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In 1980, Randy Lee May savagely attacked 15-year-old Mitzi Holt and 16-year-old Mary Jones.

He posed as a police officer, asking the girls to help him locate a missing child, he led them into the woods of Hamblen County.

There he stabbed Holt three times in the chest, slashed her throat and handcuffed her to a tree to die slowly, painfully.

He brutally slaughtered and violated Jones while her best friend could do little more than listen to her screams.

He then returned to his first victim and stabbed her again, in attempt to make sure that both would die and neither would live to identify him.

Holt shredded the flesh off her hands, escaping the handcuffs after May left her to die. She found help and somehow survived the attack.

Now, after a four-year respite, May is up for parole again.

Not surprisingly, the family of Mary Jones doesn’t think May deserves parole.

“A monster can’t change,” Jones’ sister Patti Conkin said.

Conkin has stressed several times that May only apologized for the first time in 2018, 36 years after the crime.

That apology, she said, rang hollow.

Conkin said she believes the crime was premeditated.

May, who was training to be a police officer, had the handcuffs, gun and badge to fool the girls when he asked them to help him find a runaway. Conkin said he when he asked the girls about the runaway, it was someone they’d known, too much of a coincidence for her to believe he picked the name at random.

Former Hamblen County Sherriff Esco Jarnagin called the crime one of the worst he has witnessed in his long career.

He has frequently and vocally opposed letting May out.

“I would view him as dangerous because of the nature of the crime he committed,” Jarnagin said in 2019. “It was planned out.”

Former Hamblen County Mayor David Purkey – who was working that night in the ER when Holt was brought in – has also been a frequent opponent of letting May out.

“Because I lived this night in that emergency room with both these girls (one savagely murdered, the other scarred for life), I implore you to deny this request for parole,” he wrote previously. “Randy Lee May deserves additional time in state custody to carry the burden of his calculated acts.”

Family and friends held a candlelight vigil on the Hamblen County Courthouse Lawn last Friday and is raising money to pay for family members to go to Pikeville, attend the parole hearing and speak in opposition.

There is also an online petition on change.org where people can lend their names in opposition of May’s release.