0:00 [SPEAKER_04]: Language and content in this episode may not be appropriate for all listeners. 0:05 [SPEAKER_04]: Listen our discretion is strongly advised. 0:08 [SPEAKER_04]: Some voices may come from voice actors, but the words are accurate to the interview described. 0:29 [SPEAKER_01]: Don't black out away Take me home 0:46 [SPEAKER_01]: What is the opposite of an edible complex? 0:49 [SPEAKER_01]: For those of you unfamiliar with the term, this is a fraudulent idea from the field of psychoanalytics in which a son develops a romantic or sexual attraction to his mother and a sense of rivalry with his father who is married to the woman who has dreams. 1:05 [SPEAKER_01]: This is not the clinical definition, but you get the general idea. 1:10 [SPEAKER_01]: The term comes from the Great King of Thieves, in Greek mythology, who, on returning to his family, after years of a strange man, accidentally kills his father, and marries his mother, which was an erotic pho-par, even in the free-willing sexual climate of ancient Greece. 1:27 [SPEAKER_01]: But what do you call it when the figurative, edipus wants to kill his mother instead? 1:34 [SPEAKER_01]: What do you call it when his sexual obsession is basically an ongoing rape fantasy? 1:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Where he's not interested in replacing his father, so much as strangling his mother and throwing her in a ditch. 1:46 [SPEAKER_01]: And what do you call it when Alathario turns his impulse into a murderous routine, suffered by strangers whose names he barely knows? 1:55 [SPEAKER_04]: Whatever the name for this is, it appears to be something like what we're dealing with here. 2:01 [SPEAKER_04]: rather than adoring and desiring his mother, according to the frutying complex. 2:06 [SPEAKER_04]: Jerry Johns appears to have hated her, subtly, and relentlessly, under the guise of the run of the mill, spree killing. 2:16 [SPEAKER_04]: Hearing all of this, you might be able to guess what chances mother did for a living and what color her hair was. 2:24 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm going to give you a moment, or what might be the least suspenseful dramatic pause you'll ever experience. 2:37 [SPEAKER_01]: She was a red-headed prostitute. 2:41 [SPEAKER_04]: Most of us have the same feeling when we hear stories like this, we empathize with the victims, we feel outrage, and we feel some degree of rubber neckers delight, of unemitted gawkers satisfaction, and we also wonder where on earth this guy came from. 3:01 [SPEAKER_04]: We wonder how a normal person becomes a serial killer, capable of this type of ruthless and different cruelty. 3:10 [SPEAKER_04]: part of the question is how one can become this kind of person and remain a normal guy in so many other ways. 3:18 [SPEAKER_04]: How can he keep grocery shopping and eating popcorn and picking his kids up at school? 3:27 [SPEAKER_01]: The other part is where that cruelty comes from. 3:30 [SPEAKER_01]: How does the normal guy go bad? 3:34 [SPEAKER_01]: If that first part is above our pay grade and anyone's pay grade really, every shrink and theologian has been answering that question since before the first sewage system underneath the civilisation, and it hasn't amounted to much, but the second question is a matter of motive, or at least of disposition, and a certain amount of clarity is at least conceivable, most of the time we never get it. 4:01 [SPEAKER_01]: But every once in a while we do. 4:02 [SPEAKER_01]: Honestly, we didn't expect it here, but maybe we'll tell you what we know and you'll have to tell us what you think. 4:12 [SPEAKER_01]: We spoke with Jerry's wife Phyllis a number of times and those conversations were enlightening. 4:20 [SPEAKER_01]: You will hear exact words for to protect her privacy 4:25 [SPEAKER_04]: John's family history, in itself, is a bit of a soap opera. 4:30 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm still not sure I entirely understand it. 4:34 [SPEAKER_04]: John's definitely didn't understand it, and that was part of the problem. 