Long haul, p.2
Long Haul, page 2
Mike poured himself into being a chef. “I’m a fisherman, I’d fish every day as a kid, so my favorite cooking was ocean-to-table, any fish dish.”
There was a job at Racks Fish House and Oyster Bar in Delray Beach. Then a couple more restaurant roles, including Sun, Surf, Sand, an upscale place in Fort Lauderdale. But Mike began to suffer, badly, from gout, which he was genetically predisposed to. It was painful; he couldn’t walk, couldn’t be on his feet. He started to call in sick even on busy Friday nights, not something that went over well in the restaurant business. Mike knew his health was becoming a burden not only to him but to his bosses and his coworkers. The money a new chef earned wasn’t that great to begin with, and now that money was drying up. Mike had bills to pay. He was broke. He needed cash, and he needed to be off his feet.
“But why trucking?” I asked.
Mike told me he wasn’t an office guy; he had never been that guy in the cubicle. “I’m a car enthusiast, gearhead; so was my father. We always had dirt bikes, go-karts; we considered these our toys. I always thought trucks were cool.”
Mike started researching online to learn what he had to do to get a CDL, a commercial driver’s license. “I had no money, I sold my motorcycle to get my CDL. My mom spotted me seven hundred dollars the first time I even went out on the road. I chose a training school that was ten minutes from my house. They didn’t even teach me how to disconnect a trailer. My school let you take the test when you felt you were ready as long as you met a minimum of three days on each of the required exercises—backing up, offset or parallel parking, alley dock. There were three written tests at the DMV, then a DOT physical, then a trip back to DMV to get my license. Start to finish, it was about three weeks,” Mike told me.
That’s not much, I thought, for being allowed to pilot tons of steel on wheels across our nation’s highways.
Then the job search began. One day, Mike was on his laptop and found a site for new CDL drivers looking for work. Yet what he mostly saw there were guys complaining that a newbie driver had to start out at one of the major companies, and those places could be brutal to work for and not great in the pay department. This is shitty, Mike thought. But one guy on the site posted that he worked for a small company out of Chicago called Ox and Eagle. That piqued Mike’s interest. He messaged the guy and got a response.
“How much do you want to make? What do you make now?” the man asked Mike. It turned out this guy was the lead dispatcher for Ox and Eagle. Pretty quickly, Mike was introduced to Andrei, Ox and Eagle’s owner. After a long phone conversation, Andrei told Mike, “I’ll pay for your flight to Chicago.”
His friends thought he was crazy.
“What is this company?” Mike’s friends asked him. “Are you leaving Florida for Chicago in the middle of winter?” Mike’s mom even had a private investigator check it out.
Andrei was supposed to pick Mike up at the airport, but he got stuck in a business meeting. No big deal for Andrei, who told Mike he’d pay for the Uber ride to a drug-testing place to start the hiring process. When Mike arrived at the testing site, they asked him for four hundred dollars. Andrei paid this fee over the phone, and Mike was impressed. “I felt better,” Mike said.
Finally, Mike met Andrei at his office. He offered Mike coffee, among other things. “Are you hungry? Here’s the keys to my Mercedes—go explore Chicago, get something to eat while you wait for your driver trainer to arrive.” Now Mike was really impressed. He called his friends to tell them he was holding the keys to the boss’s Mercedes.
Mike’s trainer—the presumably seasoned driver selected to impart all things trucking—was twenty-one-year-old Noah. Noah had worked for Melton, a flatbed company with a specialized three-week course in their parking lot that truckers call the Harvard of flatbedding. Noah met some guys at this Melton school, made friends, got their numbers. “Then Noah meets this trucker that tells him to stop working at Melton,” Mike said, “that he can make double at Ox and Eagle. So now Noah has a bunch of these guys in a group chat that he recruited to work here—we talk to these guys all day on the phone while driving. In fact, we all decided to meet in Austin where one of us lives. We had a great time. Great town.”
