The trucker kept beating her. She was desperate and dope sick and certain that her life would end inside that truck. All she thought about was how another girl had been raped, beaten, and tossed unconscious into a field an hour outside of town. She was determined not to be another victim. She shifted into survival mode. In her situation, neither fight nor flight was an option, but she could talk and pretend, so she did.
Something clicked in her brain. She told the driver that the truck-stop cameras must have grabbed a photo of his license plate. She claimed there were friends following her. She said the cops would send him to prison.
She kept talking and screaming and crying. Then she tried another route.
“I’ll give you all the money back!”
It worked. The trucker shoved his panicked passenger out the door and onto the frontage road like yesterday’s trash.
It was a day in the life of what truckers called a lot lizard. It’s what lot lizards called themselves too. If one of them survived that kind of encounter, could she survive them all and find a different life? How does that become someone’s life—or death? What does the path of what I call pre-victimization even look like? I needed to understand. I particularly wanted to wrap my mind around how an all-American girl next door—like the woman who is called Hannah in this book—ended up trafficked to truckers. Hannah agreed to meet with me as a consultant; she even signed a release for this book and approved her alias in the hopes that, by telling me her story and about the work she now does, she could provide insights into truckers, trafficking, and victims. More important, she hoped that someone out there might be helped, inspired, maybe rescued by reading this book.
I hit the ground at an airport in the Midwest on Friday around midday and grabbed an Uber for the twenty-minute ride north. In an earlier series of texts, Hannah had agreed to start our multiday conversation with dinner. After she suggested three different options (“Do you have any dietary restrictions or any foods you don’t particularly care for?”), we settled on a place that served decent Greek food. In her almost compulsively coordinating, people-pleasing fashion, Hannah had sent me links to three nearby hotels to consider for my lodging. Those efforts at planning and coordinating, smoothing over issues for others, gave me some of my first insights into who Hannah was. Soon I’d learn more. Much more.
Those hotel choices were convenient to the Course Change Center, where Hannah worked in the center’s human and sex trafficking support initiative. It’s a place designed to offer women the many services they need to turn away from trafficking. It was also where we spent most of our waking hours for the next couple of days, with the permission of its leadership.
Soon after I checked into the worn, dated chain hotel near Hannah’s office, she texted me.
Hi, Frank, hope you made it okay. I wanted to reach out because we had a bunch of emergency intakes today, I was hoping to be able to have dinner tonight but it’s not looking so good. We just got started on these intakes. I’m not sure if you want me to message you when done. Once I am finished, if it’s not too late, I could message you and take it from there?
With twenty-five years in the FBI, I was no stranger to Friday-night emergencies—were there any other kind? It didn’t surprise me that the same was true for victim advocacy. It turned out that three women had chosen this Friday evening to flee from the same pimp; they couldn’t go another weekend on the street. True to her word, Hannah texted me an update later to confirm dinner wasn’t happening. We agreed to meet at eight thirty a.m. the next day. She would pick me up outside my hotel and we’d head to Course Change.
Good morning, I will be leaving in about thirty minutes to pick up coffee. I’ll be there at 8:30 a.m. and let you know when I’m about ten minutes away. That was my Saturday-morning text from Hannah.
When I slid into Hannah’s Ford sedan, there was an unsolicited venti-size Starbucks waiting for me on the console, a simple gesture that suggested her larger and learned longing to minimize any risk posed by the unknown. I was an unknown. When we walked into the conference room at Course Change, I saw fresh fruit and pastries on the conference table. Had Hannah already been here this morning?
This young lady, in her late twenties with green eyes and a thick mane of brown hair, had grown up in a slumbering, unpretentious village in the north-central Midwest. Her family were hardworking blue-collar folks of European heritage, churchgoing brick masons, millworkers, and cops.
The human-trafficking experts and social workers I consulted for this book taught me that there were specific patterns and commonalities in the lives of victims. Not every young person with this background became a victim, but the existence of one or more of those indicators was frequently found in the personal stories of those who were ultimately trafficked. Elements of their early lives pointed them down a path of vulnerability and, later, victimization. While each of these women had unique stories and circumstances, they had more similarities than differences. Some of the victims’ stories contained only a few of the recognized warning signs that foreshadow a descent into destruction. Yet many of the women eventually, sooner or later, experienced most or all the danger signs. Hannah was one of the many.
Some women had early childhood recollections of their parents fighting; some of their parents drank heavily or disappeared for days at a time. There were memories of lots of drunken yelling, arguing, throwing things. The smell of alcohol imprinted on a young mind became the smell of trouble. I was told stories of young siblings huddled in a closet, covering their ears, sobbing, and trying to comfort each other. To the outside world, these families often seemed serene. The grass got mowed; the kids went to school.
