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Sex Trafficking and Murder on the Road with Frank Figliuzzi

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“I’ve seen a lot in my 25 years in law enforcement, but I’ve got to tell you, these crime scenes and these killers… it’s evil.” - Frank Figliuzzi Share on X

It sounds like an episode straight out of Criminal Minds. The FBI’s Highway Serial Killers initiative hunts for long-haul truckers behind at least 850 murders of mostly female sex trafficking victims along our nation’s highways.

Today’s guest is Frank Figliuzzi. Frank was the FBI’s Assistant Director over Counterintelligence. He served 25 years as an FBI Special Agent in assignments across the country. As the head of all espionage investigations, Frank frequently briefed the White House, the DNI, and the Attorney General. For the past seven years, Frank has been a national security analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He’s the author of a national bestseller, The FBI Way: Inside the Bureau's Code of Excellence, and now Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers.

“The book is my journey into a very dark underbelly of our society.” - Frank Figliuzzi Share on X

Show Notes:

“Get rid of the notion that this can’t happen to your family. That’s dangerous in and of itself because you’ll never see it coming.” - Frank Figliuzzi Share on X

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Transcript:

Frank, thank you so much for coming on the Easy Prey Podcast today.

Chris, it's been a while. I'm glad we could do it again. Thanks for inviting me.

I know. You were back here just in the spin-up of COVID, so it's been almost four years or just over four years. I'm excited to have you come back and talk about something other than viruses.

That's true. Maybe computer viruses, but maybe that's another topic for another day. I'm glad we're going to have a good discussion today.

I'm looking forward to it. Can you give the audience a little bit of background about who you are and what you do?

I spent 25 years as an FBI special agent. I retired as an Assistant Director, specifically the Head of Counterintelligence. I managed all espionage investigations in the United States government, briefed the White House, Congress, the DNI, the Attorney General, and had just a wild ride of an adventure for 25 years.

I've been assigned throughout the United States and worked on a variety of things, particularly running, for example, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in the Miami field office immediately after the 9/11 attacks. I also became the on-scene commander of an anthrax homicide scene in Boca Raton, Florida, the first death related to the anthrax attacks, also right in that 9/11 time frame.

I became the chief inspector of the FBI at one point under the then-director Bob Mueller. I ran the FBI in Northern Ohio, Miami. I had a Crimes Against Children squad in San Francisco. Wide variety of things, but that adventure continues. I'm on my third or fourth career. I retired from the Bureau and went to a big corporate security job as an executive with a global company and did that for five years.

NBC News came calling and said, “Hey, can you tell us all about this Russia threat, this Trump situation? Bob Mueller's now the special counsel looking into Russian interference in our election. Can you tell us about that?” That was seven years ago, Chris. I'm doing that.

I do security consulting and public speaking, but I also wrote a national best selling book. We may have talked about that last time I was on. It was called The FBI Way: Inside the Bureau's Code of Excellence. It's a leadership management tell-all book, life lessons, management lessons learned about how the FBI operates under really intense stress every single day, and gets it right most of the time. There are takeaways that everyone can apply to their lives.

Now, much to my amazement, I'm writing another book, which just got released. I'm happy to talk about that.

What's the name of the book?

It is Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers. It is the true-crime account of the FBI's highway serial killings initiative. A lot of people are asking me, Chris, “Hey, is this something you actually worked? Did you work this highway serial killings thing in the FBI?” The answer is no. I knew few, if any, details of this initiative during my career.

When I found out about it about two years ago, I was floored. The investigator in me said, “You’ve got to dig into this. What is going on? Are you telling me there are 850 homicides along our highways, mostly of women, mostly of sex-trafficked women, and the FBI suspects it's long-haul truckers?”

This is what I said when I'm asked, when I met the head of the FBI initiative. She's telling me this and I said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Are you saying this is still going on or is this history?” “No, no, still going on.” “Have you locked up anybody?” “Yes, there are already 25 long-haul truckers in prison for multiple murders.” “Those guys are not good for the remainder of the unsolved cases?” “No, there are about 200 pending and active unsolved cases.” I said, “How many suspects are you looking at right now?” “About 450.” “OK.” I had to dig into this for myself. The book is my journey into a very dark underbelly of our society.

A couple of questions about it. The Highway Serial Killers Initiative, how long has it been around?

It has been worked actively only since about 2004. Now, the 850 victims at least identified and tied to highway killings and truckers, that goes back to the late 1980s.

