Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate
By Ginger Strand, University of Texas Press
With a dark lyric from the Doors as its title, Killer on the Road explores how the explosive postwar growth of the federal highway system has enabled violent crime. Who knew that these marvelously engineered clover-leafed roadways would not just drive the economy but also create a deadly combination of social transience and personal anonymity, destabilizing sociopaths and psychopaths while making them feel invulnerable to legal consequences?
Look at Nebraska’s 19-year-old Charles Starkweather: His 1958 car lust turned bloody as he and jailbait girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate headed down the road on a shooting spree that claimed 11 lives. Or Ed Kemper, a necrophile dubbed the “Coed Butcher,” who dismembered the bodies of six female victims after he’d performed sexual acts with them. It was the early 1970s, and the 6-foot-9, 300-pound highway worker found easy pickings among naive hitchhikers on northern California’s improved roadways, which afforded easy drop-offs when he was done with them.
By the 21st century, much of the early optimism about the interstate system was replaced by fear over what lurked by the roadside. Still, trucker Bruce Mendenhall, like an 18-wheeling Grim Reaper, exploited the seeming invisibility of off-ramp sleaze to murder women at truck stops. Convicted of one slaying, he is still under investigation or awaiting trial for several more.
Less familiar than tales of lone predators is how the interstate program enabled the series of child killings in late 1970s Atlanta: Around 29 victims (opinions differ on the total), all of them black, prompted the first New York Times use of the term “serial murder.” New highways had paved over large parts of the city’s black neighborhoods by the early 1960s, displacing more than 60,000 people and isolating them from the renaissance Atlanta enjoyed in the 1970s. High-crime areas, vacant lots, access to major roads—“Atlanta’s urban renewal and expressway construction had, at the very least,” Strand writes, “built the stage on which the tragedy in Atlanta could unfold.”
Strand does not overstate the relationship between highways and homicide—there is no direct cause and effect, no simple explanation— but she provides clear-eyed and complex analysis that illuminates their interplay. Killer on the Road merges the chilling appeal of true-crime stories with compelling social history.
Originally published in the April 2013 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
