A Discussion with Frank Figliuzzi, Author of Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers
The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit and Violent Crimes Apprehension program – known as ViCAP – helps coordinate cross border violent crime investigations by assisting police departments with behavioral science profiling and maintaining a massive law enforcement database on unsolved violent crimes, largely serial murder. In 2003, an Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation Analyst detected a crime pattern, a trail of bodies of murdered women found alongside the corridor of Interstate 40 spanning Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi.
The analyst and a police colleague from the Grapevine, Texas Police Department referred these cases to ViCAP to see if there were similar patterns of killings along the nation’s highways.
And it turns out there were.
This terrifying finding led to the creation of the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, and a separate area if ViCAP focus supported by a dedicated database to pool all the Highway Serial Killings Initiative data.
Since the launch of the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, a staggering 850 homicides have been linked to a solitary breed of serial killer long haul truckers.
Former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi is the author of a new book, Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers. It’s an in-depth examination of this ongoing initiative by the FBI together with police agencies throughout the US. I spoke with Frank recently about the Serial Killings Initiative and what he learned researching his book.
Frank emphasized that long haul truckers are essential workers without whom we wouldn’t have food on our tables or the other essentials that we take for granted every day. Most of them are hardworking, valued members of the workforce. Lurking amongst the over 2 million long haul truckers working for over 800,000 trucking companies traveling the highways are a small number of drivers who were drawn to the profession because of evil intent.
I asked Frank what attracts serial killers to work as long haul truckers. His answer was chilling.
“Who are the truckers and why are they attracted to trucking as a profession? We know this. We know that long haul trucking is the number one profession of serial killers. It just is. There’s nothing even close. And you can imagine why. It provides the kind of freedom, license and isolation to do what you want to do as long as you’re getting from point A to point B.”
Frank’s research included a deep dive into three distinct subcultures. Long haul truckers, sex trafficking victims and lastly, the crime analysts who hunt serial killers. How do they do it? Who are they? How do they connect the dots to try and stop the killing? Connecting those is particularly challenging for law enforcement. There have been 850 murders, 200 still pending, with 450 suspects in those pending unsolved cases.
What challenges these investigations is killers working as truckers in order to exploit the seams in our law enforcement jurisdictions. Serial killers working as long haul truckers will abduct a victim in one jurisdiction, murder them in a second jurisdiction and dispose of their remains in the third. Solving these cases requires consideringly more coordination – and manpower – than many small departments have at their disposal.
Frank is not suggesting the trucking profession creates serial killers. In fact, the study of psychology of serial homicide has shown that that some of this abnormal behavior may be genetic – brain synapses and chemistry that’s misfiring. And then add the environmental factors of often very abusive childhoods, at the hands of parents or loved ones and the abused become abusers.
The intersection of what makes someone become a serial killer and the solitary existence of long haul trucking make for a perfect storm. Truckers don’t have to talk to people, can be left alone so long as they are able to move much needed cargo from its point of origin to its destination.
That perfect storm of isolation and the solitary existence of long haul truckers as long made them an ideal target market for prostitution rings that operate in proximity to truck stops.
Frank travelled 2000 miles in a big rig researching the lives of long haul truckers and the sex trafficking victims who end up working as prostitutes. He interviewed women who had been trafficked to truckers some of whom survived violent encounters with truckers. These victims helped him understand these two distinct and yet intertwined subcultures.
One particularly upsetting thing Frank learned from his research is that sex trafficking victims are often underage women who were initially targeted online, then groomed and recruited, sometimes over the course of years. Some of the women Frank interviewed came from good homes, were smart, well-educated and yet these advantages that they had earlier in their lives didn’t shield them from becoming victims of sex trafficking.
Another shocking fact that I learned through my interview of Frak is the fact that the FBI’s Highway Serial Killings initiative has been in existence for over 20 years. It is the largest and longest running law enforcement initiative that you probably never heard of.
I asked Frank to explain the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit and the vital role that it plays. Frank mentioned that there is a great series on Netflix called Mind Hunters. It is about the history of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit (Now known as the Behavioral Analysis Unit) which is produced by John Douglas, the founder of the FBI’s BSU. It’s about the very early days of behavioral analysis and profiling. It’s a great way for people interested in the FBI’s role in investigating serial homicide to learn about how their approach has been honed over time.
The FBI’s Highway Serial Killings Initiative is overseen by the Behavioral Analysis Unit. The unit is comprised largely of non-agent crime analysts. No badge, no gun, but years and years of experience in what’s going on out there.
Frank interviewed the woman who leads the Highway Serial Killings Initiative who does amazing work. She described it as a combination of algorithms that are applied to the HSK database to find commonalities across time zones and the painstaking, analog analysis crime scenes of multiple unsolved homicides spanning two decades. The unit’s mission is also somewhat of a public relations role alerting police departments and the sheriff’s departments to the existence of the Highway Serial Killings Initiative database, educating them how to contribute data to it and raising awareness of grant money that is available to support police and sheriff’s departments.
There is another important, analog component to contributing data to ViCAP or the HSK. It is the completion of a questionnaire comprising roughly 200 questions asking every conceivable detail about the homicide case being submitted including about the crime scene, evidence collected, the suspect pool, witnesses interviewed and the status of the investigation. This is an incredibly important process especially to assist small town or rural police departments who may have very limited resources.
An often overlooked component of these investigations is something called victimology. Most crime analysts will tell you victimology is at the core of the study of serial homicide. It is the study of victims. We can become so fixated on the killers that we sometimes forget the importance of the victims. While yes, the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence has advanced things a great deal, the solution of these crimes still comes down to analysts who spend their days combing through files from across the country looking for common threads.
