Appalachian Figures
On an overcast Monday in early spring 1985, two people cutting through a familiar dumping spot along U.S. 25E near Gray, Kentucky, noticed an old refrigerator lying on its side off the road at a place locals call Gilliam Hill. When they opened it, they did not find scraps or empty jars. Inside was the body of a small red haired woman, folded into the cabinet and left among the trash.
Kentucky State Police later summarized the scene in a cold case bulletin. On April 1, 1985, troopers responded to a rural dumpsite alongside 25E in an area “commonly known as Gilliam Hill,” where the body of an unidentified white woman was found in an old refrigerator. An autopsy showed that she had been murdered.
The location is easy to miss even if you know U.S. 25E well. Gilliam Hill rises along the highway just north of Gray, part of the route that carries traffic between Barbourville and Corbin. Earlier in the twentieth century, a small tourist court operated at the base of the hill to catch travelers on the pre four lane road; a 2014 local history column in the Mountain Advocate remembered it as “Gilliam Court,” eight miles east of Corbin and just west of Gray. By the mid 1980s the old court had faded, the road had been straightened and widened, and the hillside just off 25E had quietly become a place where people dumped tires, appliances, and the other castoffs of rural life.
In that setting the refrigerator did not look out of place. What lay inside did. The Jane Doe that Knox Countians would come to call “the redhead in the refrigerator” had hazel eyes and auburn hair, cropped in a practical cut that was redder at the front than the back. She was only about four foot ten or eleven and roughly one hundred pounds, small even by the standards of the era’s height and weight charts. Autopsy summaries preserved in NamUs and later compiled by Doe Network list her cause of death as asphyxiation.
She wore no shirt, skirt, or jeans. Investigators found only two pairs of white socks on her feet, one pair with green and yellow stripes, and a pair of brown boots lying near the refrigerator. Around her neck hung two necklaces that would become iconic details of the case: one with a heart shaped pendant, the other a small eagle.
Knox County Jane Doe in the record
From the beginning, investigators treated the case as homicide. Kentucky State Police estimated that the woman had been dead roughly a day when she was found and that she was probably between twenty five and thirty five years old. There were no obvious ligature marks around her neck, which made her asphyxial death more puzzling, but there was no doubt that someone had forced her into the refrigerator and abandoned her in the dump.
Troopers canvassed the truck stops and diners that dotted U.S. 25E and nearby Interstate 75. Witnesses at a truck stop in Corbin, roughly ten miles away, told police that they had seen a red haired woman matching Jane Doe’s description the day before the body was found. According to later KSP statements summarized by WKYT, WDRB, and WYFF, she was reportedly trying to get a ride to North Carolina.
When standard missing person checks did not produce an identification, the woman entered a bureaucratic limbo. She was buried as a Jane Doe in Warfield Cemetery outside Gray, her grave marked with a small headstone rather than a name. A later Find A Grave memorial remembers her pre identification as “the Redhead in the Refrigerator,” a woman widely discussed in the community and on regional television but officially known only as “Unknown.”
Behind the scenes, her file grew. The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, the federal NamUs database, eventually assigned her Unidentified Person case number UP #82. An archived copy of that entry, preserved through NamUs and linked repeatedly in later reporting, records the essentials: a white female, twenty five to thirty five years old, discovered April 1, 1985, at a dumpsite off U.S. 25E near Gray, Knox County, Kentucky, death by asphyxiation, with dental and DNA profiles available.
Volunteer researchers with the Doe Network created an associated case file, 192UFKY, labeled simply “White Female in Refrigerator, Gray, Kentucky.” Their summary, drawn from law enforcement reports and autopsy data, reiterated the basic scene: a body placed in a discarded refrigerator at a dumping area just off 25E near the entrance to Gray, wearing only socks, with brown boots nearby and the two distinctive necklaces still around her neck.
For more than three decades, that is who she was in the record: Knox County Jane Doe.
The Redhead Murders and the interstate map
From the standpoint of Knox County residents, the refrigerator case was a local horror story. For journalists looking out over the larger interstate network, she soon became part of a different narrative. In the spring of 1985, reporters and law enforcement officials began to talk about a pattern: a string of murdered red haired women found along highways in Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi, and other states.
An Associated Press feature titled “Officials Puzzle Over String of Redhead Murders,” published in late April 1985, pulled several of these cases together and noted that some of the victims had been dumped near busy interstates. Not long afterward, Jim Nesbitt of the Orlando Sentinel, in an article that has become a touchstone of later writing about the series, framed the pattern even more bluntly under the headline “Serial Killer Likely Preying on Redheads.”
Modern syntheses, such as the “Redhead Murders” entry on Wikipedia and the Unidentified Wiki’s Redhead Murders page, treat Espy Black Pilgrim’s case as one probable member of that loose cluster. They note the details that drew investigators’ attention at the time: a young or young middle aged white woman with reddish or auburn hair, killed by asphyxiation, left near an interstate corridor that truckers used heavily in the 1980s, and initially unidentified.
