53“American are living in the midst”: Robert Paul Jordan, “Our Growing Interstate,” National Geographic, February 1968: 195.
53“As the Woodstock generation”: “Rules of Thumb,” Newsweek, February 19, 1973: 38.
56“a virtual Möbius strip of money”: Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: 127.
57a plan to drop twenty-two nuclear bombs to vaporize the Bristol Mountains: “Creation of Mountain Pass by Atom Blast Studied,” New York Times, December 24, 1963: 36.
57“As 1970 draws near”: Richard Lillard, Eden in Jeopardy (Knopf, 1966): 204.
57“a monument to materialism”: Bronson, How to Kill a Golden State: 104.
61“a beautiful, groovy way to travel”: “A New Rule of Thumb,” Newsweek, June 16, 1969: 63.
61“Mostly you just feel”: “Youth on the Move: A Look at the Hitchhiking Scene,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, July 11, 1971.
66“Where Are Those Superhighways?”: Richard Thruelsen, Saturday Evening Post, December 14, 1957.
68A 1966 Sports Illustrated feature: “Rule of Thumb,” Sports Illustrated, June 6, 1966.
74“they are asking for a lot more than a ride”: “Women Mobilize for War on Rapists,” Cabrillo Times & Green Sheet, February 15, 1973.
75they “liked to hitchhike”: “Thumbs Down on Hitchhiking!,” Reader’s Digest, January 1970.
82the cops stopped handing out the cards—except to women seen hitchhiking: reported in Jet, March 22, 1979.
Chapter 3: The Cruelest Blow
Several books have been written about the Atlanta child murders: Cliff Dettlinger and Jeff Prugh, The List (Philmay Enterprises, 1983), take a skeptical approach toward the Williams verdict, as does James Baldwin in The Evidence of Things Not Seen (Henry Holt, 1985). Jack Mallard, The Atlanta Child Murders (self-published), does not—which is not surprising, since the author was the prosecutor. Bernard Headley connects the murders to the city’s politics in The Atlanta Youth Murders and the Politics of Race (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). He borrows from Steve Oney’s insightful feature “A City Robbed of Light,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution Weekly Magazine, April 19, 1981. John Douglas makes an argument for the FBI’s importance to the case in Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit (Pocket Star, 1995). More useful to me were the declassified FBI files on the case, available at the FBI’s online Freedom of Information Act Reading Room: http://vault.fbi.gov. Kim Reid’s affecting memoir No Place Safe (Dafina, 2007) paints a picture of what it was like to be a black child in Atlanta when black children were regularly turning up dead.
Freeway racism and freeway revolts are discussed in many of the early antihighway screeds, including Helen Leavitt, Ben Kelley, and Ronald Buel (all cited above), A. Q. Mowbray, Road to Ruin (Lippin-cott, 1969), and Richard Hébert, Highways to Nowhere: The Politics of City Transportation (Bobbs-Merrill, 1972). More recent histories include Paul Mason Fotsch, Watching the Traffic Go By: Transportation and Isolation in Urban America (University of Texas Press, 2007); Brian Ladd, Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age (University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Henry Moon, The Interstate Highway System (Association of American Geographers, 1994).
The Atlanta History Center is not only a refrigerated haven on hot summer days, but a gold mine of documents painting a dramatic picture of Atlanta’s housing, highway, and economic development programs. Charles Rutheiser’s brilliant Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams (Verso, 1996) helped me sort through the city’s planning history. Also useful were Ronald Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Larry Keating, Atlanta: Race, Class and Urban Expansion (Temple University Press, 2001); Tamar Jacoby, Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration (Basic Books, 2000); Clarence N. Stone, Economic Growth and Neighborhood Discontent: System Bias in the Urban Renewal Program of Atlanta (University of North Carolina Press, 1976); Barbara L. Jackson, “Desegregation: Atlanta Style,” Theory into Practice 17, no. 1. In thinking about Atlanta’s redevelopment of its business district, I was influenced by the always eye-opening work of Mike Davis, especially “Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism,” New Left Review 151 (May–June 1985), as well as by simply spending time walking around there.