In some stories, the appearance of serenity was broken when the police showed up on a domestic call and a parent was arrested. That began the trauma that triggered the need to make things better, to alter the current reality. Tough stuff for little kids; difficult memories for an adult. If only those earliest memories had been the end, not the beginning, of the trauma. In Hannah’s case, her mom packed up Hannah and her sibling and trekked to another town. Hannah thought they were going on a road trip, but she soon found out that her parents were divorcing.
So many of the stories that victims shared with me included a traumatizing violation at an early age. One such victim wanted me to know what happened because she felt it was important for people to understand. When the woman reached this part of our discussion, she took a deep breath in and let it out forcefully. She paused. I sensed that talking about this was almost as difficult as experiencing it. It happened one summer when she was still a kid, a preteen.
There was this man in her neighborhood who came around often. One day, her parents were out running an errand. That solitary moment in time was enough for him to steal this little girl’s innocence. That’s all that needs to be said. She was tricked, traumatized, and twelve.
I was struck by the randomness of this molestation, the seizure of a single moment by an adult predator, the brief window of opportunity that a warped human crawled through. Being hurt like that changes someone’s life. If unacknowledged and unaddressed, the trauma lurks just beneath the surface, altering who someone is and who she becomes.
Nancy Yarbrough was a girl next door, a PK—preacher’s kid—from Wisconsin. She told her story publicly to the press and in a TEDx talk in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.1 Nancy’s upbringing was filled with love, faith, and a keen sense of right and wrong. Her homelife exemplified the scripture passage that hangs framed in many Christian homes: “But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15). That foundation didn’t mean Nancy was immune from the traumas that take girls next door down a trail to trafficking.
The trauma started early. “So, my journey began when I was younger, way younger than I needed to have had somebody touch me inappropriately and not know how to respond. So, my first interaction with being exploited was unwanted touches.”2 People she was familiar with committed acts Nancy was most unfamiliar with. She couldn’t imagine how to tell her parents what had happened, so it remained unspoken.
Nancy’s parents divorced, and her older brother took on the role of head of the household. It didn’t go well. Nancy experienced more trauma, more of the unfamiliar. The personal violations came at the hands of extended-family members. “They took advantage of these vulnerabilities that lie in the heart of any child, of anyone who wants to be loved and accepted.”3 More traumas came at school, where Nancy said her peer group shunned her. She was “bullied, ostracized, teased at school.”4 In her young mind, based on what was happening, Nancy began to view her value, her worth, as something defined by older males driven by their own self-interest. She said that she started turning to men to seek attention and affirmation.
There’s a trail of trauma in the lives of trafficking victims. The traumas can start early and then stack up into a tower that crushes and consumes whoever is under it. Victims shared tragic stories of childhoods filled with grief, including the accidental death of close family members, suicides or attempted suicides, major illnesses, and the pain of parents cheating on each other. There were roller-coaster rhythms, times when everything seemed right with the world, followed by dramatic plunges that sent everyone reeling.
Nancy and Hannah experienced the kinds of journeys I needed to learn more about. Hannah had her own personal details that she might share in her own way, in her own time, like Nancy did. Those intimate particulars remain Hannah’s to tell, maybe revealing the predators who marked her slow but sure path into darkness. For now, for the purpose of my research, I’m sticking with the generalities of Hannah’s story that most mirror the core elements of what others have told me about their journeys.
These shared pathways were split into before and after. Sometimes there was the before and the after of parents’ volatile divorce. For some, there was the before and after of childhood molestations. Others noted the before and the after of a tragic death of a beloved relative. Of course, these victims described their stories with the benefit of hindsight, a benefit bestowed only on those who have lived to have that luxury.
Early exposure to drugs was relatively common among some, although not all, of the victims I met. Older siblings, relatives, peers, parents, and certainly aspiring pimps were often responsible for introducing drugs into the picture. There was frequent early-age marijuana use among a trusted group, the weed transforming into a kind of communal sacrament for kids whose developing brains were still under construction.
That was Nancy Yarbrough’s reality. She started drinking and using marijuana as a very young kid, substances supplied by older influencers. “That caused me to be raped for the first time, for my first sexual experience.”5
For these girls next door, the signs of drug use sometimes began to appear in their school performance and at home, but too often the signals were missed by parents distracted by their own traumas, despair, grief, or simply their fight to survive. Teachers and coaches, if they even spotted the indicators, would sugarcoat reality, cut a good kid a break, or assume someone else was addressing the problem. Nancy’s parents thought her behavior was merely “teenage rebellion,” but she reminded all who might be dealing with similar conduct that “this is not teenage rebellion. I’m crying out. I want help, but nobody notices.”6
For many victims, drug use served as a salve in a circle of friends who were bonding over their mutual traumas. That bonding sometimes evolved into a romantic relationship between a younger girl and an older teen or man. Since trauma and drugs formed the foundation of the attraction, those same two elements predestined a future filled with more of both. In a typical case, the older partner introduced increasingly harder drugs into the dynamic, often accompanied by pressure and the threat that rejecting the drugs was tantamount to abandoning the relationship. In more than one case, the boyfriend coaxed the girlfriend to partake in the shared pleasure of heroin, assuring her that a small sampling wouldn’t lead to addiction. That was always a lie.
