Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  “We had never considered the interstate highway system as a common linkage system,” ViCAP head Mike Harrigan told me. “We know now it’s been going on for years, but we had never picked out the pattern.”

  • • • • •

  “Are there more serial killers out there today than there ever have been?” Jim McNamara asked. “No. It’s just that there are units that specialize in helping catch and identify them, and through the increase in communications and technology, linkage is better.” Jim is a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit—the profiling unit made famous in The Silence of the Lambs. We were sitting in a windowless conference room in a nondescript office building near Quantico, Virginia. There are no signs outside the building, just a sea of very clean cars; no name on the front door, just a buzzer commanding “Press here.” This is the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, created after the serial killer panic of the mid-eighties. Countless commuters drive by the brick office plaza daily without ever knowing that inside it, FBI agents wearing business attire and sidearms are attempting to connect the dots between some of the nation’s most inexplicable crimes.

  FBI agents are quick to deny that there is an “epidemic” of serial killing along America’s highways, but they seem to be working at cross purposes. On the one hand, they are exceedingly careful not to overstate the danger to the public. That’s partly because, after using the wave of public hysteria in the early 1980s to build enthusiasm for funding the NCAVC, the FBI faced a backlash. The numbers they had fed the press—the four thousand annual unsolved murders committed by thirty-five roving serial killers—were declared inflated. Scholars took the FBI to task for fanning the flames of hysteria. The FBI, wary of becoming the federal agency that cried wolf, now backs away from such sweeping claims.

  On the other hand, the Bureau has a clearly defined problem, and a program designed to address it. In early 2009, it announced the Highway Serial Killings Initiative (HSKI), focused on killers who choose their victims and dump their bodies along highways. As in the past, the media jumped eagerly on the story. After decades of popular culture linking mobility and murder, who isn’t convinced there are killers on the road? Who doesn’t fear rest areas or half-expect to see bodies dumped in the right-of-way’s scrub? Road trip violence has become such a cliché that films have taken to playing with its gender dynamics: the 2007 film Interstate gave us a pair of female hitchhiking murderers, and the same year’s remake of The Hitcher swapped the male character’s heroism for that of his girlfriend. When the psychotic serial killer John Ryder ties one of them to a truck to be torn limb from limb, it’s young Jim who gets quartered, not Grace. She must then pursue and kill the hitcher herself.

  The Highway Serial Killings Initiative includes Hollywood’s favorite victims—hitchhikers and stranded motorists—in its mission definition. But most of the database’s victims are truck stop prostitutes. And while the FBI may be fearful it will be accused of inflating the stats again, in fact recent studies suggest that the numbers of serial murder victims have continually been underestimated—even during the eighties panic. The undercounting stems from the fact that the vast majority of victims have always been prostitutes—as many as 75 percent according to one scholar. Research into prostitute mortality suggests that the homicide rate for prostitutes is 229 out of every 100,000, making it the leading cause of death in the profession. The U.S. national average for all homicides in 2009: 5 per 100,000.

  Press releases introducing the Highway Serial Killings Initiative included a frightening-looking map pinpointing more than five hundred bodies found on or near highways and already entered into the ViCAP database. Represented by red dots, the bodies cluster around major transfer points in the interstate network: Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, Nashville, Indianapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia. But no state is immune: the red dots spread along the interstates like a pathogen carried by car. It looks like a connect-the-dots puzzle where the picture is the interstate highway system. The map is the perfect culmination of the evolving link between highways and violence. At the top of its online release, the FBI inserted a stock photograph of a road, white line bisecting the pavement like a scar.

  Reporting the story, the media noted that the majority of victims were drifters and prostitutes, but they played up the menace to average Americans. USA Today immediately filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI, asking for details of where the bodies were found. “Many families drive from state to state and need accurate information to determine where they should and should not stop,” the newspaper sanctimoniously declared. The FBI denied the request. USA Today ran a story reporting on its refusal, with a sidebar offering tips on how to “avoid being a victim.” The most obvious precaution—don’t turn tricks at truck stops—seemed to go without saying.