So they've been around 20 years and they're investigating cases up to 40 years old.

Indeed. Some of the sad tales here are that sometimes the victim remains don't even get identified for 30–40 years, usually from DNA matches. Many of these are cold cases.

If you're a true-crime aficionado, this book is for you. If you've always wondered what's going on in that truck on the highway behind you or alongside you, it's a book for you, too, because I've rode over 2000 miles in a big rig to just learn the culture.

The book is really a deep dive into three cultures—trucking, trafficking, and criminal analysis. If you love any one of those things, you will like this book because I learned a heck of a lot of it. It's very impressive about modern trucking and truckers. Their value to our economy, tens of billions of dollars in gross freight revenue, grocery stores will stop selling groceries in three days if trucking were to stop. We saw some of that during COVID.

I learned how to be safer on the road. I learned about the different kinds of truckers, the different kinds of sex-traffic victims and the street-level work they do, who's more likely to be a victim, which truckers are more likely to kill, and I learned a heck of a lot about the current initiative and how they work to connect the dots to stop the killing.

This sounds an awful lot like a very detailed Criminal Minds episode.

It's funny you say that, because I'm typically the guy who doesn't come home and turn on a true-crime story. I lived that for 25 years. But in this niche, this narrow groove of what the FBI does, which is behavioral analysis specifically regarding highway killings, this does indeed mirror what many of us see on movies and television, which is the profiling, the behavioral analysis.

What's fascinating to me is the unit that handles this initiative is primarily not gun-and-badge special agents, it is crime analysts who are the heroes in this story, who connect those dots by collecting the data from state county local police departments and saying, “I think we have a pattern here. I think the person who did this one over here has done this one over there.” The success of the initiative is tied directly to the police department's capacity to load their unsolved or similar cases into this special database.

Interesting. You were talking about 850 murders over 40 years. How did they specifically classify those as related to truckers as opposed to something that would have just happened in that local community that happened to be near where truckers might be?

I asked the same question. Maybe you missed your calling as an FBI agent. I asked the same question. What gets a case into the database and gets worked? The answer is to get into the database, the case has to be first in close proximity to an interstate highway. It has to involve a female victim because that's typically what we're looking for. The last known location of the victim spotted alive also needs to be at or near the highway or adjacent truck stop.

When you say, “That's OK. I’ve got that criteria,” but then what makes the FBI say that's a trucker, then we get more detailed. If the last known spot is at a truck stop in Oklahoma, but the body is recovered in Tennessee, there's a high likelihood that's a trucker. It's that kind of thing that gets the Bureau so confident that we're dealing with long-haul truckers.

That's crazy. I guess to take a step back, we would look at the victims involved here. Are there different classifications of women that get sex trafficked in these types of situations?

Yeah, I got deep into that culture. I went to the experts. I went to, most people say, the top two PhD experts in street-level trafficking who not only teach for a living—one at the University of Toledo and one at the Arizona State University—but they also live this out because they do street-level work and research and help women get out of the trafficking trap. They're not just academics. They're very much on the street level, and they've got their finger on the pulse. I went to them. They were gracious enough to say, “Let me teach you what's going on here.”

What I learned was that there are three types generally of trafficked women. There are pimp-controlled women. By the way, there are two kinds of pimps, generally. There's a gorilla pimp, which works by absolute force and intimidation, often violently. There's a finesse pimp that grooms and becomes the best friend of the young lady, in fact maybe her only sign of affection in life.

You've got the pimp-controlled. You've got a renegade, who usually decides to abandon a pimp after she's had that horrible experience and go out on her own. Lastly, there's a type called the outlaw that actually has decided, “You know what? Sex is no longer part of the transaction. I'm going to rip you off. I'm going to commit a crime here.” That's very dangerous as you can imagine.

I started asking some questions. Which of these types of young women trafficking victims is more likely to fall prey to a serial killer? You might instinctively go, “Well, maybe it's that pimp control because they're beaten into it. But I found that the pimp-controlled woman is monitored almost 24/7, if not by the pimp himself, by what they call a bottom, the pimp's deputy, a girl who's the supervisor, who's making sure the job's getting done. Actually, ironically, it's possible that the pimp-controlled young lady is the safer one in terms of serial killing.

You've got the renegade. The renegade is at high risk. She's on her own. She might have recruited a friend to work together with, but there's no backup. There's no one there if something goes horribly wrong inside that truck cab or inside that motel room.

