Script

 In September 1969, a young blonde woman was hitchhiking along a lonely coastal highway in South Carolina. By the late sixties, an entire generation of young people had relied on hitchhiking along highways to travel to their destinations, and this young woman was no exception. It was evening, so she hoped someone would pick her up. After all, it was September near the coast, and the nights were beginning to get chilly and damp. A car pulled over, and she got in. The driver was a non-descript-looking man. She did not know she had just gotten into the car of Donald Henry "Pee Wee" Gaskins Jr., who had served time in prison for burglary, assault, and statutory rape. He planned to murder the young lady. In his memoirs, he wrote, "All I could think about is how I could do anything I wanted to her." And he did.

He sank her body in a swamp when he was done. She was the first of many victims he picked up off the coastal highways of South Carolina. He later claimed he had killed eighty to ninety men and women, calling them his “coastal kills” – people he said didn’t matter because they were hitchhiking. He would torture and kill a victim every six weeks, he claimed, and since the victims were picked up on a highway, sometimes they were not even missed. The highway allowed him to continue to kill for years without getting caught.

In our episode “Tracking Terror,” I shared the story of a serial killer at the beginning of the twentieth century, who used the rail lines to go from place to place, killing with the blunt end of an ax, including the victims of the famous Villisca axe murders in Iowa. Today, we’ll be looking at his dark offspring – the people who used the highway system to move around the country and escape detection or capture as they caused havoc throughout America.

We may take highways for granted. After all, they are easy paths to take. Conveniently, the interstate highways link states, cities, rural areas, and suburbs, allowing for rapid mobility and greatly reducing the time to move people, goods, and services all over America. We forget that the highway system as we know it did not begin to be built until the late fifties.

Despite its relative youth, the highway system has proven a very useful means by which serial killers can both seek prey and avoid detection. Ted Bundy was and is the paradigmatic mobile serial killer, killing in several states, from Washington to Utah to Florida. He helped create the myth that most serial killers traveled the roads of America, taking advantage of what Bundy called "the anonymity factor." He was, in the words of another biographer, the first coast-to-coast killer. Most killers are geographically based, working out of a single community. Even Bundy did most of his killing in Seattle before traveling out of state. It was the roads that made his handiwork possible.

         John Wayne Gacy, the killer clown, a household name for his depravities, killed people in his suburban Chicago community, burying the bodies of his victims within his own yard and under his house. David Berkowitz, better known as the Son of Sam, only killed in the boroughs of New York City. Richard Ramirez, better known in the media as "The Night Stalker," stalked Los Angeles. Many serial killers' names are geographically derived because they are linked with specific places: Jeffrey Dahmer was known as the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster after the city in which he preyed on his victims. Albert DeSalvo, better known as The Boston Strangler, was named after the city he terrorized. Anthony Sowell was first known as The Cleveland Strangler, Morris Solomon, Jr. was first The Sacramento Slayer, and Antonio Rodriguez was better known as The Kensington Strangler, after the Philadelphia neighborhood in which his victims lived. Even the serial killers who were never caught or identified, as often as not, are named after the specific location in which they act: The Cleveland Torso Murderer, The Connecticut River Valley Killer, The Chicago Strangler, The Oklahoma City Butcher, The Storyville Slayer (named for the neighborhood in New Orleans), and the Skid Row Stabber, his nickname from the neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles whose name has become synonymous with poverty, crime, and homelessness. Serial killers are known in, and often named after, the place where they kill. A number of killers are thus named after the highways that they prowled.

         On this dark highway, however, I want to look at the lesser knowns, the people behind the myths of the mobile serial killer. These people are not household names; you may not have heard of them, but they were notorious killers using America’s highways as their hunting grounds until and when they were finally caught, if they were finally caught, killers like Donald Henry "Pee Wee" Gaskins Jr. What makes them scary is that they used the highways to find victims, to dispose of victims, and to avoid capture. Hitchhiking itself is doubly dangerous. It is dangerous for the one hitchhiking – any driver could be a killer. You’ve probably even heard the joke about a hitchhiker who had spent hours standing on the side of a dark road on a cold winter night. Dozens of cars had passed the figure since he had started thumbing for a ride. A few had slowed but then sped up again as they looked at the hitchhiker – his clothes and appearance making them wary of picking up a stranger. 

