Killer truckers remain a clear and present danger. It’s a threat that sometimes veers far off the highway and much too close to home. In March 2023, Texas-based long-haul driver Ramin Khodakaramrezaei,1 thirty-eight, murdered a podcast host he was obsessed with. The trucker began stalking Zohreh Sadeghi, thirty-three, who went to court and got a temporary restraining order against him. But before police could find him to serve the order, Khodakaramrezaei found his target. He appeared at Sadeghi’s suburban Seattle home and shot and killed her, her husband, and then himself.
While truckers keep killing, the FBI keeps helping police solve cold-case murders by truckers. In January 2023, James William Grimsley, a fifty-five-year-old long-hauler living in Utah, was finally arrested for allegedly murdering Terrie Ladwig, a twenty-eight-year-old trans woman, in her Concord, California, apartment. She had been beaten, strangled with a cord, and murdered almost three decades earlier, in 1994. California police said forensic evidence directed them to Grimsley.
This book started as an interest in the FBI’s Highway Serial Killings Initiative but quickly became a quest to understand the cultures beneath the killings. The truckers and the trafficked, the professors and the pimps, the cops and the crime analysts took me on a journey to places I hadn’t anticipated, populated by people I never knew. They allowed me into their worlds, their realities, and their stories. I learned much from each of them—enough to offer some thoughts on tackling the tough issues around trafficking victims, the people who kill them, and what the future might hold.
Our country has made inroads against the scourge of sex trafficking. Yet it’s hard to counter what we can’t even quantify. The estimates of the number of women, men, and children forced into sexual servitude in the United States every year vary broadly because there’s no single method of capturing the data. As detailed by DeliverFund, a nonprofit intelligence group that helps train and equip police to counter human trafficking, “one study from the Department of Health and Human Services estimates the number between 240,000 and 325,000, while a report from the University of Pennsylvania says there are between 100,000 and 300,000 victims annually.” We must get better at data collection if we’re going to make a dent in trafficking prevention. To do that, more people need to give a damn.
Victims of sex trafficking are still among the most vulnerable people in our society. Yes, there is far less sex trade at truck stops these days, but don’t be deceived. The trafficking still happens in nearby motels and massage parlors and, most of all, via the internet, the greatest force multiplier of trafficking in history.
Hannah, herself an early adopter of online ads, confirmed the shift away from truck stops and toward a more tech-driven approach to trafficking.
“There’s a lot more signage today at truck stops warning about trafficking. A lot of truck stops are renovated—they don’t want to return to the days of sleaze and drug sales. In my city, there are signs that warn of prosecution. The trade has shifted online: ‘Let’s meet at a motel’ or ‘Park your truck at the Walmart.’ The problem hasn’t gone away, it’s just moved. There’s also cash apps like Venmo and PayPal that make it easier for everyone—pimps, their girls, their clients—to move money around.”
The shift is not unlike the transition from Dale’s old-fashioned trucking to Mike’s high-tech logs and trackers.
Sex ads on Craigslist are largely eliminated since that platform shut down its personal-ads sections several years ago. The notorious Backpage.com is shuttered. But there are hundreds of more sites now, more decentralized, harder to isolate and neutralize. For law enforcement, anti-trafficking groups, and legislators, it’s a game of cyber-world Whac-A-Mole—take a site down, two more sites pop up. Yet the battle must continue, with increased policing of the internet and enhanced civil and criminal penalties for people and platforms that host sites where victims are trafficked.
Polaris, the anti-trafficking organization, has assembled the most comprehensive North American trafficking database. In 2018, they released results of multiyear research that found almost a thousand sex-trafficking victims were recruited online—through Facebook, dating sites, Instagram, and in chat rooms and other electronic venues, often through a technique that Polaris calls boyfriending.2
Online groomers use coded language or sometimes no language at all; emojis are part of a subtle recruitment of victims. McKenzie Zahradnik,3 a prevention educator at ASTOP (Assist Survivors. Treatment. Outreach. Prevention), had this revelation from her observance of online grooming: “The things that they were communicating wasn’t through actual words,” she said. “It was through different emojis and they meant different things. So if we take our child’s phone and we’re trying to look through it, do we always know what that fully means?”
Of course, internet advertisements, online recruiting schemes, and the physical presence of victims for sale at truck stops are merely public manifestations of deeper ills. As I learned from the experts, drug abuse and mental-health issues are inextricably linked to the supply side of sex trafficking. Public awareness of these problems has risen, along with a growing yet still inadequate number of treatment plans and programs.
