A new three-part docuseries, "Murder 101," now streaming on Prime Video, examines the "Redhead Murders," a series of unsolved killings that once gained regional attention before fading from public memory.
The series follows Alex Campbell, a sociology teacher at Elizabethton High School in Elizabethton, Tennessee. Beginning in 2018, Campbell involved his students in an effort to solve the cold case. What started as a classroom project evolved into a real-world investigation, with students uncovering new leads and drawing attention to the victims.
The "Redhead Murders" gained their name because many of the victims were young women with red or reddish hair, according to Prime Video. The killings began in the late 1970s, and many victims were found near highways in Tennessee and surrounding states. A task force was established in 1985 to investigate the cases, but the investigation eventually went cold.
In 2024, it was reported that Campbell's students identified a potential pattern in six of the 12 to 14 killings linked to the series. The students also played a role in identifying Tina McKenney-Farmer, who was found dead on January 1, 1985. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) confirmed her identity in 2018. In 2019, the TBI implicated Jerry Leon Johns in McKenney-Farmer's death; Johns had died in prison in 2015 while serving time for a different violent assault.
While McKenney-Farmer is the only victim positively linked to Johns, Campbell's students believe there is evidence connecting him to the deaths of other victims, including Lisa Nichols, Michelle Inman, Elizabeth Lamotte, and Tracy Walker, as well as an unidentified victim known as DeSoto County Jane Doe. However, a spokesperson for the TBI stated that there is currently no evidence linking Jerry Johns to the death of Elizabeth Lamotte, who was identified in 2018.