Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  Hitchhiking was clearly the problem. The sheriff’s office issued a press release warning female college students against it. “Ten rapes, eight assaults with intent to commit rape, three incidents of indecent exposure, two kidnappings, and one incident of sex perversion,” it read. “That’s 23 cases in 1972 in the unincorporated area of Santa Cruz county—all connected with hitchhiking.” The police math was bad, but local newspapers began printing stories with titles like “Women Hitchhikers—Why Do They Do It?” The local underground newspaper ran a banner ad declaring “Women, it is no longer safe to hitchhike in this community.” The sheriff shifted the blame to the women themselves: “When women hitchhike,” he declared, “they are asking for a lot more than a ride.”

  Some groups tried to establish rules that would make the practice safer. An organization called Women Against Rape, or W.A.R., posted rape hotline phone numbers in public telephone booths and offered a list of hitchhiking suggestions like “Never hitch at night,” “Don’t sit in the rear of a two-door car,” “If the driver starts talking about sex, change the subject immediately,” and “Accept rides from people most like yourself—age, sex, ethnic and social background.” The university also weighed in, warning female students to stay in at night, or failing that, to hitchhike in pairs. It suggested they only take rides from cars with university parking decals.

  Writing about the murders in 1974, author Ward Damio declared it was “impossible not to think of the victims of Edmund Kemper while reading these instructions. . . . How many of these rules did they break?” The answer is practically none. Kemper was roughly the same age as his victims, with a similar ethnic and social background. He easily killed women who were hitching in pairs, he never propositioned his victims or gave any hint that he was a sex fiend, and he had a university parking decal.

  • • • • •

  “The old order of highway violence has been stood on its head,” declared Newsweek in February 1973. “Instead of the driver fearing the pickup, it is now the hitchhiker herself who runs by far the greater risk of being robbed, assaulted, abducted, murdered—or, most likely of all, raped.” The magazine declared violence against hitchers “a new and still unofficial category of crime.” That year, the Hitchhiker’s Field Manual noted: “At first, the driver was the victim of most hitchhiking crimes, but in the past few years the tables have turned, and most violence is directed toward the solicitor.” Author Paul DiMaggio downplayed the threat, however, pointing out that with more thumbers on the road, there were bound to be more crimes against them.

  But the media had embraced the cause. Reader’s Digest, early to the antihitching movement, had declared in 1970 that “police across the country indicate that the one common factor in many unsolved cases involving people found sexually molested and murdered along rural roads is that they ‘liked to hitchhike.’ ” By mid-1973, other voices were joining the chorus. Articles like “Hitchhiking Really Isn’t Cool!” (Seventeen), “Hitchhiking: The Deadly New Odds” (Good Housekeeping), and “Hitchhiking: Too Often the Last Ride” (Reader’s Digest) declared the practice unsafe. Police in San Diego began handing hitchers a pamphlet titled “Hitchhiking: Easy, Fun, Deadly.”

  Santa Cruz was quickly becoming exhibit A in the antihitching campaign. Reader’s Digest reported crime waves in Santa Cruz, Ann Arbor, Boston, Boulder, Berkeley, and San Diego, declaring, “In the case of a girl who hitchhikes, the odds against her reaching her destination unmolested are today literally no better than if she played Russian roulette.” Police regularly claimed there was little they could do about “highway violence.” “Why should we waste our time?” one detective told the magazine. “Most juries figure that if the kid put out her thumb, she was asking for it.”

  • • • • •

  As student volunteers in Santa Cruz organized search parties for Alice Liu and Rosalind Thorpe, another seemingly random murder occurred in the town. On the morning of February 13, 1973, a retired fisherman working in his garden was shot and killed by a man in a Chevy station wagon. A neighbor who saw the whole thing called the police and gave them a thorough description. Within hours, Herbert William Mullin was under arrest. Two days later, he was charged with the retired man’s murder, as well as the unsolved “drug” murders. Later, he would also be charged with killing the Los Gatos priest, the drifter on Highway 9, Mary Guilfoyle, the Cabrillo College hitchhiker, and four teenagers camped out in a forest lean-to outside of town. Herbert Mullin was responsible for much of the violence that had been haunting Santa Cruz—but not all of it.