85“Every major city from Boston”: the editors, “Highways vs. People,” New York Times, November 20, 1966: E12.
85“The War on Black Children”: Pamela Douglas, “The War on Black Children,” Black Enterprise, May 1981: 22.
88“you have to hack your way through with a meat ax”: quoted in Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Vintage, 1975): 849.
88displaced around a million Americans: Raymond Mohl, “Race and Space in the Modern City,” in Mohl and Arnold Hirsch, eds., Urban Policy in Twentieth Century America (Rutgers UP, 1993): 101.
89“they hadn’t the faintest notion of what they were doing”: Lewis Mumford, “The Highway and the City,” Architectural Record, reprinted in The Highway and the City (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953): 234.
89“Autos are strangling cities coast to coast”: “Senate Unit Told of Transit Crisis,” New York Times, March 21, 1961.
90everything progressive planners advocate today: EPL, John Stewart Bragdon Papers.
92one-third of the city’s existing housing stock was demolished: Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta: 153; Keating, Atlanta: 93.
93Atlanta would lead the nation in public housing: Atlanta Housing Authority, http://atlantahousingauthority.blogspot.com/2008/07/public-housing-projects-in-atlanta-are.html.
93Twelve percent of its population: Dettlinger and Prugh, The List: 102.
93planners had once infamously attempted to build a wall: see Ronald Bayor, “Roads to Racial Segregation: Atlanta in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Urban History 15:1 (November 1988).
93configured to eliminate portions of poor black neighborhoods: Keating, Atlanta: 205.
93the city insisted on moving I-75/I-85: Stone, Economic Growth and Neighborhood Discontent: 53.
95might easily be called “a slum”: Sweet Auburn: A Comprehensive Urban Design Plan for Auburn Avenue (Georgia Institute of Technology College of Architecture, December 1975): 3.
96“Rats and roaches infest every building”: “Cities: Recipe for Riot,” Time, June 30, 1967.
97decried the “racial double standard”: Richard Whalen, “The American Highway,” Saturday Evening Post, December 14, 1968.
97“blacks found themselves receiving at best” and “they most certainly are dealing them the cruelest blow”: Hébert, Highways to Nowhere: 105, 189.
98population of many counties surrounding Atlanta: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census figures; cited in Decade of Decision (Research Atlanta, 1981): 4.
98warned of the “extreme separation”: Back to the City: Housing Options for Central Atlanta, technical report commissioned by Central Atlanta Progress, June 1974: 3.
98“stock the Chattahoochee with piranha”: Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta: 99.
99“heroic mirror towers surging up one after another”: Philip Diamond, “Capturing the Great Town,” Real Estate Atlanta 5:1 (1975): 8.
100“everything is within reach of the pedestrian”: John Portman: Art and Architecture, walking tour guide by the High Museum of Art, 2010.
100“the suburban couple can ice skate”: Mike Keza, “Atlanta Straining to Be Top Convention City,” New York Times, March 17, 1976.
101Yusef was buried beneath concrete: Dettlinger and Prugh, The List: 57.
103“geography had become a parameter in and of itself”: Dettlinger and Prugh, The List: 125.
110“Somehow Atlanta is on trial in this thing”: “Still No Solution: Atlanta on Trial,” Washington Post, March 12, 1981.
110“inward-looking, cold, impersonal and inhuman”: “Experts Find Environment a Factor in Vulnerability of Slain Atlanta Children,” New York Times, March 18, 1981: A24.
113The district attorney said he still believed: “An Arrest in Atlanta, But Has There Been Too Much Pre-trial Publicity?,” Christian Science Monitor, June 23, 1981.
120Housing activists point out: “Atlanta Is Making Way for New Public Housing,” New York Times, June 21, 2009.
121city is canceling bus service: “Going to Extremes, as the Downturn Wears On,” New York Times, August 7, 2010.
123previously undisclosed transcripts: Bob Keating and Barry Cooper, “A Question of Justice,” Spin, September 1986, and Bob Keating, “Atlanta: Who Killed Your Children?,” Spin, October 1986.
