0:00 [SPEAKER_04]: Language and content in this episode may not be appropriate for all listeners. 0:05 [SPEAKER_04]: Listener 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]: Come back away Take me home 0:47 [SPEAKER_04]: 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. 0:58 [SPEAKER_04]: If the police are with you, they know it's not you, or so the logic goes. 1:03 [SPEAKER_04]: This is, in fact, the very thought process that stalled the prosecution of Jerry Johns for the Redhead murders. 1:11 [SPEAKER_04]: When Jerry went to trial for the attempted murder 1:17 [SPEAKER_04]: Investigators were already closing in on him for the Redhead murders. 1:22 [SPEAKER_04]: And they were gearing up for prosecution. 1:24 [SPEAKER_04]: When SB Pilgrim was found locked inside an abandoned refrigerator, along the I-40 corridor. 1:32 [SPEAKER_04]: SB's discovery on April 1st, 1985 was incredibly problematic for investigators, because when it happened, Jerry Johns was with them in the Knox County jail. 1:46 [SPEAKER_04]: He was subsequently ruled out as the Redhead murderer, and the case went cold, almost overnight. 1:54 [SPEAKER_04]: But the closer you look at S.B.' 1:56 [SPEAKER_04]: 's case, the more you realize how unusual it was. 2:00 [SPEAKER_04]: and that throughout all of this, everyone was focused on Jerry, and they completely overlooked his younger brother. 2:07 [SPEAKER_04]: In fact, no one in this case appears to have paid Wayne, much attention at all. 2:14 [SPEAKER_04]: Except, I believe, one unlucky transient named S.B. 2:19 [SPEAKER_04]: Pilgrim. 2:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe the weirdest thing about SB's murder was the fact that while she had clearly been murdered, she did not appear to have been the victim of violent crime. 2:31 [SPEAKER_00]: She had been dead for hours when they found her from suffocation, but she wasn't strangled. 2:37 [SPEAKER_00]: It was a remarkable lack of physical trauma on her body. 2:40 [SPEAKER_00]: She was naked, but there were no ligature marks on her neck, or feats, and her hands had not been tied. 2:48 [SPEAKER_00]: nor were there any signs of pressure to a head or neck. 2:51 [SPEAKER_00]: None of those little red fireworks of sub-conjunctive or hemorrhage or the sickly bluish hue of cyanosis. 2:59 [SPEAKER_00]: she fitted the physical profile of a victim of the Bible Belt Strangler and was found along the interstate as you might expect, but then no one know other marks of the interstate killer evident of the crime scene. 3:13 [SPEAKER_00]: On top of all this, investigators had no answer for why she appeared to be simply undressed, rather than stripped by an attacker. 3:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Though she was naked, she was still wearing socks, two layers of them, pink and white, and she was still wearing purgeulery, two necklaces. 3:31 [SPEAKER_00]: If you didn't know better, you think she'd only undressed herself for an intimate encounter, as she was wearing the kind of things that prostitute, or anyone might leave on when they were having sex. 3:44 [SPEAKER_04]: Also, none of the other victims were hidden like this. 3:48 [SPEAKER_04]: They were left in the open, or left to the elements, somewhat out of sight. 3:54 [SPEAKER_04]: But without this kind of trouble, taken to conceal them. 3:58 [SPEAKER_04]: Why would the killer remove her clothes? 4:01 [SPEAKER_04]: Believe her, with her most distinctive accessories, the two necklaces by which she would be later identified, and how would he get her there, in the dark of the pre-done morning, and pack her neatly inside, while leaving no forensic evidence of this cumbersome clumsy process, the simplest explanation is probably this, he wouldn't. 4:25 [SPEAKER_04]: Here's what I think happened. 4:27 [SPEAKER_04]: She climbed in voluntarily. 4:29 [SPEAKER_04]: Bear with me. 4:32 [SPEAKER_00]: We think she was running for her life and hid in the fridge from her attacker. 4:36 [SPEAKER_00]: Once she got inside the door locked behind her and she suffocated. 4:39 [SPEAKER_00]: Those old-at-moral refrigerators only open from the outside. 4:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Once you're inside, you can't just push the door open like you can with modern fridges. 4:49 [SPEAKER_00]: The outside handle locks the door in place and only this handle can release it, which is just the sort of thing you wouldn't think of in the middle of the night if you were running a few life. 5:00 [SPEAKER_00]: Let's be couldn't have known this, but the model of refrigerator she climbed into was a particularly dangerous one. 5:06 [SPEAKER_00]: They had at the time already been multiple cases of children playing hide and seek and tragically suffocating in them. 5:12 [SPEAKER_00]: So if this hypothesis is true, no one actually murdered S. B. Pilgrim. 5:18 [SPEAKER_00]: The appropriate legal term would be manslaughter. 5:21 [SPEAKER_00]: But that isn't say that her death was unrelated to the redhead murders. 5:25 [SPEAKER_00]: We think it was right at the centre of them. 5:28 [SPEAKER_00]: We believe it was an attempted 5:35 [SPEAKER_04]: SB was tiny, she was slim and under 5 feet tall, in the highest of her high heels, for foot nine barefoot. 5:43 [SPEAKER_04]: How does a woman of that size, escape a man who is decided to kill her? 5:49 [SPEAKER_04]: As we saw with Linda Shack, once an attack of this kind begins, there is often little the victim can do to stop it. 5:57 [SPEAKER_04]: Linda survived only once her attack or walked away. 6:04 [SPEAKER_04]: or we might ask the question another way, how does the person that was trying to kill SB let her get away, how does he have the strength to start her murder but not to finish it? 6:17 [SPEAKER_04]: Before we ask that question, let's rewind for a minute to the trial for the kidnapping and attempted murder of Linda Shack. 6:26 [SPEAKER_04]: As I said, thinking about SBM, and wondering how she may have come to die while hiding inside an abandoned fridge, my mind drifted to one particular exchange in Linda's testimony that I somehow managed to hear, without really hearing it. 6:56 [SPEAKER_01]: What did he look like at that time? 6:59 [SPEAKER_03]: One was, his hair was much longer and wavy. 7:03 [SPEAKER_01]: He didn't look like he sits in the courtroom today. 7:07 [SPEAKER_03]: No, he had a mustache or beard or something. 7:12 [SPEAKER_03]: He had, I'm not sure, a mustache or beard or something. 7:17 [SPEAKER_01]: That is the individual that you met sitting next to Mr. Fels. 7:22 [SPEAKER_01]: Is that correct? 7:23 [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, sir. 7:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Was anybody with him? 7:27 [SPEAKER_03]: Uh, his brother. 7:29 [SPEAKER_01]: And what did his brother look like? 7:31 [SPEAKER_03]: He was missing an arm. 7:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Did you have any conversations with Mr. Jones and his brother? 7:39 [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, I had, uh, I sat down with Jerry Johns and talked to him. 7:45 [SPEAKER_01]: Did his brother say much during this time? 7:49 [SPEAKER_03]: No, just a very few words. 7:52 [SPEAKER_03]: He sometimes answered a sentence, yes or no. 7:57 [SPEAKER_00]: It's hard to strangle someone with one hand. 7:59 [SPEAKER_00]: It's hard to control someone physically, even with a gun. 8:02 [SPEAKER_00]: If you're literally, psychologically, short-handed. 8:06 [SPEAKER_00]: How does someone commit a partial murder? 8:10 [SPEAKER_00]: How does someone have half the strength for a murder? 8:13 [SPEAKER_00]: Enough to start it, but not quite enough to finish. 8:17 [SPEAKER_00]: By having half a pair of hands. 8:20 [SPEAKER_00]: While Jerry was in room 304 of the holiday in on Dale Avenue with Linda, his brother Wayne was in 303 with another dancer named Shannon. 8:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Wayne wasn't involved in Linda's strangulation, but the two men were inseparable. 8:37 [SPEAKER_00]: They drove together for Wayne's trucking company, Rebel Trucking, and often travelled in Cornvoy from one city to the next. 8:44 [SPEAKER_04]: Jerry was the unquestioned leader of the two, the big talker, and while Linda quoted Wayne as answering, yes and no, his vocabulary was even more limited when he came to his older brother. 