Chapter 25
NUMBERS GAME
By the end of February 2009, our family was en route to New York City to participate in an interview with Hoda Kotb, a correspondent for Dateline NBC. Unfortunately, Ryan was unable to accompany us because of his scheduled midterm exams at college. Having entered a new school with a fresh slate, Ryan knew how important it was that he focus more seriously on his schoolwork. Although he wanted to join us, he thought better of it, not willing to let even the smallest of distractions jeopardize his future again. I thought it was the right thing to do, and we all supported him. I was still apprehensive. I didn’t know what to expect or what questions we would be asked. I admit that I also harbored some other, more superficial concerns, such as how I might appear on camera. I was not looking forward to the entire country seeing me with ten extra pounds courtesy of the NBC television cameras, not to mention the twenty extra pounds I had packed on over the previous two tumultuous years.
Also weighing on my mind at the time was an e-mail that I had received the day before. It was from Todd Ewalt’s victim advocate, Jennifer Storm, who requested my assistance in pressuring the governor’s office to expedite the signoff on Lane’s impending extradition to Pennsylvania. A few weeks earlier, Kevin and I had already given an authorization that gave Pennsylvania our consent to keep Adam Lane in that state to serve the entire length of his prison sentences after they tried him. However, Lane had still not been moved, and the Pennsylvania prosecutor’s office was hoping I might be able to remedy whatever red tape was holding up his extradition with a phone call. Since I had previously contacted the governor’s office and inquired about the same issue almost a year and a half earlier with regard to the New Jersey case, and was rewarded with only further frustration and failure, I wasn’t sure it would do any good. But I agreed to try it once again to see if I might have an impact this time around. I made some quick phone calls and got ahold of E. Abim Thomas, a member of Governor Patrick’s legal counsel, and left a message. I made my case as best I could, but I didn’t know what might come of it, if anything. However, after we landed in New York and arrived at the hotel, I received a call on my cell phone. It was Thomas. She was as helpful as she could be, given the circumstances, and promised me that she would contact me personally once the governor had signed the grant. We agreed to reconnect the following week. It was very encouraging news.
Marianne O’Donnell had gone to great lengths to make sure our stay in New York would be a positive and memorable one in every way. The accommodations at the Waldorf were exemplary; the food was simply outstanding, and the entire dining experience was unlike anything I have ever had before. All of this was something that most people may never experience. Having become friendly with Marianne, I’m sure she just wanted to put us all at ease and try to offset some of our anxiety at having to recount our horrific experience during the summer of 2007 in front of a national television audience.
The next morning, Marianne met us in the lobby, and from there we proceeded to our interview by limousine. Interestingly enough, the filming took place in an obscure loft tucked away in SoHo and not in the NBC studios as we had been expecting. The atmosphere was laid-back and comfortable, which helped to reassure us that our decision to sit down with Dateline had not been a mistake.
Hoda Kotb immediately put us further at ease with her friendly demeanor and even the way in which she shook our hands, holding them firmly but gently as she greeted us. She introduced herself to Shea with a warm, “Hey, girl,” which left an immediate and lasting impression, not only on our daughter, but Kevin and me as well. At that moment, we looked around at each other, feeling confident that she would portray our experience in a positive and sincere manner. She made it easy to answer the questions posed to us, and before we knew it, it was all over. It was like a dreaded trip to the dentist that you fret and worry about all week, but once you get there, it is not as bad as you thought.
As we spilled out onto the street afterward, a cameraman followed us, like our own private paparazzo. Dateline wanted to get a few casual shots of our family in motion. It was rather comical to think about seeing ourselves in such a scenario, trying to act as if it was normal for the three of us to be walking along the crowded streets of New York City like this every day. And trying to do it while someone was taking pictures of us made it difficult just to keep a straight face. Some people on the street stopped and stared. You could see them trying to figure out who we were. I laughed out loud, wondering what they may have been thinking. The stars of some reality show, perhaps? We had our fun with that, but I became much more sober-minded when I considered how these pictures might be perceived by those who did not know us.
Our flight back was scheduled for early that evening, which left us with plenty of time to take in some of the sights of the Big Apple. Marianne had even arranged an impromptu tour for us at Rockefeller Center and lunch at the Rock Center Café. We had something to eat with an excellent view of the skating rink and the Prometheus statue. It was a beautiful day. The entire trip was something none of us will ever forget. Later that night, however, my feet firmly planted on Massachusetts soil once again, I felt an incredible sense of relief even though I had enjoyed our brief visit to New York and felt that the taping had gone well. I only hoped that now life would go back to normal for the McDonoughs.
In my continued need to grasp some kind of understanding of Lane’s motivations, I started Googling “truck drivers” and “truck stops” and “truck stop crimes,” or anything that was directly or indirectly related to these topics. It wasn’t that I thought I might find something that law enforcement officials had missed, but I was curious about how unusual a crime spree like this might be. I thought perhaps there might be some insight I could gain about the life of a truck driver. Maybe something about the job was conducive to homicidal behavior, like being a postal worker, as the joke goes.
I was shocked by what my search turned up. I simply could not believe how many truck drivers have been suspected or convicted of highway murders through the years. In fact, after what I found out, I’d think the phrase “going postal” should be permanently replaced with “going trucker.”
