Serial killer truckers: Long Haul by Frank Figliuzzi review
by Danuta Reah
Last updated: 03 February 2025 | 15:38
11 hours a day, 7 days a week, hurtling along the interstate highways, seeing no one but the occasional hitch-hiker. Is it surprising that serial killers are drawn to this life? Ex-FBI man Frank Figliuzzi shines a light on the murky world of the long-haul trucker. There’s just one problem…
True crime
Frank Figliuzzi is a former assistant director for counter-intelligence and was a special agent in the FBI for twenty-five years. He is now a national security analyst and writer.
His latest book, Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers, is classified in most bookstores, online and off, as true crime. This is a vast catalogue. The number of true crime books about serial killers alone would fill a library. Some of these look at the work of forensic psychologists and pathologists, like Kerry Daynes’ The Dark Side of the Mind. Some are biographical or autobiographical accounts of the lives of serial killers, such as Carol Ann Lee’s biography of Myra Hindley, One of Your Own. Some seem to be just another excuse to recount the often nightmare details of sadism, rape and murder.
Torture chamber
Where does Frank Figliuzzi’s book Long Haul fit into this true crime catalogue? It is true, it is about crime and it addresses a particular breed of serial killer, the highway serial killer. Figliuzzi looks briefly at a small number of these: the so-called Truck Stop Killer who created a torture chamber in the back of his vehicle and who may have killed as many as fifty women; the ‘Interstate Strangler’ who apparently spoke to his mother on the phone while he was killing a woman. But Long Haul is not a catalogue of gruesome killings with the attendant detail that some readers of true crime are searching for. It is a journey into the world of the long-haul trucker.
Serial killer truckers
Long Haul is an exploration of the link between a small number of long-haul truckers, and the abduction and murder of women. In 2004, the FBI formed the Highway Serial Killing Initiative (the HSK). Concerned by patterns of killings that occurred along the vast freeways and crossed state lines, the authorities began to realise they had a problem on their hands: a woman can be abducted in one place, murdered in another, and her body dumped in a third. The investigations can cross several jurisdictions, and may never be linked up.

Mobile crime scenes
The women who frequent the truck stops are all too often trafficked women who have no social network to identify them. A truck can become a mobile crime scene that may never be linked to a death. In Long Haul, Figliuzzi looks closely at the work of the HSK, who believe there are hundreds of unsolved murders that may be linked to long-haul truckers. Crime scene analyst Terri Turner says: ‘The industry also provides a ripe environment for someone who wants to travel through multiple jurisdictions, prey on victims that no one knows are missing, and take their crime scene with them.’
Liminal spaces
Figliuzzi explores the culture of the road: the drivers, the life, and particularly the truck stops. It is at these much-frequented but liminal spaces where the trafficked women do business. These women are all too often the victims of the highway serial killers. A truck, like a train, is a doorway with its entrance in one place, and its exit hundreds of miles away. What can happen in the transition is what Long Haul is about.
Serial killers can be unpleasant
Figliuzzi does not fall under the spell of the serial killer, the spell that has given us the fictional Hannibal Lecter, Dexter, or Joe Carroll. Instead, he reminds us of the true nature of these killers with the wonderful understatement: ‘Sometimes serial killers can be unpleasant.’ It’s anodyne to remember that they are not the glamorous creatures with almost superhuman powers that fiction too often presents.
Real serial killers
These men are not Hannibal Lecter. They are Fred West or Jeffrey Dahmer. They are not Dexter. They are Levi Bellfield or Brady and Hindley. They are not Joe Carroll. They are Bittaker and Norris, they are Peter Sutcliffe. These are people who killed vulnerable women and children in the cruellest of ways. They prey on the weak and they are almost always driven by a perverse or inadequate sexuality.
Nasty, brutish and short
Figliuzzi writes about real serial killers. He identifies very few. He doesn’t glamorise these men who leave the dead bodies of the vulnerable women they have killed strewn along the interstates of the USA. The truth of real serial killers, like war in Hobbes’ Leviathan, is nasty, brutish, but sadly, not always short. The fact of a serial killer is often hard to identify. Catching them may be tougher still.
Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’
It took years for British police to catch Peter Sutcliffe, probably the UK’s most prolific sexually motivated serial killer. Sutcliffe was a long-distance lorry driver (British English for ‘long-haul trucker’). I have documented my own encounter with this man in my memoir, The Stranger in the Square, in the collection The Best New True Crime Stories: Serial Killers.
The UK’s serial killer trucker?
Was Sutcliffe’s role as a long-distance driver important in his killings? It’s hard to say as we don’t know the true extent of his killings. However, the key for Sutcliffe seems to have been mobility. He tended to use his car when he went ‘hunting’. Nor did he lead the solitary life that Figliuzzi describes in Long Haul. He was married and lived close to his family. Are the serial killer truckers, those damaged and dangerous individuals, drawn to the life, or does the life create them? The question is yet to be answered.
Long Haul: my verdict
Finally, how effective is Long Haul as a true crime book? It gives the reader a lot of information about the life of the US long-haul trucker. It gives insights into the system that investigates serial killer truckers. It suggests that many more of these men – because they are almost always men – exist than was previously thought. It also gives a lot of information about the kinds of women who become victims of these killers, the lives they live, their vulnerability and the way many of them are trapped by poverty, addiction and fear. What it doesn’t do is look in detail at any specific investigation, or give any graphic details of the killings.
For the reader who wants to learn something new about crime in the 21st century, or about a lifestyle few people give much thought to, Long Haul has a lot to offer. One of its real strengths is the focus Figliuzzi has on the potential victims, the vulnerable, trafficked women who, like the truckers they serve, live lives hidden from the gaze of everyday society.
However, for the reader who wants a detailed account of specific crimes and investigations, Long Haul does not deliver. We get only very general accounts of the way the HSK operates. There is none of the tension found in true crime classics of an investigation into a killer who may kill again, and soon. Colin Sutton’s Manhunt takes the reader through the hunt for a UK serial killer step by step. Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter gives a gripping account of the investigation into the Manson murders. Long Haul does not do this, despite the promise of the title.
The problem
And here lies the problem. It is not the book: it is the sub-title: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers. This seems to promise narratives of killers, their pursuit and possibly their apprehension. But this is not what Long Haul is about. Figliuzzi interviews a senior member of the HSK, who talks to him using a pseudonym, and gives more general details of investigations rather than close accounts of past cases or ongoing unsolved ones.
A major part of Long Haul focuses on the trip Figliuzzi takes with experienced long-haul trucker Mike, travelling hundreds of miles with him and giving a detailed account of this solitary, highly-stressful and often insecure way of life. This is fascinating in its own right, and is something to which few people have access – but it isn’t hunting the highway serial killers.
If you want a book that engages and gives real insight into an aspect of 21st century life that is so commonplace it is almost invisible, then Long Haul is for you. If you want a detailed account of how highway serial killers are hunted, then you may need to look elsewhere.
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