8:58 [SPEAKER_04]: Jerry talked and Wayne listened, and when Jerry asked him to do something, the answer was invariably, yes, 9:09 [SPEAKER_04]: Following my last conversation with Agent Davenport, he handed me a small stack of hand-written notes from his interviews with Jerry Johns in 1985. 9:19 [SPEAKER_04]: These notes are clearly personal notations, but the kind of incomplete sentences in grammatical shortcuts were all guilty of when we are only writing for ourselves. 9:33 [SPEAKER_04]: They say things like, 9:35 [SPEAKER_00]: wants to talk about mass murder in Texas, says he's studied serial killins, women at targets because they are the weaker sex, thinks some prostitutes are a nuisance, especially along rest areas, along interstates. 9:47 [SPEAKER_00]: This victim is skit so hawk, crazy mixed up, thinks invalidience. 9:51 [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what happened last night, the victim may really believe I heard her, but I didn't. 9:57 [SPEAKER_04]: As few were especially eye catching, 9:59 [SPEAKER_00]: Someone is going around killing people and I can't help it if I have been where the bodies are on the interstates. 10:05 [SPEAKER_00]: I didn't try to kill anyone. 10:07 [SPEAKER_00]: I would have to have a reason to kill anyone. 10:09 [SPEAKER_00]: Glad brother didn't get involved. 10:11 [SPEAKER_04]: And this? 10:12 [SPEAKER_00]: Hope someone else gets strangled to get the heat off him. 10:16 [SPEAKER_04]: The date of the top of these notes indicate that this interview took place on March 6th, 1985. 10:23 [SPEAKER_04]: Just a few weeks later, after Jerry Johns had told Agent Davenport that he hoped another Redhead dies along the Bible Belt in her state. 10:32 [SPEAKER_04]: This exact thing happened and it got the heat off of him. 10:37 [SPEAKER_04]: Imagine that. 10:39 [SPEAKER_04]: So did Jerry ask Wayne to make his hope a reality and did Wayne try to do so with a rather complicated results? 10:49 [SPEAKER_04]: After seeing this last comment in Davenport's notes, I reached out to Phil's for more information. 10:55 [SPEAKER_04]: For all we discussed, Jerry's brother had never come up. 10:58 [SPEAKER_04]: Just like the TBI, I had focused all of my attention on Jerry and ignored Wayne. 11:07 [SPEAKER_00]: Phyllis believes that any murders Jerry may have committed Wayne must have been present for. 11:13 [SPEAKER_00]: The two men were too close in each other's pockets all the time, but there were differences too. 11:19 [SPEAKER_00]: Wayne was quieter, more reserved, less intelligent and less charismatic. 11:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Unlike Jerry, who was a redhead like his mother, Wayne had dark hair, and of course he was missing a hand. 11:32 [SPEAKER_00]: He dressed like a typical trucker in blue jeans and cowboy boots with a jean jacket and shirts in muted colors. 11:39 [SPEAKER_00]: The words filist used in her description of wine, average, and ordinary. 11:44 [SPEAKER_00]: He began to remind us of another conversation from almost a year earlier with a restock employee named Bruce Jenkins. 11:53 [SPEAKER_00]: You might remember him from our second episode. 11:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Bruce worked as a shift manager at the Union 76 truck stop in Knox County at the time of SB's disappearance. 12:04 [SPEAKER_00]: And he was the last person to see SB alive. 12:07 [SPEAKER_00]: He watched a climb up into a maroonish, semi-truck that matched the fleet of rebel trucking company with a man he described ironically 12:21 [SPEAKER_02]: And he was non-descript. 12:23 [SPEAKER_02]: The best I can remember, I think he had like black hair. 12:26 [SPEAKER_02]: He had on a denim jacket with blue jeans. 12:29 [SPEAKER_02]: I couldn't tell you if he had boots or anything. 12:32 [SPEAKER_02]: Someone wanted me to tell that it was boots. 12:35 [SPEAKER_02]: The shirt was kind of brownish in color. 