Police hunt for possible serial killer in 1980s 'redhead murders'
More than 30 years after the bodies of multiple young, red-haired women were discovered dumped near U.S. highways in Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas, police say the killings may be the work of an unknown serial killer.
"The cases are probably connected," said Detective Aaron Frederick of the Kentucky State Police. "There's a lot of similarities."
The first break came in the summer of 2017. The FBI had re-examined evidence from a 1985 homicide in which a
Jane Doe with red hair was found inside a refrigerator near a Kentucky highway.
"The FBI called," Frederick said. "They said they found a match for a fingerprint found on the refrigerator."
The print turned out to be unrelated to the case, Frederick said. But it spurred him to re-examine the old files.
"I had never heard of the case," he said. "I came back and looked it over. We'd had no leads since 1992. So, we decided to put a press release out and try to get her identified."
The release went out in July 2017. The following October, a woman from North Carolina called saying she thought the woman could be her mother, Espy Regina Black-Pilgrim.