  In 2007, its first full year of operation, the HSKI assisted in the clearing of twenty-five murders committed by three truckers. Excitement grew among law enforcement agencies about addressing a backlog of unsolved murders. Massachusetts has never cracked the case of nine prostitutes discovered dead along highways near New Bedford. Miami has thirty-one murdered prostitutes with unknown perpetrators on the books. San Diego has more than forty, all of whom vanished from truck stops. A series of bodies found along highways in four Southern states is known as the “redhead murders,” because several of the victims had red hair. There may not be an “epidemic” of serial killing menacing average Americans this time either, but if you restrict the population to truck stop prostitutes and truckers, it does look like there’s an epidemic going on. The list of around two hundred suspects, the FBI press release bluntly said, was mostly long-haul truckers. But even there, the FBI—once bitten, twice shy—is hesitant to make any broad claims.

  “No one here is saying, ‘Well, they’re obviously truck drivers,’ ” FBI Supervisory Special Agent John Molnar told me. “No, the only obvious assumption you can make is that it’s somebody using that road.”

  • • • • •

  A few weeks after Sara Hulbert’s murder in Nashville, Pat Postiglione and his partner Lee Freeman arranged to meet at the T.A. and go through the receipts. As Postiglione was driving over, he noticed a yellow truck with a white trailer cruising slowly down the Cowan Street “stroll.” It looked like his suspect vehicle—but no doubt thousands of trucks did. Still, a truck had no reason to be on this road, other than a truck wash, prostitution, or drugs. The truck didn’t get a wash, and it didn’t stop for anything else. With Postiglione following, the truck passed the spot where Hulbert was last seen alive and then entered the T.A. As soon as it parked, the driver shut all the curtains in the cab.

  Detective Postiglione radioed Freeman to let him know where he was, then approached the truck and knocked on the door. After a few moments, the trucker opened it. A heavy man with stringy brown hair and glasses, he was yawning and stretching as if he’d just been awakened. Postiglione explained that he was working on a murder investigation and asked to see the guy’s license. The trucker handed it over. Bruce Mendenhall was the name on it. It didn’t mean anything to the detective. But he noticed what looked like spots of blood on the inside of the cab door. And there was blood on Mendenhall’s thumb.

  It’s a detective’s job not to jump to conclusions. Postiglione didn’t mention the blood. He told Mendenhall that police were asking all drivers of yellow cabs with white trailers to volunteer DNA samples. Would Mendenhall agree to the test? The trucker said he would. Lee Freeman had arrived by this point, and he went to his car to get a consent form. Mendenhall came out of the truck to sign it. As he did, a voice in Pat Postiglione’s head told him to look inside that cab. He asked Mendenhall for permission to search his truck.

  “Are you going to tear it up?” Mendenhall asked. Postiglione said no, he just wanted to look around. Mendenhall agreed, and Postiglione climbed into the cab. He was surprised at how spacious it was. He edged between the seats and into the living ar
ea behind. The top bunk was folded up; he sat down on the bottom bunk. Nearby, he could see a pair of black shoes. He picked them up. The tread looked a lot like the cast made of the shoe tread at the crime scene. There was a garbage bag near the bed, and Postiglione pulled it to him. It was filled with paper towels, women’s clothing, and shoes, all of it soaked with blood.

  Mendenhall had jumped onto the running board and was watching Postiglione with an inscrutable expression. Postiglione asked him about the bloody paper towels. He had cut his leg, Mendenhall said. He pulled up his pant leg and displayed a smooth calf. Postiglione pointed out that it didn’t seem to be injured. Mendenhall switched his story. He’d had a girl from Indianapolis in the cab, he said, and she had cut herself. Postiglione asked if he had any women’s clothing in the truck. Yes, the trucker answered, his wife and daughter had some clothes there. Postiglione looked in the bag again. There was a lot of blood. Later DNA testing would link it to at least four women, all of whom were missing or dead.

