Larry William Eyler killed at least twenty-one young men and boys along the highways of Illinois and Indiana between October 1982 and August 1984. He was convicted of two murders, one in each state, and sentenced to death in Illinois in 1986. He died of AIDS-related illness at the Pontiac Correctional Center on March 6, 1994, aged forty-one, with an appeal still pending. The Midwestern press called him the Highway Killer and the Interstate Killer.
He was born in Crawfordsville, Indiana on December 21, 1952, to George Howard Eyler and Shirley Phyllis Kennedy, one of four children of a mother who married five times. He dropped out of school in his final year and took a GED. He worked as a house painter and a shop assistant, moved between Terre Haute and Chicago, and had a long and financially dependent relationship with Robert David Little, a library science professor at Indiana State University.
Between October 23, 1982 and August 19, 1984 the bodies of young men began appearing along the interstates and on farmland in Illinois and Indiana, with further cases alleged in Kentucky and Wisconsin. Most were hitchhikers or young men selling sex. They had been stabbed repeatedly, often with their hands bound behind them, and left where they would be found from the road. A multi-state task force was formed, which was unusual for the period.
He was stopped on Interstate 65 in Lake County, Indiana on September 30, 1983 by Trooper Kenneth Buehrle, with a young man in his truck. The search that followed produced boots consistent with prints at a body site, and a knife. The evidence was suppressed as an illegal seizure and the charges were dropped in early 1984. He was released, and the killings continued. Which is the fact the case is usually cited for, and the reason the standard account of it is titled Freed to Kill.
On August 21, 1984 a janitor at his building in the Rogers Park area of Chicago opened a rubbish bag in a dumpster and found part of a leg. Police found the remains of Danny Bridges, sixteen, cut into eight pieces across eight bags. Fingerprints on the bags matched Eyler's. His apartment held bloodstains, a hacksaw, a box of matching bags and a T-shirt belonging to Bridges.
Bridges is one of very few of the victims whose name survived the case. He had been befriended by police officers who introduced him to reporters working on the sexual abuse of children, so when he was killed his photograph and his own words appeared in the newspapers and the city paid attention for a while.
He pleaded not guilty and the trial opened in Cook County on July 1, 1986 before Judge Joseph Urso. The jury convicted him on July 9 of murder, kidnapping, aggravated kidnapping, unlawful restraint and concealment of a homicidal death. He waived a jury for the penalty phase. On October 3, 1986 Urso sentenced him to death, telling him that if the death penalty was ever appropriate for anyone it was appropriate for him, and added fifteen years for the aggravated kidnapping and five for the concealment. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed on October 25, 1989.
From death row he made an offer. He confessed voluntarily to the 1982 murder of Steven Agan, twenty-three, and said through his lawyer Kathleen Zellner that he would give a full account of twenty further killings if Illinois commuted his sentence to life without parole. Cook County State's Attorney Jack O'Malley refused. He was convicted of the Agan murder in Indiana and sentenced on December 28, 1990 to sixty years.
The account was given to Zellner anyway and released after his death. In it he named Robert David Little as an accomplice in five of the killings and said Little, not he, had physically killed Danny Bridges. A claim he had also made in his 1988 appeal. Little was tried for the Agan murder and acquitted. A polygraph operator engaged by Zellner tested Eyler on both the Agan confession and the accusation against Little and reported no deception on either, which is not evidence and was not treated as any.
Twenty-one deaths are attributed to him and two convictions stand. Several of the bodies recovered along those highways have never been identified, and there have been renewed attempts since to match them to families through DNA.