12:38 [SPEAKER_04]: Now, this isn't the most exhaustive physical description, but it did happen to overlap, lined by line, feature by feature, with fillets' description of her brother and law. 12:50 [SPEAKER_04]: But as striking as this was, and believe me, my jaw was on the floor, one thing about Bruce's description bothered me, and it might be bothering you too. 13:00 [SPEAKER_04]: How could a man with one hand be called non-descript? 13:05 [SPEAKER_04]: Wouldn't that be memorable? 13:07 [SPEAKER_04]: The very definition of described, so to speak. 13:11 [SPEAKER_04]: wooden bruise have noticed this and mentioned it to me. 13:15 [SPEAKER_04]: According to Phyllis, not at all, Wayne was self-conscious about his missing limb, and because of this, he wore a prosthetic. 13:25 [SPEAKER_04]: From the distance, bruise had seen him from, it would have been impossible to distinguish this artificial hand from a living one. 13:33 [SPEAKER_04]: And even up close, it would have been easy to disguise 13:41 [SPEAKER_04]: On the night of espionage murder, Wayne John's remained an accounted for. 13:45 [SPEAKER_04]: He has no alibi, because the police never asked for one. 13:51 [SPEAKER_04]: They were never looking at Wayne John's. 13:54 [SPEAKER_04]: They were hyper-focused on his brother, just like I was, and just like you probably were as well. 14:01 [SPEAKER_04]: And because of this, the redhead murders were shalt and forgotten. 14:09 [SPEAKER_00]: The other reason this case went cold is actually a happy one, the killing stopped. 14:15 [SPEAKER_00]: When Jerry went to prison for a hundred and eight years, and when Wayne no longer had any reason to draw suspicion away from Jerry, there were no more redhead murders along the I-40 corridor. 14:26 [SPEAKER_00]: Wayne was never questioned in S.B.' 14:28 [SPEAKER_00]: 's death, and he never will be, as he died in 2014, one year after Jerry. 14:35 [SPEAKER_00]: Before he died, he appears to have protected Jerry's identity as the Bible Belt Strangler, responsible for up to, and possibly more than, five in state murders between 1983 and 1985. 14:50 [SPEAKER_00]: To date, we know the identities of four of these six victims, 14:56 [SPEAKER_00]: Lena Ann Nichols, Tina Farmer, Elizabeth Lamott, and SB Pilgrim. 15:04 [SPEAKER_00]: The final two are known only as Whetsaw County Jane Doe, and Chitam County Jane Doe. 15:12 [SPEAKER_00]: Both of which counties are in northern Tennessee. 15:15 [SPEAKER_00]: The case of the redhead murders isn't resolved because we think we know the identity of the Bible Belt Strangler, because it was never really about him anyway. 15:26 [SPEAKER_00]: The Wetzel County, Jane Doe, may be the first victim of the Bible Belt Strangler. 15:31 [SPEAKER_00]: An elderly couple was driving to church early Sunday morning. 15:35 [SPEAKER_00]: On February 13th, 1983, when they noticed something unusual off to the right of Route 250. 15:43 [SPEAKER_00]: It had snowed heavily the night before, and something in the deep snow bank grabbed their attention. 15:49 [SPEAKER_00]: Two weeks earlier, Washington running back, John Riggins had been named the MVP of Super Bowl 18. 15:58 [SPEAKER_00]: Leading the Redskins to victory over the Miami Dolphins with a score of 27 to 17. 16:03 [SPEAKER_00]: 18, the extra terrestrial was still in the theatres, and the song Down Under by the minute work 16:13 [SPEAKER_00]: Cabbage patch kids were selling so fast it was impossible to keep them in stock. 16:18 [SPEAKER_00]: There was no such thing as the redhead murders. 16:21 [SPEAKER_04]: Convince they had seen something out of place. 16:24 [SPEAKER_04]: The elderly couple made a U-turn for a closer look. 16:28 [SPEAKER_04]: At first, they thought it was a mannequin, until they noticed the awkward position of the body, and the presence of human hair. 16:36 [SPEAKER_04]: They raced to the station and returned, with West Virginia State Trooper Norman Wood, who I recently spoke with, regarding the crime scene. 16:47 [SPEAKER_04]: The body was naked, with all burn hair, and two scars. 