A long-haul truck driver can wake in Tennessee, eat lunch in Arkansas and sleep in Oklahoma. "They live in that truck and they can be in three different states in one day," Terri Turner, a senior criminal analyst with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, told the Oklahoma City station News 9 in 2013. That mobility is what made her work necessary. In 2004 Turner noticed a pattern in the deaths of women whose bodies had been left near the Interstate 40 corridor, and the cases she gathered became the seed of a national FBI program.
Each of the ten men whose cases follow drove for a living. Some were caught because they confessed, one because he walked into a sheriff’s station, one after an arrest in a Massachusetts home invasion, and several because a laboratory matched a profile that had sat in a database for years. The courts drew sharp lines among them. Some were convicted of several murders, one of manslaughter as well as murder, and one, in the last reports of his case, stood charged rather than convicted.
The FBI described the program’s origin in April 2009. An analyst with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation had detected a pattern of women’s bodies left along Interstate 40 in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi, and she and a colleague from the Grapevine, Texas, police department referred the cases to the Bureau’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, known as ViCAP. ViCAP analysts searched their national database, found similar killings elsewhere, and began building a matrix of victims found along or near highways. By 2009 it held more than 500 murder victims and some 200 potential suspects, most of them long-haul truck drivers. Analysts reconstructed suspects' movements from company logs, fuel receipts and other records to place a man in a town on a particular night.
In a later account, the FBI said the initiative had been launched in 2004 with support from the trucking industry and that the matrix had grown to more than 750 victims and nearly 450 potential suspects. "We want to help local law enforcement agencies tie their cases to similar cases nationwide," said Christie Palazzolo, the FBI crime analyst who managed it. The Bureau stated the obstacles plainly: offenders who cross many jurisdictions, long distances, and few witnesses or forensic traces.
By April 2009 the FBI said at least ten suspects believed responsible for about 30 homicides had been taken into custody. Turner put a human face on the numbers. "These women were somebody’s mom, someone’s sister or someone’s daughter," she told News 9.
Keith Hunter Jesperson was born on April 6, 1955, in British Columbia and grew up near Yakima, Washington, KPTV reported in 2023. He drove trucks across the western and southern states, and between 1990 and 1995 he killed women he met on the road.
The first was Taunja Bennett, 23, whose body was found in the Columbia River Gorge east of Portland on January 21, 1990. The case was closed within weeks, wrongly. A Portland woman, L.P., told detectives that she and her boyfriend, J.S., had killed Bennett; she later said she had invented the story to escape an abusive relationship. Both were convicted in 1991, she of felony murder by a jury, he on a plea of no contest made, the National Registry of Exonerations records, out of fear of a death sentence. In 1994 anonymous letters reached Oregon newspapers and authorities from a man who said he had killed Bennett. Nobody connected them to a name.
The name came in March 1995, after the death of Julie Ann Winningham, 41, of Camas, Washington. Friends knew she had been seeing a trucker named Keith, and Clark County detectives found him. He confessed. In a letter to his brother that summer, the Associated Press reported, he wrote that he had killed eight people in five years and added, "I am sorry that I turned out this way." Sixteen jurisdictions answered a nationwide advisory asking agencies to check unsolved killings along his routes.
He pleaded guilty in Washington to Winningham’s murder in 1995, ABC News reported. In the Bennett case he led investigators to her purse, which had not been found at the scene, Multnomah County District Attorney Michael Schrunk said that October, and Schrunk told the court there was considerable evidence that the two earlier defendants were innocent. They were released on November 27, 1995. Jesperson pleaded no contest to Bennett’s murder that November, according to the Registry.
