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Man Welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with Frank Figlusey. His book is called Long Haul. Will tell you where you can get it in a moment, Frank, you highlight on the FBI's Highway Serial Killings initiative. What caused them to start it?
A great question. I go into the birth of the initiative deeply in the book. As is often the case, George, the FBI responds to a need. They don't necessarily have that great original idea, but rather sometimes they need to get slapped about the head and shoulders and dragged to the law enforcement problem before they've realized they can support it.
In this case, it was Oklahoma. It was a female crime analyst back in late nineties, late nineties, and she starts realizing that she's got bodies piling up, young women from Oklahoma, their bodies turning up in other states. And there's two, and there's three, and there's four, and in a manner of months, she's got ten, as she calls them, her girls, women from Oklahoma turning up dead in other states, and they are linked to sex trafficking, and she pounds
her fist on the table. This is years ago now, and it's not necessarily the case in many law enforcement agencies that the woman crime analyst was given a lot of credence and she's pounding her fists on the desk and she's saying, we've got a problem. It's truckers, it's sex trafficking, it's dead bodies. And finally she was allowed
to have a meeting. She put out a teletype to law enforcement agencies and homicide detectives across the country, thinking, if I have a meeting, maybe we'll get I don't know ten twelve detectives showing up. Well, it was in the dozens. They showed up and said we have cases like this too. Invited the FBI and she said you have to see this meeting. You have to see these cases. And they showed up and they said, you're right. This absolutely qualifies as serial killings and you can count us in.
And that was the birth of the FBI's Highway Serial Killings Initiative. It was never publicly acknowledged until two thousand and nine when they needed the public help. There were too many killings and too many unsolved killings to not enlist the help of the public.
Where were the bodies found? Generally Frank.
So, in order to qualify for the HSK initiative at the FBI, you've got to meet a couple of standards. One is, you've got a female victim that's been taken or last seen from or close proximity to an interstate highway. And then the dump site has to be the same close proximity to an interstate highway. If you have those three things email victim last seen alive at or near an interstate highway, and dumped at or near an interstate highway,
you've qualified for the initiative. That's and that's where these bodies are being found. And then you know, I get deep in the book George into what's called victimology and then all of the study of the crime scene. So was the body near water, was she partially clothed or nude? Was she a shot and or strangled? Was she ripped before before death or after death? All all of this goes into connecting the dots within the FBI's database.
You had one story of a police officer who found a woman in a cab shackled in there with fishhooks.
This is the case of Robert Van Rhodes and a state trooper in Casa Grande off It ten between Phoenix and Tucson. A rig with its hazard light flashing, gets out of his car, strolls up to the cab of
the truck, and here's a woman screaming inside. She is literally shackled, naked except for buzzy bathroom slippers, and she has been kidnapped and would have been the next victim of Robert Ben Rhodes, who is good for at least fifty five zero murders, including fourteen year old Regina Walters, who he took as a hitchhiker outside of Houston, tortured her for weeks and raped her in times and places of his choosing, and killed her in an abandoned farmhouse
in Illinois. In fact, Regina Walter's photograph, which is the last photo of her taken alive by Rhodes, is perhaps the most ghastly photo I have ever seen. I've seen a lot in twenty five years in the FBI. Blood, guts, gore, that's not what this photo is about. She's fully clothed in this photo, but she's clothed in a black dress and high heels that he bought and forced her to wear. He cut her hair short and she is pleading for her life in this photo. It's one of the worst photos I've ever seen.
He even taunted her father, didn't he.
He had the audacity to anonymously call Regina's father and say, I made some changes. I cut her hair. And in fact, you can see in this photo that he did do that. And you know, the crime scene produced, as is usually the case, some fantastic forensic evidence in terms of looking for that signature of the killer, and the FBI agent who worked in this case said he found that signature at Regina's dump site, which was that her pubic hair had been shaven after death.
After death, when the police officer on the other case spotted the woman in the cab, Where was Rhodes? How did they find him?
Well?
Roads, Roads has finally been caught. He had a traveling torture chamber that he had rigged up in his truck and he was imprisoned. He will die in prison, and he is not cooperative with law enforcement at all. But they eventually caught up with him because he had committed so many crimes that they began to find fingerprints DNA in common and they and the police eventually caught up with it.
Was a movie called The Vanishing with I believe it was key for Sutherland.
You remember that one I do remember, yeah, I do.
About a sicker long haul truck driver who abducted his wife at a convenience store. So these guys are all over the place.
Well, it's you know, again, it's a shame because again we're talking about a tiny fraction of long haul truckers that are doing this. But if I get deep into the three subcultures in my book Long Haul Trucking, Sex, trafficking, victims and crime Analysts, I learn a whole lot about the unhealthy nature of trucking, and I actually offer some some changes to be made near the end of the book at all three of these areas. But the sedentary lifestyle,
the healthy diet. Even in my short time on the road, you have to work very hard to eat healthy, and you're unlikely to get that. At the truck stop convenience store, we did a lot of cooking in the cab. By the way, the trucker I rode with actually was a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, and we had some We cooked some mighty fine meals right in the truck that were very healthy.