But then, after the hitchhiker had given up hope, a car pulls over, and the male driver asks where he is headed. A quick conversation establishes that they are headed to the same town an hour away, and the driver invites him into the car to share the ride. 

The hitchhiker is relieved, and soon, he’s seated comfortably in the warm car as the driver restarts his car to continue their journey. After a few moments of silence, the hitchhiker again thanks his host for saving him from a cold night on the side of the road. He says: "It's so hard to hitchhike anymore. Most people are afraid to stop and pickup a stranger."  Then the hitchhiker asks, tongue in cheek: "Why did you decide to give me a ride? How did you decide that I wasn’t a serial killer?”

The driver listens to the occupant in the passenger seat and nods slowly to the question, thinking about his answer. Then he turns to the hitchhiker, a broad grin revealing gleaming white teeth, and responds: "I figured that the chance of there being two serial killers in the car at the same time was extraordinarily low."

As this joke reveals, hitchhiking can be just as dangerous for drivers just trying to give someone a lift. If horror movies have taught us anything, the hitcher could also be a killer, looking for their next victim. The highways are convenient and a modern miracle, but they can also be unsafe and a haven for those who harm others. Today, let's look at America's dark roads and the serial killers who made them their hunting grounds.

Hi, I'm MF Thomas, and welcome to My Dark Path . In every episode, we explore the unexplained. We hope you'll check us out on Instagram, sign up for our newsletter at mydarkpath.com, or email us at explore@mydarkpath.com. We also want to thank our Patreon supporters. Check out our Patreon, where subscribers will have access to exclusive full episodes starting with our special miniseries, a My Dark Path tour of history, science, and the paranormal in Cold War Moscow that we're calling "Secrets of the Soviets."  If you're interested, head over to our website and consider becoming one of our Patreon supporters.

Finally, thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me. Today’s path is dark, but, as usual, there's nothing gratuitous or explicit. So, if you’re ready and willing, let’s walk down Our Dark Highways.

PART ONE:

In 1956, congress finally passed The Federal Aid Highway Act, which began the largest public work in history: creating 42,795 miles of Interstate highway under President Eisenhower. The benefits to a federal interstate highway system were obvious and immediate: easier mobility for a growing nation, a series of roads that connected the entire nation, plus the labor and material costs involved would combat the inflation threatening to grow in the mid-fifties. People would be put to work for years, if not decades, building the roads, requiring machinery, steel, concrete, cement, and other equipment. This new set of highways was sold as "Manifest Destiny for modernity," in the words of Ginger Strand, a writer who explored science, history, and culture. In the wake of the Second World War and the Korean War, highways would help people move west (and south and north).

Less well known, but equally important for the Eisenhower administration was the defensive purposes of the new highway system – if the Soviets or their western hemisphere allies ever invaded, the highways could help mobilize quickly so American troops could quickly move to sites they were needed. Highways thus served multiple constituencies and purposes, to the imagined benefit of all.

In her history of the role of highways in serial murder, Killer on the Road, Ginger Strand argues that the highway system is schizophrenic and paradoxical. We cannot decide if freeways represent a brand-new world or a world gone horribly wrong. Do they deliver the American dream or destroy it?

Still, the highways of America are its arteries and veins, moving people and supplies across the nation. Journalist Peter T. Kilborn refers to the Interstate Highway System as “the 51st state;” its own community and culture with its own rules and practices that links all the other states together, allowing the people of the forty-nine continental states mobility and travel between them. Yet, as Bernice M. Murphy reminds us in The Highway Horror Film, the road is a place of horror, connecting states yet promoting rootlessness, joining us together while actually allowing people to move anonymously through the nation. Killers use highways to avoid detection and capture; victims can be found easily on the road. Highways, as Murphy notes, "facilitate dangerous encounters between individuals whose paths would otherwise never crossed.”

