Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  The prosecution’s closing argument was accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation. It was the most complete circumstantial case imaginable. It added up to a complete story. But—and this is one of the many places where real trials differ from the ones in movies and on television—it didn’t tie up every loose end. There were gaps and inconsistencies in the testimony. There were witnesses who hadn’t appeared. There was a tire track and a second footprint at the crime scene that had never been matched. And there was the semen evidence, none of which matched Mendenhall. The state just let these things hang in the air.

  The defense, in its summation, highlighted every one of them, declaring that the state had simply not made its case. There were enough loose ends to leave a reasonable doubt. Even if they believed Bruce Mendenhall to be guilty, it was the jury’s obligation to acquit. The attorney methodically went through the state’s case, masterfully phrasing every gap in the story as a question the jury could not answer: “Is that answer good enough?” “Should we just take him at his word?” “Is this coincidental?” “Whose semen was it?” As he spoke, you could see the family growing noticeably upset. Before he began talking, acquittal was like a ship sailing by on a distant horizon. As he talked, it turned and headed for shore. You could make out its contours.

  “I’m asking you to do something difficult,” he told the jury in closing. “I’m asking you to follow the law.”

  The prosecutor, on rebuttal, asked them to do the exact opposite. He offered them a story that made sense. He referred to the truck as a “killing chamber.” He told the jury Sara Hulbert was “doing the only thing she knew to do to support her habit.” He painted a picture of the actual murder, “probably under the interstate, so you couldn’t hear the noise.” In the final moments, he put up a slide of Sara Hulbert, a young woman happy and hopeful, her brown hair restrained by a headband.

  “She had a right to live,” he declared. “She had a right to change her life and raise her children.” Sara’s relatives, pictures of control until that moment, silently wept. At least one of the jurors wept as well.

  Once the jury retired to their deliberations, family members were whisked off to the room set aside for them. The detectives headed out to get things done. The lawyers vanished into other parts of the courthouse. Only the reporters hung around outside the courtroom, unwilling to risk missing the verdict. The reporter from the Tennessean worked on another story. Two members of the local TV news crew fiddled with their camera. I sat on the bench before the plate glass windows, watching the never-ending stream of cars and trucks flow around Nashville on its way toward St. Louis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Lincoln, Sacramento, Atlanta.

  This is the world we have made. It’s worth asking what effect it might have on people who spend a long time in it. In the late nineties, an outbreak of interest in “road rage” and aggressive driving led scientists to research what happens to people at the wheel. Driving, they reported, has psychological—even physiological—effects on drivers. This is your brain on the road: being at the wheel—especially if you are alone—noticeably changes human responses to stimuli. It renders us anonymous and deprives us of verbal interaction, body language, eye contact. Sociologists call this “asymmetry of communication”: we are rendered mute, our identity reduced to a make and model. Frustrated in our innate desire to be perceived as humans, we become paranoid. We attribute hostile motives to oblivious others. How many times have you found yourself screaming something in your car that you couldn’t imagine saying to a live human being? Deprived of the human reciprocity we are hardwired to crave, we may begin to see other people as objects. Behind the wheel, we are all psychopaths.

  One day after Pat Postiglione knocked on the door of Mendenhall’s truck, Darlene Ewalt, a Pennsylvania homemaker, was found murdered on her back patio. She had been talking on the phone late at night when someone crept up in the darkness and slit her throat. Her husband, sleeping upstairs, was considered the prime suspect. Two weeks later, Monica Massaro, a thirty-eight-year-old woman who ran a home-cleaning business, was slashed to death in her bed in Bloomsbury, New Jersey. The next night, parents of fifteen-year-old Shea McDonaugh heard whimpering coming from their daughter’s bedroom in their home in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Rushing in, they found a man dressed in black crouched on top of their daughter with a knife to her throat. Incredibly, the two suburban parents wrestled the intruder to the floor, disarmed him, and held him down while Shea dialed 911. The man turned out to be Adam Leroy Lane, a trucker from North Carolina.

