Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  As Roger Kibbe served his time for battery, Ray Biondi’s task force put together their murder case. They gathered behavioral evidence linking the crimes, but it was trace evidence linking victim Darcie Frackenpohl with Kibbe’s car that made it possible to get an indictment. Upon his April 1988 release from prison, Kibbe was promptly rearrested for the murder of Frackenpohl.

  The first hearing was held in the fall. The judge banned television cameras from the courtroom. He needn’t have bothered; the media showed little interest. Not that the public’s fascination with serial killers was flagging. In England that autumn, a celebration was being held on the centennial of the White-chapel murders. Vendors hawked Jack the Ripper T-shirts, mugs, and pins, while newspapers, books, and television specials recounted the murders. A B-movie called Jack’s Back was released, and a story collection called Ripper came out; “Jack the Ripper: He was the first” the cover declared. There was an extra-gory computer game called Jack the Ripper and, in pubs, a special, blood-red Ripper cocktail, so people could drink to the forefather of serial killers everywhere.

  The following year, Ted Bundy’s execution was front-page news across the nation.

  • • • • •

  After a series of delays, Roger Kibbe’s trial for the murder of Darcie Frackenpohl opened on February 14, 1991. That day, MGM Studios released the blockbuster hit The Silence of the Lambs. The Sacramento Bee hailed it as “the definitive slasher film.” Directed by Jonathan Demme and based on the 1988 novel by Thomas Harris, Silence was perhaps the most successful pop culture evocation of serial killing ever. The film creates a triangle between FBI cadet Clarice Starling and two serial killers: the “bad” killer Buffalo Bill, and the “good” killer, Hannibal Lecter. Buffalo Bill, who longs to be a woman, kidnaps women, starves them for several days, and skins them to make himself a “woman-suit.” Hannibal Lecter, now in prison, was the more civilized murderer: he simply ate his victims.

  Played with demonic glee by Anthony Hopkins, Hannibal the Cannibal immediately became a cultural icon. This serial killer was no monster, but a master of consumer culture; not simply a collector, but a connoisseur. A white-collar killer—he used to be a psychiatrist—Lecter is not only brilliant, but gracious and elegant, rising above his lowly prison circumstances. He makes drawings of the duomo in Florence, quotes Marcus Aurelius, recognizes that Clarice has a “good bag and cheap shoes.” He has the soul of an aesthete, and in prison he reaches out to collect the one thing available to him: Clarice Starling’s memories. In the film’s pivotal scenes, he offers her information that will help her track Buffalo Bill in exchange for her recollections of the miserable, hardscrabble childhood she has repressed to get ahead in the world. He savors her stories just as he once savored a victim’s liver, as he famously tells Clarice, with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. In comparison, poor, social-climbing Ted Bundy—the Safeway stockist—looks pitiably obvious in his attempts to ape highbrow tastes. Hannibal the Cannibal is no poser but the real deal: sophisticated, high-class, and educated. Audiences loved him for it. At the film’s end, he has escaped, and the final scene shows him following an obnoxious prison warden who has tormented him: viewers know another grisly meal is about to take place, and they can’t help but relish it too.

  Was it inevitable that the serial killer would metamorphose in the eighties from figure of repulsion to figure of adulation, from bogeyman to icon? Serial killing is, after all, a kind of greed: Jeffrey Dahmer fixating on his victim’s body parts, Ed Kemper hoarding his trinkets, Henry Lee Lucas piling up the confessions. Hannibal Lecter, too, is nothing if not greedy; “Thank you, Clarice,” he breathes when she finally yields up her most painful memory, the one for which the film is named, the one he was waiting for all along. His materialism verges on camp. “Love your suit!” he tells a desperate senator whose daughter is missing, in a line that always gets a laugh. Was embracing the serial killer just one more way to insist that greed was good?

  The year Silence hit theaters, Bret Easton Ellis published his widely reviled novel American Psycho. Its protagonist and narrator, yuppie Wall Street executive Patrick Bateman, spends much of the novel recounting his flashy, brand-name-obsessed lifestyle in exhaustive detail. He uses the same flat tone to describe the increasingly brutal murders he commits as the novel progresses—in fact the two merge. In one scene, for instance, he tortures a victim by making her watch a video of himself killing another woman: “I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit, a tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I’m kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl’s brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat.”