         Highways are also the space in between spaces. The interstate system is a federal highway system within the states, connected to state and county highways, as well as local roadways, but the highway itself becomes the spaces between places, a liminal state between states, in all senses of the word. As anyone who has driven across the nation knows, a lot of the route across America is through empty but beautiful spaces. When one stops traveling, one does not stop at home but at a temporary place of rest, including rest areas, hotels, motels, campsites, restaurants, and places where one is not known and does not know who is in the next room.

Highways also created distance between police jurisdictions. For decades after the Highway Act was passed, a murder on a Kentucky highway would neither be reported nor known across the border in Ohio or Tennessee. And so, serial killers could repeat patterns of behavior and seek victims in one location, then move on to another state and continue without anyone being aware that the murders in these different jurisdictions were the work of a single individual.

Consider Interstate 70, also known as I-70, is a major east-west Interstate highway that runs from Interstate 15 near Cove Fort, Utah, all the way across the middle of the United States to end in Woodlawn, just outside Baltimore, Maryland. It covers most of the old U.S. Route 40 east of the Rocky Mountains, passing through Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before reaching its terminus at Maryland Route 570. It passes through numerous cities like Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Columbus, and Pittsburgh.

And Interstate 70 also has two serial killers named after it.

In the Spring of 1992, Robin Fuldauer, a 26-year-old, worked as a manager at an Indiana Payless Shoe Store. Around 1:30 on the afternoon of April 8, while she was working alone, an unknown man entered the store and shot Fuldauer. Her body would be discovered in a rear storage room an hour and a half later. Robbery was not the motive, less than one hundred dollars was taken from the register, and other items were left in the store. The woman was not assaulted. So, the motive was unclear. It seemed like an odd, random crime. That is until another occurred three days later in Wichita, Kansas.  

Patricia Magers owned La Bride d'Elegance bridal shop, and Patricia Smith was her 23-year-old employee. The two women were working late on April 11, waiting for a customer to come and pick up a cummerbund. Sometime after six o’clock in the evening, the door was unlocked for a man who then entered the store and shot Magers. In retrospect, police believe the killer thought Magers was working alone, as this was the only double murder in the series. When Smith emerged to see what the noise was, she, too, was shot. The actual customer for the cummerbund then arrived at the store. The man in the store told the customer to come with him to the back room. The man refused, having seen a gun in the man’s possession, and left, no doubt saving his own life in the process. He was so frightened at the encounter, however, that he did not report the incident for over an hour. When the police finally arrived, they found the two dead women. The customer was able to report the killer was a tall, slender white man with reddish hair.

On April 27, a little over two weeks later, the killer walked into Sylvia's Ceramics in Terre Haute, Indiana, a short jaunt down the I-70 from Wichita. Astute listeners will now have picked up on the fact that the killer preferred to shoot women in retail establishments. Police believe he assumed the person in Sylvia's Ceramics would be owner Sylvia McCown. Instead, working that afternoon was Michael McCown, Sylvia’s son. The killer shot him and took his wallet and forty dollars from the cash register. Michael would be the only male victim of the serial killer.

Six days later, the killer walked into Boot Village, a footwear shop in St. Charles, Missouri, just after noon when Nancy Kitzmiller had opened the store. She was not scheduled to work that day but came in to cover for a sick co-worker. She was the only employee in the store at the time. Two and a half hours later, her body was found, shot in the back of the head as Michael McCown had been.

It was a detective in St. Charles, investigating the murder of Kitzmiller, who discovered the previous four victims all died in similar circumstances. All were retail workers who were shot in the back of the head in their place of business by a .22 caliber handgun. They all had long, dark hair, including Michael McCown, who wore his in a ponytail, leading police to think the killer may have thought him a woman when he shot him in the back of the head, not seeing his face. The murders also took place in strip malls just off I-70, across several states, earning the murderer the name “The I-70 Killer.” Given that the man only took a little money and did not assault his victims in any way, police believed murder was the sole motive. The man just wanted to kill dark-haired, petite women.

The same fate befell Sarah Blessing, owner and operator of Store of Many Colors, a gift shop in Raytown, Missouri, four short days later. The owner of the video store next door saw a man enter the shop, heard a gunshot a moment or two later, and then saw the same man leave the shop. He resembled the description of the man who shot Patricia Magers and Patricia Smith in Wichita. The video store owner ran into Store of Many Colors and found Blessing’s body. She had been shot in the head. A clerk for a grocery store in the same shopping area saw the killer walking away from the store and climbing a hill towards I-70.

