Wood told me that T.A. was concerned enough about the problem of truck stop crime that it was instituting a host of new security features. But when I contacted company representatives several times asking for details, they declined to comment.
• • • • •
“All the research in this field shows that problems are highly concentrated,” Ron Clarke told me. “So you will find that
the vast majority of truck stops are no problem and that there’s just a few that account for quite a large percentage of the problem. It’s called the 80/20 rule.” Eighty percent of the problem, in other words, will be caused by 20 percent of the truck stops. Criminologists call them “risky facilities.” Clarke is a leading authority on situational crime prevention, a discipline founded on the startlingly simple assertion that every crime requires the intersection of three elements: a criminal, a victim, and a place. You can reduce crime—not just relocate it, but reduce it—by focusing on any or all of those elements. You can try to dissuade the criminal. You can try to remove the victim. But the easiest thing to do is to redesign the place.
Situational crime prevention grows out of the work of Jane Jacobs on urban design in the sixties and of architect Oscar Newman in the seventies. Both Jacobs and Newman discussed “natural surveillance,” a community’s propensity to reduce crime by being alert to problems before they get out of hand. Jacobs called it “eyes on the street,” Newman, “defensible space.” But criminologists and planners soon showed that there were many additional ways to “design out crime.” A famous case is New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, an infamous haven for prostitution, gun sales, drug-dealing, larceny, and panhandling in the eighties. A task force was convened to study the problem, and in 1992, the Port Authority began instituting hundreds of changes to the terminal’s design. Some were obvious: securing ceiling panels and locking doors to stairwells, hiring bathroom attendants, improving lighting, creating programs to move transients into shelters. Others were less obvious: reducing the size of support columns, straightening sight lines, moving ticketing to a central location, enlarging entrances, repainting walls in light colors. Special attention was paid to shining up the floors. Fourteen key changes were made in the restrooms, including reducing the sink size, shortening the doors, straightening the walls, and increasing the tile size. The redesign was an unqualified success: robberies, assaults, and public disorder rates plummeted. People no longer think of the Port Authority as a crime gauntlet.
A setting that creates crime? The Bloomsbury, New Jersey, truck stop that makes its small town the most crime-ridden in Hunterdon County. A blog requesting truck drivers to name “truck stops so dangerous even truckers don’t stop there” yielded the reply “all of them in New Jersey.” Photo by the author.
“Somewhere like the Port Authority Bus Terminal created crime,” Clarke said over a bowl of chili. “It produced all the conditions for crime to happen.” We were sitting in the diner of the T.A. truck stop in Bloomsbury, New Jersey. Bloomsbury, an adorable town in a rolling, rural part of the state near the Pennsylvania border, has a population of 857, mostly living in charming Victorian homes. But the tiny burg had the highest crime rate in Hunterdon County in 2009—because of the town’s two truck stops. Two-thirds of the town’s crimes happened at this T.A. After lunch, we took a walk around the facility.
“At the moment it doesn’t look particularly dangerous,” Clarke said with some surprise as we stood in the back lot watching a never-ending stream of big rigs clanking and snarling their way into the T.A. parking area. “It’s probably perfectly safe right now.”
Ron Clarke doesn’t usually spend much time at truck stops; he seemed a little taken aback when I invited him to lunch at one. A university professor at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, he has a PhD in clinical psychology and an incredibly long list of publications on crime prevention. He has a genteel British accent, and he looks a little like Anthony Hopkins; he even slides down the hill of his “yes”—Yeeeyas—in a way that sounds like Hopkins at his most diabolic, which is vaguely disconcerting. Some people find his ideas disconcerting as well: his work proceeds from the assumption that we are who we are in part because of where we are.
“Criminal disposition isn’t something totally independent of environment; it’s interacting with it,” he explained. “If you produce a whole lot of crime opportunities, you will create a criminal disposition. People will be tempted to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do.”
The interstate highway system and the environments it creates—rest areas, service plazas, truck stops, motel and gas station clusters, not to mention the blighted urban areas alongside or underneath the highway itself—might very well be creating such opportunities. Our transportation system could be an enabler.
Much of situational crime prevention looks like plain old common sense: harden targets. Reduce the vulnerability of victims. Take away the anticipated rewards for crime and increase the perceived risks. It seems very straightforward, and yet, it has by no means become standard practice. People are resistant to an approach that feels so deterministic.
“People like to demonize criminals, don’t they?” Clarke said by way of explanation. “They like to think that criminal people are different from other people. It makes them feel more secure in their own morality and their own lives. They don’t like to think that in a slightly different environment they might behave very badly.”
As we strolled around the truck stop parking lot, threading our way between trucks in the fuel lanes and cruising the aisles of the convenience store, Clarke pointed out all the possible places where a situational crime prevention approach might intervene. Increasing security at those places would involve a variety of obvious efforts—more security cameras, better lighting, some sort of “check-in” function or license plate scanner—as well as some less obvious ones. Perhaps, Clarke said, the truck stops that enable murder are the ones that tend to be closer to or farther from the on-ramp. Perhaps they tend to be in rural areas—or maybe in urban ones. They might be the ones with more landscaping, or different video games. The layout of the place could make a difference. The correct approach to the problem would begin with collecting data: identify the risky facilities through crime rates, then survey how they differ from the nonrisky ones.