Other states followed. Angela Subrize, 21, was killed in January 1995; Wyoming extradited Jesperson in December 1997, and prosecutors dropped their pursuit of a death sentence in exchange for his guilty plea to first-degree murder and a life term, Cowboy State Daily reported. In California he pleaded guilty in July 2007 to the murder of a woman found beside State Route 152 near Gilroy on June 3, 1993. She was identified in April 2022 as Patricia Skiple, a mother of two from Colton, Oregon, ABC7 reported. He pleaded guilty in Riverside County on January 8, 2010, to the murder of a woman found near Blythe on August 30, 1992, and was sentenced to 25 years to life. He had called her Claudia. In August 2026 the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office announced that genetic genealogy had identified her as Lydia Jane Wade McWhorter, who had disappeared from Texas in the 1990s.
In Florida, a woman found near Interstate 10 in Okaloosa County in September 1994 was identified on October 3, 2023, as Suzanne Kjellenberg, 34, of Wisconsin, and Jesperson was charged with her murder the same day, WALA and WJHG reported. As of August 2026 he was serving multiple life sentences in Oregon, according to the Riverside County District Attorney.
John Wayne Boyer, a long-haul trucker who lived with his mother near Augusta, Georgia, first came to attention in Wilmington, North Carolina, over the 2003 death of Scarlett Wood. In 2007 he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in her death, WECT reported.
The plea required a DNA sample, and that sample reached back two years. Jennifer Smith, 25, had been killed in Tennessee in 2005; a highway worker found her body near Bucksnort in Hickman County, NewsChannel 5 in Nashville reported. Investigators said it took two years to match DNA from the case to Boyer’s profile. Confronted with the match, he confessed, CBS News reported in 2011, citing the Associated Press. Detective Scott Smith of the Hickman County Sheriff’s Office, who was not related to the victim, said Boyer had expressed hatred toward women during the confession and that he believed there might be more victims.
At that point Boyer faced murder charges in Tennessee and in South Carolina and was suspected in a fourth killing. In July 2015, at 58, he was moved from North Carolina to the Hickman County Correctional Facility in Centerville to face a first-degree murder charge in Smith’s death. In 2016 a Tennessee court convicted him of murder in her death, WECT reported. Wilmington investigators had also named him a suspect, in 2012, in the 2002 death of Rose Marie Mallette, and he was named a suspect in the 2000 death of Michelle Haggadone. No charge in either case was reported.
He did not outlive his sentences. WECT reported in August 2023, citing the Tennessee Department of Correction, that Boyer had died on June 29 after being taken from prison to an outside medical center two days earlier.
Scott William Cox, born November 3, 1963, lived in Newberg, in Oregon’s Yamhill County, and drove long-haul trucks. He was already on probation there for forgery when he was arrested for two killings in Portland. Reena Ann Brunson, 34, was stabbed to death in Northeast Portland in November 1990. Victoria Rhone, 32, was strangled in Portland in February 1991. KATU spelled the first woman’s name Rheena; the Associated Press wrote Reena.
On September 15, 1993, Cox was convicted of two counts of murder, according to Yamhill County Community Corrections. The court imposed two terms of 150 months, to run one after the other, followed by post-prison supervision for life. Because he drove long distances, police agencies along his routes reopened files on young women who had died near truck stops, the Associated Press reported, and in 2013 KATU described him as a person of interest in at least 15 other killings in western states. He has not been charged with any of them.
The timing of his conviction shaped what came next. Had he been convicted in 1995, after Oregon voters approved Measure 11, he would have faced at least 50 years, the AP noted. Instead, credit for good behavior and for jail time brought his release forward to February 22, 2013. The State Parole Board gave Yamhill County about two weeks' notice, the county said, after a first plan to send him to Douglas County was denied. With no home and no job to go to, he was taken to the Yamhill County Jail to live, fitted with a GPS monitor and barred from schools, parks, libraries and bars. He could leave from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. but not leave the county. Sheriff Jack Crabtree was asked whether Cox was dangerous. "I guess we’ll find out," he told KATU.