  Unpleasant as it is to read, American Psycho—like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street—was clearly intended as a satirical critique of eighties materialism. The controversy that exploded upon its publication—and reignited over the subsequent film adaptation—suggests that it may have been a little bit too close to the bone. Critics declared it “repulsive,” “revolting,” “garbage,” and “designer porn.” The author received death threats. The nation was more ready to accept a serial killer as hero than to contemplate the consequences of doing so.

  The Silence of the Lambs was not only a box-office smash hit; it won five Academy Awards. Host Billy Crystal was brought onto stage at the awards ceremony dressed up as Hannibal Lecter, demonstrating conclusively that it was no longer a bad thing to be identified with a serial murderer, as long as it was the classy kind. If the nation was fascinated by serial killers before, it was absolutely crazy about them now. “Somehow it has happened,” declared Joyce Carol Oates in a 1994 New York Review of Books essay, “that the ‘serial killer’ has become our debased, condemned, yet eerily glorified Noble Savage, the vestiges of the frontier spirit, the American isolato cruising interstate highways in van or pickup truck that will yield, should police have the opportunity to investigate, a shotgun, a semiautomatic rifle, quantities of ammunition and six-packs and junk food, possibly a decomposing female corpse in the rear.”

  I had to look up isolato when I read the piece. It means a person who is not just isolated, but out of step with the times or the culture. This seemed like the opposite of what Oates was saying. The serial killer in the nineties had become an antihero, “condemned yet eerily glorified,” but completely in-step with the times, not least for his unapologetic materialism.

  Bland, blue-collar Roger Reece Kibbe was the one who was out of step: an economic loser in an age that loved winners, he was getting no such glorified status. Even as the media couldn’t get enough about Hannibal and those they took to be his real-life counterparts, they were barely interested in the case of the I-5 Strangler. The Sacramento Bee ran intermittent stories about the trial in its Metro pages; outside Sacramento, it was barely covered at all. The hundreds of reporters who had jostled for seats at Ted Bundy’s trial were no-shows. An Associated Press reporter doggedly filed stories from court, but few newspapers picked them up.

  As Operation Desert Storm gripped the nation and California coped with a devastating drought, the trial of Roger Kibbe went stolidly on. The first soup kitchen in Citrus Heights opened as he sat in the courtroom, leading some to note that suburbanization often pushed the vulnerable into the ranks of the underclass. The trial took just over a month. In his closing statement, the prosecutor told the jury that Kibbe’s actions were “a road map of the most repugnant behavior possible in a human being.” Jurors deliberated for a little less than four hours before delivering a verdict. The Silence of the Lambs was still raking in admissions fees when Kibbe was declared guilty.

  A few regional papers took note of the conviction in their “Around the Nation” sections. In May, Kibbe was sentenced to a mandatory twenty-five years to life. The event was given a single column in the Los Angeles Times. USA Today gave it thirty-four words. No other major newspaper even mentioned it.

  The media were not the only ones who felt the case was hardly noteworthy. As the sheriff’s de
puty escorted him from the building, Kibbe made small talk with the man.

  “I’ve killed a few women,” he said. “What’s the big deal?”

  • • • • •

  The New York Times used the phrase “serial killer” or “serial murderer” 108 times in the 1980s. In the 1990s, one or the other appeared 781 times. In the aughts, 1,199. The vast majority of mentions, however, were not in news stories but in arts and entertainment contexts: movie, book, and television reviews. The nation is still crazy about serial killers—but they have to fit the bill. The Silence of the Lambs is widely touted as one of the best thrillers of all time. American Psycho is available on DVD in an “uncut Killer Collector’s edition.” And today the nation is entranced with its latest serial killer hero, the handsome and winning Dexter of the popular television series.

