Evil on the Open Road: Inside the FBI’s Highway Serial Killings Initiative

The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit and Violent Crime’s Apprehension Program (ViCAP) help coordinate cross border violent crime by assisting police departments with behavioral science profiling and by maintaining a massive law enforcement database on unsolved violent crimes largely serial murders.  In 2003, an Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation analyst detected a crime pattern: a trail of bodies of murdered women found near the Interstate 40 corridor 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 there were. This terrifying finding led to the creation of the Highway Serial Killings Initiative and a separate database under the auspices of ViCAP to pool all of 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.

I interviewed former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi about his best selling book: Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers on the Fraud Eats Strategy Podcast.  Frank does an in-depth examination of the ongoing investigation of 850 homicides committed by long haul truckers and takes inside the worlds of long haul truckers, the victims of human trafficking and the crime analysts and investigators who investigate serial homicide.  Listen to the whole interview at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/evil-on-the-open-road-inside-the-fbis-highway/id1527816335?i=1000659510504