Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  In India, as in Mexico and China, the new order of violence was linked to the nation’s increased mobility, the migrations of hundreds of thousands of people, and the new, more anonymous communities of a rapidly changing culture. As in the United States at an earlier point, the anxiety about the violence seems to reflect fears for where the nation is heading: toward a culture, as Bowden put it, where the rich get richer and the poor sink further into miserable destitution. The Hindustan Times put it succinctly: “We imagine we live in a perfect shining India where there are no serial killers and where new malls open every week. . . . But for millions of Indians, there is no justice, there is no security, and when their children go missing, there is nobody who will even listen to them.”

  The mark of an intelligent person, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time. Trade and economic growth, and the mobility that underwrites them, are good. They improve people’s lives, as their advocates claim, and help spread the blessings of democracy. But they can also be dangerous. If they bring increasing inequality, they eventually lead to increased violence. Sociologists have dedicated reams of paper to parsing the statistical connections between development and homicide rates across cultures. The widely accepted consensus is that development decreases homicide—up to a point. That point is the point of extreme income inequality. When income disparity creates an underclass, homicide rates begin to rise again, and a culture grows more violent. Inequality is the fly in the ointment of growth, just as John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out in 1954, right at the beginning of it all.

  Galbraith was talking about America, but in a globalized world, we must look at inequality globally, too. Trade and economic growth and mobility may seem to be reaching some sort of natural limits in the United States, but a whole new world of commerce and mobility awaits us, a world where goods, money, people, drugs, and violence increasingly cross borders, and where the underclass one economy creates often lives in another nation. Once again, our misgivings about this are reflected in a frightening figure, a new killer on the road whose features we have yet to fully discern. Like his predecessors, he is surely part of the world that made him, the underside of a dream that is increasingly not just America’s, but the world’s.

  • • • • •

  Just west of Douglas, Wyoming, near the spot on the road where Charles Starkweather came upon the sleeping Merle Collison, there’s a small turnoff with a tombstonelike marker at its edge. When I was driving Starkweather’s route, I had passed it before I had a chance to stop: old U.S. 20 has been turned into I-25 here, so I was moving fast. I was curious enough to turn around. Had someone installed a monument to the poor shoe salesman, thuggishly shot through his car window as he awoke from his roadside nap?

  I drove to the next interchange, changed direction, drove back to the previous exit, and retraced my steps to the marker. A truck was parked at the turnoff’s edge, the trucker nowhere in sight. There was nothing but interstate and brownish-yellow grass as far as the eye could see in any direction, so it didn’t seem likely he’d taken a walk. He was probably in the back of his cab, napping.

  I got out and walked to the marker. A picture and a block of text were carved on its face. The line drawing showed a covered wagon with some oxen resting nearby. By the wagon wheel was a bush, a man’s legs poking out from behind it.

  Three men named Sharp, Franklin, and Taylor, and one unknown man were killed by Indians July 12, 1864 where the Oregon Trail crosses Little Box Elder Creek 2 1/2 miles S.W. of here. They are buried 4 miles S.W. by the grave of Mary Kelly who also was killed July 13, 1864.

  The marker stood before a barbed-wire fence. It was August, and dry. The wind was bending the yellow grass backward in a graceful dancer’s dip. Cars thudded by behind me. The road, I thought, has always been a dangerous place.

  Below the text was the date the Landmarks Commission erected this marker: 1954. That was the year President Eisenhower and his advisors were scheming about how to get Congress to approve federal outlays for a national highway network. General Lucius Clay was being brought on board to help. In Lincoln, Nebraska, Charlie Starkweather and Bob Von Busch bought their first car together. In southern California, the six-year-old Ed Kemper listened to his parents arguing, and fifteen-year-old Roger Kibbe was sneaking out to snatch women’s clothing off clotheslines. And one year earlier, in nearby Los Angeles, a city already hard at work building freeways, a California Highways Department bulldozer operator named Mack Rae Edwards murdered an eight-year-old girl named Stella. He buried her beneath his worksite: the Santa Ana freeway. Stella’s death was the start of an unusually long killing career. For seventeen years, Edwards lured elementary-school-aged boys and girls to his car or his home while remaining a respectable and apparently normal citizen. The children were simply never seen again, and no one suspected the reliable highway employee.