Lastly, the outlaw who's simply ripping people off is likely to attack the serial killer. The odds are that she's not going to be falling prey to the serial killer.

I asked a similar question, Chris, about truckers. Which truckers are more likely to kill? That's a fascinating discussion because what I found was a whole hierarchy within trucking.

Interesting.

Yeah. The pay structure varies widely because of the type of trucking done as well. I rode in a big rig that was a flatbed. I mean big, dangerous loads, like suicide coils, rolls of heavy steel. They call them suicide coils because if you don't chain that thing down properly, it will come loose and roll right back into your cab, or God forbid, it'll roll off and hit a vehicle around the cab.

I learned, Chris, to stay away in my civilian life from those suicide coils. If I see that on the highway, I ain't getting anywhere near that truck. That's not happening. Those guys get paid well.

Here's the thing. My conclusion is the more engagement a trucker has with the load, meaning physical engagement, this is working out. There's a 100-pound tarp that you've got to unfurl, toss up on top of the rig. You've got to socially engage with people at the start and end of your pickup and delivery. You've got to know math and physics about points of distribution, securement, and which axle has too much weight over it. All of that's going on on something like a flatbed.

Similarly, for extra heavy or wide loads, those truckers get paid more. They're smart, they're engaged. The trucker that concerns me is the guy who's driving a load of salsa or Kleenex across the country, and his only engagement is opening that back door to the trailer. I get deep into my theories on that as well.

It's interesting. It makes sense that there are different classifications of those drivers because the work is more complicated. Does it work that because the work is more complicated, it doesn't attract the criminal element as much as just the standard box truck?

This is a theory that I put out with data and with evidence, but yes, that is my strong theory. As someone who spent 25 years investigating, one goal I had was, “Hey, you tell me you've got 450 suspects out there. Let's try to narrow this down. That's a lot. What should the analysts be focusing on? What should police detectives and sheriff's deputies be focusing on all over the nation?” That's a suggestion of mine.

There's another, there's more here. The big corporate names that we're all familiar with—JB Hunt, Werner, and others—monitor those trucks through geopositioning. There are cameras looking into the cab, there are cameras looking out the windshield. The electronic log knows where you are at all times, the speed you're traveling. Not impossible because I cite cases of this, but really harder to be that serial killer. If you're a big-time corporate driver, there's just too much electronic monitoring.

Now, if you're an owner-operator, maybe you've got your truck and three or four others, now that gets troubling. There are cases, Chris, where a guy has parked his rig for his mandatory downtime. The Department of Transportation requires 36 hours of downtime, usually on a weekend. You park your rig, you get an Uber or a rental car, and you go out and kill. I've seen cases like that. You’ve got to be careful with conclusive theories about, “Hey, a corporate driver won't ever be a killer.” It has happened.

Is that because there's just more control—the cameras—or does it attract a different type of person into that occupation?

Yeah. I think that the corporate job is going to be less attractive to someone with a predilection to be violent and kill. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. They may sign up. Then, once they realize, “My God. My presence is monitored 24/7. I’ve got to be here and there at certain times,” they might say, “No, thanks,” and find another form of trucking.

Again, there are ways to beat the system. I've even seen cases where someone's asked a buddy, “Hey, can you run this load for me, and I'll pick up your vacation time? We'll trade off here.” The company thinks Joe is delivering this load. It's not Joe, it's Bill who volunteered to take that load. It gets tricky, and this is where the real investigative work takes place.

Interesting. Your experience, was there anything that surprised you in your 2000 miles of being in a cab?

I'm going to be honest here and admit that I knew next to nothing about long-haul trucking, and I was fascinated by it. I thought it might be boring. I thought it might be mindless. Yes, there are periods of time like that, but when you're dealing with flat-bedding, I was shocked at the high-tech nature of trucking today. The electronic log book is fascinating, and you're constantly punching in, loading, unloading, downtime, fueling. It knows all, it sees all.

You help it, know that you can cheat, but you're going to get caught cheating at the log. The brains needed to understand load distribution was fascinating. I was getting a good workout every day or a couple of times a day, depending on how short our routes were. That impressed me with regard to the future.

I rode with a young trucker in his twenties, and I came away thinking, “You know? If they're all like him, we'll be in good shape.” He was sharp. He liked what he was doing. He was very social. He was on. There are some not-so-nice things that I learned, but truckers spend a lot of time watching movies while they're driving. Did you know that?