Mike knew why I was riding with him. I told him my interest in killer truckers had become a quest to learn more about culture, including Mike’s. I wanted to know what truckers did, how they worked, why they chose trucking in the first place. Mike was a young, relatively new trucker, so he was still trying to wrap his head around the culture. Mike shared an initial observation with me.
“A lot of truckers don’t have a place to live, no place to go; they live in the truck. It could explain why so many truckers can be rude to each other, heckling over the CB or at truck stops over parking spots. I have hobbies. I bought another motorcycle. I have a mother, my mother’s fiancé, my brother, my friends. Other guys, other truckers—they may have nothing.”
What Mike tried to tell me was that he had a life, a life with other people in it. A life outside his truck. Duly noted.
Noah decided to train Mike, the kid from Florida, in whiteout blizzard conditions in the Rocky Mountains of Montana and Wyoming. It was cruel and unusual punishment for Mike, who would never forget the heart-pounding, sweat-soaked days of simply trying not to die or kill anyone else. At the time, Mike didn’t know the difference between a flatbed on a truck and a flat note on a keyboard. His on-the-job training took place over the course of just six weeks. Then Mike was ready to drive on his own.
That was it. Trained. Mike joined the ranks of the one million semitruck drivers in the United States.
For the next seven weeks, Mike drove a truck belonging to some guy named Sergey. That too was a flatbed. Now it was my turn to be educated on what it took to drive, load, and off-load that kind of big rig.
For Mike, CDL school was just something he had to get through so he could start working and begin to really learn the job. He gave me a taste of his brake knowledge gleaned during his sojourn in the Rockies. “There’s an engine brake, called a Jake brake, and there’s a trailer brake. In the winter, if your trailer starts coming out from under you, a fishtail, most drivers will just slam on their Jake brakes, but what they should do is apply the trailer brake and then hit the gas—speed up—and then the trailer will straighten out.”
I hoped we wouldn’t need to do that.
“Then Andrei tells me he bought me a brand-new truck. He gives me an address in Kentucky to go pick up a new trailer for the truck.” Along with his new ride, Mike was given a new electronic tablet logbook and new straps and chains to secure his loads. “I drove that truck for eighty thousand miles last year. Then I traded trucks to add a bunk bed to the sleeper berth so I could start training new drivers. My buddy tells me he’s getting his CDL, so I trained him and kept this truck.”
Just like that, the student became the teacher. And Mike would provide my education during our week together on the road.
At this point, the Uber pulled into a large lot filled with big rigs in an industrial part of town. Mike directed the driver toward his assigned truck. It was dark except for an occasional overhead light, so all the chrome truck grilles that grimaced back at us looked alike to me. Mike spotted the truck number on the side of his rig. Bingo.
It was about three a.m., and Sunday had crept into Monday. Mike did a walk-around safety check before we entered the truck, and I tossed my bags up onto the top bunk in the sleeper berth. The time for talking was over. The time for sleeping was a few hours ago.
As Mike instructed, I pulled my bags back down from the top bunk and dropped them on the passenger seat—a drill I’d reverse in the morning and repeat twice each day. Then I removed my boots and slipped through a mesh magnetic closure curtain into the cramped, dark berth. I grabbed a handle on the bunk, planted one foot high on a small countertop, and hoisted myself up into the top bunk. Mercifully, there was a pillow—lumpy, with no pillowcase, but a pillow. There was also a towel-size paper-thin blue blanket that I attempted to draw up and around at least part of me against the Chicago night chill in the truck.
The alarm was set for six a.m.
Chapter 2
The FBI Crime Analyst
“Dump sites, weapons used, bindings used, the place or position in which the victim’s body was found—was the body in water? A culvert? Was the body mutilated or sexually abused?” Catherine DeVane recited the commonalities assessed by crime analysts across a spectrum of murders. Commonalities that connect the dots that form a line that points to a serial killer.
Catherine rattled off the kinds of things that constitute commonalities in terms of the offenders. That’s where the bindings, the weapons, the dump sites, the proximity to water all come into play.
