Serial killers hiding in plain sight as truckers to terrorize US highways, expert says

Serial killers could be working as long-haul truckers in the United States.The FBI launched its Highway Serial Killings Initiative in 2009 after analysts noticed a pattern of murdered women – most living transient lifestyles involving drug abuse and prostitution – who had been killed and dumped along the Interstate 40 corridor in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi, according to its website.Using the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which is a national database between law enforcement branches that contains information on homicides, sexual assaults, missing people and unidentified human remains, analysts amassed a list of hundreds of victims along highways nationwide and hundreds of suspects, predominantly long-haul truckers. Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director of the FBI who spent 25 years with the agency, released a book this year on the subject, “Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers.”In the book, he writes that there have been approximately 850 murders along America’s highways since 1980, and that about 200 of them are unsolved.“Oftentimes, the people who are at the highest risk for being kidnapped or harmed by a serial killer are the people who are the most invisible, the least likely to have connections to their families and may or may not have a trafficker,” said Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, the director of Arizona State University’s Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research.“The casual reference [to a woman selling sex at truck stops along interstate highways] is a ‘Lot Lizard.’ They are often very transient and often suffer from substance abuse disorders.They are very likely to not be missed, to be easily lured in by a truck driver with some money,” she said.

“It’s a low level of screening and a low level of personal safety.”There are between 300,000 and 500,000 long-haul truckers in America, NPR reported, and the majority of them are upstanding workers committed to keeping the supply c...