Despite declining to use heroin multiple times, some young women eventually caved. They needed to understand this thing that had such power over the men in their life, this substance that won the attention of their partners. One victim told me about the first time she tried heroin: “In a second, my life changed. Anxiety, insecurity, trauma—with heroin, they were gone in seconds.”
This next level of drug use also included cocaine, LSD, mushrooms, and ecstasy. Abuse of prescription drugs like OxyContin was prevalent among pre-victims and rampant among those young women who were in the throes of trafficking. Eventually, there was little distinction between dependence on drugs and reliance on the relationship; they were both sources of meaning and affirmation in a life increasingly isolated from the positive influence of family and stable friends.
Victims told me that verbal abuse and physical violence by the male partners were common even in their young, initial relationships. It wasn’t unusual for the police to enter the picture in response to domestic disturbances between girlfriend and boyfriend. That influencer/boyfriend often became abusive, in some cases while the girl was still in high school. One young victim I spoke with had been choked by her boyfriend. Another time, he hit her head against furniture. Her attempts to escape the relationship were met with strong opposition, and she was afraid of losing him and her dream of a fairy-tale future. The fear won.
From where I sat, the girls in these budding romantic relationships were the ones who seemed to possess the higher intellect. They also appeared to be more industrious, often working the job, or jobs, that put food on the table. Many young women attended college before finally succumbing to the siren calls of their boyfriends and the drugs. All too often, a victim’s hard-earned money was diverted by her partner to purchase drugs. A girl’s disbelief upon discovering the frequency and potency of her partner’s often secretive drug use was a common theme. But the sense of deceit and betrayal triggered by the revelation that her boyfriend was up to no good seldom resulted in a quick or easy breakup.
The tales about pre-victim pathways were littered with boyfriends’ broken promises that they would never again strike them or shoplift or steal; often they pledged to enter and complete drug rehab. You might ask—as I did of Hannah—why these bright, hopeful girls didn’t just leave. But at that point, they were isolated from everyone but their boyfriends. The more abusive the men became, the more trapped the women felt. And those boyfriends did indeed become more abusive. In many cases, a type of call-and-response developed: The girlfriend would finally find a way to break off the relationship, only to be lured back by the boyfriend in great need of bail or rent money, companionship, or sustenance. As Nancy noted, the factors that kept her from walking away from predatory men included “fear, vulnerability, and the love we believed we had would now go away.”7
I was wrong in my preconceived notion that young women involved in trafficking probably came from families who didn’t care or who lacked the capacity to do anything about it. Nancy Yarbrough had parents who loved her, provided her with the newest toys and latest fashions. She said that nothing traumatic ever happened within the confines of her home.8 Some families often tried mightily to create distance between their daughters and dangerous boyfriends. Sometimes it worked temporarily, but often their efforts failed. And sometimes those attempts worked to wipe away the first perilous relationships, but the young women eventually got involved in even more fatal attractions.
Multiple trafficking victims related accounts of early pre-trafficking days when they either looked the other way while a boyfriend or husband committed crimes or outright participated in those crimes. Shoplifting, car theft, and burglary, often to feed a mutual drug habit, further cemented an alluring sense of “us against the world.” Becoming partners in crime also fueled a codependent bond and isolation from others. A victim from a law-abiding family described being haunted by anxiety, worrying constantly whether this would be the day the police finally caught up with her or her boyfriend and sent them off to jail. The crimes and the drugs fueled the anxiety, and the anxiety could be quieted only by more drugs. This became an unending cycle, beyond this bad boyfriend and the next one and the one after that, across a developing matrix of drug-addled decision-making, despair, pain, and even jail.
The act of purchasing drugs itself was a source of overwhelming anxiety for girls next door like Hannah. Small towns in the Midwest weren’t exactly underworld bazaars brimming with ready supplies of heroin. That meant that kids raised in rural or exurban bubbles who were now hooked like trout on taut lines were reeled into the big city for their next taste. In the upper Midwest, that big city was either Chicago or Detroit. As a young lady described it, you could just drive to a known dealing location in Chicago and wait. “We would take the Cicero exit to Michigan Ave., almost to the lake, and just pull up. A guy comes to your window—that guy doesn’t have it, but he whistles to someone who does. Even today, this hasn’t changed.” The process became routine, and so did the danger-induced dread.