  Highway killers, however, rarely enjoy top billing in the serial killer ranks. Outside the world of serial killer “buffs”—admittedly a growing subculture—the names Larry Eyler, Randall Woodfield, Randy Kraft, and Roger Reece Kibbe are little known. Kibbe, up for parole in 2009, got a small flurry of coverage in the local media when DNA evidence led prosecutors to indict him for six more murders. He was linked not only to Stephanie Brown and Charmaine Sabrah, but also to prostitutes Lora Heedick and Katherine Quinones. Prosecutors added Barbara Ann Scott, who had disappeared in early 1986 and was not originally linked to the I-5 series. And they charged him with the murder of Lou Ellen Burleigh, the hopeful secretary “John Brown” had interviewed in his van thirty-two years earlier. In order to avoid the death penalty, Kibbe pled guilty to all six murders and received a sentence of life for each.

  Like the highways and their soulless sprawlscape of big-box stores, parking lots, strip malls, and ground cover, highway killers have become a part of life in America—one that is ugly, unpleasant, and no fun to think about. It’s much more fun to ignore them in favor of their glamorous fictional counterparts. The nation adores Hannibal Lecter, not Roger Kibbe. It wants to live in Knots Landing, not Citrus Heights.

  When I drove from San Francisco to see the stretch of I-5 between Stockton and Sacramento where so many women had vanished, boxy housing developments were still spreading along I-580 from the East Bay into the Central Valley. I-5 looks much the same as it must have in the eighties—lined with agricultural fields and a complicated system of dikes and canals. The Hood Franklin off-ramp is still desolate and French Camp Road still a low-traffic byway through farmland. One thing, however, had changed. Along I-5, about every five miles, were bright blue emergency telephones.

  Meanwhile, as Roger Kibbe serves out the remainder of his natural life in Pleasant Valley State Prison, the FBI has turned its attention to a new and insidious kind of serial killer. These murderers, more invisible even than Kibbe and his ilk, are said to be roaming the nation’s interstates. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of victims can be mapped onto the highway network. There’s even a whole new division at the NCAVC to analyze them. The FBI claims are meeting with skepticism from many in local law enforcement who feel the FBI has cried wolf too many times. The irony is that this time, the Bureau may be dead right.

  Fed by the prosperity of the last decade, the 46,567-mile network of limited-access roads that make up the Interstate System is a linear economy-on-wheels, a distinct and self-sustaining 51st state, in a sense, that generates life and commerce.

  —PETER T. KILBORN, 2001

  Crime is a process, depending on the convergence of offenders and targets in the absence of guardians. The transportation MMEEXXIICCO MEXIC system generates these convergences.

  —MARCUS FELSON AND

  RACHEL BOBA, 2010

  A map the FBI released when it announced its Highway Serial Killings Initiative. The dots represent bodies spread across the nation like a pathogen carried by car. Courtesy FBI.

  5

  DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS

  Sometime on June 25, 2007, twenty-five-year-old Sara Hulbert went to Nashville’s seedy Cowan Street with a pair of guys named Lee and Hollywood. According to Lee, the three scored some crack and smoked it together. After a while, an argument broke out about divvying up what was left. Sara got annoyed and left. Lee figured she was headed for the nearby T.A.—a truck stop with a lively prostitution trade—to make some cash. He watched her disappear between a pair of empty truck trailers. He never saw her again. Somewhere in that row of warehouses, truck washes, and vacant lots, as traffic on I-24 roared by overhead, Sara Hulbert climbed into the wrong truck. Around 12:50 in the morning the T.A. security guard called the cops. He had found Hulbert face-up in the back lot, near the sagging fence hookers squeezed through to do business, a half-inch hole in her head.

  Looking at the crime scene, Nashville Metro Detective Pat Postiglione thought he might be dealing with a serial killer. Postiglione, a small, wiry man, with black hair, nearly black eyes, and the trace of a Queens accent, had encountered serial killers before. During his nearly thirty years at the Nashville Metro Police Department, he had helped track down Paul Reid, who had killed seven people while robbing fast-food joints. He worked the case of Michael Scott Magliolo, a “lumper,” or person who does odd jobs for truckers, who claimed to have killed twelve people across several states. In the Hulbert crime scene, Postiglione saw several things that said “serial killer” to him. Hulbert was naked, not just dumped there but carefully posed, the soles of her feet pressed together so her legs made a diamond. There was no sign of a struggle. And there appeared to be little or no physical evidence. In fact, Nashville police really had only two things to go on: a sneakerlike footprint and a grainy T.A. surveillance tape. It showed trucks streaming in and out of the lot all night, but there was one that seemed suspicious: it had stayed only sixteen minutes. All that could be made out was a yellow cab pulling a white trailer with some kind of writing on the side. As a lead, it wasn’t much.