4:38 [SPEAKER_04]: His mother Lucy, the red-headed herker, and his father, had very secretive sexual histories and hidden lives. 4:47 [SPEAKER_04]: They had secret families and quasi-doliers ons. 4:51 [SPEAKER_04]: They simply wouldn't talk about, but their kids. 4:55 [SPEAKER_04]: So by the time John's was old enough to date the girls and his small hometown, the roots of his family tree stretched wider than he knew beneath the rich Kentucky soil. 5:06 [SPEAKER_04]: When he was 17, he went a wall from the marines, and started dating a local girl in Illinois who would eventually become his wife. 5:16 [SPEAKER_04]: We asked Phyllis how she and John's met in the terms of their relationship. 5:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, if you were the truth, Jerry was in the Marines and he had come to stay at the house. 5:29 [SPEAKER_01]: Felicity'd grown up as had John's, without knowing exactly who her real siblings were. 5:34 [SPEAKER_01]: Her parents too had a history of what she called, sleeping around, and undocumented sometimes unconfirmed offspring. 5:44 [SPEAKER_00]: There were, I don't know, if it five of us had that time, six of us, like I said. 5:52 [SPEAKER_00]: My dad was married before, but we didn't know all of this. 5:55 [SPEAKER_00]: They kept all of this from us, so when I met Jerry, I didn't know Jerry was supposed to have been a half-brother. 6:04 [SPEAKER_00]: We didn't know anything about the other set of six kids, seven kids. 6:09 [SPEAKER_00]: We never knew about the X or any of that. 6:12 [SPEAKER_00]: At that point, we were just kids growing up, and then when Jerry and I had hit it up, then that's when they wanted to bring it up. 6:23 [SPEAKER_01]: Now that Jerry and Felicera couple and physically intimate, Jerry's mom Lucy begins dropping hints that they might be related. 6:32 [SPEAKER_01]: Lucy suggests she's been involved with Phyllis's dad, but when they press her for detail, she locks up and won't say about any more about it. 6:41 [SPEAKER_01]: There's no way of knowing Lucy's intentions, but she's creating anxiety and confusion for the kids and withholding information they need to make sense of their relationship. 6:51 [SPEAKER_00]: And we tried to get the information. 6:54 [SPEAKER_00]: We went to my desk and he said he didn't know. 6:56 [SPEAKER_00]: And Jerry asked his mom and his mom said, when I was married to Earl, you went by Todd. 7:04 [SPEAKER_00]: I married to Bill. 7:06 [SPEAKER_00]: You go by John's. 7:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Bestie only answers she would get. 7:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Not truly who the father was, but you had to know her. 7:16 [SPEAKER_00]: She was not a bad person, but she slept around. 7:20 [SPEAKER_00]: So we really never got an answer. 7:24 [SPEAKER_00]: There was never no for a sure thing. 7:27 [SPEAKER_04]: In one sense, it was already too late. 7:31 [SPEAKER_04]: Phyllis is pregnant. 7:32 [SPEAKER_04]: She goes to her doctor for reassurance and he tells her more or less that incest is not that big of a deal. 7:39 [SPEAKER_04]: European royal families, he says, do this sort of thing all the time. 7:44 [SPEAKER_00]: And with being pregnant, I was scared. 7:47 [SPEAKER_00]: And I checked with my doctor and he said, Bill is, let me tell you something. 7:52 [SPEAKER_00]: He said, I'm going to explain something to you. 7:55 [SPEAKER_00]: He said, to really assemble this. 7:58 [SPEAKER_00]: Because you shouldn't hear God pregnant in the first place. 8:02 [SPEAKER_00]: Because of my romantic fever. 8:05 [SPEAKER_00]: But he said back in the day, he said it was supposed to be royal families. 8:10 [SPEAKER_00]: They bred nothing but royalty, sisters, brothers, whatever. 8:16 [SPEAKER_00]: So he said, dropped the incest, dropped all that. 8:19 [SPEAKER_00]: He said, it's nothing to do with it. 8:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Your child is healthy. 8:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Everything is good with you and leave it alone. 8:28 [SPEAKER_00]: He's going to be fine, because I was concerned. 8:32 [SPEAKER_01]: As frustrating as Lucy's cat and mouse game would have been at the time, it may not have mattered as much as we think. 8:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Felicit John's may have been troubled to learn they were incestuous, but they were in love. 8:45 [SPEAKER_00]: How did we meet? 8:48 [SPEAKER_00]: He came in and was supposed to be Adley, and my cousin was living with us at that time too. 8:54 [SPEAKER_00]: And they were really good friends from there, so he came to see Edward, but that's how we originally met. 9:02 [SPEAKER_00]: At my parents' house, we lived in a little trailer out there, a common avenue. 9:09 [SPEAKER_01]: In the years that followed, Phyllis and Jerry's romance would have all the ingredients of a forever love story. 9:16 [SPEAKER_01]: Virtiff glances at the Coleman Avenue trailer for bidden romance and sneaky into halfway houses in the middle of the night to hook up. 9:24 [SPEAKER_01]: With your A-well part-time junkie, just at a jail boyfriend, you know, right out Shakespeare. 9:32 [SPEAKER_00]: But there's where it all started. 9:34 [SPEAKER_00]: I was sneak off and go to the halfway houses, but he was in there, and all their stuff the young girls do, because he was in and out of jail and prison. 9:46 [SPEAKER_00]: He was in and out for years. 9:48 [SPEAKER_00]: He's always been. 9:54 [SPEAKER_04]: As her doctor promised, Phyllis gave birth to a healthy boy in 1978, the named him Jason. 10:02 [SPEAKER_04]: but the doctor had given fill as a false sense of assurance. 10:05 [SPEAKER_04]: When he made the connection with the European, royal and breeding. 10:10 [SPEAKER_04]: He forgot to mention the genetic mutations that have haunted these oils for centuries, like hemophilia, in the Habsburg jaw. 10:20 [SPEAKER_04]: Phyllis's second son Lee, born a few years later, was not as lucky, and spite of the doctor's repeated promise that the child, behalty, was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease, which 10:40 [SPEAKER_04]: So this is the first reason for John's to hate his mother, and you have to admit it's a doozy. 10:46 [SPEAKER_04]: She refused to tell him when he was dating his sister, and because of that, his baby died. 10:53 [SPEAKER_04]: Lucy, withheld the identity of his father's other daughter, and it ended up being his wife. 11:01 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, it doesn't get any crazier than that. 11:05 [SPEAKER_04]: Or does it? 11:06 [SPEAKER_04]: While Jerry was on the road, driving semis for a living, Lucy was back home, secretly pimping out his young girlfriend, to patrons at the local bar, and for a little more context, Jerry was a really possessive guy. 11:22 [SPEAKER_04]: There were times he didn't want Phyllis to do so much as to look at another man, literally. 11:27 [SPEAKER_04]: He would take all her clothes and lock her in her room. 11:35 [SPEAKER_00]: When we first got together, he was super jealous. 11:39 [SPEAKER_00]: In all I ever heard was, well, if I can't have her, no other man will. 11:45 [SPEAKER_00]: He would leave out of certain times and he'd take all my clothes and stuff out of the room and lock me in a room. 11:53 [SPEAKER_00]: He'd never laid a hand on Mary and she ain't there. 11:57 [SPEAKER_00]: He just wasn't going to let me leave. 12:00 [SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't going to be able to leave. 12:03 [SPEAKER_00]: We were living together and there, like I said, you gotta remember, too. 12:09 [SPEAKER_00]: I was very young, so I was young, now you've been in love. 12:13 [SPEAKER_00]: We just stood with things. 12:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Jerry must have found out about Lucy's pimping, and he must have hated it. 12:20 [SPEAKER_01]: Reason number two for hating her. 12:23 [SPEAKER_01]: And in case all of this isn't crazy enough, you should know the most startening if not most relevant part of this story. 