She asked me not to use her name. It’s the nature of her work; sometimes serial killers can be unpleasant.
Catherine DeVane (an alias) leads the FBI’s Highway Serial Killings Initiative. I asked her, while we recorded our conversation, whether the FBI was really blaming all this killing on long-haul truckers.
“Unfortunately, the commonalities we’re looking at with this particular initiative—the HSK—are dealing with the long-haul trucking industry. I mean, we’re not saying that every long-haul trucker out there is a serial offender or even involved in criminal activity. I mean, I had family members who were involved in truck driving, but they weren’t involved in killing people or raping people.”
She added that there were thousands of cases in the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program—ViCAP—crime database that weren’t connected to the highways. But with the HSK, she said, “The folks that we’re looking at, unfortunately, are involved in the long-haul trucking industry. What we have found is because they travel the highways, they don’t have that employer sitting there, so they’ve got some anonymity as to what they are doing, how long it takes them to get from point A to point B. But that’s why this initiative was designed. Let’s see who’s traveling those highways.”
That was good enough for me. If I was going to understand the cultures beneath the HSK, I needed to start by learning about long-haul trucking from those who did it for a living. I had to travel those highways and walk in their shoes.
What are you wearing?
Mike texted me from his late-arriving Spirit Airlines flight from Fort Lauderdale to Chicago. I was camped out in the gate area fighting sleep hours after my own flight’s arrival—just me and the low hum of the overnight cleaning crew vacuuming acres of carpet.
Dude, I’m the only one at the gate. It’s 1:30 a.m., I texted back.
Gotcha. You can’t miss me. Short stocky guy, big beard, gray shirt, black basketball shorts, Mike replied.
He was right. I didn’t miss him. Mike was a twenty-eight-year-old fireplug with feet. He was five six and weighed about 270 pounds. We shook hands, and Mike—annoyed by his late arrival—muttered that this flight was always late. We talked as we walked. I asked him why he kept choosing this night flight on a chronically late, low-budget airline.
“I have integrity—I’m not going to milk the boss for an expensive airfare or a hotel.”
Mike lived in south Florida. The trucking company Mike drove for was based outside of Chicago. As we lugged our duffel bags through the terminal in search of the rideshare pickup area, Mike cautioned me that it was way too late and he was much too sleepy to start any heavy discussions. I agreed; my brain wasn’t likely to absorb much at this hour anyway. The lot where Mike’s truck waited was about forty minutes out of the city; when we got there, we’d grab maybe a couple of hours of shut-eye in his truck’s sleeper berth, then hit the road just after dawn.
From a couple of prior phone calls with Mike, I sensed he was a talker. In fact, that’s why I was grateful when he’d agreed to tolerate my presence in his truck for a week. If I was going to learn something about modern long-haul trucking, I needed a crash course taught by a willing teacher. And Mike—despite warning that he was in no mood to talk—started talking. This fireplug might be a fire hose.
As we sat in the back of our Uber, Mike seemed to finally start processing the logistics of me being his guest for the week. “I think there’s an extra pillow in the bunk. Did you bring a pillow? I know there’s a blanket. Pretty sure about the blanket.”
No, I hadn’t brought a pillow—or a blanket.
Between the airport terminal and the truck lot, Mike started to download his story to me. “I was a fifteen-year-old busboy in an Italian restaurant who saw what the chefs were doing and wanted to do that. I begged the manager to give me any job in the kitchen—prep work, whatever.” His uncle—a player in commercial real estate and restaurant properties—picked up the pricey tuition tab at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, New York.
Mike thrived at CIA. He was a driven type A leader, a self-described “Let’s get it done” guy. In the fast-paced in-kitchen assignments, when his fellow students’ indecision and inexperience devolved into culinary chaos, Mike took over. “I need two on dish,” he’d call out. “Let’s sweep this floor.”
In the breakneck pace of the flagship school’s kitchens, a struggling student was a weight around the neck of his unfortunate partner. Mike was often partnered with another top student in the class. The pair ran circles around everyone in the kitchen assignments. Other students started complaining that it wasn’t fair when they were partnered with one particularly challenged student because their grades suffered. Eventually, Mike said to the instructors, “Give me that guy. Give me the guy who’s struggling.” Well, that student, then partnered with Mike, ended up graduating with high grades.