Catherine knows. She’s led the FBI Highway Serial Killings Initiative for seventeen years. She’s a crime analyst in Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) 4, based in the Critical Incident Response Group in Quantico, Virginia. The HSK team, with the help of data entered by police departments around the nation, helps agencies match the commonalities across the crime scenes and the victims and hopefully match the crime to a killer. There are 850 cases in the HSK Initiative. That’s the number of murders that the FBI believes long-haul truckers have committed.
Catherine grew up in a small town in east Texas. She never envisioned doing what she does or seeing what she sees—“the worst of the worst,” as she calls it. Catherine can eat a salad at her desk while poring over crime scene images of grisly slaughter. She’s learned to “compartmentalize” what she sees on her computer screen, but it’s not easy.
For example, how do you compartmentalize the evil that took place in Bruce Mendenhall’s killing chamber?
Nashville Metro PD homicide detective Pat Postiglione1 caught up with long-hauler Bruce Mendenhall sitting in his vehicle at a Nashville, Tennessee, truck stop.
The veteran detective asked Mendenhall, “Are you the person we’ve been looking for?”
Mendenhall looked at the detective, shrugged, and responded, “If you say so.”
Illinois-based Bruce D. Mendenhall2 was arrested at the same truck stop where he murdered twenty-five-year-old Sarah Nicole Hulbert in 2007. In court, prosecutors described the cab of his truck as a “killing chamber”; from it, investigators recovered “a rifle, a nightstick, tape, handcuffs, latex gloves, sex toys, and a bag of bloody clothing” with traces of the DNA of five different women. Mendenhall, who liked to shoot his victims in the head after he wrapped them in plastic and duct tape, received life sentences for murdering two women, one whose naked corpse was discovered tossed in a garbage can at the same Nashville stop where he was arrested. But he had more victims.
After he was busted, Bruce confessed to similar murders across different states. He told detectives he had murdered six women near truck stops in Tennessee, Indiana, Georgia, and Alabama. He was also connected to the killing of Carma Purpura, a thirty-one-year-old mother of two who had been missing since 2007 and was last seen at a Flying J truck stop in south Indianapolis, Indiana. Her remains weren’t found and identified until August 2011. Carma couldn’t point the police to Mendenhall, but her belongings could. Her bloody clothing, her ATM card, and her cell phone were in Bruce’s truck. DNA testing confirmed the blood belonged to someone related to Carma’s parents, which helped confirm the belongings were hers.
In 2010, Mendenhall was convicted of the first-degree murder of Hulbert and sentenced to life. While in prison, Mendenhall told two inmates he’d pay them to kill three witnesses who were going to testify against him. That scheme tacked thirty additional years to his sentence.
Mendenhall slaughtered Samantha Winters too. Her naked body was found in a trash can at a truck stop in Lebanon, Tennessee, on June 6, 2007. Like the others, Samantha had also died of gunshot wounds from Bruce’s .22-caliber pistol. In 2018, Mendenhall was found guilty of Samantha’s murder. He was convicted of first-degree murder and of the abuse of a corpse, which meant another life sentence for the murder and a two-year term for the abuse.
After a decade behind bars, Mendenhall was transferred from Tennessee to Indiana to finally stand trial for killing Carma, one more of at least nine of his alleged victims. His own DNA tied Bruce to Carma, as did the blood spatter and the knife inside his truck cab.
The police suspected Mendenhall in two or three other murders, but he couldn’t have committed the hundreds of other unsolved cases in the HSK files, certainly not the ones in areas that Mendenhall was nowhere near at the time. His killing chamber held the answers to a lot of mysteries, but it couldn’t solve them all.
The FBI publicly acknowledged the HSK in 2009. They had no choice—there were too many bodies across too many jurisdictions and not enough answers. There was a map of the murders linked to the initiative with red dots that signified bodies discovered along America’s highways. While there were red dots everywhere on this map, if you stared at it long enough, you’d see it—a horizontal trail across the south-central United States. That line was Interstate 40. I-40 ran from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Barstow, California. And those red dots, like blood spatter, ran through places like Raleigh, Nashville, Memphis, Little Rock, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Albuquerque, and Flagstaff.