Anonymity, Clarke speculated, is probably a big part of it. Looking at the row of trucks with their extensive private cabs, his first thought was what a dangerous place it would be for a sex worker to go looking for customers. It would be easy for no one to know she was there besides the truckers. Paradoxically, he said, one of the best things for the truck stops to do would be to ease up on the prostitution trade a bit.
“Say that this place had a place where you could sit comfortably and drink coffee and so on,” he mused. “Prostitutes could use that and come to be known. You know how hotels often have prostitutes in the bars, and they’re friendly with the bartender. And everyone knows what’s going on and it’s not legal but it’s not interfered with because it’s not causing a problem.”
Anything that makes the prostitutes less anonymous could make them seem less disposable. And anything that makes the truckers feel less anonymous themselves will also conduce to better behavior. Pointing to a table of burly truckers eating sandwiches nearby, Clarke noted that one of them could easily be a psychopath. “But you’d never know. Most of the time, he’s behaving in a perfectly law-abiding, sociable way, because of the environment he’s in that’s guiding his behavior.” But what about when he’s alone in the truck?
“When you think about the trucking environment, it isn’t just the truck stop; it’s the truck as well,” Clarke said. “The whole thing is creating prostitution actually: lonely guys who have a bedroom with them, girls appearing out of the blue without any effort. When you think about it all, you’re tailor-making a prostitution problem, and some of that will turn bad. And the turning bad is probably made easier by the circumstances of the truck stop and the truck.”
• • • • •
On the Mendenhall trial’s third day, the state brought out a long line of experts from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to introduce the evidence found in Bruce Mendenhall’s truck. This included fingerprints, blood and semen evidence, a nightstick, a collection of knives, and the murder weapon, a .22 rifle. It also included the sex toys.
The defense objected before the prosecution could even mention the sex toys. Once the investigator who was going to bring them up took the stand, the jury was sent out of the room and the haggling began. The witness was questioned for the judge, and the lawyers argued over each item. First up was the penis pump. The assistant prosecutor, a striking woman in dramatically high heels, insisted the penis pump was relevant because of the kind of genital damage the victim suffered. The judge examined the photos over his bifocals. “What does one do with a penis pump?” he demanded. “Does anyone know?”
The trial then entered a zone so darkly comic that no one dared look at anyone else. The court officers stared straight ahead with faces of stone. The reporters looked intently at their notebooks. The lawyers hovered helplessly over their files. The one person in the room who could surely explain how a penis pump was used, Bruce Mendenhall, kept his eyes on the table in front of him. The prosecutor explained that this was why the jury needed to see the packaging: so they could read the instructions.
“Which box is it?” demanded the judge.
“The one with the baseball player.”
The judge read the box aloud: “Rookie of the year pleasure pump for the novice enlarger.” No one laughed, but the invisible vapor of self-control that always filled the courtroom could briefly be discerned. A trial is a fascinating and horrific experience. The most awful acts and injuries are described, but rarely does anyone scream or cry or call down curses on the killer. Sara Hulbert’s grandmother left the room every time she even started to weep. By the same token, no one ever laughs. The point of a trial is to drain every emotion away until the truth appears, square-cornered and solid as a building amid the waters of a receding flood.
The sex toys were ultimately allowed, but in truth they proved nothing. There was no DNA evidence on them. Like much of the prosecution’s evidence—such as the knives, which were also ultimately allowed—they served a different purpose: to help the jury construct a story. The prosecution introduced the items to make Mendenhall seem like a person who would kill, though none of these items is unusual for a trucker to have. Truck stops almost invariably sell the exact type of nightstick he had in his truck, and they frequently have large glass display cases showing off an astounding array of hunting knives. Being ready to defend yourself is part of the ethos of the independent trucker. It is not unreasonable. The combination of on-the-job violence and vehicular accidents makes truckers six times more likely than average to die on the job. Driving a truck is among the top ten most dangerous jobs you can hold, according to the Department of Labor. It does not, of course, provide data for prostitution.
As for the sex toys, they are generally not sold at truck stops, but there’s no shortage of adult video stores along the interstate that cater to truckers, as anyone who drives the freeway knows. These items might be seen as proof that truckers are a tribe of sex-crazed perverts, but they can also be seen as simply testimony to the fact that, after a long day of grueling driving, some kind of unwinding is desired. The defense could have pointed this out. But to do so would have asked the jury to consider the lives of long-haul truckers and how difficult and damaging they must be. And that is something almost no one seems willing to think about.
• • • • •
Consigned to the stressful world of interstates and truck stops, known to their dispatchers as a number, to the law as a license plate, and to their clients as a set of GPS coordinates, truckers are the gears that keep the machinery of global commerce running. But what’s going on in their heads? I asked Pat Postiglione if he thought there might be something about trucking that could push some people predisposed to violence over the edge.