But there’s another societal aspect to trafficking that remains largely unaddressed. It’s the part that few people, particularly those in power, seem willing to confront: the insatiable demand—almost entirely from men—for accessible, affordable commercial sex.
It’s not that no one is working on the client, or john, side of the equation; it’s just that the effort hasn’t taken hold. Clearly, some of the law enforcement/social work partnerships, like the ones bolstered by Dr. Sepowitz, target the men who respond to trafficking ads. But many similar efforts, including arresting the johns, are superficial at best. There’s much more work to be done.
For example, one organization created an award-winning campaign to motivate men to take a public stand against the commercial sex trade and sex trafficking. The initiative spread across the country and around the globe through the power of social media. At least 65,000 men have viewed its educational video and taken the pledge not to become part of the demand for human trafficking.
I pledge to educate men on the importance of ending human trafficking.
We pledge to work to eradicate the business of human trafficking for our women, for our men and for the world.
It is my duty to not stand by and let the industry of human trafficking benefit off the back of the innocent, therefore I pledge my heart, mind, body and spirit to the eradication of an industry that seeks to destroy life rather than build it up.
Police departments, which are often male-dominated, need to take a more active role in countering trafficking. Despite all her time at truck stops, Hannah never interacted with the police there. She could count on one hand the number of times she saw what might have been an undercover officer or police vehicle even near a truck stop. I asked Dale Weaver how common it was in his time to see the police patrolling truck stops. He told me that he might have seen a police or sheriff’s car once a night at a stop, but no more than that. In his years on the road—what he called his “lifetime at truck stops”—he told me the police weren’t really a presence. During my week on the road with Mike in and out of truck stops, I saw the police only once—and that seemed to involve a suspicious or stolen car, not a trucker.
As for law enforcement, they would be wise to spend far less time arresting the sex-trafficked and more time identifying them as victims and sources of intelligence—about drugs, pimps, and potentially violent truckers. Hannah offered words of advice to the police about combating trafficking:
“It has to be a collective effort with the community—a holistic approach to supply and demand. It’s too stovepiped. Cops do their thing; social workers do theirs. Drug treatment centers do their own thing. More partnerships are needed. There are lots of cues and signs and red flags that law enforcement misses. It’s easy to turn a blind eye and not put in enough time to really have an impact.”
Professors Williamson and Sepowitz would echo those sentiments. In fact, they’ve implemented those ideas.
In terms of impact, it’s debatable whether legalizing prostitution would have any effect on actual trafficking. While legalization might free vice detectives to shift their focus away from adult sex workers who have made a choice and onto true trafficking, it might also cause law enforcement officers to throw up their hands and walk away from investigating anything related to the sex trade. Similarly, the public could be confused and assume that since prostitution was legal, all commercial sex must be legal. The empathy for victims and outcry against trafficking could be lost. And legalization wouldn’t put a stop to trafficking. There will always be criminals who prey on the most vulnerable and try to make a buck on the backs of those who are unable or unwilling to break away.
Ten counties in Nevada have legalized prostitution within licensed brothels, but all is not as it seems. As Dr. Williamson explained it, many of the women in those brothels are sent there by boyfriends or pimps to earn money and send it back to them. Right off the top, half of their earnings go to the brothel, and for some, the rest goes somewhere else. There are also strict laws requiring women to spend most of their time inside the brothel as well as restrictions that prevent the women from raising their children in Nevada. That means the workers who are mothers are kept from their kids and are largely relegated to life inside the brothel. To me, it sounds more like involuntary servitude than free enterprise.
Most important, to reduce the number of trafficked people and lessen the likelihood of more murder victims, we need more heroes like Dr. Williamson, Dr. Sepowitz, Nancy and Hannah. Individuals who devote their lives to producing not just post-trafficking survivors but lifelong thrivers.
Then there are the truckers. Young Mike doesn’t need a medical or psychology degree to know what most truckers intuitively know—the profession is brutal on the body and brain. But most truckers might not know that there is research to back that up.
If you ask a large group of behavioral profilers, psychologists, and criminologists whether serial killers are conceived in the womb or crafted during their lives, most will tell you it’s a little of both—or, more likely, a lot of both. A horribly tragic mix of gene variants and misfiring brain synapses combined with cruel childhood home environments, neglect, and other environmental influences can produce heinous results. Of course, sometimes they don’t. And sometimes, only a few of those factors are present in studies of those who kill and keep killing until they are caught.