It is important to say what the record does and does not show. Authorities in several states did indeed consult one another, and in 1985 a multi state task force met with the FBI to compare cases. They looked at shared features: victims who hitched rides at truck stops, bodies dumped in rural locations near major roads, and a rough window in the early to mid 1980s. No one, however, has ever been charged or convicted as a single serial killer responsible for all of the so called Redhead Murders. Some cases once grouped under that label have since been solved with local suspects identified. Others remain unsolved homicides whose inclusion in the “redhead” series is based more on pattern recognition than proof.
For Knox County, the upshot was that the woman in the refrigerator briefly appeared in national stories about the dangers of highway travel, especially for women who hitchhiked or worked in precarious roadside economies. Then the national attention moved on. Her case went back to being primarily a local mystery, anchored in a very specific slope on 25E above Gray.
Glimpses of a life in North Carolina
The refrigerator and dump site are Kentucky scenes. The woman inside, however, had roots across the mountains. Years after her death, a different kind of official document preserved one of the few contemporaneous glimpses of her life.
In 1985 the North Carolina Court of Appeals heard a case called In re Black, an appeal concerning the termination of parental rights regarding several children in Rutherford County. In passing, the opinion identified one of the children’s parents as “Espy Regina Black Pilgrim,” tying that full name to the county, the mid 1980s, and a complicated chapter in the family’s history.
The opinion is not about Espy herself. It is about the legal status of her children. Still, for historians trying to reconstruct a life that ended violently in another state, it matters. It tells us that by 1985 she was known in court records as Espy Regina Black Pilgrim, that she was connected to Rutherford County, North Carolina, and that her family was already negotiating the child welfare system and its power to sever legal ties.
Later biographical reconstructions, such as the Unidentified Wiki entry on “Espy Black Pilgrim” and the Find A Grave memorial created after her identification, fill in a few more basic facts. They list her as born December 25, 1956, in North Carolina, and note that at least some of her later life was spent in Spindale, a mill town in Rutherford County that grew up around textile plants and furniture factories.
The public record is mostly silent about how she traveled from that life to a refrigerator in Knox County. Like many women linked to the Redhead Murders pattern, she appears to have been living on the margins. WYFF’s coverage of her eventual identification quotes her daughter remembering that Espy disappeared when the child was only a few weeks old. That one phrase speaks chapters about instability, fear, and the long shadow that an unexplained absence casts over a family.
Facebook, DNA, and a lead from Rutherford County
For more than three decades, the gap between those North Carolina court records and the Kentucky dump site seemed impossible to bridge. Troopers made periodic appeals, and the case migrated as forensic technology changed. In the 2000s, Knox County Jane Doe’s profile entered NamUs with DNA and dental charts on file. A National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reconstruction circulated online and in news segments.
In June 2017 Kentucky State Police tried something new. As part of a broader outreach on cold cases, Post 10 released an enhanced image based on Jane Doe’s autopsy photograph, along with close ups of her heart and eagle pendants. They asked again for help identifying the woman whose body had been found in that refrigerator on Gilliam Hill in 1985. The text of the release, widely reprinted by outlets such as ClayCoNews, laid out the essentials and reminded readers that she had last been seen at a Corbin truck stop trying to get a ride to North Carolina.
Within months, the appeal reached exactly the people it needed to find. The News Journal in Corbin reported in October 2017 that KSP had received a call from North Carolina after a woman there saw the composite image shared on Facebook and thought the face resembled her missing mother. Follow up coverage from WKYT and WDRB in October 2017 documented the next steps. Detectives arranged to travel to North Carolina to collect DNA samples from potential relatives while emphasizing that hope had to be balanced with scientific caution.
The tests took time. In October 2018 Kentucky State Police released the answer in a statement quickly picked up by news outlets from Kentucky to the Carolinas. DNA testing, they said, had confirmed that the woman found in the refrigerator at a Knox County dumpsite in 1985 was Espy Regina Black Pilgrim of Spindale, North Carolina.
An Associated Press story distributed through WLOS and other stations quoted the core of the KSP announcement. A relative had seen a social media post about the unsolved case and contacted police. Detectives traveled to North Carolina to take DNA from Black Pilgrim’s children. The comparison was a match.
WYFF’s regional coverage from Greenville, South Carolina, centered on the family’s reaction. Espy’s daughter, Elizabeth Regina Pilgrim, posted a photo of her mother with the words, “My beautiful mother, you have always had a name. Thirty three years later you have it back.” WBIR’s “Appalachian Unsolved” segment on the case showed Espy’s children visiting Gray and standing at the site where the refrigerator once lay, trying to reconcile the wooded hillside with the unanswered questions that still surround their mother’s final day.
A grave at Warfield Cemetery
Once Espy’s name was public, the grave at Warfield Cemetery that had long been marked as an unknown woman could finally be updated. Find A Grave users recorded the transition. One memorial, created before 2018, described the grave simply as “Unknown Unknown,” a woman found in a refrigerator near Gray and buried nearby. A later memorial identifies the same grave as “Espy Regina Black Pilgrim (1956–1985)” and notes that “Kentucky State Police have confirmed she was once known as Knox County Jane Doe, the Redhead in the Refrigerator.”
