A road is a convenient thing to hang a case on. It runs through counties and states, past police departments that answer to different mayors and sheriffs, and a reader who sees deaths strung along one route sees a pattern at once. Investigators see something less comfortable. The same road that links the victims also scatters the evidence across offices that do not share files, and the people who might have joined the cases are often three jurisdictions apart. The cases below are tied together by corridors, in the headlines and sometimes in the evidence. What they show most clearly is how slowly agencies learned to talk to one another, and how much of that learning came after the killer was already in custody, or dead, or never named.
Cases involving long-haul truck drivers form a separate body of work and are left aside here.
Over 29 days in April and May 1992, a killer walked into small shops in five cities in the middle of the country and took the lives of the people working there. Six people died: Robin Fuldauer in Indianapolis, Patricia Magers and Patricia Smith in Wichita, Michael McCown in Terre Haute, Nancy Kitzmiller in St. Charles, Missouri, and Sarah Blessing in Raytown, Missouri. Most of the shops sat close to Interstate 70, or, in Wichita, Interstate 35. The killings came by day or early evening, and ballistics tied all six deaths to one .22-caliber pistol that KMOV called the oddest choice of weapon of all. Little money was taken. Police said none of the victims was sexually assaulted.
Then the killings stopped. The press named the unknown man for the road, and no one has ever been arrested or charged, so everything said about him is police attribution and nothing more. He was seen face to face by only one person who lived to describe him, a Wichita customer whose account helped produce the sketch police still circulate. Relph, who had earlier spent years on the case of the Wichita serial killer Dennis Rader, said he did not think the killer had expected a second person in that shop, and that the man’s movements "had some kind of purpose," because his route doubled back across the region.
Detective Pat McCarrick of St. Charles, who inherited the Kitzmiller case about a year after her death, rejected robbery as a motive from the first. Someone who walks into a western-wear store on a Sunday afternoon, he told KMOV, cannot expect much money. "This guy’s motivation was the act of the killing, not the robbery." Captain Ray Floyd of the same department said the killer took about $100 across all the shops combined. The reporter Bob Cyphers, who covered the Kitzmiller killing in 1992 and followed the case for three decades, put it in blunter terms: "It’s the thrill of the kill for this guy."
What the road did for the investigation, in practice, was force a conversation. Agencies from several states, Texas among them, met to compare notes in 1994 and 1995, and again afterward. Several men were considered and cleared over the years: a man in Tennessee whose face resembled the sketch, an Indiana truck driver questioned by the FBI in 2001 whose DNA did not match, a man arrested in Idaho who turned out to have been in prison during the killings, and an inmate named in Texas in 1996. None was charged. Several men claimed responsibility. One, interviewed in prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, had committed a robbery in the same St. Charles shopping center shortly before Kitzmiller’s death; McCarrick said of him, "he was just using us."
Some investigators believe the same man went on to kill women in Texas in 1993 and 1994, about 500 days after Raytown, and another killing in Terre Haute in 2001 has been examined for a link. Neither connection is established, and neither is counted in the six. In late 2021 a task force led by the St. Charles police, with the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, reopened the case. Stored evidence went to be tested for DNA, and a St. Charles detective was assigned to it full time. A reward of $25,000 stands. As of March 2024, no arrest or charge had been reported.
The families have waited it out. Patricia Magers’s husband reopened her bridal shop and sold it a few months later, and told KMOV there would never be closure. Patricia Smith’s father, who once said he did not expect the killer to be caught "in my lifetime," died in 2018.
Between the spring and late summer of 1988, at least eleven women from in and around New Bedford were lost, a fishing city on the south coast of Massachusetts. Over the following months, into April 1989, the deaths of nine of them came to light in towns around the city, among them Freetown, Dartmouth and Westport. Reporters and investigators who followed the case say many of the women had ties to the area around Weld Square, in the center of the city.