So what is it about long-haul trucking and long-haul truckers? Why are a significant number of truckers historically and currently associated with serial murder? Is it nature or nurture or both?
In 2020, a Canadian study led by Jennifer K. Johnson at the University of Western Ontario provided plenty of fodder for the nurture crowd. Entitled “The Health Experiences of Long-Haul Truck Drivers and Their Relationship with Their Primary Care Provider,” the study found “repeated themes of isolation, dehumanization, unmet basic needs, and truckers living in a ‘hidden, separate world.’”
The study was filled with accounts of systemic sleep deprivation, dangerously poor diets, lack of exercise, and the absence of regular medical care. The truckers in the study all talked about the stress of having to deliver their cargo on time, regardless of variables totally out of their control—inclement weather, unexpected traffic nightmares, border inspections, law enforcement stops, and mechanical failures.
As one trucker said, and as the Canadian study seems to confirm, “If a trucker didn’t suffer from depression at the start of his career, he would by the end.”
The truckers in the study were keenly aware that as they gripped the steering wheels of their rigs, they held the power of life and death. One of the study participants expressed how that felt:
“Driving a truck is not an easy job. It’s a very dangerous job. It’s not only like you drive; I am also trying to save everybody who is around me because those people are not aware of me, like what I can do to them.”
What he can do to any of us.
That’s not to say that there are any excuses or easy explanations as to why certain truckers kill. Many people experience far greater stress than long-haul truckers under similarly isolating and unhealthy circumstances for decades but never turn into serial predators. Some of them, like prisoners of war or those with horrifically abusive childhoods, go on to achieve great successes and enjoy warm relationships. One of the differences might be the distinct traits of a small subset of truckers who choose to long-haul because they are driven—perhaps subconsciously—by the opportunity for evil. For me, the question isn’t so much why some truckers kill but whether we can lessen the odds of it happening.
I think we can.
First, trafficking education should be mandatory to obtain a CDL. It wouldn’t take much time—perhaps no more than an hour to play an eye-opening video. Truckers in CDL classes can even be given the opportunity to take the pledge not to be part of the demand side of trafficking. It would serve as a start to men understanding that the women in those lots, in those nearby massage parlors and motels, are most likely not operating of their own free will and that the trucker’s money is going straight to a pimp. It’s not that such enlightenment would dissuade a killer, but it would increase trafficking awareness among a cadre of people who are more likely than others to see it, report it, and even intervene to help someone. There is at least one organization trying to accomplish this right now.
Truckers Against Trafficking (TAT) is a nonprofit organization that says it “educates, equips, and mobilizes truckers, the travel-plaza industry, and law enforcement to combat human trafficking.” They take a “pro-trucking” approach that views truckers as a “positive force for good in discovering and disrupting human trafficking networks.” Since its inception in 2009, TAT has trained almost a million and a half people. The organization offers a four-hour block of training to law enforcement professionals. TAT recognizes and addresses that, as positive a force as truckers might be, they also represent a portion of the demand side of the problem.
On that front, TAT offers “individuals, corporations, and men’s groups” a thirty-eight-minute video called Addressing Demand Man to Man. Most recently TAT launched a mobile exhibit called the Freedom Drivers Project (FDP). The full-size tractor trailer, eye-catchingly wrapped, has traveled over two hundred thousand miles across forty-five states to over two hundred events, according to TAT’s media platforms. The TAT website claims that “over fifty thousand truckers and others have visited the walk-through exhibit in the FDP’s climate-controlled trailer.” And TAT’s training has paid off. Each year, the group recognizes truckers and cops who’ve saved lives by reporting or disrupting a trafficking situation or by aiding a victim.
Second, we should enhance health-care practices for truckers by more closely monitoring their physical and mental health and by making it harder for them to satisfy their annual checkup requirements by merely popping into a cash-only walk-in clinic for a routine once-over. All of this would take money, increase health-insurance costs, and likely reduce the supply of available truckers. The industry lobbyists would hate it, but so would the serial killers.
The mental health of truckers might also benefit from the practice of cross-training them in more than one type of trucking, especially within companies that run a variety of truck types. Training a dry-van trucker to also haul flatbeds or reefers or tankers might help break the mind-numbing monotony they experience. More engagement with the load, more mental stimulation, could lessen the opportunity and the likelihood of killers gravitating to the job. Maybe.
Third, we should treat truckers as the essential workers that they are. Trucking is an integral part of our nation’s supply chain, which means truckers are vital to our economy. In 2021, the industry earned over $875 billion in gross freight revenue. According to Business Insider, “grocery stores would run out of stock in three days if truckers stopped driving.” Yet the country does not seem to acknowledge that truckers make all that happen.
