Bible Belt Strangler: The 40-Year Hunt for a Killer Who Targeted Redheads
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 27 November 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
So there's this case that's been sitting in the shadows for over 40 years. Between 1978 and 1992, women with red hair started turning up dead along interstates across the South. Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi. All strangled or beaten. All dumped like they were nothing. The FBI task force called them the Redhead Murders. The media went with "Bible Belt Strangler." Most of these women stayed nameless for decades. Jane Does. Because they were hitchhikers, sex workers, women nobody was looking for. Then in 2018, forensic genealogy finally gave them their names back. Tina Farmer. Espy Pilgrim. Tracy Sue Walker. Michelle Inman. DNA pointed to a truck driver named Jerry Leon Johns for at least one of the murders. Investigators still don't know if he killed them all, or if there were multiple killers working the same routes, hunting the same type of woman. Before the cops even announced Johns' name, a group of Tennessee high school students profiled the killer in a sociology project and got it right. This is about women the system failed twice. Once when they were alive, and again when they died. And it's about how science finally forced us to remember them.
#RedheadMurders #BibleBeltStrangler #TinaFarmer #JerryLeonJohns #TrueCrime #ColdCase #ForensicGenealogy
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to 10-minute murder. |
| 0:07.0 | There's a stretch of Interstate 75 in Tennessee, where in January, |
| 0:12.0 | 1985, they found a young woman's body down an embankment, bound, strangled, pregnant, red hair. |
| 0:20.0 | She'd stayed nameless for 33 years. |
| 0:23.6 | They called her the Campbell County Jane Doe. |
| 0:26.3 | Her name was Tina Farmer, and she was 21 years old. |
| 0:30.2 | And the man who killed her, he might have killed a dozen more women just like her. |
| 0:35.5 | Or maybe he didn't. |
| 1:10.6 | That's the problem. Between October 1978 and 192, someone was killing women with red hair and leaving them along highways across the American South. That's 14 years. |
| 1:12.9 | Maybe five victims, maybe 14. The FBI opened a task force. Local cops coordinated across |
| 1:19.7 | state lines, which back then was basically unheard of. For over 40 years, most of these women |
| 1:25.4 | had no names. They were Jane Doe's, numbers in a file. |
| 1:30.1 | When no one knows who you are, nobody's looking for your killer either. |
| 1:34.9 | The first victim showed up in 1978, then another in 1983. |
| 1:40.0 | By 1984 and 85, bodies were appearing every few months. |
| 1:47.2 | Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, |
| 1:55.2 | Pennsylvania, West Virginia, all found within a few dozen yards of major interstates. I-75, I-40, |
| 2:03.2 | I-24, women in their teens, 20s, 30s, all with reddish hair, mostly strangled, some beaten. |
| 2:06.3 | A few left partially clothed or naked. |
| 2:10.4 | One was stuffed inside a refrigerator and left on the side of the road. |
| 2:15.7 | The pattern was obvious, a mobile killer, probably a trucker, they assumed, |
| 2:18.4 | someone who spent his days on these long southern routes, |
... |
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