FBI - Highway Serial Killings Initiative

Surprisingly, no one in the US ever tied all the roads and the dumped bodies found off them to the trucker community. Maybe it was because of movies like "smokey and the bandit", which portrayed the truckers as "good ole boys" ..... modern cowhands if you like, but finally the FBI made the connection and launched the Highway Serial Killings Initiative.

This map shows the more than 500 cases in the Highway Serial Killings Initiative database; the red dots mark where bodies or remains have been found along highways over the past 30 years. It's believed by many that this map content, may still be actually under reporting the murders by as much as a factor of ten, but so many of these cases were dealt with 'locally' that the true figure may never be known.

The victims in these cases are primarily women who are living high-risk, transient lifestyles, often involving substance abuse and prostitution. They’re frequently picked up at truck stops or service stations and sexually assaulted, murdered, and dumped along a highway.

Already this initiative has led to the identification of serial killers such as Bruce Mendenhall, and John Williams and an examination of many "cold cases" by the FBI has led to claims that the current trucker community includes around two hundred serial killers.

Lest we forget, we have had at least two trucking serial killers in the UK, Peter Sutcliffe ("The Yorkshire Ripper") and Robert Black (Child Murderer) and its likely that across Europe there are many serial killers driving the roads.

Russia for instance, has had a proliferation of serial killers since the collapse of the Soviet Union, its believed that for propaganda reasons the Soviets were unable to admit to serial killings, so they often went uninvestigated. Many of them were related to the thousands of miles of roads across Russia.