That’s the kind of guy Mike is. That’s the impact he has on those around him.
Mike did well, especially in the kitchen, and got nice job offers after graduation. Then one day, back home in Florida, “I woke up to find my father cold, dead.” Mike’s dad’s death was unexpected, and Mike and his brother had to settle their dad’s affairs. His dad had been into motorcycles and cars; if it went fast, Mike’s dad wanted it, wanted to drive it. That became part of Mike’s DNA. Today, whenever Mike was home, he worked on his own pet project, a 2001 Lexus GS 300. This was Mike’s baby. Later, he showed me the baby’s photos. He was putting a turbo engine in it, all the bells and whistles. A “Japanese rice burner,” he called it. Mike wasn’t particularly concerned with political correctness.
Mike poured himself into being a chef. “I’m a fisherman, I’d fish every day as a kid, so my favorite cooking was ocean-to-table, any fish dish.”
There was a job at Racks Fish House and Oyster Bar in Delray Beach. Then a couple more restaurant roles, including Sun, Surf, Sand, an upscale place in Fort Lauderdale. But Mike began to suffer, badly, from gout, which he was genetically predisposed to. It was painful; he couldn’t walk, couldn’t be on his feet. He started to call in sick even on busy Friday nights, not something that went over well in the restaurant business. Mike knew his health was becoming a burden not only to him but to his bosses and his coworkers. The money a new chef earned wasn’t that great to begin with, and now that money was drying up. Mike had bills to pay. He was broke. He needed cash, and he needed to be off his feet.
“But why trucking?” I asked.
Mike told me he wasn’t an office guy; he had never been that guy in the cubicle. “I’m a car enthusiast, gearhead; so was my father. We always had dirt bikes, go-karts; we considered these our toys. I always thought trucks were cool.”
Mike started researching online to learn what he had to do to get a CDL, a commercial driver’s license. “I had no money, I sold my motorcycle to get my CDL. My mom spotted me seven hundred dollars the first time I even went out on the road. I chose a training school that was ten minutes from my house. They didn’t even teach me how to disconnect a trailer. My school let you take the test when you felt you were ready as long as you met a minimum of three days on each of the required exercises—backing up, offset or parallel parking, alley dock. There were three written tests at the DMV, then a DOT physical, then a trip back to DMV to get my license. Start to finish, it was about three weeks,” Mike told me.
That’s not much, I thought, for being allowed to pilot tons of steel on wheels across our nation’s highways.
Then the job search began. One day, Mike was on his laptop and found a site for new CDL drivers looking for work. Yet what he mostly saw there were guys complaining that a newbie driver had to start out at one of the major companies, and those places could be brutal to work for and not great in the pay department. This is shitty, Mike thought. But one guy on the site posted that he worked for a small company out of Chicago called Ox and Eagle. That piqued Mike’s interest. He messaged the guy and got a response.
“How much do you want to make? What do you make now?” the man asked Mike. It turned out this guy was the lead dispatcher for Ox and Eagle. Pretty quickly, Mike was introduced to Andrei, Ox and Eagle’s owner. After a long phone conversation, Andrei told Mike, “I’ll pay for your flight to Chicago.”
His friends thought he was crazy.
“What is this company?” Mike’s friends asked him. “Are you leaving Florida for Chicago in the middle of winter?” Mike’s mom even had a private investigator check it out.
Andrei was supposed to pick Mike up at the airport, but he got stuck in a business meeting. No big deal for Andrei, who told Mike he’d pay for the Uber ride to a drug-testing place to start the hiring process. When Mike arrived at the testing site, they asked him for four hundred dollars. Andrei paid this fee over the phone, and Mike was impressed. “I felt better,” Mike said.
Finally, Mike met Andrei at his office. He offered Mike coffee, among other things. “Are you hungry? Here’s the keys to my Mercedes—go explore Chicago, get something to eat while you wait for your driver trainer to arrive.” Now Mike was really impressed. He called his friends to tell them he was holding the keys to the boss’s Mercedes.