12:32 [SPEAKER_01]: When Jerry met Phyllis and they began sleeping together, she was only 12 years old. 12:39 [SPEAKER_01]: When we asked her age at the time, they began sleeping together, she said, Let's burn this way, I don't know. 12:47 [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if I was 12, 13, something like that. 12:53 [SPEAKER_00]: Sorry, there's been a while, because I can't remember the days out of the ages. 12:57 [SPEAKER_00]: We were together nine years and had two boys before we got married. 13:05 [SPEAKER_04]: Ah, so basically, it was only after Jerry's mom, Lucy, began pipping out his 12-year-old sister, and also hid her identity from him, until after they were pregnant. 13:18 [SPEAKER_04]: which deception caused his baby to die, that he became a homicidal interstate straingler of people who looked like Lucy. 13:29 [SPEAKER_04]: Fancy that. 13:30 [SPEAKER_04]: Like I said, I'm no clinical soft scientist, but there's something about this that adds up. 13:37 [SPEAKER_04]: I'll leave you to make what deductions you have. 13:41 [SPEAKER_04]: The point as far as we're concerned is that we are connecting a convicted attempted highway straingler with a strangely specific motive for a mission oriented serial killer, which the Bible Belt straingler was profiled to be. 13:56 [SPEAKER_04]: Remember this? 14:01 [SPEAKER_03]: And this is the one that we're really stuck on. 14:05 [SPEAKER_03]: On the seven motivations of serial killers, we felt like this was a mission oriented killer. 14:11 [SPEAKER_03]: So, if he is mission oriented, and he feels like he's carrying out some type of mission against, you know, prostitutes. 14:18 [SPEAKER_02]: With it being a mission, do you feel like it was specifically targeting redheaded prostitutes? 14:25 [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, now the mission may not to be get rid of. 14:28 [SPEAKER_03]: Redhead or prostitutes. 14:30 [SPEAKER_03]: It could just be prostitutes in general, maybe the red head is some other factor that for whatever reason he likes. 14:37 [SPEAKER_03]: So that Mayor may not be part of the mission, but it might be part of whatever drives him romantically or whatever. 14:45 [SPEAKER_03]: Something from his past. 14:47 [SPEAKER_03]: People go on and on about this stuff about, oh, you know, I bet his mom with a red head and she treated him like dirt. 14:54 [SPEAKER_03]: He will never know that. 14:58 [SPEAKER_01]: Phyllis also said that Jerry was smart, and he had a way of staying one step ahead of the police. 15:04 [SPEAKER_00]: He was smart. 15:05 [SPEAKER_00]: I'll tell you how smart he was. 15:08 [SPEAKER_00]: She could open up a business, a fake business, and go cash checks, all freaking day. 15:14 [SPEAKER_00]: And bring back tons of money. 15:16 [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, we were getting chased when I, and I'm like, why running from the police? 15:22 [SPEAKER_00]: And he said, ask me no questions. 15:24 [SPEAKER_00]: I'll tell you no lies. 15:26 [SPEAKER_00]: That was his most famous saying. 15:30 [SPEAKER_00]: So pulls them to the police station in parks. 15:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Best place died because they don't look for you at the police station. 15:38 [SPEAKER_00]: Why are we at the police station if you're running from them? 15:41 [SPEAKER_00]: He said, because they won't look for me here. 15:46 [SPEAKER_04]: At times he even conspired with crooked cops. 15:50 [SPEAKER_00]: He was now stupid. 15:51 [SPEAKER_00]: He was very highly intelligent. 15:54 [SPEAKER_00]: He seriously was. 15:56 [SPEAKER_00]: If he needed to make money, he had an ex-copy worked with. 16:01 [SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't tell you that one's name many years ago. 16:07 [SPEAKER_00]: He did the same thing. 16:09 [SPEAKER_00]: He brought him a booklet of old checks. 