Tina Louise Leone’s body was dumped near Interstate 95 like a sack of trash. Laura Burgess was strangled and stabbed with a shard of glass in a D.C. hotel. Dusty Shuck was found with her throat slashed outside a Frederick, Md., truck stop.
The women are among hundreds who federal law enforcement officials believe have been slain by truck driver serial killers, motorized predators who can pick up their victim in one state, kill her in another and be across country before the body is ever found.
The FBI has recently unveiled a database five years in the making called the Highway Serial Killer Initiative, which seeks to track these mobile murderers by finding common elements among the homicides and unearthing unseen patterns within the heavy volume of unsolved crimes.
The mobility of the long-haul truckers, the high-risk lifestyle of the victims, and the lack of witnesses and forensic evidence combine to make these cases “almost impossible to solve using conventional investigative techniques,” said Special Agent Ann Todd, a spokeswoman for the FBI Laboratory in Quantico.
The FBI started the database five years ago after federal investigators helped police link a trucker to a series of killings along Interstate 40 in the Southwest.
So far, crime analysts have compiled 500 victims and 200 suspects nationwide, including 11 within a 60-mile radius of Washington, D.C. And federal agents have captured 10 drivers responsible for 30 slayings.
And more are out there, Todd said.
On May 4, 2006, a motorist found the body of 24-year-old Shuck along Interstate 70 outside Frederick just past a small truck stop.
Shuck was last seen nine days earlier, leaving a hotel in New Mexico to go to a mental health facility. Without money, a cell phone or bank account, she likely hitched a ride from a commercial vehicle driver to travel the 2,100 miles, Maryland State Police Detective Cpl. Rick Bachtell said. Shuck died from a combination of blunt force trauma to the head and a slit throat. Police believe Shuck was killed elsewhere because there was scant evidence at the scene.
“We’re not saying that the suspect is a serial killer or that it’s even a commercial driver, but because of the limited information we have, it’s the likely scenario,” Bachtell said.
Bachtell submitted Shuck’s case to the FBI, which sifts through the disparate cases for patterns and creates timelines for the drivers. Bachtell logs into the database and has eliminated a handful of drivers captured for similar killings.
“It’s a wonderful law enforcement tool,” Bachtell said. “It continues to energize the case with possibilities.”
Leone, 39, was found on Sept. 14, 2003, by a passing motorist along a roadway near Aberdeen, Md. She was from the Boston area. The FBI is hoping the database will eventually yield her killer.
Burgess remains in the database even though a man was convicted and sentenced for her 1991 killing. The FBI has put some solved cases in the database in hopes of connecting the dots to unsolved murders.
The suspects are truckers or other individuals who have been investigated for murder, kidnapping or sexual assault along a highway.
Most victims are women who lived high-risk, transient lifestyles, often involving drugs and prostitution, Todd said. Often they were picked up at truck stops or service stations, sexually assaulted and killed.
Other victims have been hitchhikers, or people with the bad luck to be stranded along the road when a killer passed by, offering help.
TO CATCH A KILLER:
Do you have information that can help police solve these slayings?
Anyone with information about the death of Dusty Shuck can contact call the Maryland State Police 24-hour tip line at 301-739-2101.
Anyone with information about Tina Louise Leone can call the Harford County Sheriff’s Office Detective Thomas Walsh by dialing 410-836-5408.