The freedom did not run smoothly. Corrections officials twice found Cox in violation of his release terms, once for taking an unapproved route to the beach and once for contact with a girlfriend’s children, the AP reported in The Bulletin of Bend. Returned to the jail, he was caught on video with chewing tobacco in his shoe, pleaded guilty to smuggling it in, and was sentenced to 90 days. He told Judge Cal Tichenor he was "trying to get myself together."
In 1995 Sean Patrick Goble lived in a trailer in Asheboro, North Carolina, and drove a black Peterbilt with "The Wild One" painted across the cab, the Associated Press reported. He weighed about 300 pounds, called himself a "real lady’s man," and was rated by a co-owner of his trucking firm among the top 15 percent of the drivers he had hired. A neighbor called him a "scary kind of fellow." Others described a gentle, generous man.
That winter three women died. Brenda Kay Hagy, 45, of Bloomington, Indiana, was found on January 23, 1995, in Washington County, Virginia. Sherry Mansur, 34, of Clearwater, Florida, was found in February in Guilford County, North Carolina. Alice Rebecca Hanes, 36, of Columbus, Ohio, was killed in Jefferson County, Tennessee, and found in Kingsport in March, The Greeneville Sun reported.
On April 13, 1995, local, state and federal officers arrested Goble on a Virginia warrant when he drove his truck into his company’s terminal in Winston-Salem. That day he gave a written statement admitting that he had strangled Hagy, identified her photograph and drew a map, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals later recorded. Within about a week he had confessed to Hanes’s death as well. The AP reported that investigators from North Carolina and about ten other states were trying to build a profile of him, and that the FBI and several states had run a task force on unsolved highway killings since 1991. "We may be hearing from some other states," said Ron Barker, sheriff of Forsyth County, North Carolina.
On December 15, 1995, in Greene County Criminal Court in Greeneville, Tennessee, Goble pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder, for Hagy and Hanes, and Judge James E. Beckner imposed two consecutive life sentences. The prosecutor, Al Schmutzer Jr., said he never showed remorse. In North Carolina he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Mansur’s death. Twenty years later Goble asked for DNA testing in the Hagy case. The petition was denied in 2018, and in September 2019 the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed, reasoning that a match to his own DNA would "merely confirm" what he had told an FBI agent on the day of his arrest. In 2018 he was held at the Northeast Correctional Complex in Mountain City, Tennessee, The Greeneville Sun reported.
On November 3, 1998, a 36-year-old truck driver from Arcata walked into the main station of the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office in Eureka, California, and turned himself in. Wayne Adam Ford, born in Petaluma and a former Marine, confessed to killing four women whose bodies had been found across the state over the previous year. He had come in, the Humboldt County coroner told reporters, because he was tormented by urges to kill his former wife, who had limited his time with their young son. He was, the coroner said, "ashamed of what he was doing."
The four women had been found near Eureka in October 1997, in Kern County in June 1998, near Lodi in September 1998 and near Hesperia in October 1998. Tina Gibbs was 26. Lanett White, 25, lived in Fontana. Patricia Tamez was 29. The woman found near Eureka had no name for a quarter of a century.
Ford pleaded not guilty at his arraignment despite the confession, and the case moved slowly. The killings had taken place in four counties hundreds of miles apart. A San Bernardino County grand jury indicted him on four counts of murder, and in December 2001 a judge ruled that a new state law allowed all four to be tried together if prosecutors proved the killings were connected. At trial in 2006 the defense pointed to his mental state, his remorse and his decision to surrender. In June 2006 the jury convicted him of four counts of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to death, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office later recorded. Prosecutors said he strangled the women.
On death row at San Quentin he told a Petaluma360 reporter he would rather be executed than spend his life there. In June 2023 the sheriff’s office announced that genetic genealogy, with the laboratory Othram and the California Department of Justice, had identified the woman found near Eureka as Kerry Ann Cummings, born in 1972. Her family had lost touch with her in 1997, when untreated mental illness had pulled her away from home. "She was dearly loved," her sister said.