Boston 25 News has called it possibly the largest unsolved murder case in New England and, by the account of investigators it spoke to, the largest homicide investigation in Massachusetts since the Boston murders of the 1960s. A former New Bedford detective, Richard Ferreira, who worked Nancy Paiva’s death with his partner and tied it to the other deaths, recalled saying, "I think we have a serial killer around here." The reporter who first wrote that such a killer appeared to be at work said later that no one realized the women were gone until they began turning up dead. Maureen Boyle, whose 2017 book on the case followed years of reporting, has said the man was never identified partly because officials were slow at first to see that a serial killer was involved.
The investigation belonged to the Bristol County District Attorney’s office and the Massachusetts State Police, and Boston 25 News described it in 2018 as the most expensive in the state’s history. It had two problems from the start. The killer left few clues, and there were no eyewitnesses. Women who worked the area described a man who drove a pickup truck, but many trucks in the area fit that description. A grand jury began hearing evidence in March 1989.
One man was indicted. In 1990 K.P., a lawyer, was charged with the murder of Rochelle Clifford Dopierala. He called himself the victim of a witch hunt and said the indictment was political, a charge the district attorney, who was then seeking a fourth term against a challenger, denied. In the summer of 1991 the charge was dropped for lack of evidence. The ABA Journal credits a special prosecutor, Paul Buckley, who called the indictment "a fishing expedition"; Boston 25 News credits a new district attorney. The accounts differ. K.P. remained the only person ever indicted, and no court has determined who killed any of the women.
The case reached the state’s highest court by a side door. Shawn Tanner was convicted of the 1988 murder of Mary Harris, a New Bedford woman. The district attorney’s office has said it ruled out any link between her death and the serial cases, and Tanner was in jail for nearly all of the period of the highway killings. But relatives of the highway victims, among them the daughters of Nancy Paiva and Debra DeMello, joined a brief supporting court-ordered DNA testing in the Harris case, arguing that it might be their last good chance at new physical evidence. Tanner, who had terminal cancer, was granted medical parole and died on September 13, 2022, before testing began. On February 27, 2026, the Supreme Judicial Court allowed the testing to go ahead. No result had been reported by June 2026.
In June 2024 and again on June 3, 2026, FBI agents searched woods in Westport for what the bureau called "specific evidence," in what a spokesperson called an ongoing multi-jurisdictional investigation. The FBI did not say what the searches were about, and the station that reported them did not connect them to the New Bedford cases. The district attorney’s office still lists the cases as unsolved.
Randall Woodfield was drafted by the Green Bay Packers in 1974 after a career as a wide receiver at Portland State University. By 1975 he was also a convicted robber, having pleaded guilty to second-degree robbery in Multnomah County. In the winter of 1980 and 1981 a run of armed robberies, many involving sexual assault, ran along the Interstate 5 corridor from Washington to California, and police in several jurisdictions began to connect them. On December 9 a bearded man robbed a business in Vancouver, Washington. Four nights later a man in a false beard held up a shop in Eugene. The next night came a robbery in Albany, Oregon, and about a week after that a gunman in Seattle assaulted a waitress. Witnesses described a tall man, sometimes with tape or a bandage across his nose, carrying a .32 revolver. The press called him the I-5 Bandit. Portland detective Jim Lawrence said in 2012 that Woodfield had committed at least 25 robberies; Sports Illustrated and Willamette Week reported that more than 100 crimes shared his methods.
The case against him was built by a single county. Dave Kominek, a detective with the Marion County Sheriff’s Office, identified Woodfield as a suspect early. He had served time for robbing women at knifepoint, he knew several of the victims, and Darcey Fix had dated a friend of his. Marion County detectives assembled a log of pay-phone calls made with his calling card, which placed him within a few miles of several of the killings. On March 5, 1981, police questioned him and searched his rented room in Springfield, Oregon, and the surviving co-worker of Shari Hull picked his photograph from a lineup. He was charged on March 9 with Hull’s murder, and further indictments in Oregon and Washington followed within a week.