16:13 [SPEAKER_00]: He went out and cashed him, and they split him. 16:16 [SPEAKER_01]: All of which cool back to our minds what we heard earlier at the press conference. 16:23 [SPEAKER_05]: Therefore, it is most likely that he is at least average or just slightly above average it is intelligence and understands basic police techniques, which has aid in his ability to remain undetected. 16:34 [SPEAKER_01]: Another example Phyllis gave as evidence of Jerry's intelligence impressed us for different reasons than it did Phyllis. 16:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Remember she was young, naive, and in love, to use her words, 16:46 [SPEAKER_00]: Now we took a couple of trips with him and he takes some tampons and he drips some food, coloring, whatever on them. 16:55 [SPEAKER_00]: And throw them out the bunk door. 16:57 [SPEAKER_00]: And I said, what are you doing there for? 17:00 [SPEAKER_00]: And he said, that way the horse don't come up and bug me. 17:04 [SPEAKER_00]: He said, and not get the door. 17:08 [SPEAKER_00]: But I think I already got somebody in here. 17:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Shit, like I told you, it wasn't stupid. 17:14 [SPEAKER_00]: He knew what he was doing. 17:16 [SPEAKER_04]: Throughout our conversations, and in spite of all the warning signs, Phyllis remained skeptical of Jerry's involvement of the Redhead murders. 17:26 [SPEAKER_04]: She wasn't outraged or defiant, just genuinely curious, as to who her husband really was. 17:33 [SPEAKER_04]: Much of his life had remained secret. 17:36 [SPEAKER_04]: That much, she knew. 17:38 [SPEAKER_00]: And like I said, Jerry is like, and like I said, his most famous thing that I learned early on there was ask me no questions. 17:51 [SPEAKER_00]: tell you no lives. 17:53 [SPEAKER_00]: And this just where we pretty much loved it. 17:57 [SPEAKER_01]: It's a killer. 17:58 [SPEAKER_01]: It was hard for her to wrap her mind around. 18:01 [SPEAKER_00]: If you knew Jerry, he was, he might have been a lot of things, but he was too smart and too intelligent. 18:10 [SPEAKER_00]: He had no reason to hurt anybody unless you were to give him a reason. 18:16 [SPEAKER_00]: Because he said, when they tried to roll him that night he said, I was beating the fuck out of that dude. 18:25 [SPEAKER_04]: During his trial for Linda's kidnapping and attempted murder, Jerry had also claimed that Linda's boyfriend was responsible for her injuries after Jerry had beaten him up. 18:37 [SPEAKER_04]: If bicycle claimed that the Jerry had little time for, but it remains a point of interest as it represents an admission by Jerry of his pinched for physical violence, as well as 18:52 [SPEAKER_00]: He said, evidently, they might have met up somewhere again, and because I beat the shit out of him. 19:00 [SPEAKER_00]: He beat the shit out of her. 19:02 [SPEAKER_00]: Remember this? 19:05 [SPEAKER_05]: You will also probably have close friends that after being told, we have seen some warning signs, like sudden rage or ranting against his victim type. 19:12 [SPEAKER_05]: But most likely, we surprised that he was responsible for so many violent and brutal acts. 19:16 [SPEAKER_01]: When Phyllis met Jerry, he was a-well from the Marines. 19:20 [SPEAKER_01]: She recounted this multiple times for our conversation, like when describing his ongoing legal troubles and history of petty crime. 19:28 [SPEAKER_00]: Like I said, he was already A-W-O-L when we first met him. 19:35 [SPEAKER_00]: He just never went back. 19:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Best when he kept getting picked up for. 19:40 [SPEAKER_04]: Of course, hearing this took me back to the comments of the student's profile that connected the killer and his job as a trucker, with ongoing problems with authority. 19:50 [SPEAKER_04]: Does this not describe Jerry? 19:52 [SPEAKER_04]: This military dropout who spent most of his life a wall from the military. 