On August 17, 2004, John Robert Williams, 28, was arrested in Pearl, Mississippi, and charged with the kidnapping and murder of Nikki Hill, 28, of Shuqualak, whose body was found near Philadelphia, Mississippi, WLBT reported. He was sentenced in Neshoba County to life plus 20 years for murder and kidnapping. His girlfriend, Rachel Cumberland, 35, received 20 years in the same case.
In July 2005 Mississippi Public Safety Commissioner George Phillips announced at a news conference in Oxford that the two were linked to kidnappings and killings in Neshoba and Lafayette counties, in Utah and in Arizona. Both had been charged with murder in Lafayette County and were awaiting a similar indictment in Oklahoma. Officials would not confirm a number.
Williams’s name ran through Terri Turner’s work. The seven Oklahoma-linked killings she gathered took place in 2003 and 2004, and in 2009 News 9 reported that Williams, a truck driver already in prison for a separate murder, was expected to face a grand jury in one of them. One of the cases was that of Casey Jo Pipestem, an Oklahoma teenager whose body was found in Grapevine, Texas, about 200 miles from home. In July 2013 Tarrant County prosecutors charged Williams with her murder. A Texas trial, an official in the district attorney’s office said, would happen only if Mississippi ever released him. "Even though it was nine years ago, it’s an everyday process that I have to fight every morning," her older sister said.
The earliest death tied to Dellmus Colvin in a court record took place in Atlantic City. Donna Lee White, 27, of Somers Point, New Jersey, was found dead there on September 15, 1987. An autopsy attributed her death to acute cocaine intoxication and the case was closed, although Colvin was charged at the time with hindering and tampering with evidence, WPVI reported.
Colvin later drove trucks out of Toledo, Ohio. In 2004 investigators took a DNA sample from him in connection with a sexual-assault complaint, and in 2005 his profile was linked to the deaths of two Toledo women, Melissa Weber, 37, and Jackie Simpson, 33, according to the Toledo Blade as cited by WFTV. He was charged with murder in both deaths, and the charges carried a possible death sentence. In 2006, as his trial neared its end, he offered to plead guilty to those two killings and to the deaths of three other women, Valerie Jones, 38, Jacquelynn Thomas, 42, and Lily Summers, 43, and prosecutors agreed not to seek death, WNWO in Toledo reported. The station described the plea in 2011 as an admission that he killed four women and helped murder a fifth. He was sentenced to life. He later admitted the death of a sixth Toledo woman, Dorothea Wetzel, 40, though no conviction for it was reported.
Atlantic City detectives reopened the White case in 2009 after learning of the Ohio investigation. On April 8, 2011, Colvin, then 51, pleaded guilty to strangling her and was sentenced to 30 more years.
In 2020, speaking by telephone from Lebanon Correctional Institution for a podcast, Colvin claimed as many as 52 killings. His account of one, in La Salle County, Illinois, led deputies to search ground near La Salle and Peru that September with cadaver dogs. A second search found only animal bones, and on October 26, 2020, Shaw Local reported that the search had been halted. "He was and is telling us the truth," Sheriff Tom Templeton said. None of the killings he claimed beyond the seven in court records and his admission has led to a charge.
Bruce Mendenhall, a truck driver from Albion, Illinois, had been on the road for about twenty years when Nashville police questioned him in late June 2007. Sara Nicole Hulbert, 25, a mother of two young children, had been found dead in Nashville on June 26. Mendenhall’s truck matched the description of one seen the night she was killed, and investigators found what appeared to be blood inside, according to an affidavit described by the Associated Press. He was charged with criminal homicide in her death in July.
In his first interviews, police said, he implicated himself in Hulbert’s death and in at least five similar killings in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and Indiana, and then stopped talking. By early August he had also been charged in the death of Lucille "Gretna" Carter, 44, found in Birmingham, Alabama, on July 1. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation collected hundreds of pieces of evidence from the truck, and the FBI built a timeline of his travels. "We hope that this comes to an end soon," Hulbert’s sister said.
