Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers

From the FBI’s former assistant director, a shocking journey to the dark side of America’s highways, revealing the FBI’s Highway Serial Killings Initiative’s hunt for long-haul truckers who account for an astonishing 850 murders across the nation. In 2004, the FBI was tipped off to a gruesome pattern of murders along America’s highways and interstates. Today at least 850 homicides have been linked to a solitary breed of long-haul truck drivers. They have been given names like the “Truck Stop Killer,” who rigged a traveling torture chamber in the rear of his truck and is suspected to have killed fifty women, and “The Interstate Strangler,” who once answered a phone call from his mother while killing one of his dozen victims. The crisis was such that the FBI opened a special unit, the Highway Serial Killings Initiative. In each case, the victims—often at-risk women—are picked up at truck stops in one jurisdiction, sexually assaulted and murdered in another, and dumped along a highway in a third place. What’s worse, the transient nature of the offenders and multiple jurisdictions involved make these cases incredibly difficult to solve. Based on his own on-the-ground research and drawing on his twenty-five-year career as an FBI special agent, Frank Figliuzzi investigates the most terrifying cases. He also rides in a big-rig with a long-haul trucker for hundreds of miles, gaining an intimate understanding of the life and habits of drivers and their roadside culture. And he interviews the courageous trafficked victims of these crimes, and their inspiring efforts to now help others avoid similar fates. The Long Haul is a gripping exploration of a violent, disordered world hiding in plain sight, and the heroes racing to end the horror. It will forever unsettle how you travel on the road.