19:58 [SPEAKER_04]: Does this not describe him to a T? 20:03 [SPEAKER_05]: However, if the killer is choosing a job such as a truck driver, it shows that he doesn't do wealth conforming to societal expectations of having an ever-present boss, the thoughts of conformity to rules. 20:14 [SPEAKER_05]: So this killer will most likely have been involved with serious relationships, including girlfriends, even long-term, and possibly even a wife. 20:23 [SPEAKER_01]: But in spite of Jerry's secret of nature, his mantra of, asked me no questions are tell you no lies. 20:30 [SPEAKER_01]: His capacity for violence, and all the rest of this, Felist does not believe he is a murderer. 20:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Because, like I said, if you bet him, you'd have never, ever put none of that together. 20:45 [SPEAKER_00]: Of course. 20:46 [SPEAKER_00]: They say that's what happens anyways. 20:49 [SPEAKER_00]: You don't, but I don't know. 20:52 [SPEAKER_00]: They're real-dormal. 20:53 [SPEAKER_00]: Kering. 20:55 [SPEAKER_00]: He was a very caring person. 21:00 [SPEAKER_00]: He provided for us. 21:02 [SPEAKER_00]: He just had this deal thing. 21:05 [SPEAKER_00]: He just needed to make that money some way, somehow, best just my opinion, but as far as murder, I don't know where that would come from. 21:17 [SPEAKER_01]: When we asked for this, what others close to Jerry might have to say about the possibility of him being a murderer. 21:24 [SPEAKER_01]: She said we could expect to hear them give a similar account. 21:27 [SPEAKER_00]: Because none of us really is going to have any help for you. 21:32 [SPEAKER_00]: They're all going to say the same thing. 21:35 [SPEAKER_00]: I mean to us, Jerry was a good person. 21:38 [SPEAKER_00]: He cared about people. 21:41 [SPEAKER_00]: He cared about life. 21:43 [SPEAKER_00]: He cared about himself, really. 21:46 [SPEAKER_04]: but even Phyllis, who loved Jerry to the end of his life, and had to wander if there was more to his story. 21:53 [SPEAKER_04]: While watching the news one day, she noticed an area resemblance between the victims of the Red Head murders, and herself. 22:01 [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, I had never seen the one chick they showed on Facebook. 22:06 [SPEAKER_04]: She's referring to Tina. 22:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, one of them, but dead one. 22:12 [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how else to put it. 22:14 [SPEAKER_00]: both of them worked a lot alike. 22:17 [SPEAKER_00]: Well, if you look at a couple of mild pictures that I have packed away somewhere, we all look alike. 22:26 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we all resumpled. 22:29 [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, whoa, was he trying to kill me? 22:33 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, just stupid things run through your head. 22:38 [SPEAKER_01]: While Phyllis still finds it difficult to connect her husband Jerry Johns with Linda's attempted murder, the jury at Knoxville did not share her reservations. 22:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Johns was found guilty on felony assault with intent to commit first degree murder, armed robbery, and aggravated kidnapping with a deadly weapon, with a side charge of reckless driving, just for kicks. 23:01 [SPEAKER_01]: He was sentenced to 108 years in federal prison and died there in 2015. 23:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Next episode will talk to former TBI agent David Davenport, who was involved in the redhead murder investigation in the early 1980s, and he believes John's to be responsible for all but one of them. 23:21 [SPEAKER_01]: Davenport was the lead investigator in the case of Elizabeth Lamont. 23:25 [SPEAKER_01]: We'll also be talking with our older brother Adam. 23:29 [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for listening. 23:30 [SPEAKER_01]: See you next time. 23:48 [SPEAKER_01]: Don't black our way Take me home
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