  It was a more trusting age, and because he could so reliably dispose of the bodies, Edwards succeeded for years. But in 1970, he kidnapped three little girls and botched the murder. Once the girls, who knew him, got away, Edwards knew he was finished. He walked into a Los Angeles police station and handed the officer at the front desk a loaded gun. “I have a guilt complex,” he said, and proceeded to confess to the murders of six children, beginning in the mid-fifties. Later, on death row, he told confidants it was more like eighteen. The bodies were going to be hard to find, however, since they were beneath the LA freeways he had helped to build. Any help he could give authorities was scotched when he hanged himself with the electrical cord of a prison television.

  While I was working on this book, new information surfaced about the locations of some of the missing victims of Mack Rae Edwards. A crime author researching the case found a man who had worked with Edwards and had detailed records of where the murderer had been working every day. Based on the records, the LAPD decided to go looking for the body of Roger Madison, a sixteen-year-old boy who had disappeared in 1968. Police, FBI agents, and cadaver dogs descended on an off-ramp on the Moorpark freeway near Simi Valley and began digging for remains. They worked for several days but found nothing. The dogs continued to indicate there was something there. The workers concluded that the child’s bones must be under the freeway itself. But they couldn’t dig beneath the freeway; to do that, they would have to close it.

  A memorial service was held next to the off-ramp. Roger Madison’s sister Sharon placed a bouquet of roses between the highway and the empty pit. The construction crew, helmets in hands, stood solemnly by her side. The dogs sat alert on their leashes, their eyes bright in the wind. Nearby, over the concrete road that would serve as Roger Madison’s tombstone, the afternoon traffic roared by, Americans, as ever, on the move.

  SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Introduction: Killer on the Road

  Throughout this book, I have used primary sources wherever possible to trace the story of the creation of the interstate highway system. I am grateful to the Eisenhower Foundation for a travel grant to visit the Eisenhower Presidential Library (cited here as EPL) in Abilene, Kansas, as well as for the loan of a bike (!) while there. Archivists Catherine Cain, Chalsea Millner, and Herb Pankratz were especially knowledgeable and helpful. The library itself is a stunning example of Eisenhower-era design, and well worth even a casual visit.

  Among the various boosterish interstate histories and antihighway screeds, Tom Lewis’s multifaceted Divided Highways (Penguin, 1997) stands out for its fair-mindedness. I have also relied on Mark Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics (University of Tennessee Press, rev. ed. 1990); Owen Gutfreund, Twentieth Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (Oxford University Press, 2004); and Stephen Goddard, Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century (University of Chicago Press, 1994). Jane Holtz Kay’s Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back (University of California Press, 1997) is as delightfull
y furious as it sounds. Phil Patton’s Open Road: A Celebration of the American Highway (Simon and Schuster, 1986) is more thoughtfully critical than its title suggests. And of the boosters, the best is surely the Federal Highway Administration itself: America’s Highways 1776–1976 (U.S. Department of Transportation, 1976) is a gigantic, detailed delight for the highway buff. Many thanks to Joe Conway, highway buff and researcher at the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center, for giving me a copy.

  To understand Lucius Clay I used Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay: An American Life (Henry Holt, 1990), a compelling, thorough biography of an unsung American of integrity and enormous influence.

  vii“Every time we merge with traffic”: David Brodsly, L. A. Freeway: An Appreciative Essay (University of California Press, 1981): 5.

  vii“We mass-produce everything”: Henry Taylor Fowkes Rhodes, The Criminals We Deserve: A Survey of Some Aspects of Crime in the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 1937): 1.