On June 26, 1981, a Marion County jury convicted him of the murder of Shari Hull, 20, who had been killed in Keizer on January 18, of the attempted murder of her co-worker, and of two counts of sodomy. He received life plus 90 years, and a Benton County jury added 35 years that December for sodomy and weapons charges. In 1983 the Oregon Parole Board refused him the chance to request a hearing. He sued the crime writer Ann Rule from prison over her 1984 book, which gave him the name the I-5 Killer; the suit failed.
Oregon never tried him for any other death. In 2005 DNA testing tied him to the killing of Cherie Ayers, 29, in Portland in October 1980. On May 10, 2012, the Portland Police Bureau announced that new techniques at the Oregon State Police crime lab had linked him to five more victims: Darcey Fix, 22, and Doug Altig, 24, in Portland; Julie Reitz, 18, in Beaverton; and Donna Eckard, 37, and her daughter Jannell Jarvis, 14, in Mountain Gate, California, in February 1981. Lawrence said investigators could now "definitively prove" seven killings, and that Woodfield might be responsible for as many as two dozen more. Shasta County said it did not plan to file charges while he remained in prison, and Multnomah County prosecutors decided they would pursue the Ayers, Fix and Altig cases only if he were ever given a parole hearing. Woodfield has confessed to none of them.
Julie Reitz’s mother said she accepted the decision not to prosecute, since a trial would cost taxpayers money, but that the idea of Woodfield asking for a parole hearing was "a slap in the face." She told the Associated Press in 2012 that she had known from the day her daughter died that it was the I-5 Killer.
Roger Reece Kibbe was a furniture maker from Citrus Heights, a suburb of Sacramento. In 1991 an El Dorado County jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Darcie Frackenpohl, 17. Detectives already suspected him in other killings of young women in the Central Valley, the cases the press had grouped under a name taken from Interstate 5, but they could not charge him. Investigators in the 1980s had come to treat deaths in separate counties as possibly connected, the Associated Press reported, and the connection stayed a theory for the better part of two decades.
Old evidence ended that. In 2002 an investigator for the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office resubmitted material from five killings of the 1980s for DNA testing, CBS San Francisco reported in 2011. The results pointed to Kibbe, who by then was already in prison. The Associated Press reported that DNA linked him to two of the victims, and the Lodi News-Sentinel that trace evidence, among it fabric from the seats of his car, tied him to others. Investigators interviewed him in prison in 2003.
In 2009, to avoid a possible death sentence, he pleaded guilty in San Joaquin County to six counts of first-degree murder: Lou Ellen Burleigh in 1977, and Lora Heedick, Barbara Ann Scott, Stephanie Brown, Charmaine Sabrah and Katherine Kelly Quinones in 1986. The women had been taken from towns in several counties, Walnut Creek, Pittsburg, Modesto, Sacramento and Thornton among them, and their deaths came to light in San Joaquin, Amador and other counties. Burleigh, taken from Walnut Creek, was not located until 2011. Sabrah’s mother told the Stockton court more than twenty years after her daughter’s death that she had forgiven him. On November 5, 2009, Judge George Abdallah Jr. sentenced him to six consecutive terms of life without parole. A prosecutor said he was also suspected in the 1987 killing of Karen Finch, for which he was never charged, and a retired detective said he believed there were more.
On February 28, 2021, at the age of 81, Kibbe was unresponsive in the cell he shared with another prisoner at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, and was pronounced dead less than an hour later. The Amador County Sheriff’s Office classified the death a homicide. The Associated Press reported in January 2024 that a fellow prisoner charged in the death had pleaded not guilty; no later outcome has been reported.
At about one o’clock on the morning of May 14, 1983, Randy Kraft, a 38-year-old computer programmer from Long Beach, was arrested in southern Orange County on suspicion of drunk driving. The death of Terry Lee Gambrel, 25, a Marine stationed at El Toro, came to light that night, and it became the last of the counts against Kraft. Officers also took a handwritten list of 61 short, cryptic entries that prosecutors said recorded victims.
