashville, Tennessee, through forensic genetic genealogy.
Espy Pilgrim
On April 1, 1985, the body of a woman was found in a large white Admiral refrigerator in Gray, Knox County, Kentucky, alongside Route 25. Her death was by suffocation. The victim had been dead for a few days and was nude except for two distinctive necklace pendants, one of a heart and the other of a gold-colored eagle, and two pairs of socks; one white, and the other white with green and yellow stripes. There were reports that the victim may have been soliciting a ride to North Carolina over CB radio. Five hundred people attended the Jane Doe victim's televised funeral. The case was a local sensation in Gray, as the town was a "quiet" and "sleepy" place where little out of the ordinary usually happened.The refrigerator had a decal of the words "Super Woman" on the front. Distinguishing features of the body included a number of moles, a yellow-stained upper incisor, and a scar and other marks on her abdomen, indicating that she had borne a child. Her eyes were light brown and her hair was red and nearly a foot long, which fit the pattern of the Redhead murders. After the autopsy, this victim was determined to be between 24 and 35, and approximately four feet nine to four feet eleven inches tall. It is also possible that she owned the pair of boots found near the refrigerator. Several missing persons have been eliminated as possible matches for the victim.
After the case was publicized in January 2013, the police received some tips, but it is unknown if they became solid leads. On October 1, 2018, the Knox County Sheriff's Office announced this woman had been positively identified as Espy Regina Pilgrim, of western North Carolina. A DNA match was made between her and her grown daughter, who said her mother disappeared when the girl was six weeks old. Pilgrim also had four older children.