Moralizing no safety net for prostitutes

By ANDREW HANON

Edmonton Sun

Last Updated: 16th November 2009, 1:22am

Amber O'Hara doesn't mind having prostitutes working the sidewalk outside her apartment building.

"Sex trade workers should have the right to choose where he and she wants to work," the wheelchair-bound great- grandmother said. "It's not prostitution that's killing the women. It's the violence."

O'Hara, who was in Edmonton recently, lives in a seedy Toronto neighborhood she describes as "Crack Central," the Dundas and Sherbourne area.

It's a district in transition. There's lots of poverty, but it's slowly being gentrified and the well-to-do newcomers are pressuring local police to run the prostitutes out.

"Some of the people are outright hateful," she said.

O'Hara doesn't think that will solve anything, other than to push the prostitutes into back alleys, poorly lit industrial areas and other spots that put them at risk.

"It's so different than it was when I worked," the 58-year-old said. "They're so desperate now. It's so much more dangerous and they're so afraid they're going to get busted. There's a different energy out there on the streets than when I was there."

O'Hara, an activist who runs the website missingnativewomen.org, used to call for decriminalization of the sex trade. Nowadays, she's calling for it to be outright legalized.

"It's the only way to ensure their safety," she argues. "They shouldn't be forced to work in an unsafe environment."

The website lists hundreds of women who've gone missing across the country. The Alberta page alone has 70 names.

O'Hara, who has her master's degree in social work, quit the sex trade in 1983 after working the streets across Canada and in some U.S. cities.

"I had other jobs," she said, listing a few off. "I was a waitress. I did medical transcription. I was in social work. But I had mouths to feed so I'd do this too. It's how I put myself through university."

She admits to forming a drug habit when she was young, but has been clean and sober for 27 years.

In 1990 she was diagnosed with HIV, which has since developed into full-blown AIDS.

O'Hara knows from getting tested regularly when she contracted the virus that it was the result of a rape.

She says she was attacked while helping bring supplies to the Mohawk protesters at Oka, Quebec.

But despite it all, O'Hara continues to work on behalf of disadvantaged women, especially those in the sex trade. There's no bitterness over the cards life has dealt her.

"I'm at the end stage of my life," she says evenly, without a trace of sentimentality.

She's perfectly happy to co-exist with street prostitution.

"People were complaining about needles and condoms on the sidewalks," she said.

"They didn't have anywhere to put them. I went out and gave them garbage bags and asked them to please use them and they were perfectly happy to."

She takes them soup and offers condoms if they need it.

O'Hara has often opened her home to prostitutes seeking shelter from the cold or trying to get away from a bad date or vindictive pimp.

Sometimes they come to her looking for a way out of the life but see no way out because they're mired in drug addiction. O'Hara helps them get into detox and rehab.

"They're people, like you or me," she says simply. "If I was healthy, I'd go back to it again."

You probably don't agree with O'Hara. But how can you not admire her compassion?

ANDREW.HANON@SUNMEDIA.CA

Women's advocates lobby for voice

Human-rights museum panel seeks advice on issues to highlight

By Andrea Sands, Edmonton Journal

November 16, 2009 7:16 AM

When officials from the Canadian Museum for Human Rights visit Edmonton this week, an Edmonton mother will push for an exhibit to highlight women's rights.

Kathy King, whose daughter, Caralyn, was found dead 12 years ago in a Sherwood Park canola field, has been eagerly awaiting a chance to speak to museum representatives about the human rights of women. She will get that chance on Tuesday when the museum's content advisory committee stops here on its cross-country tour to gather opinions on what the museum should ultimately look like.

"It's so incredibly ambitious, all the things that they're planning, so this is exciting," King said Sunday. "I'm pleased that they're finally coming here. It's something we've been looking forward to for a couple of years."

King will join Kate Quinn, executive director of the Prostitution Awareness and Action Foundation of Edmonton, in urging the museum to permanently display an art exhibition called A Roomful of Missing Women, a multimedia show that features paintings of 50 women from Vancouver's downtown eastside who are missing or have been murdered.