The case widened from inside the jail. In August 2008 Mendenhall was indicted on charges of trying to hire inmates to kill police officers and witnesses, the AP reported. In 2010 he was convicted of Hulbert’s murder and sentenced to life, and in 2018 he was convicted of the 2007 killing of Symantha Winters, a Nashville woman, and sentenced to life a second time, CBS News reported.
The third verdict came in Indianapolis. Carma Purpura, a mother of two, had met Mendenhall in Marion County, Indiana, in 2007; he was found in Nashville the next morning, and her identification was found in his truck. Her remains were found in Kentucky in 2011. On January 22, 2025, a Marion County jury convicted Mendenhall of her murder. "It is my hope that today’s verdict brings resolution to Carma’s family," said Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears. He faced up to 65 years in an Indiana prison.
In the summer of 2007 a run of night-time attacks in three northeastern states ended in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. On July 30, 2007, Adam Leroy Lane, 43, a truck driver from Jonesville, North Carolina, was arrested there during a home invasion involving a deadly weapon, the New Jersey State Police reported. Lane was later sentenced to 25 years for attacking the girl, who was 15, according to the Associated Press. Her mother spoke publicly years later. "We had angels watching over us that night," she told WBZ-TV in 2011.
The FBI’s ViCAP unit at Quantico told New Jersey prosecutors about the Massachusetts arrest. Monica Massaro, of Bloomsbury in Hunterdon County, had been found dead on July 30, 2007, after troopers were sent to check on her; WBZ reported that she had been killed on July 29. Similarities between the cases led investigators to confirm that Lane had been near her home around the time of her death, and on August 28, 2007, the New Jersey State Police and the Hunterdon County Prosecutor’s Office announced that he had been charged with first-degree murder, second-degree burglary and a weapons offense.
Two Pennsylvania cases followed. Darlene Ewalt was killed outside her home on July 13, 2007, and five days later another woman was attacked in her home and survived, WBZ reported. By September 2008 Lane was charged in Ewalt’s death and in the attack on the second woman, and he was accused of murder in the Bloomsbury case. That month a Hunterdon County judge postponed a hearing so that prosecutors could prepare a plea offer, and North Carolina authorities said they wanted to question him about the unsolved 1996 killing of a police officer, the AP reported.
Robert G. Rembert Jr. was not unknown to Cleveland’s courts. In December 1997 he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the December 23, 1997, killing of Dadren Lewis in a Cleveland parking lot and sentenced to six years in prison. Months earlier, while he was working as a bus driver for the city’s transit authority, Rena Mae Payne, 47, had been found dead in Cleveland on May 15, 1997. Her case went unsolved for eighteen years.
By 2015 Rembert, 45, was an over-the-road truck driver. Kimberly D. Hall, 31, was found dead in Cleveland on June 10, 2015; DNA traced through the national CODIS database led to Rembert, and the last calls on her phone were to him, Cleveland 19 reported. On September 20, 2015, Morgan Nietzel, 26, and Rembert’s cousin Jerry Rembert, 52, were found shot to death in the Cleveland home where Rembert had been living. Nietzel’s car was missing. Medina County sheriff’s deputies arrested Rembert the next day on a warrant for Hall’s murder; he was driving it. DNA on Payne’s body was then matched to him as well.
On October 13, 2015, a Cuyahoga County grand jury indicted him on 10 counts of aggravated murder, along with kidnapping, aggravated robbery and other charges, and bond was set at $1 million. "Robert Rembert is a serial killer," Prosecutor Timothy McGinty said. "So far, we know he’s purposefully executed five people."
The case never reached a jury. On October 15, 2018, the first day of trial, Rembert pleaded guilty in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas to two counts of aggravated murder and two counts of voluntary manslaughter in the four deaths, News 5 Cleveland reported; which count applied to which death has not been reported. The next day Judge Joan Synenburg sentenced him to life in prison, with parole eligibility after 30 years. Nietzel’s father spoke through tears in court. "We have a 6 year-old grandson," he said.
