Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  The return to a vision of an America without limits was a deep and profound shift in the national sensibility, a turn away from self-doubt and back toward the American dream—defined as unfettered free enterprise, unabashed consumerism, and unflinching military prowess. It was the definition of the American dream that drove the interstate highway program, amped up by eighties upscaling and the affluence of the aging baby boom generation. Suddenly, brand-name awareness like Ted Bundy’s was unapologetically everywhere. Shows like Dallas, Knots Landing, and Dynasty celebrated the arts of getting and spending. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous profiled the conspicuous consumption of real-life counterparts to the Ewings and the Carringtons: host Robin Leach signed off each night by offering his audience “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.” It was the era of movies like Wall Street, whose antihero Gordon Gekko’s speech proclaiming that “greed is good”—however satirically intended by director Oliver Stone—became a rallying cry for would-be corporate raiders.

  In the postwar era, Americans had expressed deep reservations about the national commitment to materialism, militarism, and the mobility that underwrote them. Many of those reservations settled on the highway program. In the sixties and seventies, the counterculture led the way to a more thoroughgoing critique of that ideology, including a failed attempt to redefine highways. The eighties would put the critique, and even the reservations, to rest. But not without a struggle. And part of that struggle would center on highway serial killers.

  • • • • •

  In 1982, Henry Lee Lucas was arrested in Texas for the brutal murder of an elderly neighbor, Kate Rich. If Ted Bundy evoked the serial killer’s “mask of sanity,” Lucas, a one-eyed former mental patient who had already done time for killing his mother, seemed to embody the monster behind the mask. Born in the backwoods of Virginia, Lucas was a nasty piece of work. His father, according to stories, was a moonshiner who had passed out on a railroad track in a drunken stupor and had both legs severed by a passing train. He hopped around legless for a while before dragging his sorry self into the cold one night to freeze to death. Henry’s mother was no better: allegedly she was a prostitute, and it was claimed she forced her family to watch her meetings with “clients,” and regularly beat her children with a club. Not surprisingly, young Henry’s life of crime began at an early age.

  Seemingly remorseless, Lucas admitted upon arrest that he had murdered his elderly neighbor and raped her dead body. But that was only the beginning. Once in custody, he spontaneously began confessing to more murders. First it was around 100 women. Then 150. Then 165. He offered up the name of his frequent accomplice: Otis Toole, who was already in jail in Jacksonville, Florida. Police declared that between them, Lucas and Toole were “good” for at least 28 murders in eight states, including some of what were being called “the I-35 killings”—the late-seventies murders of around 20 hitchhikers and women with car trouble along Interstate 35 in Texas. By October of 1982, Lucas was admitting to 200 murders. Then Otis Toole—perhaps greedy for some of the airtime—confessed to having killed Adam Walsh. The son of a wealthy Florida hotel developer, six-year-old Adam Walsh had been kidnapped in 1981 from a Florida shopping mall. When Adam’s severed head turned up sixteen days later, his father John dedicated his life to preventing crimes against children. John Walsh went on to found the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and would eventually find his niche as host of the Fox network’s longest-running program, America’s Most Wanted.

  The Lucas confessions picked up where Ted Bundy left off. Ted Bundy’s travels launched the idea of a new trend: mobile killers roaming the nation’s highways. With Henry Lee Lucas, the bond between the killer and the road was drawn even more explicitly. Lucas and Toole, traveling the country, had used the highways and the anonymous exchanges they offered as accessories to murder. Many of their victims were hitchhikers and transients. Their bodies were said to be scattered from Florida to Washington, California to Michigan, many by the side of the road. In the press, Lucas was almost always labeled a “drifter”; articles about him usually featured an impressive list of states whose investigators were on his case.

  The exaggerated confessions of Lucas and Toole confirmed what many already believed: the nation was being haunted by increasingly random violence. The Reagan administration had swept into office in part on the promise of “getting tough” on offenders and immediately created a new Task Force on Violent Crime. The FBI also rolled into gear. In April 1983, Senator Arlen Specter wrote FBI director William Webster to request a report on the feasibility of creating a centralized system to “track and analyze serial murders.” Webster’s report was unveiled at Senate hearings on serial murder in July of that year.