"We have talked about this for a couple of years, ever since I heard they were doing a museum for human rights," King said. "I thought, OK, whose human rights have been violated across history and across the world more than the rights of women? I thought, isn't this a good opportunity to create that awareness at a national level."

The meetings and roundtable talks Tuesday at Grant MacEwan University are part of an effort to gather personal stories to guide the design of the $310-million museum, slated to open in Winnipeg in 2012.

Longtime human-rights activist and educator, Lewis Cardinal, has also been invited to meet with museum officials. Cardinal has won the Alberta Centennial Medal for his work in human rights and diversity. He is on the board of directors for the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights and does work with The Global Youth Assembly. Cardinal also works with numerous advocacy groups and is co-chairman of the Aboriginal Commission on Human Rights and Justice and a founder of Racism-Free Edmonton, a city project to end racism and discrimination.

Cardinal said he wants the museum to include exhibits on aboriginal and treaty rights within Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. It should also address immigrants' rights, such as the rights of temporary foreign workers, many of whom have made their way to Alberta, Cardinal said.

"The museum itself has to be a showcase of our rights and history and the violation of those rights, but also, what is the future of Canada in human rights," he said, noting that designers will bring theatre and art into the space. "It's not a dusty museum of remembrance, but it's a living, dynamic reality, and that's what I want to see in this museum." He described the beautiful spire--the tower of hope--that will crown the building and give a wide view of Winnipeg. "It should inspire, and we should aspire to the values of human rights," Cardinal said. "That's what I like about it."

Angela Cassie, the museum's director of communications and public engagement, said the museum's physical design is meant to empower people to see beyond human rights failures and educate them on how to advance human rights in their communities. "We hope to also be able to inspire them with examples of people who have survived, people who have succeeded, people who have achieved and made a difference," Cassie said.

The museum's content advisory committee --made up of human rights scholars, specialists and leaders--started the public consultation sessions in May, and will visit 18 communities before the tour ends in February.

In Edmonton, approximately 50 people and groups so far have registered to participate, Cassie said. Museum officials will also hold public roundtables from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

"Whether it be issues of religion, whether it be issues of gender or orientation or language or economic and poverty issues--those are all topics that fall under the umbrella of human rights," Cassie said.

The 47,000 square-foot museum is the first national museum established in more than 40 years, and the first to be located outside the National Capital Region. The project will include exhibits related to Indian residential schools, Japanese internment camps and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Cassie said. Migration, as well as challenges for people with disabilities are other human-rights topics that have been raised across the country, she said.

asands@thejournal.canwest.com

© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal

Frost still missing after 39 years

Written by Frank Peebles
Citizen staff
Thursday, 15 October 2009

Helen Frost is still missing and still loved by her family, 39 years after she disappeared from Prince George.

Tuesday was the anniversary of her disappearance in 1970 and on Saturday she would have been 57. Her parents in Nanaimo still hope for the day Frost walks through their door and sister Sandy Barnet, now living in the Lower Mainland, still remembers when the two were living with a friend on Queensway when Frost didn't come home one day.

"She left in the evening. I didn't contact the police until two days later, because I didn't know what was going on until then, and there was nothing done in the media, no posters put up, zero. That's just the way it was done back then," Barnet told The Citizen. "And being young myself back then, I didn't know there was any way to push. We just went ourselves out looking. The police back then didn't do anything. Maybe they (police) discuss it, but there doesn't seem to be any new rocks to turn over."

Barnet wonders why Frost was never put on the Highway of Tears list like other missing women from around the region, dating back to about the same time.

On the other hand, she has no evidence Frost met with foul play, and on two occasions in the 1970s - once in Nanaimo and once in Cranbrook - good friends believed they sighted the missing girl, but these were not confirmed.

"To be clear, this investigation has never ceased, it has always been something we have worked on, but sometimes we get new directions to go in, so we would like to bring this to public attention again," said Prince George RCMP spokesman Const. Gary Godwin.