Blessing was the last confirmed victim of the I-70 killer, although police have linked cases in Texas in 1993 and 1994 and Terre Haute in 2001. In the latter, a convenience store clerk was shot under circumstances very similar to the Michael McKown in Terre Haute, and similarly, the victim was a male, Billy Brossman.

The I-70 Killer has never been caught. In 2021, the St. Charles Police Department released age-enhanced photos based on eyewitness sketches from witnesses in 1992. Given the amount of time that had passed, police assumed the killer would be between fifty and seventy. Part of the challenge of finding him after all this time is that he killed six people within a month and a half over thirty years ago and seemingly stopped. It was not until his second-to-last victim had been shot that police even linked the killings. An unknown killer, using the highway to move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction in different states, killing just off the highway, then getting right back on it to escape has proven difficult to capture. One can only hope that more evidence or an associate of his eventually comes forward.

But there was an earlier, still-unidentified killer who was also named for the I-70. The I-70 Strangler murdered at least twelve boys and men between 1980 and 1991. All twelve bodies were located near the I-70, murdered by strangulation.

It is believed the killer met most of his victims at gay bars in Indianapolis, would leave with them, strangle them, and then dump their partially clothed bodies in rivers, streams, and ditches just off the highway. On June 16, 1980, Michael Petree’s body was discovered off I-70 in rural Hamilton County, Indiana, making him the I-70 Strangler’s first victim. Over the next eleven years, males as young as 14 and as old as 42 were found roughly once a year in Indiana and Ohio, and once outside of Atlanta. All bodies matched the same pattern. After the third victim in 1982, police realized they might have a serial killer on their hands and formed a task force. A year later, in 1993, the FBI became involved. Initially, police suspected four more victims might be the work of the I-70 strangler, but profilers then realized the four were killed by a different person.

The task force interviewed many people and had a number of suspects, finally asserting that local businessman Herb Baumeister was most likely the I-70 Strangler. Baumeister subsequently committed suicide in 1996, and no physical evidence exists to tie him to the serial killer's victims. Police assert that Baumeister was the killer and the case is closed, but others claim that police used Baumeister as a patsy after his death and that the real killer is still out there. Lack of a confession, conviction, or incontrovertible evidence means that the I-70 Strangler is still an UnSub, in the language of the FBI, an unknown subject neither identified nor caught. One that used the highway to dispose of bodies and create distance between himself and his victims.

PART TWO:

On January 21, 1984, the headline of the New York Times read, “Officials Cite a Rise in Killers Who Roam U.S. for Victims.” The article quoted justice department officials that there was “growing evidence of a substantial increase in the number of killers who strike again and again, sometimes travelling from city to city, choosing strangers as victims, then moving on to kill again.”  Justice’s Robert Heck called it “an epidemic” of mobile serial killers, using the highways. The I-70 is not the only highway to have had multiple killers use it. Perhaps the most active highway for killers is Interstate 5. 

The federal highways that run north/south end in 5, crossing the nation in numerical order: the 5 running the length of the west coast, then the 15, the 25, the 35, the 45, the 55, the 65, the 75, the 85 and finally, running the length of the east coast, I-95. Interstate 5 is the only continuous Interstate highway to touch both the Mexican and Canadian borders and continues past them as Federal Highway 1 in Mexico and British Columbia Highway 99 in Canada. I-5 runs 1,381 miles, roughly parallel to the Pacific Ocean from Washington through Oregon and all the way through California, roughly following the route of the old U.S. Highway 99.

In Washington, US 99 became SR 99, linking Seattle and Tacoma and their shared airport, and was also the hunting grounds for the second most prolific serial killer in American history: Gary Ridgway, better known as The Green River Killer. He murdered at least forty-nine women, or at least that’s the number he confessed to. The police think Ridgeway actually killed 71 women in the eighties and nineties in the Seattle/Tacoma area, many of them prostitutes he picked up along Pacific Highway South (SR99), just off the I-5.