Orange County Superior Court tried him on 16 counts of first-degree murder, with two of sodomy and one of mayhem. The jury convicted him in 1989 of the murders of 16 young men killed between 1972 and 1983, and Judge Donald McCartin entered judgment on November 29, 1989, with a death sentence on 11 of the murder counts. The California Supreme Court affirmed on August 10, 2000. The court described what the victims had in common: all were white men between 18 and 25, and all but one were single. Several were Marines from Camp Pendleton, El Toro or Tustin. Their deaths came to light across the freeway network of Orange County and the Long Beach area, and in one case in the San Bernardino Mountains. One victim, Edward Daniel Moore, was a Marine, and one was a young man no one could name, tried as "John Doe Huntington Beach."
Through most of the period charged, the deaths were investigated one at a time by different departments, and some were not treated as homicides at first. When Michael Ray Schlicht died in 1974 his death was recorded as accidental, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department said in 2023 when it named him as a long-suspected early victim. Kraft came to police attention once before 1983. In 1975, after Long Beach detectives traced a car registered to him in the death of Keith Crotwell, 19, Detective Robert Bell interviewed him on May 19. He was not charged, and the recorded interview was played for the jury fourteen years later.
At the penalty phase the prosecution also presented eight deaths in Oregon and Michigan between 1980 and 1982, which were attributed to him and never charged. In May 2025 Oregon State Police said that Kraft was the only person under investigation in the death of Larry Eugene Parks, a man identified that month after a 1980 death near Woodburn. Kraft denies every killing. The Habeas Corpus Resource Center listed him among the people under sentence of death in California as of June 1, 2026, in a state that has not carried out an execution since the governor’s order halting them on March 13, 2019.
Between April 1971 and September 1972 six Black girls and young women were taken from neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. Carol Spinks was 13, Darlenia Johnson 16, Brenda Crockett 10, Nenomoshia Yates 12, Brenda Woodard 18 and Diane Williams 17. Their deaths came to light within hours or days, most of them beside a major freeway in Southeast Washington or along roads just over the line in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and a reporter’s name for the unknown killer stuck: the Freeway Phantom. A note signed with that name was later tied to the fifth victim.
Two police departments with two chains of command shared a corridor and a list of victims. The Metropolitan Police Department and the Prince George’s County Police Homicide Unit are both named on the District’s appeal for information, with a reward of up to $150,000 on a poster dated April 18, 2006. According to Boundary Stones, the FBI joined a joint task force after the fourth killing. Analysts counted hairs from an African American person on three of the victims and green carpet fibers on four, and investigators concluded that one man, probably a Black man, was responsible. Reporters worked the girls' neighborhoods on their own, and the families felt that the news often told them more than the police did.
The task force had its dead ends. In 1974 the government approached a man already convicted in separate kidnapping and sexual-assault cases and offered immunity for information about what the District of Columbia Court of Appeals later called the widely publicized "freeway phantom homicides." He cooperated from May 1 to June 4, 1974, and then refused to go on. The court concluded that he had deliberately given misleading information about the killings. Without an arrest, the task force broke up and the case faded from attention.
The evidence faded with it. The Washingtonian reported in July 2009 that the police had lost the entire case file and that none of the evidence could be located in the evidence warehouse. Detective James Trainum, then in charge of the cold case unit, and a group of interns rebuilt the files from material supplied by retired detectives, the FBI and Prince George’s County, and filled a row of binders. Trainum drove the routes with a WUSA9 reporter. He said the man had treated the area around the freeway as his own territory, a place where he felt safe to commit his crimes and get away. A geographic profile suggested that he first struck close to where he lived.
A 2023 book by Blaine Pardoe and his daughter Victoria Hester, and a podcast the same year, reopened public attention. The authors placed the geographic center of the killings at St. Elizabeths, the psychiatric hospital in Southeast Washington, and discussed several possible suspects, one of whom they considered the most likely. WUSA9 reported that police never gathered enough evidence to charge him and that he died in prison. No one has been charged with any of the six killings. Prince George’s County police describe the case as active. A D.C. police spokeswoman said the District’s cases had been purged and were no longer active, even as its appeal and reward stayed online.