  Raised in a conservative Santa Cruz home by deeply religious parents, Mullin had bounced back and forth between the straight and hippie worlds for a long time. He had completed Cabrillo College’s two-year program in civil highway technology, then switched to San Jose State to study Eastern religions instead. He started dropping acid and registered as a conscientious objector, but later reverted to conservatism and attempted to join the marines. He was rejected because he had been committed to mental hospitals multiple times. Back in Santa Cruz, he slid further and further into an insanity some said was drug-induced. His family, deeply concerned, attempted to find a place where he could receive long-term care, but under budget cuts enacted by Governor Ronald Reagan, who had been elected in 1967, mental hospitals across the state were closing. There was no room for someone semifunctional like Mullin. Living on his own, Mullin went off his meds. He told police that the voice of his father came to him periodically, ordering him to commit murder in order to avert an earthquake that would kill thousands. In October 1972, he began to obey.

  Mullin’s trial took place in July 1973. Prosecution and defense agreed that Mullin had committed the murders and that he was patently crazy. But the prosecution asserted that, crazy or not, he should be considered legally sane. Ultimately, the jury agreed. Mullin was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. It was some relief, but not total relief. Police didn’t believe that Mullin was responsible for any of the “Butcher murders.” The man they called “the Chopper” was still at large.

  • • • • •

  The day after Mullin’s arrest, two of Kemper’s fellow Division of Highways workers stumbled upon two headless bodies in the woods just off I-580 in Alameda County. Five days later, the bodies were identified as Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu. District attorney Pete Chang declared that Santa Cruz must be “the murder capital of the world.” A week later, over a thousand students and friends turned up on the UC Santa Cruz campus to attend a memorial service for the two young women.

  Ed Kemper had reached his breaking point. He was convinced he would be caught at any moment. In fact, police had already come to his house and taken his gun—they had been alerted to the fact that a convicted felon had bought a firearm. Kemper explained that his youth record had been expunged, but they confiscated the gun anyway, while they determined whether he could legally own it. To Kemper it seemed sinister. Perhaps they knew something. Perhaps they were just waiting to arrest him. He was certain he was going to be caught soon, but it wasn’t the prospect of being jailed that tormented him. It was the thought of his mother finding out what he had done. There was only one way to prevent that: he would have to kill her.

  At close to midnight on April 24, 1973, Officer Andrew Crain at the Santa Cruz Police Department got what he thought was a prank call. Someone in Pueblo, Colorado, wanted to talk to the officer investigating the coed killings. At first the caller wouldn’t give his name, but then he said he was Big Ed Kemper. Crain knew Big Ed. He told Kemper to call back; the detective assigned to the coed murders was home in bed. Kemper called back a couple hours later, collect, and another officer refused to accept the charges. Kemper called again at five a.m., rambling and begging the Santa Cruz cops to send someone to the Pueblo phone booth where he was and take him into custody. He gave the address and described the car he was driving. He rattled off its license plate number. Finally, an officer said they would send someone over.

  “I wish to
shit you would, really,” Kemper replied, “ ’cause I have over 200 rounds of ammo in the trunk and three guns. I don’t even want to go near it.” He told them he had been taking No-Doz and driving nonstop for two days straight, that there were eight dead people involved. The officers asked him to describe some of the victims. He described Rosalind Thorpe and Alice Liu. Then he told them that the last two victims had been his mother and one of her friends. The bodies were still in the house in Aptos. The police officers asked for the address. Kemper gave it to them, helpfully spelling the street name.