In the span of about a year, a young woman could spiral from occasional drug use to constant craving. Lurking just below the surface of that overwhelming desire was an ever-present fear: Do we get arrested today? Or, worse, robbed and murdered? The relentless anxiety of making the purchase caused one pre-victim to pull over her car and vomit on the way to a purchase. It was a momentary delay of the inevitable score. As usual, the girl and her guy still made their buy. Those fears of arrest or harm were warranted; it was only a matter of time. For so many of these young women, the time grew exponentially closer.
The fate of the girls next door was frequently linked with deeper involvement in drugs, crime, or both. For Nancy, the drug was cocaine.9 Using drugs and committing crimes were joined at the hip. I met a trafficking victim who explained that she found herself agreeing to hold drugs for her boyfriend, then to hand off heroin to buyers, and then to receive the cash payments. As I listened to these stories, I sensed the train wrecks in progress. A young woman was exploited by the perceived love of her life so he could maintain plausible deniability when the police showed up. Rest assured, the police did eventually arrive. These episodes wouldn’t be the last time such women were exploited by a man, or men, for the benefit of everyone but themselves.
The injection of police into the picture sometimes presented an agonizing decision point. Whether detectives were inquiring about narcotics, burglaries, bad checks, or stolen credit cards, they inevitably asked their young defendant to cooperate—to snitch on her boyfriend or on others. In one case, the police proposed that their arrestee engage in controlled buys—drug purchases against specific targets. For the young woman, the fear flooded back: Do I tell the police what I know? Do I become a rat? Word travels fast in a small town where everyone knows everything about everyone, including who among them is cooperating with the cops.
Trouble with the law, with family, or with finding work became catalysts for young women like Hannah to catch the wanderlust bug and escape the pressures of the present. Like itinerant farmers seeking greener pastures, off they went with their beaus in rented U-Hauls or old cars groaning with the weight of all their worldly possessions. They road-tripped to warmer climes or to locales where some well-meaning cousin or uncle sang the praises of job opportunities or easier living. Some scraped together all their remaining funds to make the move happen; others pleaded with their parents or relatives and pledged that this move would be the fresh start, the new beginning that would make all the difference in their lives. Hopeful parents, not understanding the depth of the drug use, wanted to believe that geographic distance from the wrong crowd and the drug supply was the answer to their prayers. But miles didn’t make miracles.
For some, at first, the freshness of new jobs, a new apartment, maybe the encouragement of a local relative or friend, contributed to a genuine sense that life was looking up. Hannah told me tales typical of addicts who swore to stop using—the “just one more time” phenomenon, a splurge on one last binge before hitting the gas pedal and magically leaving addiction behind. Blowing wads of cash, often provided by moms or dads, on copious quantities of heroin or Oxy or both was a form of self-sabotage that undermined the best of intentions. The last-minute binges became part of a “wash, rinse, repeat” pattern over months or years of drug-induced stupors, failed stints in rehab, and multiple relocations aimed at more fresh starts, all of which quickly became old news.
Hannah and Nancy certainly weren’t the only young ladies from Midwest towns to experience heartache and trauma. Trauma had visited twenty-nine-year-old Sharon Kay Hammack long before Hannah was born. In August 2022, twenty-six years after a citizen made the unpleasant discovery of a woman’s remains rolled up in a blanket near Grand Rapids, Garry Dean Artman10 was finally caught and charged for murdering Hammack. Sharon had been bound by her hands and feet, raped, and stabbed. Hammack, a mother of two, was an addict and had engaged in prostitution, just like twelve or so other women found dead near Grand Rapids during the 1990s. A long-hauler, Artman had a record of violence, including a rape conviction that sent him to prison in Michigan for nearly a dozen years.
Like so many other victims’, Sharon Hammack’s corpse spoke for her, pointing to her killer. Unfortunately, it took two and a half decades for someone to get the message. Hammack’s vagina and rectum contained traces of Artman’s DNA, as did the rope used to bind her. Detectives submitted that DNA and waited.
In 2006, Maryland State Police provided to their laboratory the DNA from the body of a murdered sex worker who had also been raped. That DNA matched the DNA from Hammack’s case in Michigan and revealed the murderer was responsible for both deaths. Now the police needed to know who that person was. The rapidly advancing field of forensic genealogical testing came to the rescue.
Using publicly available DNA databases, police traced the DNA to the parents of four sons. Only one son was connected to Michigan. Garry Artman had lived and worked near the Hammack murder scene, and police could place him within twenty miles of the Maryland victim.
I couldn’t possibly access all the case files or meet all the women who, like Hannah, Nancy, and, tragically, Sharon Kay Hammack, became trafficking victims, but I could find someone who knew a multitude of Hannahs, Nancys, and even Sharons.