Better pay and better working conditions; professional screening and background checks, even psychological vetting; and mandatory tracking devices regardless of independent ownership could all potentially stack the odds against serial killers or at least make it easier to catch them. Those kinds of changes would require legislation and overcoming the powerful trucking-industry lobby, and it would run into union resistance. But it’s worth a try because electronic tracking also makes sense from an anti-theft perspective. Trucks are hijacked and loads get pilfered all the time. According to the FBI, cargo theft costs American shippers and truckers at least thirty billion dollars a year. A simple GPS device might catch a thief—as well as a killer.
Hannah has some insights on catching killer truckers from her own experiences. She would tell crime analysts assigned to highway murders to prioritize suspects with alcohol problems. In Hannah’s experience, those guys were the loose cannons, the most unpredictable.
“I saw some drug use by truckers, but by far, alcohol was the problem among the scariest drivers, and their real addiction was sex. Look for truckers with few or no relationships. Men with a deep sense of rejection by women, unassimilated into society, suffering from social anxiety, painfully introverted with a history of violence.”
I asked Hannah who she thought was more likely to be a serial killer, the corporate trucker or the guy who owned and operated his own truck. That’s when she shared the story of a friend of hers, a fellow inmate, whose regular trucker client parked at a truck stop but rented a car and a motel room. He’d use his car to take Hannah’s friend to dinner, then they’d head to the motel.
“He beat and raped my friend—but his truck never entered the picture. He did this crime during his downtime.”
If that trucker was corporate, then he’d figured out a way to beat the truck’s tracking devices: just rent a car on your downtime. If he was independent, no one cared where he was or what he did. It didn’t matter. But it mattered to Hannah’s friend. When Hannah’s parole was revoked and she was held in lockdown before she was transported back to prison, she spotted her friend on the jail television. Her friend had been found dead by the side of the road. Hannah doesn’t think it was drugs. She’s convinced someone killed her.
All of this presumes that there is some inherent uniqueness to the trucking industry and its established link to serial killing, that somehow, if the need for long-haul truckers vaporizes, we’ll see a corresponding drop in the number of serial murders.
Maybe not.
Enzo Yaksic, a founder of the Atypical Homicide Research Group at Northeastern University in Boston, said that serial killers characteristically take “unremarkable jobs, mostly in blue-collar fields, and figure out ways to use them in their favor.” Yaksic explained, “Those that punch a clock can fade into the background. And performing routine tasks that don’t require excessive concentration helps them save mental energy. Their emotional intelligence is reserved for learning how best to exploit others for their own gain rather than for the good of the company’s bottom line.”
In other words, if the day ever comes when there is no need for long-haul truckers or there are far fewer truckers, those individuals who are predisposed to killing will simply find another way to keep on killing.
So where will the killers go next? Most likely, they’ll make the same transition that their victims and other kinds of murderers have made—they’ll move right on to the internet. Undoubtedly, some long-haul killers are already there. It makes perfect sense. Researchers D. J. Williams, Jeremy Thomas, and Michael Arntfield in a 2017 article for Leisure Sciences wrote about it.
“The disappearance of once traditional career paths will obviously have profound effects not only on the jobs held by offenders but also how they acquire their victims. Serial killers once used the guise of their employment to stalk and acquire specific victims or types of victims. But new research suggests that leisure activities . . . including online interactions, may be the new avenue through which serial killers troll for their victims.”
How long might it be before killer truckers start trading their semis for the cyber world in large enough numbers that the FBI’s HSK team notices? That day is nearer than you think.
The Future Is Now4 as Driverless Trucking Hits Nation’s Highways
April 22, 2022
(NewsNation)—Many Americans might not realize that driverless tractor-trailers are currently navigating the nation’s highways, hitting the open road with absolutely nobody behind the wheel. . . .
Autonomous driving technology company TuSimple was founded in San Diego in 2015 with a mission to improve the safety and efficiency of the trucking industry.
TuSimple is a developer of heavy-duty, self-driving trucks and the autonomous startup has already created a freight network along the Sun Belt from Phoenix to Houston.
“This is better, no doubt about it,” said Jim Mullen, chief administrator and legal officer for TuSimple. . . .
“It doesn’t get mad, there’s no road rage, it’s in no hurry,” Mullen said. “It doesn’t have the characteristics that we as humans sometimes have.”