Larry Eyler was a house painter from Indiana who, by his lawyer’s account, killed 21 young men and teenage boys in Indiana and Illinois between 1982 and 1984. He was convicted of two of those deaths. A Cook County jury convicted him in July 1986 of the murder and aggravated kidnapping of Danny Bridges, 15, and he was sentenced to death. In December 1990 he pleaded guilty in Vermillion County, Indiana, to the murder of Steven Agan, 23, and received 60 years.
The rest rest on his own account. Kathleen Zellner, his lawyer, released a written confession in March 1994, days after he died of complications from AIDS on death row at Pontiac Correctional Center, aged 41. Eyler had denied killing Danny Bridges to the end.
His case is the plainest example here of what happens when a corridor crosses a state line. Deaths were being recorded in rural Indiana and northern Illinois, and by spring 1983, under pressure from local news reports and from victims' families, police in several jurisdictions had begun to connect them, Reveal reported. A task force drawing on several communities was formed that spring and became the Central Indiana Multi-Agency Investigative Team. The credit for the link is disputed. Gera-Lind Kolarik, then a Chicago television assignment editor, wrote a 1990 book claiming she had seen the connection first. The criminologist Steven Egger, reviewing it in Illinois Issues, wrote that the Indiana task force was the body that brought Eyler to the attention of Illinois authorities.
In late 1983 a Lake County, Illinois, grand jury indicted him for the murder of Ralph Calise, 28. The case never reached trial. Eyler was arrested again in August 1984, in Chicago, after the death of Danny Bridges, and that arrest led to the only murder trial he faced. His case is remembered for the months between his two arrests.
Families waited for decades. Daniel McNeive’s brother told the Associated Press in 1994 that the confession brought the family a sense of closure. Others have had to wait longer: announcements in 2021 and 2023 named victims whom no one had been able to identify since the 1980s, among them a Chicago teenager.
The corridor in this case ran through a civil war. Abdullah Shah served under Faryadi Sarwar Zardad, whom Reuters described as the leader of a private army that controlled an area about 80 kilometers east of Kabul between 1991 and 1996, including the main route from Pakistan to the capital. Shah was known as "Zardad’s Dog."
In October 2002 Afghan officials told Voice of America that Shah had run a checkpoint on the main route between Kabul and Jalalabad, where he set a toll and killed travelers who would not pay it, and that he had killed at least nine people. The U.S. State Department’s report for 2002 recorded a conviction that included the deaths of 50 Hazaras during a bus hijacking and called the offense mass murder. A special court in Kabul convicted him of multiple murders; officials also named his own wife and infant daughter among those he killed. He was executed in a prison outside Kabul on April 20, 2004, the first execution carried out by the Afghan state since the fall of the Taliban, and the government made it public only a week later. Human rights groups said the trial was held without a lawyer for him, and that he might have held information about commanders who were by then in positions of power.
Zardad, by contrast, was tried in London and convicted in July 2005 of conspiracy to torture and conspiracy to take hostages, and sentenced to 20 years, in a case Eurasianet said set a precedent for universal jurisdiction. Reuters reported that British police had met Shah before he was executed. An installation by the artists Langlands & Bell, titled "Zardad’s Dog," went on show at Tate Britain that September.
Northern British Columbia has a stretch of road that the press and many families call the Highway of Tears, for the women and girls lost along it over several decades. Cody Legebokoff’s case came to be discussed alongside that history, though the trial turned on four deaths and no more. In September 2014 a jury in Prince George convicted him of four counts of first-degree murder: Jill Stuchenko, 35, Natasha Montgomery, 23, and Cynthia Maas, 35, in Prince George, and Loren Leslie, 15, of Fraser Lake. He was 19 when the first killing took place and 20 when he was arrested.
He was arrested near Vanderhoof on the night of November 27, 2010, the night Leslie was killed. Only afterward did investigators connect him to the three women. The North District Major Crime Unit and the Prince George RCMP opened a joint investigation, Project E-Prelude, that ran ten months and drew on resources from police in the United States. In 2011 detectives investigating the Maas and Stuchenko cases interviewed more than 140 cab drivers, and in October 2011 police announced three further counts. They said they believed he had acted alone.