Wayne Adam Ford’s case ended in a death sentence. Keith Jesperson, Sean Goble, Dellmus Colvin and Robert Rembert settled theirs with pleas, Jesperson in Wyoming and Colvin in Toledo to escape a possible death sentence. John Wayne Boyer pleaded guilty in North Carolina and was convicted in Tennessee; Bruce Mendenhall was convicted by juries in two states. Several of the women in these cases waited decades for a name. Patricia Skiple received hers in 2022, Kerry Ann Cummings and Suzanne Kjellenberg in 2023, and Lydia Jane Wade McWhorter in 2026, each through genealogists and cold case investigators working long after the trucks were parked. Terri Turner’s seven Oklahoma files became a national matrix of hundreds of victims. Most of the names on it still lack an answer.
• September 15, 1987: Donna Lee White found dead in Atlantic City; her death is ruled a cocaine overdose.
• January 21, 1990: Taunja Bennett found in the Columbia River Gorge.
• November 1990 and February 1991: Reena Ann Brunson and Victoria Rhone killed in Portland, Oregon.
• September 15, 1993: Scott William Cox convicted of two counts of murder.
• January to March 1995: Brenda Kay Hagy, Sherry Mansur and Alice Rebecca Hanes killed; Sean Patrick Goble arrested April 13, 1995.
• March 1995: Julie Ann Winningham killed; Keith Hunter Jesperson confesses.
• November 27, 1995: the two people wrongly convicted of Bennett’s death are released.
• December 15, 1995: Goble pleads guilty in Greeneville, Tennessee; two consecutive life sentences.
• May 15, 1997: Rena Mae Payne found dead in Cleveland.
• November 3, 1998: Wayne Adam Ford turns himself in at Eureka.
• 2003: Scarlett Wood dies in Wilmington, North Carolina.
• August 17, 2004: John Robert Williams arrested in Pearl, Mississippi.
• 2004: an Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation analyst refers the I-40 cases to ViCAP; the Highway Serial Killings Initiative begins.
• 2005: Jennifer Smith killed in Tennessee.
• June 2006: Ford convicted of four counts of first-degree murder; Colvin pleads guilty in Toledo the same year.
• June 26, 2007: Sara Nicole Hulbert found dead in Nashville; Bruce Mendenhall charged in July.
• July 2007: Darlene Ewalt and Monica Massaro killed; Adam Leroy Lane arrested in Chelmsford on July 30.
• 2007: Boyer pleads guilty to second-degree murder in Wood’s death; Jesperson pleads guilty in Santa Clara County.
• April 6, 2009: the FBI announces the Highway Serial Killings Initiative.
• January 8, 2010: Jesperson pleads guilty in Riverside County.
• 2010: Mendenhall convicted of Hulbert’s murder.
• April 8, 2011: Colvin pleads guilty in Atlantic County, New Jersey, to the 1987 death.
• February 22, 2013: Cox released to lifetime supervision.
• July 2013: Williams charged in Texas with the murder of Casey Jo Pipestem.
• September 2015: Morgan Nietzel and Jerry Rembert killed; Robert Rembert Jr. arrested the next day.
• 2016: Boyer convicted of murder in Tennessee.
• 2018: Mendenhall convicted in the death of Symantha Winters; Rembert pleads guilty and is sentenced to life (October 15 and 16).
• September 13, 2019: Tennessee appeals court affirms denial of Goble’s DNA petition.
• October 3, 2023: Suzanne Kjellenberg identified; Jesperson charged in Florida.
• January 22, 2025: Mendenhall convicted in Indianapolis of Carma Purpura’s murder.
• August 27, 2026: Riverside County identifies the woman Jesperson called Claudia as Lydia Jane Wade McWhorter.