news/notes2009.04.05b

continued from news/notes 2009.04.05

[News] from [Los Angeles Times]
FBI database links long-haul truckers, serial killings

His name was Bruce Mendenhall. He was of average height and build with a sort of pinched face. His shirt was unbuttoned and he wore no shoes. As Postiglione sized him up, he said he noticed a speck of blood on the man's thumb and what he thought were several corresponding drops on the driver's door of the truck.

Though there could have been many reasonable explanations for the blood, Postiglione said, he was suspicious.

"Something -- I don't know if it was instinct or whatever -- was telling me, 'Don't let this guy leave before I look in his truck,' " the detective recalled.

According to Postiglione, Mendenhall calmly agreed to submit to a DNA swab and signed a consent form granting the detective permission to search the truck.

The officer said he stepped up into the cavernous cab, large enough to stand up in and walk around. He took a couple of steps into the sleeper compartment and sat down on the bed. To his left, behind the driver's seat, was a plastic bag. In it was some women's clothing covered in blood, he said. Also recovered from the cab were a cellphone and an ATM card belonging to a young woman who had gone missing in Indianapolis just 12hours earlier, authorities said. She has not been heard from since and is presumed dead.

By the time crime-scene technicians were finished with the cab, authorities have said, they had found blood or DNA linking Mendenhall to at least seven victims. He has since been charged with four slayings, officials said. Mendenhall has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial in Nashville.

Postiglione said the timeline the FBI put together showed that the intervals between killings were getting shorter and shorter.

."He was spiraling out of control," the detective said.

Other targets

Not all the victims attributed to alleged serial killer truck drivers have been prostitutes whose work made them easy targets. About a month after Mendenhall's arrest, another long-haul trucker, Adam Leroy Lane, parked his rig in a suburban Boston neighborhood and slipped through an unlocked door into the home of Kevin and Jeannie McDonough.

The McDonoughs were lying in bed when they heard a whimper from the adjacent bedroom where their 15-year-old daughter, Shea, had been sleeping. They went to see what was wrong and found a masked figure holding a knife to their daughter's throat. Kevin McDonough, a slight but muscular utility contractor, grabbed the intruder, applied a chokehold and wrestled him to the floor. His wife grabbed the knife.

When police arrived, they discovered that Lane was armed with three knives, a length of wire and a martial arts throwing star. In the cab of his truck was a DVD titled "Hunting Humans," about a serial killer.

A Massachusetts state trooper who earlier that year had attended an FBI presentation in Reno about the serial killer program sent an e-mail to the bureau.

"I just want to make sure this guy is on your radar," the trooper wrote.

That message ultimately led to Lane's being connected to slayings in two other states, for which he is awaiting trial. He pleaded guilty to the Massachusetts charges and was sentenced to 50 years in state prison.

J. Patrick Barnes, a New Jersey prosecutor who charged Lane with one of the murders, said the FBI was instrumental in helping solve his case.

"We're so busy looking at cases in our own towns, our own counties and our own regions that we sometimes miss what's going on around us," Barnes said.

"You can't connect the dots if you don't know what the dots are."

Access to a database

Hanging in a cubicle in the FBI office near Quantico, Va., is a map of the United States. It's covered in red dots representing some of the 500-plus cases in the Highway Serial Killings Initiative database. For all the crimes they represent, FBI supervisory agent John Molnar said he thinks the number of such offenses has been "grossly underreported."

Molnar said he hopes that will change in the wake of a decision last year to make the database available to law enforcement officials online, allowing police with a password to submit case information and make their own queries.

Though many of the dots on the map now appear connected to one another by similarities -- such as the killers' modes of operation -- the vast majority are not connected to any known suspect.

They are potential serial slayings waiting to be solved, the FBI says.

One involves the 2005 discovery of a decomposing human leg by ATV riders roaring through the woods near Interstate 55 in central Illinois. Painted toenails suggested that the leg, and another discovered nearby, belonged to a woman. But with little else to go on, the case went cold.

Three years later, an FBI analyst used a partial tattoo on one of the legs to help state police link the remains to Lindsay Harris, a 21-year-old call girl who had vanished from the Las Vegas Strip -- some 1,400 miles away -- about two weeks before the limbs were found.

She was the third Las Vegas sex worker whose dismembered remains were found along a highway from 2003 to 2005, prompting authorities to speculate that a trucker or someone else who frequents the highways was responsible for the slayings.

A fourth young woman who disappeared from the Strip and is presumed dead is also thought be part of the pattern. Her remains have not been recovered.

Mike Jennings, the Illinois State Police special agent who worked with the FBI to identify Harris' remains, said he plans to retire in a couple of years and that the case of the fourth woman will weigh heavily on his mind if it remains unsolved.

"My gut feeling," Jeninngs said, "is that it's a trucker."