  In Lane’s truck, police had found a variety of knives and ninja-style weapons, a B-movie about a serial killer called Hunting Humans, and a receipt for a radar detector bought at the T.A. in Bloomsbury, New Jersey. One of the Massachusetts investigators e-mailed the details of the case to ViCAP. It didn’t take long for analysts to link the three states’ knife assaults: all of the women lived near interstate exits. Their homes were walking distance from large truck stops. In each case, Lane had simply left his rig parked in the lot while he wandered into the nearby residential area, checking for unlocked doors.

  Investigators from the Hunterdon County, New Jersey, prosecutor’s office went to Massachusetts to talk to Lane. The trucker confessed to having killed Monica Massaro “by accident” in a botched robbery attempt. “I was looking for money,” he told the detectives. “I was losing everything I had.”

  I wrote to Adam Leroy Lane and asked him about that statement. What did he mean by saying he was losing everything? Was it because of his work as a trucker, or in spite of it? “I don’t know where you get your information,” he wrote back, “but I was never on the verge of losing anything. I never had anything to lose.” The line was eerily reminiscent of Charles Starkweather’s response when asked if he regretted throwing his life away. “I throwed away nothin’ cause I didn’t have nothin’.”

  Adam Leroy Lane is now serving a twenty-five-year sentence from Massachusetts, a fifty-year sentence from New Jersey, and a life sentence—reached on plea—from Pennsylvania. He is an anomaly: trucker violence has been largely confined to truck stops and other places created by the interstate highway system. Lane took his homicidal rage on the road—or rather, off the road, and onto Main Street instead.

  Predictably, the media response to Lane, like the response to the FBI’s announcement of the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, focused on the interstates. No television story on the topic failed to run some B-roll of cars and trucks rolling down a divided highway. “They are marvels of engineering,” intones a grave voice over a montage of interstate highways opening a Dateline episode about Lane. “Vast webs of highways and roadways, spun from human ingenuity and grit. Connecting distant points, and strangers in the night. Only no one was thinking much about exit and entrance ramps when they found her . . . A beautiful woman attacked in the night—viciously.” As it moves from one murder to the next, the show offers a map showing I-80 intersecting with I-78: “All he needed was another exit ramp, and another unlocked door.” By the time the program reaches Massachusetts, where Lane was caught attacking Shea McDonaugh, the Dateline writers connect the dots: “It had to do with where they lived—or what they lived near.” Another shot of the highway hammers the point home.

  Dateline’s focus on highways was typical. During the Bruce Mendenhall case, Nashville’s News 5 created a special logo for reports on the trucker that included his picture, a menacing truck grill, and the interstate shields for I-40 and I-65. Exit: Metropolis Utopia has morphed into Exit: Murder.

  • • • • •

  On the last day of the Mendenhall trial, around three p.m., a runner burst from the Davidson County courthouse conference room. Suddenly, everyone reappeared, as if by magic: the families, the detectives, the attorneys, thronging down the hallway toward the courtroom. I had never spoken to Hulbert’s relatives—it was lame reporting, but I couldn’t bear the thought of intruding on grief so profound. But Sara Hulbert’s grandmother walked right up to me outside the courtr
oom and grabbed my arm with the bony, fragile grip of an older woman. “I hope it goes okay,” she said, fixing her eyes on me with watery intensity.

  “Me, too” is all I could say.

  The crowd filled the courtroom and listened to the forewoman read the verdict. She paused slightly before the word “guilty.” The judge stated that Mendenhall would receive a mandatory life sentence. The trucker gave no response as he stood to leave. For Bruce Mendenhall, this was only trial number one. He had been indicted by Tennessee for another murder, as well as by Indiana and Alabama. Sara Hulbert’s family looked relieved. For them, at least, this ordeal had reached its end.

  [The Interstate System] will never be finished because America will never be finished.