Frost was a troubled girl, said Barnet. The two sisters lived together with a friend in a Prince George apartment. The friend had a baby, and Frost had recently given birth to a child that she gave up for adoption in May of that year. However, the family ties were strong, there was a support network that was in place, and Barnet said it still is.

"My parents and I are on excellent terms; they were on good terms with us then, too, we lucked out on the draw and have great parents," she said. "They were in Nanaimo, and they're in the same house to this day. Us girls had some rebellion going on as teenagers but nothing out of the ordinary, but that was over, we were on our own by then. Helen was 17, I was 19."

Anyone who knows anything about the activities of Helen Frost in October, 1970, or her whereabouts is asked to call Prince George RCMP at 250-561-3300, or give the information anonymously to Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS / www.pgcrimestoppers.bc.ca

http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/20091015999910325/local/news/frost-still-missing-after-39-years.html

Is a trucker responsible for missing women on Highway of Tears?

By Keith Bonnell, Canwest News Service
August 9, 2009 3:05 PM

Police investigating the disappearance of missing and murdered women across this country are being urged to take a long, hard look at the trucking industry, following an FBI investigation that has linked serial killings to long-haul truck drivers in the U.S.

It's a call that Angela Marie MacDougall is taking across Western Canada — and one that's being echoed by an international expert on serial killers.

MacDougall is the executive director of Battered Women's Support Services in British Columbia, and she has been touring the Prairie provinces for the last two weeks, speaking with women's support groups, sex-trade workers and relatives left shattered by the disappearance of their loved ones.

She's trying to form a coalition to bring forward a report this fall on the disappearance of women in Canada. Some have placed the national numbers in the hundreds.

"There is a sickness within our society that grinds down the lives of aboriginal women," said MacDougall.

It's a problem that has plagued the Prairies, with advocacy groups saying the streets in cities such as Winnipeg are no longer safe — as others question whether serial killers are to blame.

B.C. police have the Missing Women's Task Force; Alberta police have the Project Kare task force; and Mounties in Manitoba announced last week they will review decades' worth of cold cases where the victims were women, looking for any possible links.

On her tour, MacDougall is taking with her a report released earlier this year by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, explaining the work done in the U.S. to link truck drivers to serial killings.

Analysts have compiled a list of more than 520 homicide victims who have been found along or near highways in more than 40 states, as well as a list of 200 potential suspects.

"The suspects are predominantly long-haul truck drivers," the FBI said this spring in its report publicizing the Highway Serial Killings initiative.

It said the victims, many of them drug addicts and prostitutes, are often picked up at truck stops, sexually assaulted, murdered, then dumped along a highway.

So far, 10 suspects believed to be responsible for 30 killings are in custody, the FBI said.

The FBI uses a massive database for violent crimes. A unit of 23 analysts goes through the system, looking for links among crimes that have been submitted by state investigators.

Last year, the FBI took the program online, making it available to law-enforcement agencies across the U.S. But participation is still voluntary, so much of the agency's work is convincing police forces across the country to use the program.

FBI unit chief Michael Harrigan said there's no systemic problem with the trucking industry.

"It's an honourable profession," he told Canwest News Service. "These are a very, very small minority of individuals."

Still, MacDougall said the report should serve as a wake-up call in Canada, a country where there are roughly half a million licensed truckers on the road.

Thoughts immediately come to mind of the so-called Highway of Tears, a 700-kilometre stretch of road that runs between Prince George and Prince Rupert, B.C.

RCMP say 18 women are missing from the area, while Amnesty International attributes 32 missing persons cases to the area, all women, most of them aboriginal.

"A truck driver can pick up a woman in one state and take them to another state and dump them," MacDougall said, adding the FBI report shows predators could find the industry's working conditions ideal for committing their crimes.

If long-haul truck drivers are behind any of the missing-women cases, it would instantly reframe the issue as a Canada-wide problem, rather than a province-by-province phenomenon.