No. That's a little concerning.

Another reason to stay far away from the truck. The near misses we had were really troubling. It was almost always some oblivious driver of a car who was either on their phone, you could look down and see, “My God. They're on their phone, or they're talking to somebody and not aware that this 80,000 pounds of steel cannot stop.”

A big takeaway for me is these trucks can't stop on a dime—they cannot. If you think you're going to beat that truck onto the highway, on the exit ramp, or you're going to pass them, you are crazy, because it's not that they want to hurt you. They cannot stop.

The other thing is if you think that truck's going too slow, understand something that when they're fully loaded—we were 80,000 pounds fully loaded—that gas pedal is all the way down, and that's about 30 miles an hour. Get better educated about safety in your own car and with your own family.

When you were a passenger there, did you have anyone brake check the driver?

Oh yeah. That's when the very loud horn—the horn can be mild. When you're saying a kid's waving to you, you go beep, beep, it can really rattle your bones, like if somebody's brake checked you, cut you off. Yeah, that's not something you want to do.

I'm not an expert, but I got to sleep in the berth. I got to as if it's a privilege. It's not the Ritz Carlton, my friend. I got the upper bunk, I got the top bunk. The guy I was driving with happened to be a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and had done time as a chef, by the way. He cooked in the cab, not always, but had the hot plate, the electric frying pan. We would cook up breakfast in the truck. It was a wild ride.

Interesting. Did you have much interaction with other truck drivers at the truck stops? Or are truck drivers pretty much lone wolves, and they just come and do their things and go?

They tend to be loners, it has been my experience. I think the guy that I rode with was an exception. He had good social skills, good people skills. He was somebody who was on the phone headset most of the time, which I believe is better than watching a movie while you're driving.

He was talking to his buddies, other drivers with the same small company. He liked that a lot. He would talk to the dispatcher a lot. “Where's my next load? What can I get? How can I get more money? Give me a heavier load. Give me a more complex load.” You get paid extra for that. You get paid extra if a load's got to be there Friday night for the client Monday morning.

A load out of New York City at JFK airport on a Friday, that's money. That's money you get, and there are different ways to get paid. Sometimes you get paid a percentage of the value of what the company's getting for that load. Sometimes the big corporations will pay you by the hour which is really not ideal. This guy was a hustler, and I liked that.

Socialization. When we would pick up and deliver, there was a minimal head nod, “How are you doing? Where are you going? What's your load today?” But not a lot of time, quite frankly, for socialization, or even really for helping each other because you've got to watch the clock. Sometimes there'd be help. If a guy got done tarping his load, for example, and maybe you're having some issues. Maybe, but not a lot of time.

Do you think that job attracts people that are problematic, or does it make people problematic? I can imagine, if you're an individual who's already somewhat isolated of your own choice, once you've done five, 10, 15 years of being a truck driver, it's got to be hard on relationships and how you interact with people.

I was deeply interested in that nature-or-nurture question. Of course, it's never binary, it's complicated. Yes, a serial killer certainly has commonalities with other serial killers for sure. There's nothing particularly special about a serial killer trucker as opposed to other kinds of serial killers.

In fact, by the way, the number-one profession for serial killers is trucker, so you're right to ask the question. What is it about the job? Does it attract killers? Does it make killers? Some of all of the above.

There's an interesting study out of Canada on the health of long-haul truckers that I quote in the book, and it's horrible. First of all, it's extremely sedentary for most truckers, unless you're doing a flatbed or something like that. Extremely sedentary. The diet is horrible. Good luck trying to find healthy food at a truck stop. It's almost always not there. It's hard to find.

Lack of exercise and then the drinking and the drugs. The numbers are not good, Chris, on the percentage of truckers who flunk their drug testing. When you do anonymous surveys of truckers and ask them, “Have you used illegal drugs or alcohol in the last 24 hours?” Something like 70% say yes. The drugs aren't just marijuana that they test positive for, it's everything.

In the 80s–90s, there was a lot of heavy drug use. They want to stay up. There is boredom and loneliness. We walked into a very nice truck stop in Wisconsin in the evening. I wanted to see what the bar looked like upstairs. We go up there, and the guys are all around the bar. They're drinking cocktails. I know it's a weeknight, so I know most of them are going to be driving in the morning, and they're getting hammered. That's tough.

