CRIME HUNTER: New book pulls back curtain on trucker serial killers

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America has never been a sedentary place – physically or psychologically.

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Anxious, restless and always, always on the move crisscrossing the Great Plains, Dixie and up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Always looking for the next thing, the next adventure, or desperately chasing elusive hope.

But the highways and byways can also be laden with murderous landmines and unimaginable horrors, a homicidal skidmark on Americans’ love of the open road.

Now, a new book pulls back the curtain on the country’s plethora of serial killer truck drivers.

Former FBI agent Frank Figliuzzi’s true crime book, Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers, claims Interstate truckers have committed 850 murders along American roads over the past 40 years.

“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,” he recently told The Guardian.

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“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 – an incredibly sedentary lifestyle, incredibly bad diets. I tried very hard that week (he worked for a trucker as a teen) but inevitably it’s tough to get something healthy in truck stop places and food diners.”

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, cops in Los Angeles faced the same dilemma detectives are now up against when it comes to truck driver serial killers. At the time, at least five serial killers were hunting in southern California.

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A victim could be snatched in one jurisdiction, murdered in another and the corpse ditched miles away.

“(Truckers can) 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,” Figliuzzi said.

Among the most notorious of the big rig-driving killers is Robert Ben Rhoades. The press creatively gave him the moniker “Truck Stop Killer.”

At many Interstate truck stops, there is a bustling sex trade. Rhoades liked this and even built a torture chamber in the rear of his semi.

For more than 15 years between 1975 and 1990, Rhoades crisscrossed the U.S. During that time, he would kidnap, rape, torture and murder vulnerable women and girls. By the time he was captured, he had killed a suspected 50 victims.

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Other maniacs tackled by the book include Bruce Mendenhall, an Illinois trucker busted in 2007 by famed Nashville cold case Det. Pat Postigliano. Scouring a truck stop, the cop recognized Mendenhall’s rig.

Mendenhall was arrested for the Tennessee slaying of Sara Hulbert. He was later convicted of murdering three other women he picked up at lonely truck stops in Alabama, Indiana and Tennessee. He copped to five other murders.

For Canadian content, trucker Keith Jesperson raised the Maple Leaf. He also travelled the western U.S. raping and killing prostitutes at will. Jesperson eventually became known as the Happy Face Killer for the twisted notes he left in truck stops close to his crime scenes.

He murdered his girlfriend in 1995, and he was arrested and convicted of murdering eight women. Jesperson later boasted the real death tally was more than 160.

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Fat Joe Metheny was an obese killer who developed a taste for human flesh. During the 1990s, he murdered two prostitutes from truck stops, dismembered their bodies, then froze the severed parts.

Besides trucking, Fat Joe had a hamburger stand. He told cops he served the victims’ ground flesh in his burgers.

But when it came to pure evil, Robert Ben Rhoades was difficult to top for sheer depravity.

The sadistic killer targeted young girls who were runaways. After snatching them, he kept them in his torture chamber for weeks until he tired of them and fancied something new.

His final victim was a 14-year-old runaway from Pasadena, Texas named Regina Walters. She vanished in February 1990 with her 18-year-old boyfriend after the pair told pals they planned to hitchhike to Mexico.

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Months later, her naked body was found at an abandoned Illinois farm.

Cops recovered a mortifying final photo of the terrified teen. Her head was shaved and she had been forced into a black dress and high heels. Detectives later found torture devices and photos of Walters handcuffed and shackled in various poses at a barn.

The teen had been strangled with bailing wire attached to a piece of wood.

Rhoades was convicted of the murders and sentenced to life in prison.

Carnage along American highways became so bad that the FBI established a special task force called the Highway Serial Killings (HSK) Initiative, designed to bring killers to justice.

So far, 25 long-haul truckers have been caged for multiple homicides. Nearly all of the victims have been runaways or sex trafficking victims.

“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,” Figliuzzi said.

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun

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