Book Review
DWIGHT GARNER
KILLER ON THE ROAD
Violence and the American Interstate
By Ginger Strand
Illustrated. 252 pages. University of Texas Press. $25.
When Vladimir Nabokov wrote in “Lolita” that “you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” he was not predicting the arrival of the serial killer and necrophile Ted Bundy. But he might have been.
It’s unclear to me how fancily Bundy wrote. But he spoke with a grisly élan. Asked by a prison interviewer to describe his crimes, he said: “How do you describe what a quiche tastes like? Or what the juice of a bouillabaisse is like or why it tastes the way it does?” He added, “Some people taste clams” while others “mullet and the mussels.”
Among American serial killers, Bundy seemed especially terrifying because he was mobile. He confessed to murdering 30 young women in the 1970s, and those killings were spread across seven states. He was bad, as the ZZ Top song has it, and he was nationwide.
Ginger Strand’s new book, “Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate,” examines the links between random killings and the anonymity and soullessness bred by our Interstate System. These are connections most of us have long ago made in our minds. As Ms. Strand observes, “If a song or book title contains the word Interstate or Freeway, expect mayhem.”
Ms. Strand’s slim book is part true-crime entertainment, part academic exegesis, part political folk ballad. I don’t wish to overpraise it: it has soft spots; it frequently deals with material covered in better books; you will not confuse the author’s modest prose with Nabokov’s. Yet her cross-threaded tales of drifters, stranded motorists and madmen got its hooks into me. Reading Ms. Strand’s thoughtful book is like driving a Nash Rambler after midnight on a highway to hell.
On its most primal level “Killer on the Road” recounts the crime sprees of men like Charles Starkweather. In 1958, at 19, he cruised around Lincoln, Neb., in stolen cars with his girlfriend and a sawed-off shotgun, killing 11 people and leading the National Guard on a multistate manhunt. His bad actions inspired two indelible pieces of American art: Bruce Springsteen’s song “Nebraska” and Terrence Malick’s film “Badlands.”
Starkweather was driven, in no small part, by class rage. He said later, “Dead people are all on the same level.”
Ms. Strand, whose previous work includes “Inventing Niagara” (2008), a history of Niagara Falls, dilates frequently upon class issues in her new book, upon the social inequities and simmering resentment behind many violent crimes. But her political analysis has more tentacles than that.
In a chapter about the killings of young people, mostly black boys, in Atlanta in the late 1970s and early 1980s, murders for which an unhinged man named Wayne Williams was ultimately arrested, she carefully parses how the Interstate System plowed through black sections of town, eliminating old neighborhoods. These were “white men’s roads,” as the National Urban League put it, “through black men’s bedrooms.”
She charts the social atomization that resulted. “Atlanta’s urban renewal and expressway construction had, at the very least,” she declares, “built the stage on which the tragedy in Atlanta could unfold.”
This book’s most unsettling chapter takes its name from one of the great, literate rock bands in this country: Drive-By Truckers. This chapter gives us Ms. Strand at her angriest, grisliest and most convincing. In it she proposes that America’s 10,000 or so truck stops breed serious crime, including serial murder, at a terrible (and largely preventable) level.
She commences by observing that “at least 25 former truckers are currently serving time in American prisons for serial murder.” Trucking has become a job that attracts marginal characters, she writes, “less educated, less stable, less tied to unions, less rooted in family life” than they once were. She quotes the economist Michael Belzer, who calls trucks “sweatshops on wheels.”
The bars to entry are low: criminal records and even drunken-driving convictions are often overlooked. The pay is abysmal. Many drivers are lonely and depressed. Annual turnover at some trucking companies, she says, is around 100 percent.
This information is clearly not enough to suggest that even a fraction of America’s 18-wheelers have sociopaths at the wheel. But in 2009 the F.B.I. went public with its Highway Serial Killings initiative, noting the numbers of women, often truck-stop prostitutes, killed each year, and suggesting the suspects are mostly long-haul truckers.
Ms. Strand focuses primarily on one case. She attended the 2010 trial of Bruce Mendenhall, the so-called Rest Stop Killer, who was convicted of murdering one woman in his truck in Nashville but will likely stand trial for the killings of other truck stop prostitutes in other states.
Her analysis deepens. She notes how little work has been done on the mental health of truckers. She asks if there might be “something about trucking that could push some people predisposed to violence over the edge.”
She advocates for trucker’s welfare. Do truck stops have to be such soul-crushing places? “It’s not hard to imagine how truck stops might counter the rigors of driving,” she writes. “They might have salad bars and dog runs and fitness centers. Instead they offer arcades and dingy drivers’ lounges — a row of easy chairs all facing a giant TV, as if what a driver should do when he stops driving is go and sit some more.”
She is even better on the lives of truck-stop prostitutes, the so-called lot lizards who knock on truckers’ doors at night, offering their services for as little as $30. (Truckers who don’t wish to be disturbed, the author says, post a sign in their windows, “a lizard behind a circle with a bar through it,” so they can get some sleep.)
When these women disappear, few tend to notice. Ms. Strand interviews an Indianapolis detective who calls them “throwaway people” about whom, sometimes, only the cops seem to care. But these women can be made more safe, as can the truckers themselves, by better lighting, design and security at truck stops, the author argues, in much the same way planners designed away much of the crime at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan.
Her plea on behalf of these prostitutes is a plaintive call for simple human dignity. “Those devalued lives,” she writes, “like the truckers’, are unimaginable outside the landscapes highway federalism built: the anonymous world of exit ramps, right-of-ways and travel plazas where places are numbers, people are anonymous, and human interaction is entirely mediated by commerce.”
Ms. Strand probably doesn’t mean to creep us out on her book’s dust jacket, where she writes that she “spends a lot of time on the road.” No matter. We’ve already been creeped out. “Killer on the Road” is a small book that carries a heavy load of unpleasant but important freight.
Courtesy: The New York Times, September 4, 2012
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