I (19 page)

The way I figured, arson kept me from killing for over a year, from March of '93, when I killed Cindy in Corning, till the fall of '94, when I started to get restless again. By that time fire wasn't working for me anymore. I looked around for something else exciting.

I went to work driving a flatbed truck across forty-eight states for Systems Transport, and it wasn't long before I started taking out my boredom on other drivers. In Sacramento this guy in a pickup loaded with windshield glass flips me the bird because I kept him from passing. He gets out ahead and lays in the passing lane, blocking the whole damn freeway. I pull even, shake my fist out the window, and yell, “You son of a bitch! Nobody flips me off.”

I nudged him off the road. Last I saw, he was losing his load of glass. I figure I did a public service.

 

On an icy night near Bellingham, Washington, up near the Canadian border, a woman pulls up behind me to pass, but I'm stuck behind another car in the passing lane. She finally gets around my truck and flips me off. Then she slams on her brakes and almost wrecks us both. I think,
You're gonna teach me a lesson, bitch? You got another think coming
.

I drove up on her bumper to spin her out from behind. She stepped on the gas, but I caught her. Now she's laying on her horn at seventy-five miles an hour. I says, “You wanna fuck with me, bitch?” I ran her into an exit and she swerved off the roadway. I figured she learned her lesson, if she survived.

 

I was still fantasizing about raping and killing, but I pretty much confined my real-life sex to a few girlfriends, an occasional rider, and my hand. I limited my hitchhikers to women who looked like they were really going somewhere, had extra clothes, and told me in front where they were headed. Girls without baggage were out. They were almost always predators and I didn't trust myself to hold my temper when they showed their true colors. That's what killed Claudia, Cynthia and Laurie.

Sometimes I would have sex with my riders and sometimes I wouldn't. I tried to treat them fair and square—even carried cigarettes for them even though I hated the smell. I would stop and feed them as well because most hadn't eaten for a while. If they liked rough sex, I'd give it to them, but within reason.

As the months went by, it got harder to suppress the killing impulse. But a few seconds' rush wasn't worth months and months of worrying about being caught, jumping at shadows, never getting a good night's sleep.

 

One day I just decided to park my truck in Yakima and drive to Spokane to visit my ex-wife and kids. I wanted to give Jason, Melissa and Carrie the trampoline they'd always talked about.

I parked outside their house till they caught sight of me, then went inside to hug and kiss them. The hugs hit home. I missed my kids so much. They didn't know I was a serial killer. To them I was just their father.

I told them I didn't have time to wrap their present. They didn't care. It took me an hour to put the damn thing together, and I dollied it into the yard sideways so they couldn't tell what it was. When they finally saw it, they were on cloud nine. They'd wanted a trampoline ever since they'd played on somebody else's a year earlier.

Rose and I watched them bounce for an hour. My own kids. Except for the worries on my mind, it was one of my best days ever.

Later that night I took everybody to the truck stop on Broadway so they could have a big meal and no dirty dishes to clean up. When we got home, the kids bounced for two more hours. I told Rose how glad I was that she was happily remarried and that everything was going good for her now that we'd been divorced six years. Rose deserved the best.

 

Driving back to Yakima, I thought about how I was lying to my kids, making them think that everything would be all right when I knew good and well I would end up in prison. I worried about what would happen to them with me locked up. What would they think of the dad they loved? When I came to town it was party time for them, and when I left they went back in the dumps. I was a part-time dad that enjoyed calling them on their birthdays and sending money.

I had to watch my temper whenever I was around them because a lot of the time I was in the killing mode. I couldn't trust myself with my own kids. I was afraid to allow them to get into an argument, afraid of what I might do.

My kids deserved a full-time father. At least Dad and Mom had stayed married. I was gone from my kids almost all the time. It was the worst crime of all.

Toward the end of 1994 I was driving a navy blue 359 series Peterbilt with ten speeds and a 325-horsepower Cat engine—strictly a work truck, no chrome, no Vari-shield, nothing fancy. When I had my plum Pete I used to wash it all the time—this old heap was lucky to get a bath once a month. The air conditioner never worked right and I kept agitating to get it fixed, but the company didn't care about little things like that.

I was hauling a load of Tread Brite aluminum coils to Florida and sleeping in the truck at night for the cooler air. On the night before delivery time I was at a 76 Unocal truck stop near Tampa when a cute black girl with light complexion came to my truck wearing a Spandex jumpsuit and short hair. I allowed her to sit with me to wait out the security patrols that were cruising. It was around midnight.

She said, “For twenty dollars I could be yours for awhile.” I said okay and she went into the sleeper. She said, “You're not one of those serial killers, are you?”

I thought she said it as a joke. But I looked at her face and saw that she was serious. I tried to laugh, but I was too pissed. I said, “You should never ask stupid questions. Do you want me to tell the truth, or lie? If you had your doubts, you should've stayed the hell out.”

She pulled the twenty from my fingertips and smiled and said, “It was kind of a stupid question at that.”

