This is Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast more what You Hear Weekday
Afternoon's on the Drive. Alex Campbell is a multi time Teacher of the Year
recipient. He lives with his family in northeast Tennessee. He had the advantage
of putting together a class that pieced together a thirty year old mystery and identified
a killer behind the at least six brutal murders. It is all put together
in Murder One and Alex Campbell's joining us now, greeting sir, Hello,
Well let's get Let's start at the beginning. What when did it occur to
you? Hey, let me put together a class that's going to look into
true crime. Yes, I mean, I'm always looking for projects in all
my classes where students cannot just learn but apply what they're learning. And there
was a series of murder in and around Tennessee, mostly in the eighties.
Most of the women were redheaded, white, small, young, strangled thrown
out beside the road. But in the eighties that the police never came to
a determination if this was the work of one person or maybe you know,
just twelve different murders that had nothing to do with each other. And I
grew up in this area at that time, and I didn't remember anything about
these murders. It had been over thirty years since anything had happened, and
I thought, well, maybe my students can use their sociology skills to take
a look at these to maybe see if there was a serial killer actually working
in our state at the time, and maybe bring these things back up and
get some attention. That was my next question. What was the class?
So it was sociology you were teaching at the time. Yeah, what about
sociology is then applied to say true crime? Do a lot of sociologists get
involved in looking into criminals activity? I don't know for sure. I would
say many times they do. But in sociology you really focus on what they
call the five agents of socialization. These are family, friends, peers,
media, social structures that you know societies create. And if you think about
it, trying to see if six different women are related to one person,
why would that person do that? Why does he want to harm this type
of person? How do those women go unidentified for three decades? Why aren't
their families looking for them? Those are all questions that we can answer by
looking at those agents of socialization talking to Professor Alex Campbell. He is the
host of Murder one oh one, which is about his class that solved a
thirty year old mystery. So what level of education was this? Was this
college? No, actually it was high school and it's just antle active and
I had that year freshman, sophomore, and juniors in that class. They
did you tell them right away we're going to solve a murder? Or did
the initial part of the are we going to look into a murder? Or
was it just did he just come to you? Well? I like to
under promise and over deliver, so I never said we were going to catch
a serial killer. What I wanted, you know, what I told them
the first day was I put a number on the board, two hundred and
fifty million, which was approximately the population of America in nineteen eighty and I
said, look, how would you find one person out of all of America
that was responsible for this? That's what we're going to do. We're going
to learn how to profile, we're going to use our sociology skills, and
we're going to see if there was this one person that was responsible for these
murders. And I brought an FBI profiler to help me, and it was
amazing the work that a fourteen, fifteen, sixteen year old student can do.
Do you think that they're more observant of human behavior at thee Maybe that
gave them the advantage. You know, young people are very interesting that they
have some things in spades. You know, they've got energy, curiosity,
lots of energy, hormones, those type of things, right, Yeah,
and they're just always full, they're always up right that they always want to
do something, they want to have meaning to their life. And also they've
been sitting around for like ten twelve years being told that just learn this and
one day you could use it. I think what they really want to do
is be allowed to use it. So I just gave them a chance to
put all these things they be learning, and all that energy and all that
excitement into doing some meaningful work where women had been forgotten. Families had lost
loved ones and didn't know what happened to them. Women had been treated like
garbage and thrown out beside the road, and no one was fighting for them
and their justice. So they were really excited about doing the work. Now.
The problem is they also have some drawbacks. They don't have any naw
about serial killers or being a profiler or that kind of thing. So I
just had to bring in the right resources and people to help them, and
they did a great job with it. Well, you sound like the kind
of a professor I would have wanted. Alex Campbell Murder one oh one is
the podcast. You can hear it on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere you get
podcasts. It's about his class solving a murder back in nineteen eighty I've long
said this about education. I'm no expert at it, and I realize one
size doesn't fit all. But as far as looking back on my experience with
primary, secondary and higher education, my advice is, if you want to
teach a kid about history, tell it like like it was a story.
Take them to the places where it all happened. If you want to teach
a kid math, tell them that it's that everything in the world is measured,
and it's the only way to improve things is to measure them. You
want to teach a kid geometry, take them to the shop where they can
cut angles and build things. You want to teach a kid trigonometry, teach
them celestial navigation because that was the beginning of triggonometry and so on and so
forth, to teach kids how they can apply what it is they're learning in
everyday world. Yeah, I totally agree. Application is beginning of true knowledge.
So just sitting down a memorizing words or whatever is not the answer.
We I mean, I think most people would agree the world has plenty of
problems. So let's just put some problems in front of students and let's give
them the skills they need to start working on some of these problems. Now,
you might be surprised that's what they can do. At what point we're
talking to Alex Campbell of Murder one oh one podcast, Did you realize,
by jove, we've got them. Yeah. So we worked with an FBI
behavioral analyst, some people call him a profiler, and he taught them how
to profile. He taught them what the four things they needed to do to
prove that there was a serial killer at work, and they felt like that's
exactly what they found. And he grated it for me. So I said,
look, I can't great them criminal profile. I said, take a
look at it. Let me know what you think the kids did. He
said, I can't disagree with anything. They said, this is amazing work.
And so once we knew that we had the profile of this killer,
it wasn't doing us any good to just like let it sit in the classroom.
We needed to get the word out. So the students decided to have
a press conference where they would share all this information. And then they also
had coverage from the six different areas where the women were found that they were
believed were all related to the same killer. And so there was also like
this media blitz in several different states in and around Tennessee. And so really
what happened was they show that these women could be connected to one person and
basically reminded the world that there was all these murders that had basically been forgotten.
And within the next few months women began to get identified, and then
with that became, you know, some momentum. I know that lots of
tips were given to law enforcement. I know that we helped identify Peenut Marie
McKinney Farmer, and then I know they retested some of the items that had
been left to the crime scene, which DNA wasn't really available back then,
but because she was identified, they were able to solve her murder and the
guy who killed her matches every single one of the characteristics the students predicted in
the profile years earlier, and you can hear more about it if you listen
to Murder one on one, the podcast from Alex Campbell, who is the
Teacher of the Year recipient who put together a class that solved a thirty year
old mystery, and then some Murder one on one available everywhere you get podcasts,
including the iHeartRadio app. This is a fascinating story and Alex Kimbell,
I look forward to the movie is that coming? I don't know about that.
I'm just a school teacher and I've always said I do have a face
for the podcast. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews
Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to
seven and iHeartMedia Presentation