While they're getting hammered, speaking of loneliness, it's almost like the Star Wars bar scene. When you walk in, these guys, it's crowded, but they're all on their headsets talking to who knows who, friends, family. They're not talking to each other while they're drinking. It's rough. It's a rough life, and it's not for everybody. You could be on the road for months on end before you see your family.

Wow, that's tough. Let's switch back over to the women here. How are the women getting involved in the sex-trafficking trade?

I'm glad you asked, because it's really at least a third or more of the book is the focus on how this happens, who it happens to, and then really, there's hope to get out of this trafficking trap.

If you're sitting there listening to us and you're thinking, “Well, this really doesn't apply to anybody I know, any young lady in my family or in my neighborhood,” let me tell you something. One of the women I spent days interviewing was a white, blue-eyed young lady from the Midwest who went to a year of college, came from a decent family, church on Sundays, and had relatives in law enforcement. It can happen to anybody.

Another woman I've spoken with was a preacher's kid. Her dad was a minister. How does that happen? When you talk to the experts, which I did first, which was a smart way to go, so they educated me, and in my head, I had this checklist of things they asked me to watch for that are commonalities down the journey of recruitment and trafficking. As I talked to victims who are now out of the trafficking, I started mentally checking those boxes, and boy they were there to check.

What is it? It's generally early trauma in your life often involving unwanted touching, sexual molestation. That's there. Not always but very often. There are other traumas. It's not just one thing, usually. It's a stacking into a tower of trauma, I call it. Maybe there's a broken family. There's the death of a close loved one. There's domestic violence in the home. There are a series of bad boyfriends.

There's almost always early drug use including marijuana, which many of those women—not my phrase—there's called their gateway drug because they were just way too young to deal with getting hot. The recruitment often happens through a boyfriend, someone they trust.

We watch movies and people think, “Oh, yeah, trafficking. That's when the stranger comes, abducts you off the street, and takes you into this international trap.” That is extremely rare. What's far more common is that someone on the fringe of your friend's network, your boyfriend's network, someone there is going to introduce you.

At the point that you're having sex at a very young age, someone in that recruitment phase is going to say, or you're going to rationalize, “Well, I'm already having sex, I might as well get paid for it.” Then the drug use gets harder and harder drugs, and now your judgment goes out the window. I hate to sound like this is formulaic, but the experts tell me they see it so often that it is amongst the commonalities that identify you as very vulnerable to trafficking.

What can parents or friends do if that's something that is happening to one of the women in their life? What should they be doing?

First, absolutely get rid of the notion that this can't happen to your family. That's dangerous in itself because you'll never see it coming. You've got to engage with your child, particularly with regard to their online activity.

I tell parents if you don't know what your child is doing online or who they're communicating with, you've got to get online with them. If that means you're uncomfortable because you've asked to share the account, then be uncomfortable because you need to know what that young lady—often young lady, I also recommend it for young boys—you need to know what they're doing and who they're communicating with, because someone's going to come in from the fringe.

There's a whole different language, which I get into in the book, but online, there are icons that kids use to communicate. There are emojis that you may not understand what they're talking about because it's all emojis, but get up to speed on this. You can get online, you can get on the Internet, and find out how the teenagers are communicating right now, and even preteens, so that you're aware of what's going on. Ask hard questions.

By the way, have the conversation when it's age appropriate in an age-appropriate way. There are things out there that people will try to get you interested in. A lot of parents feel comfortable having the drug conversation, but I don't think many parents are equipped or comfortable having that trafficking conversation. “Please tell me if your friend is doing this, or if you've got a girlfriend who is really bothering you, how much she's away with her boyfriend, or what she's telling you he has her doing.” Have the conversation, first and foremost.

I highlight some great work in the book, Chris, about what's being done now since so much of this starts online, the recruitment process and the solicitation, by the way. Trucker-friendly ads online at sex sites. The days of prowling the parking lot of the truck stop, not so much anymore, but you bet it's moved online for the truckers. I saw that firsthand as we traveled around, and I researched this.

A doctor or a professor at the Arizona State University has identified a couple of interesting things. First, in terms of intervention early. All of her interviews of victims, a lot of them had somehow touched special education as a kid in school. That puts them really at a vulnerable spot.

She developed a program, a curriculum for teachers of special ed to identify vulnerabilities and also a program for young kids to understand, “Hey, this is appropriate, this is not appropriate.” That's great. Another program involves monitoring laptop activity in prisons, because so much of the activity for recruitment and grooming occurs in the prison system.