Chapter 4: American Isolato
The investigation of Roger Reece Kibbe is the subject of one book, Bruce Henderson’s Trace Evidence (Lisa Drew/Scribner, 1998). For Ted Bundy’s story, I mainly used Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynes-worth, The Only Living Witness (Linden Press, 1983), as well as their collection of interviews, Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer (Signet, 1989). I also used Elizabeth Kendall’s The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy (Madrona, 1981); Steve Winn and David Merrill, Ted Bundy: The Killer Next Door (Bantam, 1979); and, to a lesser extent, Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me (Norton, 1980). Bundy is also discussed in Elliot Leyton, Hunting Humans. Henry Lee Lucas is discussed in Peter Vronsky, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (Berkley, 2004), though for facts I primarily used contemporary newspaper accounts.
My understanding of the eighties was shaped by two fascinating books by historian Robert M. Collins: Transforming America: Politics and Culture in the Reagan Years (Columbia University Press, 2007) and More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (Oxford University Press, 2000). On suburbanization and sprawl, my thoughts were mainly shaped by a few sources both pro and con. The pro-sprawl thinkers are Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (Doubleday, 1991). The antis include Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961; Modern Library, 1993); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford University Press, 1985); James Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere (Touchstone, 1993); and Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (North Point, 2000).
FBI history is engagingly recounted in Rhodri Jeff reys-Jones, The FBI: A History (Yale University Press, 2008). My understanding of how the Bureau used the serial killer panic to its advantage was shaped by David Schmid’s fun and smart book, Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2005), as well as Philip Jenkins, Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide (Aldine de Gruyter, 1994).
126“To understand America, you have to understand”: Robert J. Samuelson, “Highways to Everywhere,” Newsweek, June 30, 1986: 50.
126“Serial killers, like society in general”: Jack Levin and James Alan Fox, Mass Murder: America’s Growing Menace (Da Capo Press, 1985): 18.
132“Ted Bundy is a one-night stand”: see Jane Caputi, “The New Founding Fathers: The Lore and Lure of the Serial Killer in Contemporary Culture,” Journal of American Culture 13:3 (1990): 5.
133a “terrific looking man” with a “lean all-American face”: Jon Nordheimer, “All-American Boy on Trial,” New York Times Magazine, December 10, 1978: 24.
133“I felt inferior”: Michaud and Aynesworth, Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer: 25.
134“The press stories about Ted stressed his apparent normalcy”: Michaud and Aynesworth, The Only Living Witness: 14.
134250 reporters from five continents: Michaud and Aynesworth, The Only Living Witness: 10.
135“How do you describe the taste of bouillabaisse?”: quoted in Elliot Leyton, Hunting Humans: 128.
136“the first coast-to-coast killer”: Roy Hazelwood, foreword to Michaud and Aynesworth, The Only Living Witness: 5.
137“the first baby born on I-5”: “Mexico, U.S. and Canada Linked by 4.6-Mile Road Completing I-5,” New York Times, October 13, 1979.
139“the subliminal theme”: Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (University of Arkansas Press, 1995): 23.
139“We can no longer rely on a rising economic tide”: quoted in Collins, Transforming America: 25.
139“rededication to the industrial, mass-consumption society”: quoted in Collins, More: 164–165.
142“The thing that I have found about the serial murderers”: all quotes from the hearings are from Serial No. J-98-52, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate (Government Printing Office, 1984).
143“those who kill for reasons other than greed”: “35 Murderers of Many People Could Be at Large, U.S. Says,” New York Times, October 28, 1983.
144“growing evidence of a substantial increase”: Robert Lindsey, “Officials Cite a Rise in Killers Who Roam U.S. for Victims,” New York Times, January 21, 1984. Robert Heck’s quote below is from the same story.
145A 1992 article: Philip Jenkins, “Myth and Murder: The Serial Killer Panic of 1983–85,” Criminal Justice Research Bulletin 3:11 (1988). Robert Stote and Lionel Standing, in “Serial and Multiple Homicide: Is There an Epidemic?,” Social Behavior and Personality 23:4 (1995), concluded that serial homicide did in fact increase in the eighties, but only as much as all homicide did.
146“In playing up the frenzy”: Robert Ressler, Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI (St. Martins, 1992): 229–230.