"It's our intention to encourage law enforcement, and encourage the (trucking) industry to take some responsibility for ensuring women's safety," she said.

"We're also talking about women who got away from long-haul truck drivers," MacDougall said, adding she knows of eight B.C. women who she said have been attacked, but escaped.

The RCMP in Manitoba have said there is no evidence to support the theory that the province's unsolved homicides are linked, let alone that truckers are behind any of them.

The RCMP also analyze violent crimes with the help of a database

The VICLAS database, or Violent Crime Linkage System, is meant to help officers search for possible serial criminals — including killers.

"All law-enforcement agencies in Canada contribute to this VICLAS," said Sgt. Line Karpish.

"Right now, we have no reasons to believe that our homicides are linked to other cases," she said, adding: "I'm not going to get into the specific occupations of those that could be travelling criminals."

But, if they haven't already, Canadian police should at least consider a link between long-haul truck drivers and the disappearance of women, said Steven Egger, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.

"It's something they should look at," said Egger, author of The Killers Among Us, a exploration of serial murder, who consulted with the Alberta task force on missing women.

"It's something they might want to check with the FBI and check if it has any fit with what they're looking at," Egger said, adding it was very possible the force has already considered such a scenario.

The group that represents the trucking industry in Canada said it hadn't heard of the FBI report.

"Like any population, could there be a serial killer (among) truck drivers? Sure," said Doug Switzer, a spokesman for the Canadian Trucking Alliance. "Who am I to argue with the FBI?"

But he stressed that, just because there could be killers among the ranks of Canada's truck drivers, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the industry itself.

"It's not that truck drivers are by nature serial killers," said Switzer. "Serial killers are dysfunctional people. . . . There's something very wrong with them that makes them serial killers."

He said he wasn't aware of his organization being approached about potential serial killers by police.

"There's no particular efforts that are made within the trucking industry to look for serial killers," he said.

The Manitoba RCMP's decision to review cold cases stretching back to the 1960s has raised speculation that one or more serial killers could be responsible.

But MacDougall, who has spent two decades working with abused women, including sex-trade workers, said the truth may be something less sensational, far more prevalent, and just as dark.

"We like to think that there's some abhorrent individual who's out there killing women," she said. "It's much harder for us as a society to understand that hatred of women . . . is deeply entrenched in our society.

"There are men who seek out young aboriginal women to beat and rape and pay them."

© Copyright (c) The Province

Remember Our Sisters Everwhere

Welcome to Remember Our Sisters Everywhere (ROSE), a website project
dedicated to the remembrance of women who have been murdered. Here we
intend to build a vibrant virtual community of women's memorial and violence prevention activists.

The ROSE website champions a cultural shift towards the remembrance
and valuing of the women we have lost to violence. When all of us - mothers,
fathers, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, and friends - remember those
women we have lost, we acknowledge the vulnerability, and the value, of
the lives of all women.

Over the past nineteen years, we have witnessed across Canada the birth
of over sixty women's memorials, from marches to monuments, as well as
thousands of yearly vigils. The ROSE website will carry this legacy online and
around the world to deepen their impact on public consciousness.

The murder of women is one of the harshest realities of our time. Remembering
can be painful - but forgetting hurts us more.

Throughout the world atrocities against women are perpetrated daily: women
are raped and murdered in the Sudan; killed in deliberately set kitchen fires
in India; disappeared and murdered in Juarez, Mexico; gunned down in
public institutions in North America; suffer domestic violence in Russia;
are tortured and murdered by serial killers in Vancouver and in every country
in the world; trafficked for sex globally; and 60 million women and girls are
“missing” from the world today as a result of sex-selective abortions and female
infanticide . Despite the great weight of the problems we are addressing, we
believe that the ideas represented by the memorial movement in Canada will
have a positive international influence on the struggle to end violence against
women, especially when published on the World Wide Web.