Like I-70, I-5 has both a killer and a strangler named after it, in addition to other killers related to the highway. The I-5 Killer was the name given to a man who killed at least 18 and perhaps as many as 44 people along the I-5 in Oregon. On October 9, 1980, Cherie Lynn Ayers was raped and murdered in her apartment in Portland. A month later, on November 27, Thanksgiving Day, Darcey Renee Fix and Douglas Keith Altig were bound and shot to death execution-style in Fix's Portland apartment. Police did not know it at the time, but these were the first murders by the I-5 Killer, a petty criminal, and former high school football player who knew both Ayers and Fix from high school named Randall Woodfield.

Woodfield then began committing a series of burglaries and murders along the I-5 corridor. The robberies began in December of 1980, and within a month, the media were reporting on "the I-5 Bandit," as he was dubbed. Later that month, Woodfield began sexually assaulting the people he robbed[NB6] , finally escalating to shooting his victims in the head. And so, the I-5 Bandit became the I-5 killer, with victims as far north as Canada and as far south as Redding, California, always just off the I-5. Victims identified Woodfield in a police lineup, and he was put on trial on a number of charges. On June 26, 1981, he was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to life in prison, where he still remains today.

Another killer who worked the I-5, The I-5 Strangler, was also sentenced to life in prison without parole. Roger Reece Kibbe was a furniture salesman in Sacramento, California. In 1977, Kibbe began patrolling the highways around Sacramento, including the I-5, looking for victims. He also used to pick up prostitutes along the highway and added them to his list of victims. Kibbe would kidnap his victims, tie them up with parachute cords, and silence them with duct tape. He would then strangle his victims and leave their bodies near the I-5. He had at least eight known victims between 1977 and 1987, with several more possible. In 1987, Kibbe was captured by the police when he was caught handcuffing a prostitute and attempting to drag her into his car. After further investigation, evidence linked Kibbe to the I-5 killings, and he was charged with the death of Darcie Renée Frackenpohl. In order to avoid the death penalty, Kibbe pled guilty in exchange for life in prison, but perhaps justice came for him anyway. On February 28, 2021, Kibbe was murdered by his cellmate and self-avowed Satanist Jason Budrow, who claimed he was driven by Kibbe’s victims to avenge them. Budrow strangled Kibbe to death.

PART THREE:

Three different men have been given the nickname “The Freeway Killer,” like the previous men discussed, they were killers named after the road where they found their victims or left their bodies.

Patrick Kearney was born in East Los Angeles in 1939 as the oldest of three sons in a well-off middle-class family. His family moved, however, and he grew up in Texas, where he was frequently bullied. He got married out of high school, but it did not last. After his divorce, he moved back to Southern California, where he worked as an engineer for Hughes Aircraft. By the early sixties, he was cruising the highways of Southern California to pick up men and boys. He later claimed his first victim was a hitchhiker that he picked up and murdered in Orange, California, in 1962. He convinced the hitchhiker to get on the back of his motorcycle, took him to the desert outside of Indio, California, and shot him. Eventually, Kearney moved in with David Hill, his lover, in Redondo Beach. When they would fight, Kearney would leave their home and go for long drives in a Volkswagen Beetle or his truck. During these drives, he would pick up young men, take them to deserted areas under the pretense of sex, and then shoot them. He ended up killing at least 25 men between 1962 and 1977, mostly by shooting, but he smothered his last victim before he was caught.

During his fifteen-year career as a serial killer, Kearney would leave the bodies of his victims on the side of the road or in a ravine near a highway, often dismembered, earning the UnSub the name The Freeway Killer. Kearney was reported as seen in the company of John Otis Lamay, who was found shot and dismembered on March 18, 1977. He had most likely been killed five days before that. Police visited Kearney and interrogated him about his relationship with Lamay, and he remained a suspect in Lamay’s death. Nineteen days later, Kearney met his final victim, Merle "Hondo" Chance, whom he smothered, then after death, violated his corpse, as he did with his other victims, and then dumped Chance's body off Angeles Crest Highway in the Los Angeles Forest National City north of the city. A warrant was issued for Kearney's arrest, and he and Hill fled to El Paso, Texas. Convinced by his family to turn himself in, Kearney returned to California and was arrested at the Riverside County Sheriff's Office. He confessed to his twenty-five known victims and another seven for which there was not enough evidence to confirm. The Freeway Killer was sent to the same facility at which the I-5 Strangler was incarcerated and met his end.