150“Many accepted the highways”: Lewis, Divided Highways: 259.
152“As the boom of the 1980s and 1990s got underway”: Bruegmann, Sprawl: 203.
155“what the perpetrator has to do to fulfill himself”: John Douglas, Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit (Pocket Books, 1995): 252.
155signature is often an acquisitive act: see, for instance, Mark Selzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (Routledge, 1998): 64. See also Sara Knox, “The Serial Killer as Collector,” in Leah Dilworth, ed., Acts of Possession: Collecting in America (Rutgers UP: 2003).
155“should have recognized that what really fascinated him was the hunt”: Bundy quoted in Winn and Merrill, Ted Bundy: The Killer Next Door: 123.
159“He’s probably a resident of one of those areas”: “I-5 Strangler Blamed for 7 Deaths in North,” Los Angeles Times (Southland edition), January 9, 1988: 35.
162“I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit”: Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (Vintage, 1991): 328.
162“Somehow it has happened”: Joyce Carol Oates, “ ‘I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness’: The Literature of Serial Killers,” New York Review of Books, March 24, 1994.
163“a road map of the most repugnant behavior”: Sacramento Bee, March 15, 1991.
Chapter 5: Drive-by Truckers
My heartfelt thanks to Pat Postiglione, who never seemed to enjoy talking about himself but dutifully did so whenever I asked him to. Lee Freeman, Terri Turner, and Clark Fine were also open and kind. Eric Hickey very generously discussed his work with me, as did researcher Mona Shattell. Extra thanks to Marcus Feltsin and Ron Clarke, who let themselves be convinced to speculate about truck stops, and especially Ron for actually visiting one with me. And I am extremely grateful to the FBI agents who met with me, some of them multiple times, to make sure I understood how both ViCAP and the Behavioral Analysis Units work. Supervisory Special Agents Mark Hilts and James McNamara of Behavioral Analysis Unit 2; Supervisory Special Agents Mark Nichols, Mike Harrigan, John Molnar, and John Raleigh of ViCAP; Crime Analyst Nathan Graham of ViCAP; and of course Special Agent Ann Todd, my loyal companion from Public Affairs, were all very generous with their valuable time. Unless otherwise cited, all quotes in this chapter are fro
m interviews by me.
My understanding of trucking was shaped by Shane Hamilton’s fascinating book Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy (Princeton University Press, 2008). Another useful book, though old, was Charles Perry, Deregulation and the Decline of Unionized Trucking (Wharton School Labor Relations and Public Policy Series no. 28, 1986).
166“Fed by the prosperity of the last decade”: Peter T. Kilborn, “In Rural Areas, Interstates Build Their Own Economy,” New York Times, July 14, 2001.
166“Crime is a process”: Marcus Felson and Rachel Boba, Crime and Everyday Life, 4th ed. (Sage, 2010): 206.
169At least twenty-five former truckers are currently serving time: list compiled from newspaper archives. Janet McClellan lists twenty-two American trucker serial killers arrested before 2008 in “Delivery Drivers and Long-Haul Truckers: Traveling Serial Murderers,” Journal of Applied Security Research 3:2 (2008).
173serial murder victims have continually been underestimated: Kenna Quinet, “The Missing Missing: Toward a Quantification of Serial Murder Victimization in the United States,” Homicide Studies 11:4 (November 2007): 319–339.
173the homicide rate for prostitutes is 229 out of every 100,000: J. J. Potterat et al., “Mortality in an Open Cohort of Prostitute Women,” American Journal of Epidemiology 159 (2004); cited by Quinet: 323. The U.S. homicide rate comes from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, available at http://www.ucrdatatool.gov.
173“Many families drive from state to state and need accurate information”: Blake Morrison, “Along Highways, Signs of Serial Killings,” USA Today, October 5, 2010.
177roughly 70 percent of all domestic freight goes over the road, and more than 80 percent of the nation’s communities are served exclusively by trucks: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Study of Rural Transportation Issues, April 2010, http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/RuralTransportationStudy.
177“sweatshops on wheels”: Michael Belzer’s fascinating study of how trucking has changed since deregulation is Sweatshops on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation (Oxford University Press, 2000).
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