As support for the project grows, we will mentor new memorial makers through
the forums on the site and generate and explore ways to prevent violence and
challenge those attitudes that operate at the deepest levels of society, and
which lead to violence against women.

The ROSE website is currently in beta (testing stage of development.) We are
using Ning technology to see if it meets our needs. Over the coming months
we will be adding content and inviting new members.

ROSE, formerly the Global Women's Memorial, was developed by the National
Film Board of Canada, Pacific-Yukon Region, and is now a project of Tides
Canada Initiatives.

By remembering our sisters everywhere we work together to prevent violence.

To contact the ROSE Committee: rememberoursisterseverywhere@gmail.com

Website:
Remember Our Sisters Everywhere

Letter to a monster. Hello Willie.

Ethan Baron, The Province Published: Friday, June 26, 2009

Hello, Willie.

I know you're reading this, because it's all about you.

Just like the trial.

After four years of working on your story, after sitting in that courtroom for months on end, watching you through bullet-proof glass, I know you far better than I'd like to.

For these four years, you have been an unwelcome guest in my world.

You have strewn my dreams with carnage, gruesome castoffs from your world of suffering, dismemberment and death.

I dream of killing. I dream of watching people die.

Once, I even dreamed of you.

We were in a room together. I don't know why. And, in my nightmare, I was overcome by fear, not that you'd suddenly attack me - I'm bigger and smarter than you - but that I would fall asleep, and would wake to feel your strange, monkey fingers around my neck.

I felt, for the first time, what every female who is familiar with your case felt from the very outset: the fear every woman lives with everyday, of crossing paths with someone like you.

A remorseless killer.

I do not hold you responsible. You are a biological aberration, an obscenity of nature.

Remember the story you told that undercover cop in jail, that you killed 49 people? I do.

Sometimes, sitting through those endless hours of testimony about which DNA swab was used on which wall in your slaughterhouse, and which sock was found in which bag in your filthy trailer, I used to think about killing you.

It wasn't that I actually wanted to, or even thought you deserved it. I would sit and examine the courtroom security procedures in place for your protection, and my mind would wander. I figured that, if I sat in the gallery seat closest to the doorway for the courtroom, I could rush through the door when a witness went in, before one of the burly, ever-vigilant sheriffs could grab me.

I would have been in front of you in a flash, my hands around your throat, squeezing. The sheriffs in the courtroom didn't carry guns, but I concluded that those who did, in the gallery, would be through the door as I began to throttle you. Friendly as they were, they were serious about their job, and I have no doubt they would have shot me before your life expired.

It was fun to think about, though.

I remember thinking once, after some particularly gruesome evidence came before the court, that it was interesting that this stuff didn't seem to disturb my mind. Then I got up at a break, and realized I felt nauseous almost to the point of vomiting.

I never cried, except for once, on the day you were sentenced, when the Crown read a statement from Brenda Wolfe's mother. She'd written that if all the tears she'd shed made a path to heaven, she would walk along it and bring her daughter home.

You might not remember that part.

I have to admit there was a lot of laughter, too. We all got a kick out of your attachment to your late horse, Goldie, especially when we found out that, when you'd taken her head to the taxidermist, you rode the bus.

I hope you're not upset they wouldn't let you have Goldie's head in your jail cell. Institutional authorities can be so cruel.

I'm not supposed to talk about the plasticine figurines some of us made during the trial, but I can tell you I have my version of your pig-butchering buddy Pat Casanova sitting on my desk. You'd get a chuckle out of how his thumb is covering up that cancer-surgery hole in his throat. I can send it to you if you want. I'm not that attached to it.

You're more clever than you look, I'll give you that. You knew enough to prey on people who wouldn't be immediately missed, women of such low social status that the police wouldn't pay attention when they started to vanish. And you even let some go free, so they could tell people Willie Pickton wasn't the reason so many women were going away and never coming back.

You got sloppy at the end, you admitted that. When the police came to your farm, they found a little snapshot of your process.