  1the nation’s murder rate shot up in the sixties and seventies: According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports (available through a fabulous table-making tool at http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/ Search/Crime/Crime.cfm), the murder rate per 100,000 Americans rose every single year between 1963 and 1974, from 4.6 to 9.8. It then hovered around 9 until the mid-nineties, going as low as 7.9 (1984) and as high as 10.2 (1980). Since 1995 it has generally fallen; in 2009 it was 5.0, lower than any year since 1964.

  3“maimed whatever it touched”: Kay, Asphalt Nation: 244.

  4“what the program could contribute to economic growth”: Reminiscences of Gabriel Hauge (March 1967), Columbia University Oral History Collection, EPL Oral History 190: 77. The Federal Highway Administration website includes a page debunking various interstate myths, including the whole idea that the interstates were predominantly for civil defense, http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/interstatemyths.htm.

  4“The defense angle was a very persuasive part”: Reminiscences of Prescott Bush (1967), Columbia University Oral History Collection, EPL Oral History 31: 166. Quoted by permission of the Oral History Research Office, Columbia University.

  5called defense . . . “an afterthought”: Charles M. Noble, memo to John Stewart Bragdon, April 6, 1960, John Stewart Bragdon Papers, EPL.

  5overpasses were being built too low for its purposes: In 1960 the Bureau of Public Roads briefly suspended interstate highway projects, including bridges, after the Department of Defense stated its need for seventeen feet of clearance. Congressman Henry S. Reuss, letter to John Stewart Bragdon, January 12, 1960, John Stewart Bragdon papers, EPL.

  6“what was good for the country is good for General Motors and vice versa”: typically Wilson is misquoted as having said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the nation,” a subtle but significant change. Jean Smith cites the actual quote in Lucius D. Clay: 611.

  7“leveling off in automobile use would certainly be disruptive to our economy”: Lucius Clay, speech to Washington Conference of Mayors, December 3, 1954, Lucius Clay Papers, EPL.

  8“make another pie and everybody has a bigger piece”: Remarks of George M. Humphrey to the National Governor’s Conference, April 1954.

  8“[T]he automobile,”declared the Labor Department: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, How American Buying Habits Change (U.S. Department of Labor, 1959): 196.

  9“leaves a self-perpetuating margin of poverty”: John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958; Houghton Mifflin 40th anniversary edition, 1998): 79.

  10large-scale economic effect of highway building was to drive up inflation: part of a good analysis of the economic effects of highways in Phil Patton, Open Road: 87.

  Chapter 1: What a Mean World This Is

  For the facts of the Starkweather murders, I have relied predominantly on typescripts of the trial transcripts available at the Nebraska Historical Society and on newspaper reports from the Lincoln Journal and the Lincoln Star (since merged), many of which are collected in Earl Dyer’s Headline Starkweather (Journal-Star Printing Co., 1993). Newspapers, however, printed many inaccurate details, so I have used them with caution. Governor Victor Anderson’s papers in the Nebraska State Archives were helpful in re-creating the political context; they include a fascinating trove of letters people wrote to him advocating or denouncing mercy toward Starkweather. Many thanks to librarians at the state archives and at the Nebraska Historical Society, the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and the Lincoln Public Library.

  Quotes from Charles Starkweather come from Dr. James Reinhardt’s The Murderous Trail of Charles Starkweather (Thomas, 1960), based on his extensive prison interviews with Starkweather. He revisits some of this material in The Psychology of Strange Killers (Thomas, 1962). Two “true crime” accounts of Starkweather’s spree have been written: William Allen’s Starkweather: Inside the Mind of a Teenage Killer (Emmis Books, 2004 ed.) relies heavily and effectively on Reinhardt’s transcripts. Michael Newton’s Waste Land (Pocket Books, 1998) is more of a novelization. Additional facts about Caril Ann Fugate come from Caril by Ninette Beaver, B. K. Ripley, and Patrick Trese (Lippincott, 1974), a work of advocacy but a good source of detail about Caril and her family. Marilyn Coffey’s “Badlands Revisited” in the Atlantic Monthly (December 1974) describes the panic in Nebraska following the Ward murders.