  “Bruce, am I sitting in the right truck?” he asked. Menden-hall shrugged. Postiglione asked again. “Is this the truck we’re looking for?”

  “If you say it is,” Mendenhall replied.

  “Are you the guy we’re looking for?” Postiglione asked.

  “If you say so.”

  • • • • •

  To someone like Detective Pat Postiglione, it makes a kind of intuitive sense that long-haul truckers might be behind many of the highway killings. There were roughly 3.5 million truckers on the road as of 2006, and the workforce has changed along with the job.

  “I’ve dealt with truckers a lot and truckers are a different breed,” Pat Postiglione told me. “A lot of them are regular good family people but a lot of them are not.”

  Interstate highway construction led to a boom in the trucking industry. In the years since the interstate era began, the proportion of freight going over the road has steadily increased. Then came the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 deregulating trucking, and the number of trucks on the road shot up even more. In the last twenty years alone, according to OSHA, there has been an increase of 44 percent in registered large trucks and a leap of 86 percent in how many miles those trucks travel. Today, roughly 70 percent of all domestic freight goes over the road, and more than 80 percent of the nation’s communities are served exclusively by trucks.

  To survive cutthroat competition, trucking has become leaner and more efficient. Unionized trucking companies have dwindled, while smaller, low-wage ones have multiplied. Today, trucks have become what economist Michael Belzer calls “sweatshops on wheels,” with truckers driving harder, longer, and faster, for lower relative pay. Most are paid by the mile—on average around thirty-nine cents.

  Drive any interstate and you’ll read a variety of “We’re hiring!” ads on the backs of the big rigs you pass. As the need for drivers has expanded, the bar to entry has been lowered. Today, neither a high school diploma nor a clean criminal record is required to drive a truck. In fact, beginning with welfare reform in 1996, employers could get a federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit for hiring convicted felons, and many in the trucking industry did. Most trucking companies don’t care if drivers have a permanent address. It’s possible even to drive a truck with drunk driving convictions on your regular license. Quickie trucking schools of varying quality are everywhere, offering a commercial driver’s license in as little as two weeks. Often the training is paid for by a trucking company in return for a period of indenture. Annual employee turnover at these companies is around 100 percent.

  As trucking has changed, it has attracted a new demographic: less educated, less stable, less tied to unions, less rooted in family life. Has it also begun attracting a criminal element? Or as Supervisory Special Agent Mark Hilts, head of one of the FBI profiling units, puts it: “Are some of these guys migrating to truck driving as a lifestyle that allows them to do what they do? We don’t know enough yet to make conclusions.”

  The FBI may not want to draw conclusions, but the public already has. The mythology of the trucker has changed along with the industry. In the sixties and seventies, the independent trucker was celebrated in country music and in movies like Smokey and the Bandit or Convoy. The trucker was a working-class hero, the last American cowboy, a skilled handler of twenty thousand pounds of pure power who outfoxed county mounties, bears in the air, and prissy hours-of-service rules in his patriotic dedication to American commerce. It took a special breed, as Merle Haggard sang, to be a truck driver. But as frustration with the interstate system grew and the association between highways and violence was cemented in the public mind, truckers, too, started to look like a menace to public safety. Today, the public image of the trucker is closer to the deranged driver who gets his comeuppance in Thelma & Louise. No longer heroic asphalt cowboys, truckers are frequently seen as ill-educated rednecks, amped up on meth, shoving themselves up your tailpipe or spewing misogyny over their CB radios. And sometimes, as in the case of 1997’s Breakdown, they are depicted as cold-blooded killers.

  • • • • •

  “At the end of this testimony,” declared deputy district attorney Tom Thurman, “there will be no doubt that there is a cold-blooded killer in the courtroom.” It was May 2010, nearly three years after the murder of Sara Hulbert, and day one of Bruce Mendenhall’s trial. From the windows of Courtroom 6A you could see, across the Cumberland River, the muddy, shuttered T.A. where Hulbert was found, a collection of hazmat trucks scattered with debris around its lot. One week earlier, the Cumberland had risen and raged through Nashville. The historic floods had closed the courthouse and had nearly swept the T.A. off the map: the fuel tanks filled with raw sewage, and one trucker had to be rescued by boat. To Sara Hulbert’s relatives, a row of women with feathered hair and dressy pants sitting behind the prosecution’s table, it must have seemed like poetic justice.

