What I Am Reading: "Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate" by Ginger Strand

I’ve had this book on a sub-backlist for years because one of its chapters, that about trucker serial killers, made its way to Longform. I picked it up as an easy read that combines two of my occasional interests: true crime, and castigating car culture.

The book, written by a journalist and part of a “Discovering America” series, chronicles different aspects of America’s ambivalent and anxious relationship to the highway infrastructure that it has built since the end of World War 2. Highways have led to a series of highway killers, both famous and unknown, who have been spawned by real social problems arising from the creation of the interstate system and in turn spawned both reasonable introspection and mass hysteria.

Many of the problems caused by the interstate highway system will be familiar to anyone with a cursory interest in urban studies or geography. Besides having a hand in the environmentally damaging exponential proliferation of automobiles, highways have fostered endless sprawl that squanders resources and replaces more socially-cohesive communities with mass dislocation and suburban isolation, fraying the social fabric. They have drastically increased inequality in the cities that they have cut through, as whole neighborhoods (often Black or other minority neighborhoods) were bulldozed to make room for their passage, and others were walled off with no on-ramps and no way for those too poor to drive to get to the jobs that were exported to the suburbs. Highways have negative psychological effects on their drivers, as they foster anonymity and paranoia that leads to road rage.  

All of this has come about in order to foster perpetual economic growth in the United States through interconnectedness. But growth, in the conclusion that Ginger Strand builds to, eventually (sometimes rapidly) reaches a tipping point where it creates an underclass, and the killers that her book chronicles often both come from and prey upon this underclass. It is made up of those who saw their socio-economic position deteriorate because the streamlining efficiency of interstates took money from the losers and gave it to the winners. Some were people who lost their livelihood to big business, some were those who flocked to urban slums to take part in the new economy, some were those crowded into those slums after the highway or the growth machine took over where they used to live.

I recently came across another book on a similar topic. A review of Thomas Frank’s new book pointed me to a book by Shane Hamilton on the nation’s trucking infrastructure. Trucking provided an outlet for farmers who had been displaced by big agribusiness (facilitated by the reach that interstates provided to new markets), an outlet where they were self-reliant but economically squeezed regardless. Another article I recently read (courtesy, again, of Longform) talked about how truckers often became ensnared by predatory lenders while pursuing the dream of self-reliance in owning their own truck. I’ll return to trucking later.

Highway killers started early, and fed social anxiety from the beginning. The first that the book covers is Charles Starkweather; not someone who had his livelihood taken away by the new economy, but someone who the boom passed by. A young kid growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska, he was a hot-rodder who idolized James Dean and identified with the alienation of the post-war Silent Generation youth. After he went on a killing spree that targeted his girlfriend’s family, a family friend, and a rich family in one of Lincoln’s suburbs, the media focused on his car-obsessed lifestyle, and how he had traveled to the murders, tooled around between the murders, and gone on the run on the highway before being apprehended. Our expectations of the stultified ‘50s are overturned somewhat when Strand talks about how this tabloid fodder, so close to Sputnik and other Cold War setbacks, triggered a bout of introspection where Americans worried that the new obsession with speed, growth, independence, and consumerism was tearing the country’s social fabric apart, and leading to the generation of “juvenile delinquents” who weren’t statistically a problem but were a large cultural concern. Kids had no guidance and no meaning in life, no role models; they were able to pick up and move wherever they wanted, and not anchor themselves in any community. They were becoming rootless and antisocial, and communities came apart on their own as the rich moved to suburbs and the poor were left behind in crumbling cities. Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels investigated a similar blue-collar late-‘50s motorist milieu from a different angle. Starkweather made suburbanites stare down the barrel of the world that they had rapidly and inexorably set into motion.

