For three years now I’ve been nailing these little red crosses into the ground. I know it doesn’t mean very much, but what the hell else am I supposed to do? Forget? Walk away with the same indifference I’ve resented in others? I know they don’t fix anything; I know they don’t make anything right. Maybe most people don’t even know what they are. In fact, I’m sure they don’t.
The best imaginable alibi, outside of lunch with the Dalai Lama, 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.
By the time someone becomes a lot lizard, they have, by and large, already suffered enough. Truck stop sex work is a late stop on a tour of misery that almost always begins at home. And if it doesn’t begin at home, it begins just outside of it, with bad boyfriends, bad uncles and other predators with their foot already in the door. Interview any one lizard, or twenty, and you’ll hear a similar story - their home life or love life was, to put it mildly, problematic.
Rather than adoring and desiring his mother according to the Freudian complex, Jerry Johns appears to have hated her subtly and relentlessly under the guise of run of the mill spree-killing. Hearing all this, you might be able to guess what Johns’ mother did for a living, and what color her hair was. She was a redheaded prostitute.
In pitch darkness, shortly after 2AM, Jane Doe #7 stumbled into the median of I-40, near Junction 58, in Kingston, Tennessee. The strangling had ruptured the blood vessels in her eyes and rendered her virtually blind, though only temporarily. Her hearing was also damaged by the astronomical physical stress of her murder.
When you were in school you probably had class projects. You made terrariums and did that thing with a papier-mâché volcano filled with Mentos and Coca-Cola. If you were lucky you got to dissect a pinecone or two, or maybe even a worm if you lived in the right district.
After Shane started researching the case of the Barbourville Jane Doe, and sharing this story on Foul Play, smaller newspapers around the Bible belt began reviving the story. Crime bloggers began writing about it online. Encouraged by this surge of interest, I called up a dear friend of mine who is a fellow investigator, Gemma Hoskins, and discussed some of the ways in which we might draw yet more attention to the case.
This new series details the investigation of the Redhead Murders, including details of how I got involved all the way to identifying the serial killer and 3 of his Jane Doe victims.
This new series details the investigation of the Redhead Murders, including details of how I got involved all the way to identifying the serial killer and 3 of his Jane Doe victims.