I would never have suspected that.

Yeah. The cellmate who is recruiting knows when you're coming out. She says, “Hey, I have a place for you to stay. When you come out, I'll put some money on your phone account here in the prison or the jail, the county lockup, whatever it is. When you come out, you call me. We'll pick you up, we'll give you a roof over your head. You can stay with me and my boyfriend.” That happens over and over again. There are programs like that going on.

The whole underage aspect of this, there are now mathematical algorithms that can look at ads on the dark Internet and the dark web, ads for soliciting sex acts. Those algorithms can now tell us that this ad looks like it involves an underage victim. There's tremendous work being done in that area.

There's hope. A place called Starfish Place in Phoenix, Arizona is run jointly by the City of Phoenix and Arizona State. It's residential. It's just for young women coming out of trafficking who have young children themselves. It's a phenomenal program.

I visited there. I met with some of the residents. It's really heartwarming to see what's happened because they're equipping them with certifications, education, resume building, life skills. All of that's going on there.

There's another great program going on in Ohio in the Toledo area. That's very different. It's not residential, but it puts you in the community and surrounds you with people who can help get you what you need to stay up.

I also talked about how law enforcement has got to change the model. Handcuffing young women who are trafficking victims and treating them like criminals is not the answer. They have to be viewed as victims. There has to be trust that's built, partnerships with local groups.

Ask them what they need to get out of this trap, and then eventually they start talking about who their pimp is and how many girls are involved. The handcuffing thing, you know what happens with that? The pimp shows up to bail them out and becomes an even greater hero to this young lady.

“The pimp is the one who got me out of the problem” and reinforces that cycle.

Exactly.

What are the commonalities on the other side of this? That you have the serial killer, truck drivers. What are the commonalities about these folks?

You asked about Criminal Minds and television shows. This is where it really meets the road, because the experts at the FBI understand these commonalities. Often you've got alcohol or drug abuse by the suspect. You definitely have almost always a loner, not always but almost always. Almost always acting alone, although there are some rare cases where they had a partner, usually a girlfriend, but that's extremely rare.

The experts tell me there are really two kinds of serial killers. One is into power and control. They want very much to control life and death. Those people are going to take their time torturing, raping, and eventually killing the victim because they enjoy that time and control.

They do almost always end up having sex with the victim, surprisingly often postmortem. The crime scene analysts and the coroners can easily tell what's happened pre-death and post-death, including ligature, strangulation, cutting, shooting.

Generally, a serial killer does not change their method or means of death. If they're a shooter, they usually remain a shooter. If they strangle by rope or using the victim's clothing, it's very common to strangle and choke them. They stay with that.

The study of dump sites, again, usually doesn't change. If they dump in water, they usually keep dumping in water. You've got this one that's about power, control, likes the idea of controlling life and death, wants the sex.

The second serial killer is about killing. They're going to kill very fast. There might be sexual arousal in the act of killing, but they're generally not going to have sex with that victim. You can tell pretty quickly from crime scene analysis and from examination of the victim's body what kind of killer you're dealing with. That does help.

The number-one takeaway on the FBI initiative is that not enough police departments are heeding the call to load that database, the HSK (Highway Serial Killings) database, which is within VICAP. For those who are familiar with police work, it's the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. There's a special HSK database.

A lot of police departments will tell you, “Look, we're aware of it, but I don't need to answer 200 questions. I don't have the time. I don't have an analyst here at my local sheriff's department. We barely have a detective to work this, and you're asking me to answer 200 questions about my case.” Those 200 questions, that's how the FBI connects the dots and tells you what's like this, who did it, whether it's connected to another case.

That 850 cases, is that just the ones that were entered into this database? In theory, that number could be double, triple, way higher.

Exactly. That 850 is only what the FBI knows about. That's exactly right.

Is there an estimate as to how undercounted it is then?

All they would tell me with confidence—and the FBI doesn't tell us a lot about their data—is that they're confident that there are multiple serial killers active right now amongst the trucker community. There are “many more than 850 known victims.”

Wow. Is there anything, maybe at a slightly different angle, that truck drivers should be aware about? There's just something that they could do of like, “Hey, this guy seems really off in this particular way. Maybe I should report them.”