There was horror and grief splashed all over the Internet, like the blood of the victims at the hands of these truckers who made the towns around the interstates their personal killing fields. It was not quite a daily event, but it appeared to happen often enough to make my family’s situation less exceptional than I first thought. I felt all the more fortunate as a result.
Los Angeles Times journalist Scott Glover wrote an interesting article in the Sunday, April 5, 2009, edition of the newspaper. Citing an ever-growing database of female murder victims, Glover reported that the FBI suspected that serial killers working as long-haul truckers were responsible for the slayings of hundreds of prostitutes, hitchhikers and stranded motorists whose bodies had been dumped near highways over the last three decades.
In 2004, law enforcement officials identified a pattern of homicides involving the deaths of prostitutes who worked in and around truck stops in the south-central region of the United States. These killings had taken place over a number of years and initially involved the states of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi as well as Indiana and Pennsylvania. In 2009, the FBI launched the Highway Serial Killings Initiative to track suspicious slayings and suspect truckers.
In the years following, federal as well as state and local law enforcement agencies began meeting for joint case consultations, resulting in the identification of more than two hundred truck-driver suspects. Timelines have been compiled on more than fifty of these individuals to date, with more in progress. These timelines, which cover the entire United States, are available to departments that have rape and homicide victims meeting the following description: prostitutes working from truck stops, hitchhikers, transients, stranded motorists, unidentified dead bodies, and any other victims at risk where the suspect is likely to be a long-haul truck driver.
Many of these crimes remain unsolved, but in other cases, the suspected truckers are still at large. One such trucker had served fifteen years for a previous murder in Illinois and was paroled early; then on March 16, 1996, he offered a Denver, Colorado, woman a ride home. Her body was discovered the next day, beaten, strangled and raped in an alley adjacent to railroad tracks. The trucker was quickly identified as a suspect, but he fled when he realized a warrant had been issued for his arrest. He abandoned his tractor-trailer at a truck stop in Sioux City, Iowa, and has not been seen since.
In another example, a California trucker-murderer turned himself in to authorities one day in 1998 by walking into a Humboldt County sheriff’s station with a severed breast inside a Ziploc bag and telling a deputy that this was just “the tip of the iceberg.” It seems the handsome, clean-cut trucker, who kept his rig impeccably clean, had a penchant for prostitutes and hitchhikers. He was convicted of killing four women, their mutilated and dismembered body parts found scattered throughout the state. And in a more recent case, a fifty-six-year-old independent trucker from Illinois was implicated in the deaths of six people in four states throughout the South.
There is a map of the United States in the FBI office near Quantico, Virginia, covered with more than five hundred red dots, each one representing a murder victim in the Highway Serial Killings Initiative database and spanning thirty years of time. Despite all the red on the map, one FBI supervisory agent believes that the number of such offenses has been “grossly underreported.” Some estimates say that as many as eighty thousand unsolved, apparently random violent crimes, not limited to murder, have taken place and continue to take place all across the country. With more than fifty thousand miles of highways connecting American cities and towns, it would seem that no one is really immune from this kind of thing.
The database is filled with information on scores of truckers who’ve been charged with killings or rapes committed near highways or who are suspects in such crimes, but authorities do not have statistics on whether driving trucks ranks high on the list of occupations of known serial killers. Investigators could only speculate that the trucker’s mobility, lack of supervision and access to potential victims, most of whom lead high-risk lifestyles that leave them particularly vulnerable, make it a good cover for someone inclined to kill. Painting with a broad brush, one investigator described the trucking community as a “mobile crime scene.”
The FBI had not publicized the existence of the program to the public until just prior to Glover’s article. Working in relative secrecy, the information that these FBI analysts gathered had helped solve dozens of cold-case killings, and making the database available for law enforcement agencies to submit additional case information helped locate numerous suspected offenders. With information and data gathered from local police departments on seemingly random killings, sexual assaults and other violent crimes, the analysts can use the system to spot patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. The Highway Serial Killings Initiative was designed to help local police “connect the dots” to slayings outside their jurisdictions. Unfortunately, even with all the progress and success of the program, there is still a long way to go, with many of the dots remaining unconnected to any known suspect.
It makes the whole thing seem like a numbers game. But all these dots have names.
Hunterdon, New Jersey, County Prosecutor J. Patrick Barnes credited the FBI with helping them eventually solve the Massaro case.
“We’re so busy looking at cases in our own towns, our own counties and our own regions that we sometimes miss what’s going on around us,” said Barnes. “You can’t connect the dots if you don’t know what the dots are.”
It is frightening to think that there are others like Lane in the world, but there are many more like him out there. This is by no means meant to disparage all truck drivers. There are far too many good ones, who abide by the laws, both moral and man-made, to make any kind of critical judgment against the profession as a whole. The harsh reality is that there are people in all walks of life and in many lines of work who are capable of hurting and willing to hurt other people for no reason. These are dangers you cannot spend too much time worrying about because you have to live your life. Everyone, however, should be aware that these dangers exist and minimize them at every opportunity. For the rest, I guess, that’s why we have police departments and police officers. If it is all just a numbers game, I am glad we have officers, like the ones we have in Chelmsford, on our side.