High schoolers ID possible serial killer in 40-year-old cold case — reveal their findings on true crime podcast

To catch a killer: classroom edition!

When Tennessee sociology and history teacher Alex Campbell decided to have his students try to solve a series of cold case slayings in the spring of 2018, he never thought they’d end up identifying a suspect — and landing a true crime podcast six years later.

In fact, he told his original group of students to be “prepared” to fail because top law enforcement officials had “worked on this for years and they haven’t gotten anywhere,” Campbell told The Post Wednesday.

All the Elizabethton High School students wanted was to identify one of the women and spread the word.

“My students have never, ever disappointed me, I’ve given them some very hard things to do,” Campbell said in a phone interview. “But when they know they’re helping people, they work very hard.

“They never cease to impress me.”

Now those students are revealing their findings in a 10-episode podcast called Murder 101, sharing just how they obtained their evidence.

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In 2018, more than 20 youngsters set out to find the connection between a long trail of redheaded, white women who had been killed in the surrounding area and how they might be related.

Dubbed the Redhead Murders, the mystifying crimes involved up to 14 possible victims whose bodies were found abandoned along major highways in the South. It is believed some of these women were prostitutes.

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What Campbell’s class originally set out to do was simple on paper: try to see how many of the women could be connected to a singular killer.

And in that one-semester sociology class, they agreed six of the victims were potentially connected to the same man, who they called the “Bible Belt Strangler.”

Those women have since been identified as Lisa Nichols, Michelle Inman, Tina McKenney-Farmer, Elizabeth Lamotte and Tracy Walker. One from DeSolo County remains unidentified.

As part of the class, Campbell brought in former FBI behavioral analyst, Scott Barker, who told the students that in order to confirm their connection they had to identify four things: timeframe, geography, an modus operandi — more commonly know as an “MO” — and a signature.

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All six women were found between 1983 and 1985, Campbell said, and in nearby areas and states. Three were from Tennessee and the others from West Virginia, Kentucky and Arkansas. They also all died from close-up conflict and were dumped on highways.

One of the women was found nude and in a refrigerator, a student revealed on the podcast. Another was merely a skeleton when she was found by a driver after her body had decayed for months. A third was found over a guardrail, beaten and strangled and 10-12 weeks pregnant at the time.

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What surprised Campbell the most was the “empathy” his students built for the dead women over the course of the semester.

“You as a teacher plan out what you want your students to learn,” the educator of 23 years said. “But you can never predict what the students really learn… And they learned so much more than I ever imagined.”

The “proudest” moment came when his students started referring to the victims as their “six sisters.”

Despite the women’s real families not pushing the cops, the students decided it was their job to keep fighting for their justice.

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“For 14- to 17-year-olds to think that way, it just really impressed me about the maturity of my students,” Campbell said.

Parents were also on-board, including a father who was a former police officer, who hoped his daughter would learn how to avoid similar situations that the women went through.

But the Elizabethton High students did more than just learn about the “real world,” they had even identified Jerry Johns as a potential suspect. Johns died in prison in 2015 after being convicted of strangling a prostitute in Knox County, Kentucky, in 1985.

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The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation later announced the late trucker as a suspect, giving no credit to the students or podcast producer Shane Waters, which Campbell said he took harder than they did.

TBI is investigating to see if Johns can be tied to other Redheaded Murders.

Although he does not have students actually working on the case at the moment, as the class is only taught once a year, Campbell thinks the students’ work, both from 2018 and last semester, could lead to justice.

“I really do think we’ll get justice for these women,” the teacher, who has taught at the school for 15 years, told The Post.