Warfield is a modest country cemetery, the kind found on hillsides and hollows all over eastern Kentucky. The photographs that accompany the memorial show narrow gravel lanes, trees boxing in the hill, and rows of stones that face the morning light. For thirty three years, people in Knox County came there knowing that one of those stones belonged to a woman whose name they did not know. Some remembered the televised funeral and the sense that even without an identity she deserved more than a pauper’s burial. Later writers in the Redhead Murders literature often highlight that community response as a counterweight to the anonymity forced upon her by violence.
Today Warfield Cemetery holds a different kind of story. The headstone with Espy’s name does not erase the years when she was Jane Doe. Instead it layers identities. To the record she is Espy Regina Black Pilgrim, born Christmas Day 1956 in North Carolina and killed on April 1, 1985, in Knox County, Kentucky. To the history of 1980s highway crime she remains a likely member of the Redhead Murders pattern. To her family she is a mother who vanished when her baby daughter was only weeks old. To the people of Gray she is still the woman in the refrigerator on Gilliam Hill, the reason state troopers kept returning to the same dump site year after year.
What remains unsolved
DNA answered one question. It did not answer the questions that have haunted this case since the first autopsy. Investigators still do not know who killed Espy, why she was targeted, or precisely how her last hours unfolded between the Corbin truck stop and the refrigerator on Gilliam Hill. KSP has said repeatedly, including in the 2018 AP story about her identification, that the homicide investigation remains open.
The Redhead Murders context offers one framework for thinking about possibilities. If Espy’s death is part of that series, then it may be connected to the movements of long haul truckers who crisscrossed southern interstates in the 1980s, some of whom have since been implicated in other highway corridor killings. On the other hand, murder does not require a serial killer. It is entirely possible that the person who killed her was someone she met once at a truck stop, or someone from a network of acquaintances that has never been fully mapped.
For historians and local communities, Espy’s case sits at the intersection of several Appalachian stories. There is the story of U.S. 25E itself, a route carved through Knox County’s hills that has long tied the region to wider economic and cultural currents. There is the story of Appalachian out migration and return, visible in a life that began in rural North Carolina, passed through factory towns like Spindale, and ended in a Kentucky dump site just off a federal highway. There is the story of how small communities respond to violence, from the decision in 1985 to give an unnamed woman a proper burial in Warfield Cemetery to the Facebook shares and family advocacy that helped bring her name back home in 2018.
However investigators eventually classify it, Espy Regina Black Pilgrim’s murder is part of the history of Appalachia’s roads. It ties Gilliam Hill and Gray to a late twentieth century landscape in which highways brought new possibilities, new dangers, and a new kind of anonymity. In that landscape, even a woman who vanished from a mill town in western North Carolina could lie for decades in a Kentucky grave marked only as “Unknown,” waiting for a combination of science, memory, and persistence to catch up.
Sources and further reading
Kentucky State Police, Post 10, “KSP Seeking Public’s Assistance with a Cold Case in Knox County,” June 22, 2017, as reproduced by ClayCoNews, provides an official summary of the 1985 discovery on Gilliam Hill and describes the necklaces, age estimate, and Corbin truck stop sighting.ClayCoNews
WKYT, “State Police investigate lead on identity of body found in Knox Co. in 1985,” October 20, 2017, and WDRB, “Kentucky State Police may be closer to identifying woman found murdered in 1985,” October 20, 2017, document the 2017 outreach, enhanced photos, and plans to collect DNA from potential relatives in North Carolina.https://www.wkyt.com+1
Associated Press, “Kentucky police ID body found at dumpsite 33 years ago as North Carolina woman,” distributed through WLOS, and WYFF’s “‘Red-headed Jane Doe’ identified after 33 years as missing mother from North Carolina” summarize the 2018 DNA identification of Espy Regina Black Pilgrim and quote her children’s public statements.WLOS
“Redhead Murders,” Wikipedia, and related entries on the Unidentified Wiki synthesize contemporary reporting, NamUs records, and Doe Network files, including the archived NamUs UP #82 entry and Doe Network case file 192UFKY for the Knox County refrigerator victim.Wikipedia+2Unidentified Wiki+2
North Carolina Court of Appeals, In re Black, 76 N.C. App. 106 (1985), accessible through Casemine and other legal databases, anchors Espy Regina Black Pilgrim in Rutherford County legal records in the mid 1980s and illustrates the broader family context in which her disappearance occurred.CaseMine
Local and community sources, including the News Journal’s “Remains found in Gray in 1985 may be North Carolina woman,” the Unidentifieds of America blog entry “1985 Gray Jane Doe,” and Find A Grave memorials for Espy Regina Black Pilgrim and her earlier “Unknown” grave at Warfield Cemetery, preserve details about the funeral, local memory, and the way the case was understood before and after identification.The News Journal+2unidentified decedents of america+2