  Postiglione knew that another prostitute had been killed just a few weeks earlier in Lebanon, Tennessee, about thirty miles east of Nashville on I-40. That woman had been shoved butt-down in a truck stop trash can, garbage carefully piled on top of her stomach. The detective contacted the FBI’s Violent Criminals Apprehension Program (ViCAP) and asked agents there to query their national database for similar crimes along highways connecting to the Nashville region. An FBI analyst confirmed that there were cases that looked similar, including a prostitute killed at a truck stop in Alabama. Postiglione and his partner, Lee Freeman, decided to ask for every credit card receipt from the T.A. on the night of the murder. They figured they had a trucker to find.

  At least twenty-five former truckers are currently serving time in American prisons for serial murder. There’s Robert Ben Rhoades, who converted his truck cab into a torture chamber, now serving a life sentence in Illinois. There’s Scott William Cox, a trucker who pled no-contest to two murders in Oregon. There are Dellmus Colvin, who pled guilty in five murders to avoid the death penalty in Ohio, Keith Hunter Jesperson, serving life sentences from four different states, and Wayne Adam Ford, who finally got sick of killing and walked into a California sheriff’s office carrying a woman’s breast in a plastic bag. When trucker Sean Patrick Goble was arrested in North Carolina and confessed to several murders, ten states lined up to question him about their own cold-case highway homicides. It seems our interstate highway system has become our Whitechapel, with truckers its roving Rippers.

  • • • • •

  A soft-spoken woman from Oklahoma first saw the pattern. Terri Turner is a supervisory intelligence analyst with the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation. In September of 2003, a homicide case landed on her desk. A body had been found along I-40 in eastern Oklahoma, and because of jurisdictional issues, the OBI was asked to work the case. Turner, a homicide and sex crime specialist, immediately put out a teletype seeking other female bodies that had been found, like hers, nude, near interstates, and with signs of having been bound. Within seventy-two hours, two responses came back: agencies in Arkansas and Mississippi
had similar cases. At that point, Turner knew she might be looking at linked crimes. She had her communications specialists monitor the teletypes for further cases that might be related. In seven months, they had seven homicides. She calls them “my seven girls.”

  The bodies were all unidentified at first, but eventually investigators identified two of the women. Both had worked as truck stop prostitutes. This was the breakthrough moment for Turner.

  “We hold the trucking industry as a whole in very high regard,” she told me. “The vast majority of truck drivers are good, hardworking people, and without them our nation would come screeching to a halt. But there are a very few who have found that that particular job is very suited to this particular type of crime.”

  Turner began reaching out to people in the trucking industry, as well as bringing the different investigators together, making sure they knew about one another’s cases. In the spring of 2004, she decided to have a meeting in Oklahoma City for all the investigators working on her seven cases—and any others that might be related.

  “I anticipated maybe twenty, twenty-five individuals,” she told me, “but by the time word got around about the kind of cases we were going to be talking about, I ended up having sixty investigators from seven different states show up for that meeting. That was really the beginning of the initiative.”

  FBI analysts at ViCAP had even more surprising news. When they queried their database, they found more than 250 homicides connected to I-40 in the existing files, spread out across Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas. A trucker arrested for rape and assault in Lincoln, Nebraska, in late 2004 was eyed as a possible suspect. But in the end, it was John Walsh’s show America’s Most Wanted that broke the case. The show aired the story of an Oklahoma City prostitute killed and thrown from an overpass in Texas. A woman called in and reported that her nephew, already in jail, had bragged about doing something similar. She gave police his name: John Robert Williams, a twenty-eight-year-old long-haul trucker.