Police hunt for possible serial killer in 1980s 'redhead murders'
More than 30 years after the bodies of multiple young, red-haired women were discovered dumped near U.S. highways in Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas, police say the killings may be the work of an unknown serial killer.
"The cases are probably connected," said Detective Aaron Frederick of the Kentucky State Police. "There's a lot of similarities."
In the spring of this year, a high school sociology class in Elizabethton, Tenn., began researching the "redhead murders" for a class project. The students and their teacher, Alex Campbell, gathered information from multiple police agencies and solicited advice from an FBI profiler.
The killer, they said, was probably a truck driver based in Knoxville, Tenn. He lured hitchhikers or prostitutes into his truck, then killed them with his bare hands before dumping their bodies beside the road, the students' profile alleges.
The students sent their eight-page profile to each agency investigating the killings, including Frederick, who -- still waiting for the DNA results for his victim -- immediately recognized that the children's analysis could be right.
A few months after the students released their findings, investigators with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation came across a blog post about a red-haired woman missing from Indiana. The woman matched the description of a Jane Doe found more than 30 years earlier beside Interstate 75 in Tennessee. Fingerprints confirmed the woman was 21-year-old Tina Farmer.
"Since this investigation is ongoing and remains very active, we can't confirm any connection this case may have to another," Leslie Earhart, a spokeswoman for TBI, said in an email. "It's too premature in the investigation to discuss such specifics."