The road came into the courtroom in a way the police did not intend. In December 2012 his lawyer asked to move the trial to Vancouver, arguing that heavy local coverage, including stories that linked the case to the Highway of Tears, would prejudice jurors in the north. Justice Glen Parrett refused. At sentencing on September 16, 2014, he gave Legebokoff life with no parole eligibility for 25 years, and spoke of the wider problem of missing and murdered women in the north. "It is a mistake, in my view, to limit the seriousness of this issue," he said, and cited an 84 percent cut in the budget of the RCMP’s task force. British Columbia’s attorney general, Suzanne Anton, disputed reports that the investigation had been gutted. The Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal in September 2016, and the Supreme Court of Canada refused leave on February 16, 2017. In early 2019 he was moved to medium security at Warkworth Institution in Ontario; the local member of Parliament, Todd Doherty, campaigned for his return to maximum security.
Outside court, Natasha Montgomery’s mother said it was not over for her: "I still don’t have Natasha back." She asked the public to keep watching for her daughter.
Seen together, the cases divide along an odd line. Where a single county built its case, as Marion County did against Woodfield, the road was a matter of geography and an unusually good phone log. Where the work belonged to many agencies, as in the I-70 case, the New Bedford murders and the Freeway Phantom killings, no one has been tried. Kibbe’s cases were joined in the end by laboratories, long after the fact, and the corridor mostly explains where the nickname came from. Kraft was caught by a traffic stop, not by any pattern in the deaths. Eyler shows the cost of the seams between states, and Legebokoff shows how little a famous road may say about who used it.
Three of the cases have no named defendant: the six I-70 victims, the nine New Bedford women and the six Washington girls. In each, the work now depends on laboratory testing done decades after the first deaths, and in one of them on files that were lost.
• 1971 to 1972: Six Black girls and young women are taken in Washington, D.C.; the last, Diane Williams, 17, on September 5, 1972.
• May 1 to June 4, 1974: An informant cooperates with the Freeway Phantom task force under an immunity arrangement, then repudiates it.
• 1977: Lou Ellen Burleigh is killed; Kibbe pleads guilty to her murder in 2009.
• October 1980 to February 1981: Woodfield’s robberies and killings; Cherie Ayers dies in October 1980, Shari Hull on January 18, 1981.
• March 5 and 9, 1981: Woodfield is questioned, then charged with Hull’s murder. June 26, 1981: convicted in Marion County.
• 1982 to 1984: The killings later confessed to by Larry Eyler in Indiana and Illinois.
• May 14, 1983: Randy Kraft is arrested in southern Orange County.
• Spring 1983: An Indiana task force forms around the Eyler cases. November 1983: Eyler is indicted in Lake County, Illinois.
• August 1984: Eyler is arrested in Chicago.
• April to November 1986: Five killings later covered by Kibbe’s 2009 pleas.
• 1988 to April 1989: Nine New Bedford women’s deaths come to light.
• 1989: Kraft is convicted; judgment November 29.
• 1990 to 1991: K.P. is indicted in the New Bedford case (1990); the charge is dropped (summer 1991).
• 1991: Kibbe is convicted in El Dorado County.
• April 8 to May 7, 1992: The I-70 killings in Indiana, Kansas and Missouri.
• 2002: San Joaquin County resubmits evidence in the Kibbe cases; Shah is convicted in Kabul.
• April 20, 2004: Shah is executed.
• 2005: DNA ties Woodfield to Cherie Ayers. July 2005: Zardad is convicted in London.
• November 5, 2009: Kibbe is sentenced to six terms of life without parole.
• November 27, 2010: Legebokoff is arrested. September 11 and 16, 2014: convicted and sentenced.
• May 10, 2012: Portland police announce DNA links between Woodfield and five more victims.
• February 28, 2021: Kibbe dies at Mule Creek State Prison. Late 2021: the I-70 case is reopened by a multi-agency task force.
• February 27, 2026: The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court allows DNA testing in the Tanner case.