Heads, hands and feet in buckets. A jawbone in the pig manure. You had it all down to a routine, didn't you?

And what you didn't dispose of at the farm went to the rendering plant. That driver from the plant testified that he'd pick up barrels of burnt-black chunks of meat from your farm.

Did you just pour gas into barrels of human remains and set them on fire, so the pieces of people wouldn't look like pieces of people?

You will be remembered as an awful human being, worse than worthless.

Still, you have one shot at redemption, Willie, one chance to be seen in a different light.

You can come clean.

Forget about any appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.

You need to tell the world what you did, and why.

You can go down in history as a nasty bit of human trash.

Or you can have the last word, and be forever remembered as a terrible monster who, in the end, did the right thing. It would be - almost - heroic.

Do you have the courage, Willie? Do you have the strength?

Maybe.

Do you have the humanity?

I don't think so.

ebaron@theprovince.com

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1735663

FBI database links long-haul truckers, serial killings

By Scott Glover
April 5, 2009
LOS ANGELES TIMES

The growing database includes more than 500 female victims, most of whom were killed and their bodies dumped at truck stops, motels and other spots along popular trucking routes crisscrossing the U.S.
By Scott Glover
April 5, 2009
The FBI suspects that serial killers working as long-haul truckers are responsible for the slayings of hundreds of prostitutes, hitchhikers and stranded motorists whose bodies have been dumped near highways over the last three decades.

Federal authorities first made the connection about five years ago while helping police link a trucker to a string of unsolved killings along Interstate 40 in Oklahoma and several other states. After that, the FBI launched the Highway Serial Killings Initiative to track suspicious slayings and suspect truckers.


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A computer database maintained by the FBI has grown to include information on more than 500 female crime victims, most of whom were killed and their bodies discarded at truck stops, motels and other locations along popular trucking routes crisscrossing the U.S.

The database also has information on scores of truckers who've been charged with killings or rapes committed near highways or who are suspects in such crimes, officials said. Authorities said they do not have statistics on whether driving trucks ranks high on the list of occupations of known serial killers.

But the pattern in roadside body dumps and other evidence has prompted many investigators to speculate that the mobility, lack of supervision and access to potential victims that come with the job make it a good cover for someone inclined to kill.

"You've got a mobile crime scene," one investigator said. "You can pick a girl up on the East Coast, kill her two states away and then dump her three states after that."

Although some local police agencies have been briefed on the program, the FBI had not publicized its existence outside law enforcement until earlier this year, when officials agreed to show The Times the inner workings of the operation and share details of some of their cases.

Housed in a nondescript brick building on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., FBI analysts pore over reports and computer entries looking for patterns in slayings from California to Connecticut.

Since the program began, more than two dozen killings have been solved, authorities said.

Michael Harrigan, who oversees the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, said the program helps local police "connect the dots" to slayings outside their jurisdictions. He said most of the victims led high-risk lifestyles that left them particularly vulnerable.

"We don't want to scare the public and make it seem like every time you stop for gas you should look over your shoulder," Harrigan said. "Many of these victims made poor choices, but that doesn't mean they deserved to die."

Though most of the entries in the database pertain to unsolved slayings, cases that authorities consider "cleared," or solved, remain in it so that investigators may potentially link additional crimes to a known perpetrator. There are also entries on sexual assaults and missing-person cases linked to highway locations. FBI officials declined to provide The Times with a more detailed breakdown of the database's contents.

The program's success depends largely on local police departments' voluntarily providing data on seemingly random killings, sexual assaults and other violent crimes to the FBI, where it is stored in a massive computer database. FBI analysts can query the computer to spot patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed.

This was exactly the kind of help Terri Turner was looking for when she turned to the FBI in early 2004. Turner, a senior criminal intelligence analyst with the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation, was working on a string of seven slayings along I-40 in which the victims were truck-stop prostitutes who had been killed and left at roadside locations.