  —FRANCIS C. “FRANK”

  TURNER, FORMER FEDERAL

  HIGHWAY ADMINISTRATOR,

  1996

  The overall increase in crime and possible ineffectiveness of government services to manage the problem had made boundaries become blurred. This helps create a sense of anonymity, which makes a ripe playing field for serial murder. Thus a change in the ecosystem leads to a new phenomenon appearing or mutating.

  —GERARD LABUSCHAGNE, 2001

  The marker near the spot where Charles Starkweather murdered his last victim memorializes not Merle Collison, but earlier victims of road violence: pioneers killed by Indians. Photo by the author.

  6

  A PRAYER FOR THE BODY BURIED BY THE INTERSTATE

  In 1998, retired FBI profiler Robert Ressler was invited to Mexico by the state government of Chihuahua. The border city of Juárez, officials told him, was being haunted by murder. Young women, many of them teenagers with long brown hair and pretty faces, were disappearing, often on their way to work in the city’s many maquiladoras, the plants where consumer goods are assembled for export. Some young women simply vanished. Others were later found dead in vacant lots, irrigation ditches, or the scrubby desert outside of town, raped and often brutally tortured. They had usually been strangled. Authorities thought they might have a serial killer on the loose, and they invited the famed American expert in serial murder to help them look for the pattern. Who better than the Americans, after all, to help them puzzle out a problem the United States had been grappling with for years?

  Mexico, like much of the developing world, had been modernizing rapidly in the last decades of the century. That modernization was changing life in the nation, and the changes were most dramatic in places where transportation was driving the transition. Juárez was one of those places.

  Part of one of the largest binational urban areas in the world, Juárez is linked by four bridges to its American sister city, El Paso, Texas. It had long been a typical border town, its restaurants, bars, and nightclubs offering Americans a south-of-the-border night out since Prohibition. But it was more than just a tourist trap. Its location made it a hotspot for U.S.-Mexican trade. Juárez is one of the rare international cities serviced by the U.S. interstate highway system—I-110 branches off from I-10 and takes traffic directly to the Cordova Bridge—and is well connected to the rest of Mexico, mainly via the Ciudad Juárez–Mexico highway. And in the nineties, Mexico, like so much of the world, was increasingly taking to the road.

  President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was investing in upgrades to the Ciudad Juárez–Mexico highway. He had also spurred nationwide road travel by licensing eighty companies to build and operate $12 billion worth of private toll highways. The new roads, along with proximity to American freeways, had made Juárez into not only a major manufacturing center but a transportation hub. American companies had been setting up maquiladoras since 1965 in the border area’s free trade zone, where they could take advantage of cheap, nonunion Mexican labor. This intensified after the 1992 signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. Negotiated by Mexico’s President Salinas, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and U.S. President George H. W. Bush, the three-nation treaty sought to eliminate the remaining trade barriers between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. And indeed, in its first decade, it helped to create 1.2 million Mexican jobs. NAFTA was meant to reduce pressure on the border area, letting plants open elsewhere in the nation, but in fact, most of the jobs it created were in the established free trade zone—around a quarter of them in Juárez. There, assembly plants, warehouses, and trucking terminals were already in place, with connections to the American highway network.

  The killings began in the early nineties. There had been murders of women earlier, but they suddenly surged in 1993, as Juárez experienced an influx of residents. When NAFTA bolstered industry, thousands of workers streamed north from Mexico’s less industrialized south to take jobs assembling brake pads, vacuum cleaners, car seats, Blackberry components, plasma TVs. Parts were shipped tax-free to Mexico, and assembled products were shipped back across the border, en route to American households. Juárez swelled to an official population of around 1.3 million—but many estimated the real number was more like 2 million. The 80 percent of the maquiladoras that were American-owned were exempt from paying local taxes, so the city had a hard time providing services to this massive influx of workers. New residents lived in the rapidly expanding colonias, or shantytowns, on the city’s edges. Houses were makeshift structures cobbled together from pallets or cardboard, streets were dirt lanes, water came by truck, and electricity usually came from illegally tapping into one of the city’s rare streetlights.