Mike’s trainer—the presumably seasoned driver selected to impart all things trucking—was twenty-one-year-old Noah. Noah had worked for Melton, a flatbed company with a specialized three-week course in their parking lot that truckers call the Harvard of flatbedding. Noah met some guys at this Melton school, made friends, got their numbers. “Then Noah meets this trucker that tells him to stop working at Melton,” Mike said, “that he can make double at Ox and Eagle. So now Noah has a bunch of these guys in a group chat that he recruited to work here—we talk to these guys all day on the phone while driving. In fact, we all decided to meet in Austin where one of us lives. We had a great time. Great town.”
Mike knew why I was riding with him. I told him my interest in killer truckers had become a quest to learn more about culture, including Mike’s. I wanted to know what truckers did, how they worked, why they chose trucking in the first place. Mike was a young, relatively new trucker, so he was still trying to wrap his head around the culture. Mike shared an initial observation with me.
“A lot of truckers don’t have a place to live, no place to go; they live in the truck. It could explain why so many truckers can be rude to each other, heckling over the CB or at truck stops over parking spots. I have hobbies. I bought another motorcycle. I have a mother, my mother’s fiancé, my brother, my friends. Other guys, other truckers—they may have nothing.”
What Mike tried to tell me was that he had a life, a life with other people in it. A life outside his truck. Duly noted.
Noah decided to train Mike, the kid from Florida, in whiteout blizzard conditions in the Rocky Mountains of Montana and Wyoming. It was cruel and unusual punishment for Mike, who would never forget the heart-pounding, sweat-soaked days of simply trying not to die or kill anyone else. At the time, Mike didn’t know the difference between a flatbed on a truck and a flat note on a keyboard. His on-the-job training took place over the course of just six weeks. Then Mike was ready to drive on his own.
That was it. Trained. Mike joined the ranks of the one million semitruck drivers in the United States.
For the next seven weeks, Mike drove a truck belonging to some guy named Sergey. That too was a flatbed. Now it was my turn to be educated on what it took to drive, load, and off-load that kind of big rig.
For Mike, CDL school was just something he had to get through so he could start working and begin to really learn the job. He gave me a taste of his brake knowledge gleaned during his sojourn in the Rockies. “There’s an engine brake, called a Jake brake, and there’s a trailer brake. In the winter, if your trailer starts coming out from under you, a fishtail, most drivers will just slam on their Jake brakes, but what they should do is apply the trailer brake and then hit the gas—speed up—and then the trailer will straighten out.”
I hoped we wouldn’t need to do that.
“Then Andrei tells me he bought me a brand-new truck. He gives me an address in Kentucky to go pick up a new trailer for the truck.” Along with his new ride, Mike was given a new electronic tablet logbook and new straps and chains to secure his loads. “I drove that truck for eighty thousand miles last year. Then I traded trucks to add a bunk bed to the sleeper berth so I could start training new drivers. My buddy tells me he’s getting his CDL, so I trained him and kept this truck.”
Just like that, the student became the teacher. And Mike would provide my education during our week together on the road.
At this point, the Uber pulled into a large lot filled with big rigs in an industrial part of town. Mike directed the driver toward his assigned truck. It was dark except for an occasional overhead light, so all the chrome truck grilles that grimaced back at us looked alike to me. Mike spotted the truck number on the side of his rig. Bingo.
It was about three a.m., and Sunday had crept into Monday. Mike did a walk-around safety check before we entered the truck, and I tossed my bags up onto the top bunk in the sleeper berth. The time for talking was over. The time for sleeping was a few hours ago.
As Mike instructed, I pulled my bags back down from the top bunk and dropped them on the passenger seat—a drill I’d reverse in the morning and repeat twice each day. Then I removed my boots and slipped through a mesh magnetic closure curtain into the cramped, dark berth. I grabbed a handle on the bunk, planted one foot high on a small countertop, and hoisted myself up into the top bunk. Mercifully, there was a pillow—lumpy, with no pillowcase, but a pillow. There was also a towel-size paper-thin blue blanket that I attempted to draw up and around at least part of me against the Chicago night chill in the truck.
The alarm was set for six a.m.