I love this question because, again, we'd be remiss to not say that we are dealing with a tiny fraction of truckers in the serial-killing world. There's a great private organization out there, non-profit, it's called TAT (Truckers Against Trafficking). This organization trains long-haul truckers to spot and report signs of trafficking.

Every year they give out trucker hero awards, someone who has saved a life out of trafficking, someone who's reported something of concern, but they've been through the training. You'll even sometimes see emblems on the side of a rig that say, “I'm a TAT trucker, Truckers Against Trafficking.” It is a phenomenal program, and they've even gone beyond trafficking to truckers. They're into anti-trafficking writ large, but I can't say enough good things about programs like that.

There are organizations that ask truckers to take a pledge saying that, “I will not be a part of the demand side of the supply-and-demand equation of trafficking. I pledge not to be a part of that but to be part of the solution.” There are some really encouraging things.

The other encouraging thing that is happening is part of the reason we don't have victims parading around truck stops is because the truck stop industry, which by the way is an enormous economic machine, you pass them all the time, TA loves, you name it, they're big business. They cleaned up their act.

There are some out there who will say, “Well, yeah, they cleaned up their act because of pressure. Stop allowing women to sell themselves at your truck stops.” But whatever the reason, they have cracked down on it. It has lessened that environment.

Now, I did discover, of course, that it's gone online, that it's often at a seedy motel or massage parlor, often right next to the truck stop. Again, you can argue, well, were the women safer at the truck stop's parking lot? Because if something went really bad, they could scream, holler, kick, and some trucker parked next door to that truck would hear it. You could argue that they're less safe having moved into that motel next door. It's Whac-A-Mole, but some good things are happening.

Without talking about stuff you're not allowed to talk about, are there coming advances in the study and the analytics to be able to find people easier?

There's no question that DNA, and specifically forensic and genealogical DNA, is making a huge difference. Even while I was writing this book, Chris, I had set Google Alerts to alert me if there were any trucker killings or any developments in cases. Sure enough, two or three times while I'm writing the book, I had to stop because some victim had been finally identified through DNA. There's a great case out of Maryland where, years later, decades later, finally DNA was able to link killings together. That is the number-one development.

The other good thing that's happening is the awareness program. The FBI goes on a road show, meets with police departments around the country, and says, “Look, you need help getting your cases into this database. Have you thought about applying for a grant from the DoJ? Do you have a big case where you need us to sit here and start loading data? What can we do to help you?” That word is getting out.

One good thing that could happen is it's read by either law enforcement, people who say, “God darn it, we do have to get better at loading our data.” Or two, victim families can read the book and go, “You know what? I'm going to ask the detective on my family member's case whether he's loaded the case into the Highway Serial Killings database.” Ask that question. I'm hoping some good comes from the book.

Hopefully so. Are there any particular cases that you were setting up that surprised you?

First, to answer that question in a large way, in a general way, I've seen a lot in my 25 years of law enforcement. But I have to tell you, this work, these crime scenes, and these killers, this is evil. This is among the most heinous things I've seen in my career. I found the depravity involved in this. This isn't just killing someone. This is torture and rape repeatedly. There's that.

There's a guy who was known as the vampire trucker who took a tool and drilled his victim's teeth and fangs just like his. There's a haunting photograph out there of a victim. She was 14 years old. She was hitchhiking with her boyfriend out of the Houston area in Texas, and got picked up by a trucker. It turns out, it's a notorious serial killer. He quickly kills the boyfriend. He was a speed bump in his way. Then he proceeds to drive around the country, raping and torturing this girl.

He doesn't stop there. He decides, “I'm going to be more cruel.” He calls the girl's father, and the girl's missing. It's an anonymous call. He says, “I made some changes. I cut her hair.” OK, hangs up. They eventually find this young lady's body in an abandoned farmhouse in Illinois.

When they catch up with the killer, he's got the last known photos of her alive. He had dressed her up in a black cocktail dress with high heels. Her hair was indeed cut into a short bob. The photos are haunting because she's clearly pleading with him in these photos. Her arms are outstretched. There's a look of abject fear on her face. She's clearly pleading with him. “Not again.” You can see that in the photo. When you know what that photo is, it's haunting. To me, that was the shocking aspect of this.

Are these murders, is there a higher solve rate or a lower solve rate?

Wow. The latest clearance rates that I've seen generally across the country for all homicides aren't that impressive. They're somewhere between 60% and 75% of homicides cleared. In some cities, it's all the way down to 40%.