Turner's inquiry was given to an analyst with the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which maintains the agency's crime database. The analyst found that the database contained more than 250 cases of roadside female crime victims, many of them bearing enough similarities to suggest patterns in the violence. Subsequent searches and Internet research bumped the number to 350. As a result, bureau officials created a separate computer database to track such crimes and assigned an analyst to work full time on the serial killer program.

Later that year, Turner's suspected killer was identified as John Robert Williams, a 28-year-old trucker.

Williams and his girlfriend had kidnapped a woman from a casino in Mississippi, killed her and dumped her body along a rural county road, authorities said. Concerned that they'd been seen leaving the casino with the victim, Williams' girlfriend panicked and called police, telling them that she and Williams had found the body. Their story quickly unraveled, and the pair were arrested for murder.

During subsequent interrogations, police said Williams confessed to more than a dozen slayings -- including many of the cases Turner had been investigating. He had detailed knowledge of how the crimes had been committed, such as whether the women were killed by manual strangulation or with the use of a ligature, according to authorities. He explained how some had been sexually assaulted, in some cases after they were dead, they said.

Williams knew, for example, that one victim, Buffie Rae Brawley, had the word "Ebony" tattooed on her right thigh, investigators said. And he knew that the truck-stop prostitute had deep lacerations on her head, which he said she suffered when he struck her with a "tire thumper," a trucker's tool used to bounce off truck tires to gauge their pressure.

Police said Williams told them that Brawley solicited him for sex at a truck stop in Indianapolis.

"The second she tapped on my window, she was a dead woman," one investigator quoted the trucker as saying.

Williams has since recanted his confession, and there is no DNA linking him to any of the slayings. But Sgt. Larry Hallmark of the Grapevine, Texas, Police Department said he and other investigators do not believe that Williams' confession was bogus.

"He actually bragged that we wouldn't find any DNA because he didn't have sex with them in the traditional sense," said Hallmark, who interviewed Williams several times and has submitted a potential death penalty case to the district attorney in his county outside Dallas.

Hallmark said investigators from other jurisdictions "are kind of waiting in line" to see what happens with his case.

The investigator of Brawley's death is among them.

"We're about 10th in line," said Capt. Clarke Fine of Hendricks County, Ind. "I figure if Texas fries him, we're good."

Spotting patterns

For the most part, the FBI analysts assigned to the serial killer program have spent their time combing through crime data that is months or even years old for patterns that might link slayings to one another or to a suspect. But occasionally, they have spotted patterns as they were actually occurring. That was the case two years ago when authorities noticed that dead prostitutes who had been shot with a .22-caliber gun were being found along highways in Georgia and Tennessee.

The body of one victim, Sara Hulbert, was found behind a truck stop in Nashville.

Sgt. Pat Postiglione, a veteran homicide investigator with the Nashville Police Department, was assigned the case. He called the FBI and learned that Hulbert's killing fit a pattern of recent slayings and might have been the work of serial killer, something he'd already suspected.

With little to go on, he and another detective began reviewing videotape taken at the Truck Stops of America site in downtown Nashville where the victim had been found. It was mind-numbing stuff: big rigs pulling in and out of one of the busiest truck stops in the state, like planes taking off and landing at LAX.

The only thing that caught Postiglione's eye was a yellow 18-wheeler that seemed to come and go within about 30 minutes. The interval seemed short compared with that of other truckers, who spent at least an hour -- or even several -- as they fueled up, ate and maybe slept for a while.

As leads go, it was pretty thin. But then the detective got lucky. As Postiglione approached the truck stop the morning after watching the tape, he said, he saw what he thought was the yellow rig heading toward a nearby area of East Nashville known for prostitution.

Postiglione said he followed as the driver slowly wheeled his truck down streets lined with warehouses, budget motels and liquor stores. After a few minutes, the driver returned to the truck stop and parked, he said.

His curiosity piqued, Postiglione approached the driver's door and knocked. After a few seconds, a disheveled-looking man emerged from the cab, the detective said.

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."

scott.glover@latimes.com

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