  “You see, what I’m saying is, there is a break somewhere,” he rambled. “I can’t tell you what’s wrong with me, you know. But I had this big thought, you know, everybody thinks everything is cool, and then I pick up and split and say fuck it, I’m just going to drive until I can’t drive anymore, and then I’m just going to open up, you know? Driving all the way out here, I’m reading about some clown out in Idaho doing it, some guy out in L.A. doing it, Jesus Christ, you know!” Santa Cruz police kept him rambling on until finally, to Kemper’s relief, some Pueblo officers arrived to arrest him.

  Once in custody, Kemper continued to confess, eagerly and thoroughly. He described each of the murders in graphic detail, down to the dismemberment and disposal of the bodies. He remembered everything his victims were wearing and described all the little effects—rings, wallets, ID cards—that he kept for as long as he dared. He speculated at length on his motives. He told police he had finally gotten around to what he had always wanted to do: killing his mother. He described bashing her head in with a hammer while she lay sleeping. He told them he had beheaded her, because “what’s good for my victims is good for my mother.” He said he had cut out her larynx and put it down the garbage disposal, but the contraption had spit it out: “This seemed appropriate,” he reportedly said, “as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over the years.” This lurid detail seems likely to be an embellishment for law enforcement’s benefit. Kemper had always liked cops.

  His mother called him Guy. His coworkers at the Division of Highways called him Forklift. And the citizens of Santa Cruz called him The Chopper. Giant Ed Kemper was docile as a kitten once arrested. Associated Press photo.

  Kemper was brought back to Santa Cruz, and he led police to several of his victims’ bodies. District Attorney Chang told the press that Big Ed blamed the murders on his victims. He never would have acted out his fantasies, he said, if it hadn’t been for “the availability of naive girls who were hitchhiking.”

  • • • • •

  To the road builders and highwaymen, the freeway meant economic growth founded on mobility. To the hippies, the freeway fulfilled a different fantasy: that the open road could lead to connection, community, and “finding yourself.” It provided a space in which they could act on their antimaterialist ideals—by sharing others’ cars rather than owning them—or at least engage in an informal economy, trading “gas, grass, or ass” for a ride. It was a stage for acting out human trust and easy exchanges with others. And, experienced in tandem with strangers, it was a place where they connected with the landscape and the nation.

  Throughout the seventies, crackdowns and attempts to criminalize hitchhiking were understood by the counterculture as “a means of harassing long-hairs,” to borrow words from the Hitchhiker’s Field Manual. Women were somewhat at risk of rape or worse, but the guidelines issued to help women stay safe were a sign of how invested youth were in maintaining their reinterpretation of automobility as a means of connection, not isolation. When hitchhiking died out, that reinterpretation died as well.

  An article in Mother Jones in 1976 was already proclaiming the end of an era. In “A Half Dozen Ways Things Were Better,” author Bruce Morgan contrasted the openness and political engagement of 1969 with the present. One of the ways in which the past was superior to the present was that “hitchhiking was a cinch.”

  “In a time with so many claiming to be kin, hitchhiking represented a real-life test of those abstract linkages,” Morgan wrote. “Lately people have gotten into protecting their own space, and that is bad news indeed for those who want to share it.”

  • • • • •

  With Forklift behind bars, the highways continued to get a bad rap. Hitchhiker murders were publicized throughout the seventies. As Kemper was on his killing spree, seven hitchhiking women disappeared near Santa Rosa, California; their murders have never been solved. Twenty-seven young boys—many of them picked up while hitching—were killed by Dean Corll in Houston and Pasadena in the early seventies. Six hitchhiking teenagers were murdered in three New Jersey counties in 1974, leading police in Dover County to start taking “young girl” hitchhikers into custody for their own safety. Donald Henry Gaskins, arrested and convicted in 1976, stalked Southern roads for hitchhikers and transients. As the decade progressed, Boston, Minneapolis, Boulder, Miami, and Los Angeles all reported outbreaks of crime against hitchers. As the theme song to the 1977 exploitation film went, “when you go thumbing a ride, you can never tell when you’ll Hitch Hike to Hell!”