After some good sex I delivered to the warehouse a couple of miles away and headed back to the same truck stop to wait for 9:00
A.M
. to call my dispatcher for a load out of Florida. Walking into the store, I noticed a tall blonde woman in an ankle-length dress toting a cart with three bags. She had a slight Slavic look like Taunja.

As I walked by, she asked if I was headed north. Looking into her baby blues, I pointed to my truck and said, “If you want to ride with me, put your baggage by the passenger door and wait. I don't know for sure where I'm headed. Ask me in about an hour.”

She said okay. I said, “Where do you want to end up?”

“Lake Tahoe, Nevada.” She said her name was Susanna, Sue Shannon, Sue Anna, something like that. She was about thirty. She had tarot cards and some moss-covered bark. I thought maybe she was a fortune-teller.

I said, “I can probably put you in Reno or at least get you to Nevada. Most of my loads take me to the Northwest. I'll be calling my boss in a while.”

Dispatch didn't have a reload yet and told me to call later. The girl came back and asked if I really wanted to take her with me. I told her it didn't matter one way or the other. “If you don't feel safe with me, then find someone else.”

It took two phone calls for me to be ordered to Cairo, Georgia, to pick up tubing for the Northwest. Boise would be my first drop. I told her I was ready to leave and she got in and asked if we could swing down to Miami to pick up some of her stuff. A typical truck-stop dingbat! Miami was a four-hundred-mile round-trip and I told her I had to get loaded tonight in the opposite direction. I guess she thought I was a taxi. You try to be nice to these crazy sluts and pretty soon they're breaking your chops.

“Okay,” she said. “It doesn't matter.” She said that Boise would be close enough for her—anything to get away from Florida.

About eighty miles north of Tampa, we stopped for fuel and got two shower keys. After we washed up, we sat down to dinner. She ordered all-you-can-eat spaghetti and ate three plates. We reached Cairo at midnight and pulled into the pipe yard north of town. Not needing tarps, it was a good load to haul, just forty-five-thousand pounds of electrical conduit, evenly placed. By 1:00
A.M
. we were loaded and strapped down. I doubled back to the Florida panhandle to pick up I-10 so we could grab a little rest and head west by daylight. She said it would be okay with her if we shared the sleeper if we stayed dressed.

At 3:00
A.M
. we pulled off I-10 for a sleep break. We passed three cop cars parked at a mini-mart and took the last parking spot, right behind a security officer's pickup. He looked like he was asleep, and I didn't give a damn anyway.

I slid in behind Susanna and closed my eyes. I felt her warm body against mine as I dozed off. The death game was far from my mind.

The air conditioner wasn't working and I woke up in my own sweat to roll down the windows. The temperature was still close to the nineties. I turned the dome light on and noticed a very nicely shaped ass right next to my crotch. I imagined her body under her dress-and-pants outfit, fresh and clean from our showers.

I got hard as I pulled off my pants and shirt and slid my arm around her waist. She stirred and sat up, rubbing her eyes.

When she saw me she screamed—not just a short abrupt scream but a high-pitched terrified scream you could hear all over the lot.

I covered her mouth to shut her up. As she wiggled under my hand, I tried to figure how I would explain this to the police and the security. Who would they believe? What lies would this bitch tell? I already knew the answer. No matter what happened, security would file a report and my company would fire me for taking a rider. I was screwed either way.

She tried to pull away and I pushed my hips against her ass and told her that we were parked where no one would hear her if she screamed again. “Do what you're told and you won't get hurt.”

She turned and faced me in the dark. “If you let me go,” she said, “I won't say anything.”

“I'm sorry,” I told her, “you just do as I ask and everything will go easy on you. Now make love to me like we're lovers.”

At first she fought, but then she realized she was caught and got into the lovemaking. She really seemed to enjoy herself as I screwed her for the next few hours. She surely knew how to please a man—or was it to just please me so I wouldn't hurt her?

After a while she was quiet and seemed to doze off, but I was worried that she might be playing possum till she figured out how to get away. I knew the cops were somewhere around, but they weren't in sight.

I got hard again and pulled up her skirt, and she let out another scream. When she wouldn't shut up, I freaked and choked her to death.

With her body still quivering I drove to an exit in Okaloosa County and hid her in some brush away from the roadway. After I made sure she was dead, I spread the soiled sleeping bag in a puddle and drove back and forth over it. Five women had died in that bedroll. I thought I might have to prove later that she was my kill and not somebody else's, so I grabbed two fourteen-inch white plastic ties from the truck and cinched them around her neck for ID.

I drove fast so I could get by the next scale house before it opened for the day and documented me in the area. I headed north, caught up on my logbook, and got documented in Georgia. That way it looked like I hadn't been in Florida after I left Cairo. Then I pulled off the road for a nap.

After I woke up, I drove at top speed straight to Alabama and then across Mississippi and up to Shreveport without stopping so I could fuel at the Unocal 76 Truck Stop and get a receipt that showed I was too far from Florida to be connected to Susanna's body.

I went through her things looking for my usual trophies, but all that was worth stealing was a boom box that I ended up giving away. The rest was garbage. The bitch didn't have an ounce of taste.