  The maquiladoras offered long hours and low wages—around a tenth of what similar jobs paid on the other side of the border. Workers found it difficult to finance life in the border town: the cost of living in Juárez was roughly 90 percent that in El Paso. But the plants were clean and modern, with amenities like free meals and indoor showers, and working in them beat the grinding poverty of the countryside. They offered women in particular something that had previously been hard to come by: a route out of stifling domestic drudgery and into a more modern life. More than half the workers hired in the assembly plants were female. As long as they could prove they weren’t pregnant, women were actually preferred by the maquiladoras: they could be paid less, and they had the patience to stick to tedious, repetitive tasks for long hours.

  “We are again transforming the world by bringing progress to all people, but especially to women,” declared a maquiladora manager. Mexican women seemed to agree. In the nineties, forty thousand to sixty thousand women a year flooded into Juárez in search of a better life.

  And then they began to die. In January 1993, Alma Chavira Farel was found beaten, raped, and strangled. That same month, Angelina Luna Villalobos, a pregnant sixteen-year-old, was found strangled. Graciela Garcia turned up dead four days later. Soon it began to seem like a steady drumbeat of death. In February, one woman’s body found. In March, two. In April, one. In May, four. Often, the women had disappeared in broad daylight, while walking to work or waiting for the city bus. Two more were found in June. Two in August, one in September, two in October, one each in November and December. That was year one, and those women were the ones whose bodies were found and whose deaths were reported and counted. Activists declared there were many more: women whose bodies could not be identified, women who weren’t reported missing, women who had simply vanished. “They were murdering women,” women’s rights activist Esther Chavez said, “and throwing them out like garbage.”

  The murdered women were the city’s poorest residents, factory workers and store clerks and schoolgirls. Some were underage, using forged birth certificates to work in the maquiladoras. Some had no families and were not reported missing. Others had families who searched for them in vain. It went on with no sign of slowing through 1994 and 1995. María Rocío Cordero, age 11, raped and strangled on her way to primary school. Silvia Elena Rivera Morales, 16, a high school student who worked in a shoe store, found strangled with her breasts mutilated. Olga Alicia Pérez, 20, found eight days later, stabbed, strangled, her right breast removed, her left nipple bitten off. Both Ri
vera Morales and Pérez, like many of the victims, were found in the Lote Bravo, an area on the southern edge of the city where the dirt streets of squatter settlements give way to desert scrubland. The Lote Bravo sits between Mexican Federal Highway 2, leading to the coast, and Federal Highway 45, the link to the nation’s interior, a crossroads where many of the town’s most vulnerable residents had washed up. First they lived there in the struggling shantytowns; then they turned up dead in the brush beyond.

  In December 1995, police announced a breakthrough. They had solved the series of crimes, they said, with the arrest of an Egyptian immigrant, Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif. He was charged with the murder of Elizabeth Castro. Castro was a seventeen-year-old factory worker last seen boarding a shuttle bus from her maquiladora—in response to the murders, some maquiladoras had begun running shuttles to take their workers from the plants to public bus stops. It had not been enough to protect Castro: she was found strangled with her own shoelaces and covered with bite marks in the Lote Bravo, four days after she vanished.

  Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif had come to law enforcement’s attention three months earlier, when he was accused of rape. His accuser subsequently disappeared and the charges were dropped, but police looked into his record and discovered he had a long history of rape and assault charges in the United States. He had served time in a Florida prison for rape and attempted murder, after which he moved to Midland, Texas, to work as an engineer for the oil company Benchmark. Threatened with deportation in 1993, he had moved to Juárez, where Benchmark had a maquiladora. There, authorities said, he had indulged his taste for violence. Witnesses had seen him with Castro, and also with Silvia Rivera Morales, the high school student found dead in the Lote Bravo. A local stripper told police that Sharif admitted to her he had murdered nine women she had introduced him to.