  How dangerous was hitchhiking in reality? There are almost no studies of the question. The one actual piece of research was a study commissioned by the California Highway Patrol in 1974. California Crimes and Accidents Associated with Hitchhiking determined that hitching was a factor in only 0.63 percent of reported crimes. Statistically, it was hardly more dangerous than walking down the street. Nevertheless, public fear continued to grow. By the end of the seventies, hitchhiking was largely considered a foolhardy act. In 1979, when Rutgers University women’s groups protested the campus police practice of handing women who were walking alone at night a card that read “If I were a rapist, you’d be in trouble,” the cops stopped handing out the cards—except to women seen hitchhiking. Of course, women weren’t the only potential victims. As cops in New Jersey were trying to scare hitchhiking women, young men soliciting rides in Orange County, California, were being stalked by the first person to be branded the “Freeway Killer” by the media. The “Freeway Killer,” in fact, turned out to be three different men—Patrick Kearney, Randy Kraft, and William Bonin—all of whom used Southern California’s interstates to find murder victims. As with Herbert Mullin and Ed Kemper in Santa Cruz, police had a hard time sorting out whose victims were whose.

  Ed Kemper went on trial in November 1973. The courtroom was packed, many of its seats filled with young women the age of Kemper’s victims, prompting the judge to order bailiffs to kick some spectators out. “I’d be much happier if this room weren’t full of teenage girls,” he noted dryly. But perhaps the teenagers sensed that they were seeing the end of an era. Big Ed might be locked up for life, but the open road would never be the same.

  Kemper’s lengthy confessions made things easy on the prosecution at his trial. Even his attorney’s attempt to have him declared insane lacked vigor. The jury took only five hours to find Forklift guilty—a verdict his own lawyer called “reasonable enough.” Kemper, sentenced to life in prison, spent years trying to have himself lobotomized to end his homicidal urges.

  Kemper and his fellow hitchhiker-killers didn’t just murder young women. They helped kill a vision of the freeway as a place for new forms of human connection. They were aided in that murder by the public’s general unease about the world the highways were making. As freeways dismembered the landscape, it became easy to believe they were haunted by malevolent murderers like “the Chopper.” Today, hitchhiking is unthinkable for most people. Not long ago, I was driving in the Midwest with my daughter. Accelerating down an interstate on-ramp, we passed a scruffy bearded man in jeans and a work shirt, a cardboard sign in his hand.

  “Is that a hitchhiker?” my daughter cried. “I’ve never seen one before!”

  From the late seventies onward, the highway was increasingly seen as a place of isolation, hostility, and danger. Travelers took to the road with a new sense of vigilance. But when children began disappearing in Atlanta, the
nation would begin to see something city-dwellers had been facing for two decades. Highways were more than a place where the violent could find victims. They themselves were becoming murderers, and their victims were entire communities.

  Every major city from Boston to Los Angeles is festooned, draped—or is it strangled?—with ribbons of concrete.

  —NEW YORK TIMES, 1966

  The War on Black Children takes many forms. Homicide is only one aspect of the violence waged against the most defenseless segment of our society by individuals, institutions, and the economic reality of black life in America.

  —BLACK ENTERPRISE, 1981

  Highway construction and urban renewal transformed the nation’s cities. In Atlanta one-third of the city’s housing stock—the vast majority occupied by poor blacks—was demolished for freeways and urban renewal projects, including the stadium shown here. Courtesy National Archives (406G-5-42-66-124).

  3

  THE CRUELEST BLOW

  In October of 1979, Eula Birdsong was sitting in the balmy Southern fall sun when Yusef Bell ran by. Nine-year-old Yusef was a nice boy, smart and friendly and respectful to elderly folks like her—not at all like a lot of the young hoodlums around Mechanicsville, the shabby Atlanta neighborhood where they lived. Eula often asked Yusef to do favors for her, and today she asked him to go to the store and get her some Bruton snuff . She offered him seventeen cents for the job. Yusef agreed, and headed out to the Reese Grocery Store on McDaniel Street.