  Bruce Mendenhall sat impassively between two of his lawyers. Mendenhall is no Dexter. In fact, even as real serial killers go, he gets low marks for mediagenics—which might explain why, besides me, there were only a couple bored-looking local reporters in the room. He isn’t dashing like Ted Bundy, passionately deranged like Charles Manson, or eerily normal like John Wayne Gacy. He’s not even impressively nondescript like “I-5 Strangler” Roger Reece Kibbe. Mendenhall looks like someone you’d see eating alone at a truck stop. He is fifty-nine, and not a youthful fifty-nine. He has a cartoon trucker’s body—beer belly, sloping shoulders, trudging gait. He is diabetic. His cheeks sag in deep hollows, and his limp hair could use a trim.

  In prison, they called him “Truck.” Bruce Mendenhall, a trucker convicted of one murder so far, enters the Nashville courtroom. Associated Press photo / Christopher Berkey.

  The prosecution and the defense agreed on the basics. Sara Hulbert was killed in Bruce Mendenhall’s truck with Bruce Mendenhall’s gun. But they took differing positions on who had done the killing. There were no eyewitnesses, and Mendenhall claimed from the time of his arrest that someone else had killed her—in his truck, with his gun. Two guys followed him around, he said, killing women in his truck and leaving him to clean up the mess. That was the story he had told Detective Postiglione immediately after his arrest.

  • • • • •

  Pat Postiglione had little doubt, when he sat down to interview Bruce Mendenhall, that he was dealing with a serial killer. “We seem to have more than our share of them in Nashville,” he told me. “I think it has to do with the interstates.”

  We were sitting outside the courtroom. Postiglione was waiting to testify, and the judge had barred witnesses from the trial when they weren’t on the stand. The benches outside the courtroom faced a floor-to-ceiling plate glass window that looked out on the city’s tangle of freeways.

  Three interstates converge in Nashville: I-40, the main east-west route across the southern United States, I-65, a straight line between the Gulf of Mexico and Chicago, and I-24, a diagonal route across southern Illinois and Tennessee t
hat serves as the main corridor between St. Louis and Atlanta. At Nashville the confluence of the three routes creates a ten-mile, eight-lane ring road that encircles downtown, splitting five times. The splits cause massive backups as everyone on the right suddenly needs to go left just as everyone on the left needs to go right. The whole road is always packed with trucks.

  If you’re driving south, from Indianapolis say, the Nashville T.A. comes right after the I-65/I-24 split. It’s not well marked. But truckers knew it well enough; before the floods, it was always busy. Truckers tend to frequent one truck stop chain—the chains encourage it by giving loyalty points or making deals with trucking companies to give their credit card to drivers. But truckers also know which truck stops cater to “four wheelers,” as they call motorists in cars, and which ones are “truckers’ truck stops.” Often the latter are the ones that offer them the extra services they require.

  Truck stops are populated not only by truckers, but by many other people who labor unofficially in the trucking industry: “polishers” who work on the trucks, “lumpers” who help truckers load and unload, and, of course, “lot lizards,” the truck stop prostitutes. Many of these workers-for-hire are transients; some are homeless. Some double as drug dealers. The back row at truck stops is known as the “party row,” because it’s typically where the truckers who want sex or drugs park. Private security guards at truck stops attempt to stop the sex trade with varying levels of enthusiasm, but prostitutes arrive in cars or slip onto the property from the back; they ply their trade by moving unseen between the trucks, rapping on doors. Truckers who aren’t interested post a sign in their windows—a drawing of a lizard behind a circle with a bar through it—so they can sleep without being awakened by the unceasing knocks.