BAU 4 is staffed by supervisory special agents, crime analysts, and major case specialists, but the team that connects the HSK dots from within a special database are entirely crime analysts—no badges, no guns. This work requires different tools: computer programs, brainpower, and experience. Over 850 of the multitude of violent crimes in the FBI’s ViCAP database are murders that fit the HSK’s criteria: female victims of opportunity, close to the highway, often near rest stops, and dumped close to the road.
Many of these cases are considered solved, but most of them—hundreds—are not.
Catherine shared with me the two types of offenders she sees in her cases. There are those who want to “control life and death,” who want to “feel the power of controlling the outcome.” These are killers who take their time, who mutilate and sexually abuse their victims before ending their lives.
Then there are the killers who, as Catherine said, “Don’t want to have sex—they just want to kill someone.” Those murderers kill faster.
And there is this: Many of these cases involve what Catherine calls “multiple serials.” That means there are several killers who are each personally responsible for committing more than one of the murders.
Let me say that again: There is enough evidence of similarities among different clusters of killings for the FBI to say with confidence that there are multiple homicidal maniacs on our nation’s highways.
I asked how many potential suspects HSK was looking at—how many truckers wanted to control life and death or just simply kill someone?
The FBI says it’s 450.
Yet there’s more to Catherine’s commonalities than those related to offenders. The victims provide their own clues to analysts. This is the evolving field of victimology, and it is particularly suited to solve these killings. Catherine and I will dive deeper into victimology later. The ViCAP database relies on victimology more and more to identify murders that look alike and therefore might be the work of the same person. If such similarities are present, investigators focus on the victim characteristics in each distinct killing cluster. It’s those victim characteristics that, in death, give those women a voice, maybe for the first time in their abbreviated lives. Together, a collective chorus can cry out, We were killed by the same man.
That happened again while I was writing this book. This time, a victim’s remains gave the police the name of the person who killed her. Rebecca Landrith, forty-seven, had worked as a model, had been a finalist for Miss Manhattan in 2014, and was a talented violinist. Her killer’s name, cell phone number, and email address were on a note in her jacket pocket when her body was discovered in a snowbank near the Mile Run interchange off I-80 in Pennsylvania on February 7, 2021.
That much identifying information is seldom found on a victim; usually the police have no idea at first who the killer is. This time, they had no idea who Rebecca was. She had no ID on her. Police used her fingerprints to identify her.
It took just three days3 from the discovery of Rebecca’s body to find and arrest Tracy Ray Rollins Jr., age thirty. Based on the ejected shell casings and human biological evidence recovered, police determined that Rollins had shot Rebecca twenty-six times when she was inside the sleeper berth of his truck. Security video placed Rollins and Rebecca together on February 4, 2021, at the Pilot Travel Center in Franksville, Wisconsin. On February 6, the trucker and his victim were seen again on video at another Pilot in Austintown, Ohio. The next day, Rebecca was dead.
Rebecca’s family showed up in court for Rollins’s sentencing. Her mother had some words for the judge. “My daughter was brutally murdered and discarded like a piece of garbage,” she said. “You can’t replace a child.”
Rebecca’s mother was right—we can’t replace any of the victims in the FBI’s HSK Initiative. But just maybe, we can learn how to reduce their numbers. That’s what the HSK is about.
Long-haul truckers killing women along our interstates isn’t some new phenomenon. In fact, the FBI has evidence of multiple highway serial killings dating back to at least the mid-1990s. And those are just the cases the FBI knows about. The Bureau is certain there are even more. It really wasn’t until after the terror attacks of 9/11—after the entire FBI came up for air—that the HSK gained momentum, and that wasn’t until late 2003. The fact that hundreds of cases, solved and unsolved, dating back decades qualify for inclusion in this initiative means that history keeps repeating itself.
That’s why it’s worth looking at some of the oldest cases in the initiative, cases that exemplify what victimology is all about—cases like the Redhead Murders.