  Nebraska highway history comes from local newspapers and from George Koster’s A Story of Highway Development in Nebraska, published in 1997 by the Nebraska Department of Roads, as well as James C. Creigh, “Constructing the Interstate Highways System in Nebraska,” Nebraska History 72 (Spring 1991). I also used the book Nebraska Historic Highway Survey, prepared by the Nebraska State Historical Society and the Nebraska Department of Roads. For the histories of Lincoln and Capital Bridge I also used Neale Copple, Tower on the Plains (Lincoln Centennial Commission, 1959).

  My view of the fifties was shaped by David Halberstam, The Fifties (Random House, 1993); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (Vintage, 2004); and Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the Fifties (Harvard UP, 1994). Fifties car culture is illuminated by Christopher Finch, Highways to Heaven: The Autobiography of America (HarperCollins, 1992).

  I am grateful to the Hartmann Center at Duke University for a travel grant that allowed me to spend time in its wonderful advertising archive looking at the history of car ads. Special thanks to my Lincoln, Nebraska, research assistant, temporary Husker Miranda Strand. And a shout-out to Nebraska Bowhunters Association members for letting me camp with them at their annual retreat while I was retracing Starkweather’s flight, and for not shooting my tent full of arrows.

  12“This new highway program will affect”: Robert Moses, “The New Super-Highways: Blessing or Blight?,” Harper’s, December 1956.

  12“There will always be differences”: James Reinhardt, The Murderous Trail of Charles Starkweather, Police Science Series (Charles C Thomas, 1960): vii.

  15written up in . . . U.S. News & World Report: February 7, 1958.

  19nation’s production of goods and services doubled in the decade between 1946 and 1956, and median and mean family income doubled between 1949 and 1973: Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: 121.

  19Detroit would ship 8 million of them: Marling, As Seen on TV: 134.

  20“We were all a little like that then”: Bob Von Busch, quoted in Allen, Starkweather: 31.

  20“The relationship is, of course, reciprocal”: President’s Advisory Committee, “A 10-Year National Highway Program: A Report to the President,” January 1955, John Stewart Bragdon Papers, EPL.

  21“I hope so,” du Pont replied: quoted in Helen Leavitt, Superhighway—Superhoax (Doubleday, 1970): 45.

  23The Boom Is Just Beginning!: Business Week, September 29, 1956.

  34doubt there was any measurable increase in juvenile crime: see, for instance, James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (Oxford University Press, 1988)
.

  35“juvenile delinquency in America is largely a reflection”: Irving Sarnoff, New Republic, January 18, 1960.

  Chapter 2: Forklift

  Edmund Kemper’s story has attracted quite a few tellers, but the only complete book dedicated to him is Margaret Cheney, The Coed Killer (Walker & Co., 1976), which is the source of my Kemper quotes. He is analyzed at length in Elliot Leyton, Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Modern Multiple Murderer (Carroll & Graf, 2001); Peter Vronsky, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (Berkley Books, 2004); and the more scholarly Murder and Madness by Donald Lunde (Portable Stanford, 1975). Lunde, a psychiatrist who served as an expert witness in all three Santa Cruz trials, also discusses Herbert Mullin and John Linley Frazier. Ward Damio, a Santa Cruz journalist, also wrote about all three murderers and the way they affected Santa Cruz in Urge to Kill (Pinnacle, 1974).

  My interpretation of the “hitchhiker panic” was influenced by Jeremy Packer’s excellent study, Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars and Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2008). The story of the growth of the antihighway movement is best told by the era’s screeds, particularly Helen Leavitt, Superhighway—Superhoax (Doubleday, 1970); Ben Kelley, The Pavers and the Paved (Donald W. Brown, 1971); Ronald Buel, Dead End (Prentice-Hall, 1972); and, for the California specifics, John Robinson, Highways and Our Environment (McGraw-Hill, 1971) and William Bronson, How to Kill a Golden State (Doubleday, 1968).

  The classic book on the counterculture and its values is Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture, first published in 1968 (University of California Press, rev. ed. 1995).