  The Senate hearings focused on connecting serial killers to interstate mobility. “Experts” and law enforcement officials were brought in to testify to the dramatic increase in random stranger-murders committed with no regard for jurisdictional boundaries. One expert was Ann Rule. “The thing that I have found about the serial murderers that I have researched,” Rule declared, “they travel constantly. They are trollers; while most of us might put 15,000 to 20,000 miles a year on our cars, several of the serial killers I have researched have put 200,000 miles a year on their cars. They move constantly. They may drive all night long. They are always looking for the random victim who may cross their path.” Rule’s prepared statement referred over and over to serial killers as a “new breed” of criminal. “I cannot really tell you why this new kind of killer has emerged,” she declared. “It may be tied in somehow with the fact that we have become an increasingly mobile society.” Another witness was John Walsh. His statement was even more emotional. “When we talk about 6,300 unsolved murders in this country last year, random murders, someone is committing these murders and someone is doing these murders, and they are going through this country and police agencies are not linking them up.”

  Luckily, the FBI was there to offer a solution. Director Webster proposed creating a central repository within the FBI to track and record apparently motiveless violent crimes. Based at Quantico, the division would not only catalog rapes and murders, but would also provide law enforcement with the latest in behavioral analysis of these dangerous, mobile criminals.

  In the months that followed, the FBI helped to “educate” the public about this frightening new threat to the nation. On October 26, 1983, Justice Department officials declared that as many as thirty-five serial murderers could be at large in the United States. As reported in the New York Times, the statement defined serial murderers as “those who kill for reasons other than greed, a fight, jealousy or family disputes.” It distinguished serial from mass murderers, explaining that serial killers “often cross city and state lines, making detection more difficult.” It cited the examples of Charles Starkweather and John Wayne Gacy—even though neither fit the model of the mobile, motiveless killer. Starkweather’s spree began as a family dispute, and Gacy didn’t travel at all, but killed and buried his victims in his own home. Pointing out that 28 percent of the nation’s twenty thousand annual homicides went unsolved, the Justice Department hinted darkly that serial killers might be responsible for many of those cold cases—speculating that serial killers were murdering around four thousand people a year. One unnamed city was, according to the research project director, believed at that moment to have five serial murderers roaming its streets.

  Skeptics have subsequently pointed out that it was very much in the interest of the FBI, seeking funding for its new national database, to highlight interjurisdictional, mobile killers. As many historians of the Bureau have pointed out, the FBI has always needed to justify its existence by emphasizing the dangers of criminals who can’t be dealt with locally because they commit crimes in multiple jurisdictions. It has thus always been part of the Bureau’s mission to define an “enemy within,” preferably a highly mobile one best fought by a well-equipped federal agency. Gangsters, communists, and “student radicals” al
l served this purpose at various points. In the eighties, serial killers fit the bill perfectly.

  But the story was one the nation found easy to swallow. That’s because, underneath all the blood and thunder, the stories about this “new” phenomenon played into the very same anxiety that had been haunting the nation since the postwar years: where was our fast-tracked, on-the-move modernity taking us? The Justice Department dispatched experts to talk about serial murder, and the public eagerly listened. In a January 1984 front-page story titled “Officials Cite a Rise in Killers Who Roam the U.S. for Victims,” the New York Times reported that there was “growing evidence of a substantial increase in the number of killers who strike again and again, sometimes traveling from city to city, choosing strangers as victims, then moving on to kill again.” Serial killers were said to be increasing both in number and in ferocity. “We’ve got people out there now killing 20 and 30 people and more, and some of them just don’t kill. They torture their victims in terrible ways and mutilate them before they kill them,” declared the Justice Department’s Robert Heck. “Something’s going on out there. . . . It’s an epidemic.” To explain the epidemic, officials cited all the same reasons trotted out in the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s: broken homes, media violence, and increased mobility. Loose sexual morals were thrown in as well.