“Sure,” he said. “You’re on the road for hour after hour after hour and all you’re doing is thinking. You’re not communicating with anybody. If you’re that type of person, it could evolve out of you. But it might also be that you’re a trucker because you are a serial killer type person.”
There has been almost no work done examining the mental health of the nation’s truckers. The only paper on the topic I could find was deeply disturbing. In a qualitative survey done at a seedy Southern truck stop, truckers reported very high levels of stress related to time pressures, loneliness, bad health, and separation from their families. They related anxiety about what they saw as their bad public image, and they reported that the loneliness of the road led them to risky encounters with sex workers and to drug use. A surprising number of truckers reported using crack to keep alert while driving and pot to go to sleep when stopped.
“Basically trucking is an unhealthy occupation,” Mona Shattell, one of the paper’s authors, told me when I called her up to discuss it. Shattell and some of her coauthors also published a paper on truckers’ physical health. Surveying all the literature they could find on the topic, they reported that the job imposed a host of health-damaging conditions on drivers, including long work hours; fatigue; sleep deprivation; postural fatigue; exposure to noise, vibration, and diesel fumes; a sedentary lifestyle; and a miserable diet. As a result, truckers were disproportionately likely to suffer musculoskeletal disorders, cancer, cardiovascular problems, respiratory problems, disrupted biological cycles, risky behaviors such as drug use and unprotected sex with prostitutes, and psychological and psychiatric disorders. “It’s a public health issue,” Shattell said. She said she had another paper on trucker mental health under review—this one with a much larger data set—supporting the conclusions of the first.
Shattell finds the psychological issues particularly intractable. “There is a lot of depression, a lot of loneliness, a lot of sleep problems, a lot of anxiety, a lot of chronic fatigue—and not much treatment,” she said. “Access to care is a big issue. Even for people who do have primary care providers it’s not a fun thing, especially for men, to get treatment for mental heath problems, so many of them are not treated.” Shattell reported that truckers, in addition to being horribly lonely, often feel hemmed in and stressed out by conflicting demands on them.
“They have a lack of control—about their time, about their schedule,” she said. “There’s this pressure to deliver on time—everything is working against them and it’s not in their control. There are the federal guidelines that say they have to rest a certain number of hours. They may not be tired at that time. Then they have their employers who need this load here at a certain time. And then they can get delayed by so many things. They’re really stuck a lot of the time and without a lot of support.”
Shattell’s truckers also reported feeling vulnerable to physical violence. But the loneliness of the job was what came through most clearly. Everything truckers experience is made worse by being so isolated.
“I’m sacrificing pretty much my sanity,” one trucker in the study told researchers. “My ability to talk to people. It is total isolation.” Another reported that the job dehumanized him, because “sometimes you feel like a machine, like part of that truck . . . you’re self-contained in your own world.”
The people who share that world—both at truck stops and sometimes in the trucks—include lumpers and prostitutes. It’s a standard fact of serial killing that the killers rarely choose their victims from a radically different social class. Most often, a killer’s victims are all either one small step above him on the social scale or one small step below. In the latter case, the murder can often be seen as a way of saying “This is not me. I am better than my victim, and to prove it I will take her life.”
To truckers, the lives of truck stop hookers must feel uncomfortably familiar. They are freelance workers, paid not by the hour but by
the job. They are prone to drug use. They are poorly remunerated, and their working life, spent in truck stops, destroys their health and sabotages their attempts at family life. They are little more than a call sign to the people who hire them, and their task is simply to take on someone else’s burden for a time. One criminologist refers to this kind of victim as the “less dead.” Their lives are accorded so little value, their deaths mean less as well.
Those devalued lives, like the truckers’, are unimaginable outside the landscapes highway federalism built: the anonymous world of exit ramps, right-of-ways, and travel plazas where places are numbers, people are anonymous, and human interaction is entirely mediated by commerce. Lot lizards are the by-products of a global economy built on the easy flow of cheap goods and cheap labor, people numbered for the bottom in a world that has grown comfortable assigning dollar values to human beings. When they are discovered in truck stop dumpsters, or discarded like litter in the interstate right-of-way, their relative value is being totted up.
When Bruce Mendenhall put a gun to Sara Hulbert’s head, was he trying to reassure himself that he was something more than just a cog in the machinery of commerce, as undervalued and inconsequential as a truck stop whore?
• • • • •
For the closing arguments of Bruce Mendenhall’s trial, Carma Purpura’s family came to Nashville. Purpura’s sister was small, with short, straightened brown hair and an easy smile. In the hallway outside the courtroom, Carma Purpura’s relatives embraced Sara Hulbert’s like long-lost family, bonded by an unspeakable sorrow. Then they all hugged Pat Postiglione, who had also come for closing arguments. He and Lee Freeman were both sharply dressed, in sport coats and pressed pants. They bristled with controlled anticipation. In the courtroom, the Purpura relatives sat in the front row with Sara Hulbert’s family. The detectives sat a couple rows behind, on the same side. They had all been waiting for this day for three years.
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