Do they live in the trucks? Basically? Don't they?
Yeah, I mean it's your home. I slept in the top bunk of the sleeper berth. I won't get into detail about answering nature's call in the truck.
And you know, I'm an older guy, so the bladder starts to go and you you're not necessarily stopping time. Time is everything to a trucker, as they know.
But I learned a lot. I mean the business side of things, things like the discounts that trucking companies get with certain truck stop companies, and you know, whether you're a TA guy or a love guy at Walmart, the relationship between truckers and Walmart, and the parking spaces and the trucker app that tells you that you've got spots open at a trucks at a truck stop that you can sleep for the night in, and the free showers if you're part of the you know, the membership club,
and then what it takes to gas up, and the multiple tanks and over one thousand dollars filling up and watching that gauge on the on the tank going. All of this is in the book. If you're if you're saying, you know, I'm not really into the serial killing thing, but I've always wondered what goes on on the highway and that rig next to me. This book could be for you as well.
Absolutely. Now, is there a similar profile among these serial killers?
Yeah, you know, here's the thing. So the analysts confirmed that there's two kinds of serial killers, and this does not change much when you're shifting over to a trucker serial killer. But the two kinds are generally this. First, you have the killer who gets off on the power of life and death. This killer is about controlling the outcome and that means that he and it's almost always he is going to take longer to kill and that you know, we talked about Robert ben Rhoades grabbing Regina
Walters and raping and torturing her for weeks. This is how this goes. He's a control killer. So they are going to have sex with the victim. There's going to be abuse and torture. The second kind of serial killer is all about the killing. Sex is not a part of this or a primary reason, they will kill quickly, and for law enforcement that means you've got to move fast. The clock is.
Ticking generally, Frank, the victims are who hitchhikers.
The victims in the vast majority of these cases, George, are sex trafficking victims. They are being trafficked to truckers. And during my research, I spoke to women who had survived violent encounters with truckers. They had fallen into the trafficking trap. And just as there's commonalities that we're talking about kinds of serial killers, there are kinds of sex trafficking and kinds of victims. There's pimp controlled sex trafficking victims.
There's victims called outlaws and victims called renegades. I get deep into that those two don't work.
But the are they initially doing this though, because they want to.
So this varies. But there's a checklist that the experts have established in terms of street level trafficking, George, And even as I interviewed some victims, in my head, now having talked to the experts, I'm starting to check off that checklist of commonalities, because as different as these women were, they were the same and here's some of the commonalities. Early trauma at an early age, often unwanted sexual touching
or worse. Early drug use, often starting with marijuana but escalating quickly, often through an older sibling or older boyfriends series. A series of bad boyfriends is very common in this. And then once they switch to heavy drug use, the judgment goes out the window and everything is about getting the next fix and the rationalization of courses. Look, I'm already having sex. I might as well have sex for money.
And I'm here to tell you if you're thinking your listeners are thinking, Look, no young lady in my family, in my neighborhood, in my circle of friends, would ever fall prey to something like this. You're talking about somebody else. I'm here to tell you. I interviewed women, white girls with blue eyes, from the Midwest who went to college. One woman I interviewed was a preacher's daughter. If you think it can't happen to your young person, I would urge.
You to think again.
Generally, then how does the truck driver find.
Them so today, so years ago? And your trucker listeners will know this if they've been around a long time. The women would apply their trade, and their pimp would take them to the truck stop lot and they would work their trade there and the advertising would start on the CD radio. This is years ago now, and they had their own language. You know, anybody looking for commercial tonight that was sex for money. The truckers would say, I'm at this stop, I'm in the red house. The
red house is the red truck. This would go on like this, and quite frankly, the police would either look the other way or not show up at the truck stop. The truck stop companies would think, you know, we don't want to discourage this necessarily, We're not going to get involved in this. That was years ago. The game has moved now to online advertising. And I saw this when I was on the road because I deliberately looked for it.
And you'll see ads by women or by their pimps that say I am trucker friendly.
I'll come to you.
And this now happens. The transaction has agreed upon online or on the phone from that advertisement, and the young lady shows up either at the stop and gets in the truck, or even more likely these days, it happens at it's very close by motes or massage parlor where I think the girl is in even greater danger.
Are they aware of the serial killer truckers?
So the good news is that the law enforcement and social services organizations make a great effort to reach out and tell the young ladies that we've got a killer in the area. We suspect we have a serial killer here in our region. And even they distribute flyers with picture of a truck or.
What the guy might look like. That's been going.
On for a few years now, and that meets with some great success. You'll get some great intelligence from these girls. But here's the problem. That drug use factor, on top of mental illness, which if they didn't have when they started, they sure have after doing this for a while, fear of their pimp. All of these factors in to the point where their judgment goes out the windows. So yes, and they're clean and sober, do they know they're risking
their lives? Yes, when they're looking for that next fix and they're high on heroin or meth when they're doing the transaction, are they able to think of that safety and security?
No.
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