The sole surviving victim of the “Bible Belt Strangler” has spoken out for the first time to a Tennessee high school teacher — whose students helped crack the 40-year-old murder mystery.
The survivor, identified only as “L,” was attacked by Jerry Johns in the early 1980s, a deceased trucker investigators now believe may have been responsible for a string of unsolved killings that decade known as the Redhead Murders.
For the first time since her attack nearly four decades ago, she sat down with Elizabethton High School sociology teacher Alex Campbell to speak about her experience on the Murder 101 podcast.
“There’s no reason for me to be alive except the good Lord let me live,” she told Campbell on the iHeartRadio podcast in an exclusive clip obtained by The Post.
The grandmother said she was only able to come forward because she knew it would “save women’s lives.”
The survivor didn’t even know Johns had been tied to another murder until an FBI agent called her a “couple of years ago and told me,” she admitted.
“I didn’t even know Jerry Johns had died, but he called me and told me that they used DNA and proved that he killed this other girl,” she said.
Tina McKenney-Farmer was linked to Johns in 2018 through DNA evidence. The 20-year-old was found in December 1984 off Interstate 75 near Jellico, Tenn.
As for Johns, he died in prison in 2015 after being convicted of strangling a prostitute in Knox County, Kentucky in 1985.
“They questioned me when it happened,” the survivor admitted on the podcast about her own encounter with the suspected serial killer.
More murders continued to happen and the sole survivor noticed one of the girls “looked very similar to me.”
Farmer was one of the six victims Campbell’s 2018 class had connected as possible victims murdered by the same killer, with Johns as the suspect.
“There was a whole bunch of them that they questioned me about,” L said. “We sat at this big, huge, long table and there were photographs of all these women and some of them looked like photographs of me.
“There were dozens of girls that looked a lot like me, and they called them the Redhead Murders,” she said in the podcast, which is produced by KT Studios.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation later announced the late trucker as a suspect, but gave no credit to the students, which Campbell said he took harder than they did.
TBI is investigating to see if Johns can be tied to other Redhead Murders.
Campbell — who said he’s “poured his life” into the case trying to prove Johns is connected for the past six years —called L a “hero.”
“This is a terrible, tragic story for a lot of people and a lot of families, but if there’s a hero, it’s you,” he told her through tears.
“Your will to live is what got him arrested and kept him off the streets.”
Since the tragedy, L has kept a low profile, but KT Studios’ Gabriel Castillo said the retired nurse is a “loving mother and grandmother” who “spends her time volunteering for multiple Christian charities.”
Now, Campbell’s former students are divulging their evidence gathering in the 10-episode Murder 101 podcast, where they reveal just how they connected the six women, whom they call their “sisters,” and Johns.