Today I want to talk about something that isn’t political, but it is something that many people won’t have heard about. Back in January 1970 my mother and I were sitting in Willi Unsoeld’s house. Willi was a member of the first American mountain expedition to summit Mount Everest. He and my brother Bill Humphreys had overseen the founding of Evergreen State College in Washingon.
My brothers’ two boys had just drowned in Puget Sound. I’d flown to Washington from the UW-Madison in campus in Wisconsin. My mother and I were the first to arrive. Our two families were there in mourning. We walked over to Willi’s house near by my brothers’ home.
Willi sat at his piano bench telling us a Tibetan story about an antlered buck that had become tangled in a tree on the mountain. Sherpa guides tried for days to free it. And then they had to let go of it. At the time my mother and I were both bewildered.
Willi’s daughter, Devi Unsoeld, my nephews babysitter age 16 walked in and joined the conversation along with her older brother. Devi had golden yellow hair and an amazing vitality. Devi announced to her father she wanted to hitchhhike across the state of Washington.
Her brother reacted and argued that would be a dangerous thing to do. Being older, I sided with him. I don’t know if Devi hitchhiked across Washington State.
But I was sent the story that when Devi died on the on the mountain in her fathers’ arms, she had been named after that highest mountain, Nanda Devi, in the Himalayas.
[For more about Willi and Devi Unsoeld’s stories LINK http://footlesscrow.blogspot.com/2013/04/darkness-at-noonthe-life-and-death-of.html]
LONG HAUL: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers.
Today I realize Willi’s story meant that if you can’t save or change someone you just must move on and don’t dwell on it.
But today I cannot not dwell on it, and I have to tell you all about Frank Figliuzzi’s book, LONG HAUL: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers.
Former FBI agent Frank Figliuzzi has just just revealed in his book that there a have been over 850 serial murders of women by Long Haul Truckers in this country over the last two decades. Two hundred of those murders have still not been solved.
Frank worked 25 years in the FBI. He was witness to many of those stories of the murderers. Frank even rode with long haul truckers to see how their world was working.
Frank’s book talks about how the (HSKI) (Highway Serial Killings Initiative) came to became to be a database for law-enforcement officers to understand the actions of serial killers.
In 2004, the FBI was tipped off to a pattern of unsolved murders along American roadways. The bodies of 40 women were found in Texas.
There was an interstate murderous long haul highway corridor between Oklahoma and Texas. [See link below]
Frank found that women and girls who fell victim to the murderers often lived nearby their trucker route, or were sex workers or children. Many of the serial killers were also lone wolves.
The Mirror Texas Interstate 45
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/killing-field-road-bodies-40-15055235 The Mirror Texas Interstate 45
You may think that the 850 ‘victims’ are women or girls who lived at the bottom of society, but you would be wrong. I’ve seen teenagers sitting on the sidewalk in Vancouver Canada, who like myself at age 17, were forced to move out of their parents’ toxic homes. They are a vulnerable meal for serial killers.
SERIAL KILLERS
Later in my life in Philadelpia I encountered a serial killer near the University of Pennsylvania students, who chopped up his ‘victims’ and threw their bodies into the Schuylkill River.
At this point I was a student and he was still killing his victims. He owned a tobacco shop. I went into his store late at night after I finished my work as waitress at the the Penn faculty club to buy cigarettes.
The killer came out of from a beaded curtain, a short white man pleasantly balding a bit with a white shirt and the arms rolled up, and asked me nicely what I wanted. Just a regular chap.
But soon I could see he was trying to ingratiate himself with me. Panic growing, and asking myself why I was lying, I saved myself by lying to every question he asked me, and then ran out the door.
Days later I passed the gigantic type on the Philly newspaper headline as well as photo of him in a kiosk as I shivered down to the subway stairs. It was a horrible story for the students.
Devi Unsoeld was a privaleged young woman who died tragically, doing something she had chosen to do. I feel both my nephews Willy and Tom, and Devi could have had great opportunities if they all had lived.
But serial killers don’t give their victims, whether or not at the top or bottom, a choice.