The highway has good aspects, of course, and is much-romanticized in American culture as a pathway to freedom and adventure, a way to see the sights of the country and, in a counter-point to ‘50s concerns about rootlessness, escape stifling conformity. In the next decade, the counterculture pushed back on the materialist, consumptive aspects of car culture through hitchhiking. You only need to look at old Preston Sturgis films to see that hitchhiking was a recognized and acceptable part of car culture from the beginning; but hippies practiced it ideologically as well as practically, a way to foster connection against the alienation of the highway, and a way to help the environment. The FBI and other sources had started to push back on hitchhiking with the creation of the interstate highway system, portraying the hitchhiker as a potential danger to the quaint nuclear family who picked him up. However, Ed Kemper turned this in the other direction, a killer in Santa Cruz who targeted young women whom he picked up on the side of the road. Eventually this case and all of the other threats, real and exaggerated, curbed the practice until it was considered non-respectable and foolhardy.

Next the book turns to the city, specifically the potentially unsolved child murders in Atlanta in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. As noted above, highways and slum clearance took a great toll on the American city in post-war years, crowding minorities into run-down neighborhoods as the road passed them by to connect suburbanites, who had left the cities and taken their money with them, to new urban centers designed for upscale car access only. This was the case in Atlanta, sliced up by a whole ring of freeways that turned the city into a theme park for suburbanites while leaving its actual residents behind. It took considerable public pressure for the police to start to pay attention to a rash of children who turned up dead in the city’s vacant lots between the slums and the highways, in “the world the road had made.” Neighborhoods filled with inferior housing, occupied by transient residents, close to major roads, and pockmarked with vacant lots are highly correlated with higher crime rates, and these neighborhoods are what the highway spawned.

By this time, however, mainstream American culture didn’t care. The anti-freeway movement peaked in the ‘70s as Americans grew concerned about the environmental and social degradation that the highways and their anonymous, mass-produced commercial appurtenances had spawned; but America re-embraced limitless growth in the greed-is-good Reagan ‘80s. This was the same time that the Son of Sam, John Wayne Gacy, and others had codified the idea of the “serial killer’ into the popular consciousness. The most famous of these, because of his shallow charisma, was Ted Bundy; the roving nature of some (though by no means all) of his killings caused a misconception that most serial killers were mobile, while in fact they are more typically stationary. This inter-jurisdictional element was useful to the FBI, who hyped the idea of traveling killers. Paradoxically, killers who were actually mobile, often truckers such as Henry Lee Lucas or the chapter’s partial focus, Sacramento’s Roger Reece Kibbe, flew under the radar. While the culture was obsessed with upscale serial killers like Bundy and Hannibal Lecter, the blue-collar loser serial killers flew under the radar. They didn’t fit the serial killer’s glamorous image.

This brings us to the chapter on truckers, available online and linked to above. Truckers and serial killers intersect in a few different ways: those with a psychological tendency toward murder could be drawn to the profession’s mobility and independence, and to the opportunity to interact with the underclass in the form of “lot lizards,” or prostitutes who ply their trade at highway truck stops. These truck stops are a liminal space that allow for and encourage the kind of anonymity and social isolation that can facilitate crime, with the built environment itself contributing to the problem. They are part of the highway, not connected to any surrounding society or community, their users are transient by nature and could be hundreds of miles away the next day, and one truck is the same as any other. Meanwhile, the trucking profession is a stressful one, grueling hours for low pay and a non-existent social infrastructure to catch those falling through the cracks, whether into drug addiction or into poverty or into darker places. Truck stops provide, besides lot lizards, a diet of energy drinks and cheap food, wearing further on the road-bent bodies and isolated minds of their patrons.

The final chapter notes the rise of (reported) serial killers in Mexico, as NAFTA brings more inter-connectedness and concentrates a new underclass in the newly-booming factory areas. China and India are also seeing a rise in such crime as they industrialize. The highways don’t create serial killers, but they break down social ties and are a force multiplier of the growth that causes the economic inequality. Thus they do perhaps, lead to their rise. At this point, though, it’s a little late to turn the car around.

I was able to bring a lot of my previous readings to this book. Though it covers sprawl from the highway, it doesn’t talk much about the isolation of suburbia; references here are those that I brought to the topic myself from previous readings. Consumerism, car culture, sprawl, deregulation, inequality, racism: these things are all related, and a lot of writers tackle the topics in isolation or in interconnectedness. The luridness of true crime is a good way to draw people into the larger social problems of the highway and of growth and sprawl that the book addresses.