16:51 [SPEAKER_04]: One of them was a cesarean section, 16:54 [SPEAKER_04]: another mother among the victims. 16:57 [SPEAKER_04]: The other scar was much smaller on her index finger. 17:01 [SPEAKER_04]: Her legs and under arms were freshly shaved and her age was later determined to be between 35 and 45. 17:09 [SPEAKER_04]: Her height, 5 foot, 6, her weight, 135 pounds. 17:15 [SPEAKER_04]: Norman, or Norm, has he of prefers to be called, noted the absence of snow on the body, which meant this woman had been dumped there only a few hours earlier, after the snowfall of the night before. 17:29 [SPEAKER_04]: Besides the body, there were car tracks and shoe prints on the snow that allowed police to reconstruct at least part of the crime. 17:38 [SPEAKER_00]: You could see beside the tyre tracks where someone had gotten out of the car, walked around the trunk, then to the snow bank with a series of deeper footprints, then back to the car before pulling away. 17:50 [SPEAKER_00]: Norm took a picture of this woman to nearby towns and cities, and when he got to Wheeling about an hour away, someone recognised her as a recent patron of a local bar. 18:03 [SPEAKER_00]: Back at the crime scene, a passerby had noticed a car parked at that location on Route 250, and also mid-lazed white man, just under six feet tall and roughly 200 pounds, a description that matches Jerry Johns, but what about that car? 18:20 [SPEAKER_00]: John was a truck driver and he wouldn't have been driving anything else that far from home. 18:25 [SPEAKER_00]: At least that's what we would have thought before hearing the testimony of Linda Shark. 18:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Throughout her kidnapping, they were in Linda's car, and John was driving. 18:36 [SPEAKER_00]: Remember this? 18:39 [SPEAKER_03]: And he said, well, I've got to have your car so that they will trust me enough to get in the car. 18:45 [SPEAKER_03]: And he said, I'm not going to arrest any of your friends. 18:48 [SPEAKER_03]: I just want to find one of them that is holding something so that I can, and that I won't bust them. 18:56 [SPEAKER_03]: I'll just make them tell me the name of where they got it. 18:59 [SPEAKER_03]: Because he said, we don't want the little people, we want this a big drug bust. 19:06 [SPEAKER_01]: And after he said the scoot over and that we've got to get one of your friends for a drug bust, what happened then? 19:12 [SPEAKER_03]: He made me, he said, I even asked him if I could drive, I said, just, you know, and he said, well, no, I am not going to record car. 19:23 [SPEAKER_03]: So I got on the passenger side and he got in and started to drive. 19:29 [SPEAKER_00]: John had multiple arrests for Grand Theft Auto and preferred to use his victims car when it served his purpose. 19:36 [SPEAKER_00]: The body of the Wetzel County Jane Doe showed no signs of sexual assault, and there was no seam and recovered from her body. 19:44 [SPEAKER_00]: The Cheatome County Jane Doe was found skeletonized on March 31, 1985, and determined to have died three to five months prior. 19:54 [SPEAKER_00]: She was found on the side of I-24, between myelmarkers 29 and 30. 20:00 [SPEAKER_00]: We're in a shirt, sweater, pants, and underwear. 20:05 [SPEAKER_00]: Her age was estimated to be near 31. 20:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Her height between five foot and five foot two inches tall, and the medical examiner noted to significant crowding in her teeth. 20:17 [SPEAKER_04]: And, as we already know, she had red hair. 20:21 [SPEAKER_04]: If you have any information that you think my help bring clarity, to either of these cases, please reach out to me and let me know. 20:29 [SPEAKER_04]: And it's foulplay.com or email me at shaneaditsfalplay.com 20:37 [SPEAKER_04]: And as of now, both the Wetzel County, Jane Doe and Chitam County Jane Doe have read crosses, marking the side of their discovery. 20:47 [SPEAKER_04]: But these crosses alone, among the six, still have no names. 20:54 [SPEAKER_04]: Let's change that together. 21:12 [SPEAKER_01]: Don't black our way Take me home
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