Do you know who committed the \Redhead Murders\? On New Year's Day in 1985, the body of a young woman was found down an embankment off the southbound side of Interstate 75 near Jellico, Tennessee. The Caucasian female, who had shoulder-length curly red hair, had been strangled to death approximately 72 hours before her discovery. For 33 years, her identity remained a mystery, and she was known only as a Jane Doe.
In 2018, through fingerprint analysis, investigators were finally able to identify her as 21-year-old Tina Marie McKenney Farmer of Indiana. At the time of her death, she was a mother to a young daughter and was also ten to twelve weeks pregnant.
Tina was last seen alive in Indianapolis, Indiana, reportedly in the company of a truck driver who was headed to Kentucky. Her family had reported her missing in 1984, but for decades, her whereabouts remained unknown. The discovery of her body, bound and wrapped in a blanket, launched a long and arduous investigation. Initially, her case was thought to be one of the 'Redhead Murders,' a series of unsolved homicides involving red-haired women whose bodies were found along major highways.
Years later, a major breakthrough in the cold case came in the form of DNA evidence. Seminal fluid found on the blanket that Tina was wrapped in was analyzed, and the resulting DNA profile was entered into the Combined DNA Index System. The profile was a match to Jerry Leon Johns, a convicted kidnapper and truck driver. Johns had been a suspect in the mid-80s due to a strikingly similar case where he assaulted and strangled another woman with red hair who miraculously survived.
Jerry Johns was convicted in 1987 for the attack on the other woman and was serving time in prison. He died in custody in 2015 at the age of 67, before he could be formally charged with Tina Farmer's murder. However, in 2019, a grand jury in Campbell County, Tennessee, determined that there was sufficient evidence to indict Johns for the first-degree murder of Tina Farmer had he still been alive.