Within the highway homicide, the problem with tracking this is time because they're often not solved for decades. You don't even know the name of the victim. You've got a body.

People say, “What do you mean you don't know the name of the victim?” I mean that sadly, the family—and this is what the experts have told me—there's a natural human mechanism that when something keeps bringing you trauma, you end up distancing yourself from it. If it's your daughter or your granddaughter that keeps having to be bailed out of jail or keeps passing out and overdosing, and you're sick of the 2:00 AM phone calls from the police, you often distance yourself.

They don't report the girl missing because they don't know that she's missing. You don't have families demanding justice. What that means is the girl dies without any ID because maybe the trucker has taken her ID. No one knows who she is. You don't find out and clear it. Even if you catch the guy, you're not making that DNA match or identification for 20–30 years. It's hard to track the solve rate in these cases.

Even when you catch one of these guys, put them in prison, he may or may not confess to the sixth crime. You got him for five, but he may not confess for the sixth. Long way of saying the solve rate is actually lower than the average homicide.

That's unfortunate. Would the thing for family members of someone who's missing is to provide DNA to an investigator?

This is extremely helpful in many of the cases. Yes, if indeed you know your loved one is missing, you should absolutely approach the right police department. Finding that out is another thing. You could approach your local police department if you don't know where your loved one disappeared from or where the body is. If they found a body somewhere and it's decomposed, go ahead and offer your DNA. If the police department won't take it, you can get this done privately.

We've all heard of 23andMe and Ancestry.com. If you get those DNA results, you can hand them over voluntarily to the authorities and ask them to put it in the system. The FBI controls that DNA system around the country. If you get a match, you've got a huge development in the case.

How often would the FBI go to a 23andMe or Ancestry if we just have the DNA of the victim, and we're going to go there to see if we can get a match from there? Do they do that on a regular basis, or do they stick within their own systems?

I’ve got to be careful with using particular brand names, because I think the company we're talking about actually won't cooperate without paper, without a subpoena from law enforcement. They tend to promise the customers—they’re not an arm of law enforcement—but there are other private outfits, even one that exists for the sole purpose of helping law enforcement.

Increasingly, genealogical familial DNA is solving case after case generally in the homicide caseload across the country. The police are absolutely using it. It's nothing more with cooperative outfits of them uploading their DNA into that private firm’s database as if they're a client. Boom, it comes back and says, “Hey, your father is Joe Smith.” Boom, they got it. Or with regard to a suspect, they can do that as well. It is solving cases. Yes, it's the private sector that's helping.

The one that is set up for the purpose of trying to help out situations with this, do you know their name?

I can get it for you. I mentioned it in the book. It is for people who say, “Look, maybe I can help,” or, “Maybe I do have a loved one that's missing.” That's the one; check out the book. I'll get it to you as soon as we're done here.

We'll throw it in the show notes.

Yeah. They make no bones about it. We exist to help law enforcement.

That would be the resource. Rather than using one of the name brands that wants a subpoena, if you're trying to make sure that justice can be done for a missing individual, the one that openly, voluntarily, and its purpose is to work with law enforcement will be the one to submit to.

I agree.

As we're wrapping up here, any last thoughts?

A couple of things. One is, yes, this is a dark story, but there is light at the end of this journey as I talk about the tremendous work being done not only to intervene early in young people's lives, but to actually help women who decide it's time to escape this trap. There are some amazing programs, and that's hope for survivors and even drivers.

I've talked to two women: one who actually runs a center to help women like this, another one who is a caseworker at such a center. There's good happening there. Awareness is half the battle. If you read this book and come away more alert and educated, then that's a good thing. I'm happy about that.

I even offer suggestions moving forward with regard to getting better at vetting truckers, training truckers, and how we might actually mitigate and reduce the risk and chance that a trucker is a killer.

Those are great things. What's the title of the book again?

It's Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers. It's just out. You can get it anywhere you buy books: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Harper Collins. Check it out. It's a great gift as well. If you're thinking about, for example, Father's Day gift, it's there for you.

If people want to find out more about you, where can they go?

You can subscribe for free to my website and get alerts. It's frankfigliuzzi.com. I'm also on X, @frankfigliuzzi1. I'm on Instagram. I'm on Threads. I write a regular column for MSNBC Daily. You can subscribe to that for free. All my appearances, clips, and columns, you'll get right through my website.

Awesome. Frank, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Thanks for having me, Chris. Good talk.

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