I actually completely one of those questionnaires when I was still in the FBI. It was in effort obtain a psychological profile of one of my subjects who we were hoping to “flip”. It was an interesting experience and an incredibly detailed questionnaire asking every conceivable thing including details you couldn’t imagine. Several of the questions caused me to ask: “how would anybody know this?” And yet, thanks to the extent to which we had investigated this individual prior to completing the questionnaire, we were able to fill it out to the point where the BAU called us and asked, “how did you know all this stuff?” And it was in-depth financial analysis that we’d done on this guy. As it turns out, he paid for everything by check and made notes in the memo section for each. Amazingly, we could answer obscure questions such as what era he most identified with (the 50s), what music he listened to (rock oldies), what historical or popular cultures figures he admired (Marilyn Monroe) and other details about him based upon his purchases.
When the movie The Silence of the Lambs was first released in 1991, it brought the work of the Behavioral Science Unit into pop culture and the public’s mind. It was the first time that actors and a film crew were granted access to the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit and the FBI Academy where they are based. I remember reading an interview of the actor Scott Glenn, whose character was based on BSU founder John Douglas. Glenn was embedded with the Behavioral Science Unit for a week or so alongside the agents and the analysts in the unit. At first, Glenn said he was appalled at how members of the unit joked about this incredibly horrifying subject matter that is their day-to-day lives. He then realized that humor was a coping mechanism that everybody in the unit not just used, but really needed in order to be able to work in this grizzly field to lighten the mood.
I remember my own behavioral science classes while at the FBI Academy which were taught by profilers from the unit. Quite unexpectedly, they were some of the funniest people I’ve ever met in my life. It wasn’t lost on me that the work that they did was not at all funny, and yet their senses of humor were intact.
Frank spent time with the investigators and some of the survivors of the Highway Serial Killings initiative. I asked him how they coped. He likened what they do to a razor’s edge. You don’t want to be so numb to the work that you don’t care anymore, yet you need find a way to distance yourself and use compartmentalization from the work to be effective. “Were it not for that ability to straddle the razor’s edge, you’d be crying at your desk or you’d be sick to your stomach every day. It’s a balance that has to exist. It is something that where analysts, agents, and homicide detectives in particular have in common with emergency room nurses and doctors and first responders in the EMS community. It’s either laugh or cry.”
Many of the victims in the Highway Serial Killings Initiative were at risk women who are sex workers, some of whom also suffer from addiction. I asked Frank to share what he learned in his research as to how the Highway Serial Killings Initiative has helped expose the role that human trafficking has contributed to the targeting of vulnerable women.
Frank believes that human trafficking and the targeting of vulnerable women are inextricably linked. Indeed, they are targeted and recruited first by the traffickers themselves who then put them to work as sex workers where they are once again in extremely vulnerable and dangerous situations on any given day.
As part of his research, Frank interviewed two widely recognized scholars who have studied human trafficking extensively. He learned that there are three types of “work styles” of trafficked victims. Pimp-controlled, renegades (so named because they have no pimp) and outlaws – who pose as prostitutes but instead isolate their purported customers to rob them.
Life on the road as a long haul trucker means being part of a kind of a caste system within the truck-driving community. Frank rode along with a flatbed driver for over 2000 miles. Flatbed drivers are very involved with their cargo both physically and mentally. Loads vary significantly in terms of customers, weight, the extent to which the cargo needs to be secured and how. In addition to flatbed truckers, there are “reefers” who drive refrigerated trucks. HazMat tankers. Wide load drivers. Low boys. And then on the lower end of the spectrum, there are dry vans. They’re just moving trailer dry goods across the country. There’s very little human interaction and no physical engagement.
Frank asked which of these types of truckers is more likely to be a killer given these subcultures. Some offered their opinion that truckers that work for big corporate trucking companies wouldn’t be able to be killers given how much tracking there is of loads, the cargo itself and the fact that the tractors are equipped with cameras. But those cameras are intended to keep track of the drivers and their cargo. They provide no coverage or assurance as to what the driver is doing away from the rig.
Hiring organizations are a microcosm of society and just like the society as a whole, there’s a subset of the truck driver subculture who have bad intent. Adding to that mix is the fact that the federal government permits trucking companies to offer second chance programs which involve the hiring of convicted felons. These are wonderful programs in that they create opportunities for ex-cons to assimilate back into society by giving them gainful employment. It’s been proven to reduce recidivism. But there is a potential downside to these programs. Organizations who hire ex-cons must perform thorough background investigations and have strong policies as to what type of criminal convictions are acceptable, which would disqualify a candidate and how to make sure that these disqualifying criteria are being followed. Was a crime of violence? Violence against women? These programs are great, but they come with heightened responsibilities.
Frank’s background as a corporate security director for one of the largest companies in the world helped him view the Highway Serial Killings Initiative through a few different lenses and prompted him to pose some questions. How do we do this better in trucking? How do we do this better in law enforcement? How do we get better at anti-trafficking for the victims? One of Frank’s big takeaways came from his having visited places that help women get out of the trafficking trap. One such place is called Starfish Place in Phoenix, Arizona which is a joint venture of the City of Phoenix and Arizona State University. It’s run by Professor Dominique Sitz who was extremely helpful in his research into sex trafficking. Professor Sitz and Starfish Place taught him about the current research into trafficking, and how partnerships between police agencies, social services organizations, and private organizations are providing the resources trafficking victims need to start new lives.
To hear the entire conversation with Frank Figliuzzi, click here.
To order a copy of Frank’s book, Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers, click here.