  The story was wildly popular throughout the rest of 1984 and 1985. Articles ran in Life, Newsweek, Omni, and a host of other magazines. Every television news magazine, from 60 Minutes to America Undercover, ran at least one serial killer episode. HBO created a full-length documentary called Murder: No Apparent Motive. New “infotainment” television shows like Inside Edition and Hard Copy aired lurid “re-creations” of killers’ alleged crimes. All of these stories emphasized the killers’ mobility, and most of them repeated the Justice Department estimate of four thousand victims annually, murdered by thirty to thirty-five serial killers roaming the nation. That would mean each killer was dispatching a hundred people annually—an average of two a week. And since they were doing it all across the nation, they could strike anywhere, anytime. No wonder there was a panic.

  Mobility was central to the story—but it often didn’t fit the crime. Of the eight killers whose photos ran with the “Killers Who Roam the U.S.” piece in the New York Times, only three could actually be said to have roamed the United States: Bundy, Lucas, and Toole. Randy Kraft, who was known as the “Freeway Killer,” did in fact roam the highways, but like Edward Kemper, he stuck to a familiar area in southern California. Wayne Williams—if he was in fact responsible for the majority of the Atlanta child murders—roamed a fairly circumscribed set of streets in Atlanta’s ghettos. Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi stuck to the hills above Los Angeles, and John Wayne Gacy chose his victims in the Chicago region and killed them in his own home. But the notion that the highways were behind this frightening rise in violence just made sense to Americans.

  Was there an actual epidemic of serial killing in the eighties? Separating an increase in serial murders from an increase in the reporting of them is difficult. A 1992 article in Criminal Justice Research Bulletin concluded there was evidence for a dramatic increase in American serial murder since 1964, but that the number of victims was nowhere near the Justice Department’s insinuations. Scholar Philip Jenkins estimated that serial murder accounts for about 2 to 3 percent of American homicides, meaning there are perhaps three to four hundred victims a year. And most serial killers, he declared, do not roam. The public’s panic was not only unjustified by the numbers, but it was focused on an image that had little basis in reality.

  “In playing up the frenzy,” wrote retired FBI profiler Robert Ressler the same year, “we were using an old tactic in Washington, playing up the problem as a way of getting Congress and the higher-ups in the executive branch to pay attention to it.” The strategy worked. In June of 1984, President Reagan, addressing the National Sheriff’s Association Conference, announced the creation of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, a federal clearinghouse for information about mobile violent criminals under the auspices of the FBI at Quantico. The NCAVC would be home to the evolving art of criminal profiling, as well as a computer database, known as ViCAP (Violent Criminals Apprehension Program), a centralized, searchable repository of unsolved, apparently random murders and rapes. In developing the questionnaire that local law enforcement agencies would fill out when entering their cases into ViCAP, the FBI consulted with America’s favorite expert on serial killers: Ted Bundy.

  • • • • •

  Americans and the FBI may have been obsessed with Bundy, but most of the real serial killers out there were significantly less glamorous. Just two months before Reagan announced the creation of the NCAVC, a heroin-addicted prostitute filed a complaint with the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department accusing Roger Kibbe of rape. Police visited Kibbe at the trucking company where he worked to discuss the case. Kibbe admitted to having given the woman a ride, but denied having had sex with her. Police then tried to contact the woman to follow up with her, but they couldn’t find her. Once again, a report on Kibbe was shelved.

  Two years later, the bodies began to appear. They were found at varying distances from the I-5 corridor between Sacramento and Stockton, where all of them had vanished. This stretch of freeway zooms through one of the sparser parts of the Central Valley, an area still dominated today by rich agricultural lands. Almonds, corn, and grapes—many of the latter destined for the cellars of Ernest and Julio Gallo—can be seen along the highway. The farms create a complicated patchwork on the flat valley floor, threaded through with a network of channels, distributaries, and sloughs that make up the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. This part of the Central Valley also features a network of man-made waterways: flood control channels and dams, irrigation canals, and aqueducts, all designed and built during the 1950s to keep water away from places where it wasn’t wanted, while bringing it to places where it was.