California may be known for its highways. Indeed, the car culture that is prevalent in Southern California is a staple of popular culture. This may also explain why a second individual was nicknamed "The Freeway Killer” in the Golden State. He was also known as "The Freeway Strangler," showing no matter how he was identified, killer or strangler, it was the freeway that was the mark of his activity.

Thirteen-year-old Thomas Glen Lundgren left his parents’ house in Reseda in the San Fernando Valley on the afternoon of May 28, 1979. He had told friends he was meeting a man at a nearby skate park to take photos for a skateboarding magazine. His body was later found in Agoura Hills, sixteen miles down the 101. He had been stabbed and strangled. He was the first of the twenty-one known victims of the Freeway Killer, named by the media as such as his victims were often found a distance from where they had been taken and were discovered near freeways, such as the Ventura Freeway, the 101, State Route 99, and the Ortega Highway. Seventeen-year-old Mark Duane Shelton went missing from Beach Boulevard, California Route 39 in Huntington Beach in Orange County on August 4 and was found many miles away in San Bernadino County on August 11. Once or twice a month, the bodies of young men between thirteen and twenty would be found near a highway in Southern California.

On June 11, 1980, police witnessed a man named William Bonin initially attempting to lure young men into his van and then found him assaulting a teenage boy inside the van at a service station off the Hollywood Freeway. Bonin was arrested for assaulting a minor, but it was what police discovered in the van that made them realize they might have found a serial criminal. Knives, ropes, restraining devices, and a tire iron that matched the wound on some of the Freeway Killer's victims indicated that Bonin was the Freeway Killer. His girlfriend indicated after he was arrested that he was the Freeway Killer. What was fascinating about Bonin was that most serial killers work alone. He had four accomplices who would occasionally work with him as he hunted young men for sex and murder, all of whom were arrested after Bonin, and all of whom agreed to turn state evidence against the man known as the Freeway killer.

Bonin stood trial for his crimes, was found guilty, and sentenced to death. He spent fourteen years on death row until he was executed by lethal injection on February 23, 1996, at the age of 49. Not only were his murders cruel, violent, and horrifying, but he remained unrepentant and showed no remorse. Whereas California celebrates the freeway as part of its history and a symbol of freedom of movement and the ability to go anywhere in the state, a means of connecting the beach to the mountains to the city to the desert, Bonin shows how he used freeways to commit his evil acts. He picked up his victims and used the freeways to move them into isolated locations; he was able to avoid detection by taking bodies to other counties and leaving them by the freeway. The anonymity and freedom of movement are what allowed the Freeway Killer to earn his name.

A third Californian in the seventies earned the title of “The Freeway Killer.” Like the other two serial killers with the moniker, the third Freeway Killer is believed to have exclusively killed young men and boys, using the freeway in the same manner as the other two, to isolate victims and as a place to leave the bodies. Between 1971 and 1983, police believe this Freeway Killer murdered 67 men and boys. On October 5, 1971, police discovered the body of a thirty-year-old man next to the Ortega Highway. The body was in a state of decomposition, so police did not initially suspect foul play, but as more bodies were discovered, it was thought this man was the first victim of the man who came to be called The Freeway Killer.

By January 1975, a total of fourteen murders were thought to be the work of The Freeway Killer; bodies were found next to highways in four different counties in California. The killer seemed to stop killing for sixteen months, starting in December 1976, but in April 1978, the body of an eighteen-year-old marine was found beside a freeway on-ramp in Anaheim, followed by the body of a twenty-three-year-old found near a San Diego freeway two months later, stabbed and showing evidence of having been pushed out of a vehicle traveling at a high rate of speed.

The Freeway Killer’s murders continued on a regular basis until May 14, 1983, when two California Highway Patrol Officers, driving down the five, witnessed a Toyota Celica driving erratically. They pulled the car over on suspicion of a DUI. The passenger was bound and dead. The driver was Randy Kraft, the man who was the Freeway Killer, caught, appropriately enough, on a Freeway.

