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Long back outweigh. Long Black Highway. Take me all. The best imaginable alibi, is simply to place yourself in police custody at the time

the crime is committed.

If the police are with you, they know it's not you, or so the logic goes.

This is in fact the very thought process that stalled the prosecution of Jerry Johns for the

Redhead murders.

When Jerry went to trial for the attempted murder of Linda Shaq in 1985, investigators

were already closing in on him for the Redhead murders, And they were gearing up for prosecution when Espy Pilgrim was found locked inside an abandoned

refrigerator along the I40 corridor. Espy's discovery on April 1st, 1985, was incredibly problematic for investigators,

because when it happened, Jerry Johns was with them in the Knox County Jail.

He was subsequently ruled out as the Redhead murderer and the case went cold, almost overnight.

But the closer you look at Espy's case, the more you realize how unusual it was.

And that throughout all of this, everyone was focused on Jerry, that they completely overlooked his younger brother.

In fact, no one in this case appears to have paid Wayne much attention at all except I believe one unlucky

transient named Espy Pilgrim.

Maybe the weirdest thing about Espy's murder was the fact that while she had clearly been murdered,

she did not appear to have been the victim of violent crime.

She had been dead for hours when they found her from suffocation, but she wasn't strangled.

There was a remarkable lack of physical trauma on her body.

She was naked, but there were no ligature marks on her neck or feet, and her hands had not been tied.

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