New book lifts the lid on terrifying phenomenon with truckers responsible for 850 highway murders

• Truckers have killed at least 850 people in the past few decades
• Some of America’s most notorious killers have been truckers 

A new book has offered a terrifying glimpse into the world of America’s serial killer truck drivers who use their nomadic lifestyle to evade law enforcement.  

Truckers have committed 850 murders along US highways in the past few decades, according to Frank Figliuzzi’s book Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers. 

Figliuzzi says truckers’ jobs allow them to ‘grab a victim in one jurisdiction, kill them in a second jurisdiction, dump their body in a third jurisdiction – and be on their way before anyone has figured anything out’. 

Some of America’s most notorious serial killers have been truckers, like Robert Ben Rhoades, known as the ‘Truck Stop Killer’ who built a torture chamber in the rear of his semi. 

Over 15 years Rhoades cruised the US, kidnapping, torturing and killing 50 suspected victims before he was caught. 

Figliuzzi, 61, from Houston, spent 2,000 miles with a young trucker, sleeping in his cab to learn about the subculture. 

He told The Guardian: ‘I’m quite careful to point out that we’re talking here a tiny fraction of long-haul truckers that actually give other truckers a bad name.’

But he said the job both appeals to a certain type of personality that may be predisposed to murder, and also exacerbates sociopathic tendencies. 

He told The Guardian: ‘A certain type of personality might be attracted to long-haul trucking because it is isolated and they’re perfectly fine with that and the lack of engagement with others.

‘But in the same vein there’s a thing that happens in years of exposure to trucking that causes clinical depression – incredibly sedentary lifestyle, incredibly bad diets. I tried very hard that week but inevitably it’s tough to get something healthy in truck stop places and food diners.’

Either way, he said that the phenomenon of trucker killers cannot be ignored. 

He writes: ‘Part cowboy, part fighter pilot, and part hermit, long-haul truckers glide along the edge of a certain seam in the fabric of our society – the seam that separates their reality from ours. Killer truckers exploit that seam.’

The issue of killer truckers became so bad that the FBI set up a special unit, the Highway Serial Killings (HSK) Initiative, to hunt down and arrest the perpetrators. 

As a result of increased efforts, twenty-five long-haul truckers are currently serving in time in prison for multiple homicides. 

But the crimes are still occurring today and almost all of their victims are vulnerable, sex-trafficked women. 

One of the most shocking, notorious cases that Figliuzzi reviews in his book was Rhoades, the Truck Stop Killer. 

Rhoades, described by authorities as a sadistic killer, specifically targeted runaway girls and kept them in a specially designed torture chamber in the back of his truck cab for weeks at a time before dumping their bodies. 

One of his victims was 14-year-old Regina Walters, a runaway from Pasadena, Texas.

She disappeared in February 1990 with an 18-year-old boyfriend who told friends they planned to hitchhike to Mexico. Her body was found months later at an abandoned farm in Illinois. Her companion has never been located.

A horrifying final picture of Walters shows her with a shaved head, forced into a black dress and high heels, looking terrified of Rhoades behind the camera. 

Police later found torture devices and photos of a Walters handcuffed and shackled and in various poses at a barn.

She had been strangled with bailing wire attached to a piece of lumber.