Kraft was arrested, put on trial, convicted, and sentenced to death. He still sits on death row at San Quentin State Penitentiary in California.

PART FOUR:

I have thus far shared with you several disturbing stories of serial killers linked to highways and freeways, and often named for those roadways which they travel, prey upon, and leave their victims. I have one last one for you.

On December 7, 1983, a hunter in the woods along I-40 in Illinois came across a partially decomposed body, partially buried body. Police were called, and the victim was identified as a seventeen-year-old who had been hitchhiking from California back to Indiana and had gone missing sometime in March. It was the work of The Interstate Killer, also known as the Highway Killer, a serial killer who preyed the I-40 corridor in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Kentucky and was responsible for at least twenty-one murders. His two media-granted names were because his victims were all discovered in locations near the highway, often the I-40.

On September 30, Larry Eyler was arrested in Lowell, Indiana, for a routine traffic violation. Police discovered a young hitchhiker in the car, and the two were detained and questioned about their relationship, as police feared Eyler had been soliciting the young man for sex. Police found a knife in the car with blood on the handle, his shoes and tires matched prints found near the Interstate Killer’s victims. The two were released, but Eyler was now on police radar, and they received a warrant to enter and search Eyler’s home for evidence that he may be the Interstate Killer.

A judge ruled the evidence inadmissible due to a lack of probable cause to search his vehicle in the first place, and Eyler was freed. He proceeded to kill another victim and was subsequently arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. He died in prison in 1994.

The Interstate Killer, like the three Freeway Killers, like the I-70 Killer and the I-70 Strangler, all used the Federal and state highway systems to find victims, avoid detection, transport bodies, and dispose of remains. This remarkable achievement of planning and engineering had the unintended effect of empowering serial killers and allowing them to carry out their crimes more effectively and longer than perhaps they would have been able to.

One reason that highway killers may be overlooked is that their victims are also overlooked: sex workers, runaways, drifters, homeless, and gay hustlers.  Often, the assumption by law enforcement was if an individual from one of these groups is reported missing, it’s because they had “moved on” to another city, not because they had fallen victim to a horrible fate.

In 2009, the FBI announced the formation of the Highway Serial Killers Initiative (or HSKI for short). The HSKI was tasked with investigating and catching killers who dumped bodies near highways, on the assumption that they might be mobile killers, able to carry on their work through anonymity and moving from jurisdiction to jurisdiction without police connecting the dots. One of the first things the HSKI did was release a map of where bodies had been found near highways. The bodies tended to cluster around places of connection of Interstate Highways: Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, Nashville, Indianapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, which seems to bear out the contention that there is an active group of mobile serial killers. In its first year, HSKI was able to solve twenty-five murders carried out by three separate truck drivers. As of this recording, at least twenty-five or more former truckers are serving time for serial murder. And while truckers are the backbone of the transportation of goods in America and the knights of the road, and we thank and appreciate them for working the long and lonely hours, the job does provide good cover for serial murderers. While there may not be an epidemic of serial killers on America’s freeways, there certainly are some sociopaths and psychopaths using the highways to kill and move on.

None of this suggests that trucks, truckers, or highways are a danger to us all. You are far more likely to be hurt in an accident than by a serial killer on America's highways, and you are far more likely to be helped by a trucker than any need to fear them. But to look at the HSKI map is to see a larger pattern of freeways and highways providing a hunting ground where one is less likely to be caught.

Peter T. Kilborn writes, “Fed by the prosperity of the last decade, the 46,567-mile network of limited access roads that make up the Interstate System is a linear economy-on-wheels, a distinct and self-sustaining 51st state, in a sense, that generates life and commerce.”  The fifty-first state is a wonderful one that encompasses all states, allows freedom, and allows for a great deal of commerce. From the food on store shelves to toys, books, clothes, and cars and trucks – it is the highways that bring our goods and supplies to the places we buy them. The highways have been the gift that keeps giving to our economy and culture. But they are also a dark path. The fifty-first state, like all states, has its dark paths and dangerous people, so please drive safe and be careful.

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I'm MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with our engineer and creative director, Dom Purdie. Kevin Wetmore prepared this story for us; big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.

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Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of the world with me. Until next time, good night.