  Stephanie Brown was pulled out of one of those irrigation ditches, near a place called Terminus Island. A vivacious nineteen-year-old bank teller, Brown lived in Foothill Farms, a suburb on the northeast fringe of Sacramento. Late at night in July 1986, she got a phone call from her roommate, whose car had broken down, stranding her and her boyfriend downtown. Stephanie drove over to pick them up, then dropped the roommate and her boyfriend off at his apartment on Sacramento’s south side. She didn’t know the area well, so they gave her directions back to the northeast suburbs. She never made it. The California Highway Patrol tagged her abandoned car the next morning on the Hood Franklin off-ramp, an isolated highway exit about sixteen miles south of where Stephanie should have gone north on I-5. A crumpled roadmap lay on the ground nearby.

  It was easy to imagine what might have happened: lost at night on the increasingly desolate highway, the young woman probably stopped to get her bearings. Perhaps she had been offered aid by a passing motorist. Or perhaps someone posing as a driver in trouble had solicited her help. She didn’t live for long after the encounter. Her strangled body was soon found about twenty miles southwest of her car, not far from the intersection of I-5 and Highway 12.

  The next month, Charmaine Sabrah disappeared. She had enjoyed a night out in Stockton with her mother, Carmen Anselmi. But as the mother and daughter drove home to Sacramento, Charmaine’s car broke down. The two women waited on the shoulder of I-5, hoping the highway patrol would pass by. Eventually, a middle-aged man with a small, two-seater sports car stopped behind them. He asked if they needed help, and when they said they did, he drove the mother, Carmen, to a nearby exit so she could make a phone call. She couldn’t reach anyone. The man drove her back to the disabled car, and then offered to drive them home. But one at a time, he said, as he only had room for two in his car. Carmen and her daughter decided Charmaine should go first, since she had an infant waiting for her at home. Charmaine got in the car with the man and waved good-bye to her mother. She was never see
n alive again. Her strangled body was found several months later in the old gold mining country of Amador County, on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada.

  Detectives talked with Carmen Anselmi at length. She had, after all, ridden in the car with the man suspected of abducting her daughter. She had talked to him as they drove to the telephone, and she had watched her daughter go off with him in his car. She did her best to remember details that might help the police. But the description she gave was vague, and even on further questioning she couldn’t fill it in. He was middle-aged, with graying hair. Maybe his nose was a bit big. She desperately wanted to help, but it was dark and she had been drinking. And the man, she told police, was completely nondescript.

  Roger Reece Kibbe, the “I-5 Strangler”: a killer so bland even a mother who put her daughter into his car couldn’t remember any details about him to tell police. Courtesy Sacramento Bee.

  Not long after Charmaine Sabrah disappeared, another body was found in the desolate country along I-5. It was Lora Heedick, a Sacramento prostitute. Her case didn’t receive the attention paid the pretty all-American girl or the young mother trying to get home to her baby. But Lora Heedick had also been strangled.

  • • • • •

  The August that Charmaine Sabrah met her awful fate on the highway, the last five miles of I-80, the first transcontinental interstate, opened to traffic. A celebration was held on the spot, outside Salt Lake City. The occasion reminded some people of industrialist Leland Stanford pounding in the “golden spike” in nearby Promontory, Utah, in 1869. That event, marking the completion of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad, had been celebrated with plenty of pomp and national publicity. The completion of I-80, on the other hand, was a small affair that went largely unnoticed. Neither the secretary of transportation nor the director of the Federal Highway Administration attended. The governor of Utah was conspicuously absent. Of the nation’s major newspapers, only the New York Times covered the story. As Tom Lewis, author of a history of the interstate, points out, what people had come to feel toward the highway system was mostly indifference. “Many accepted the highways as a part of contemporary life and thought little about them,” he writes, “except, on occasion, to complain that they were overcrowded, or falling apart.”