An excerpt (via the Believer: Pt. 1 + Pt. 2) from Killer of the Road: Violence and the American Interstate, Ginger Strand’s hard-boiled book about serial murderers, who’ve been given aid by our car culture and star treatment by our pop culture:

“In June of 1983, Henry Lee Lucas was arrested in Texas for possession of a firearm. Five days later, he confessed to the brutal murder of an elderly neighbor, Kate Rich. If his famous predecessor Ted Bundy evoked the serial killer’s ‘mask of sanity,’ Lucas, a one-eyed former mental patient who had already done time for killing his mother, seemed to embody the monster behind the mask. Born in the backwoods ofVirginia, Lucas was a nasty piece of work. His father, according to stories, was a moonshiner who had passed out on a railroad track in a drunken stupor and had had both legs severed by a passing train. He hopped around legless for a while before dragging his sorry self into the cold one night to freeze to death. Henry’s mother was no better: allegedly a prostitute, she forced her family to watch her meetings with ‘clients,’ it was claimed, and regularly beat her children with a club. Not surprisingly, young Henry’s life of crime began at an early age.

Seemingly remorseless, Lucas admitted upon arrest that he had murdered his elderly neighbor and raped her dead body. But that was only the beginning. Once in custody, he spontaneously began confessing to more murders. First it was 27 women. Then 100. Then 150. Then 165. He offered up the name of his frequent accomplice: Ottis Toole, who was already in jail in Jacksonville, Florida. Police declared that between them, Lucas and Toole were good for at least 28 murders in eight states, including some of what were being called ‘the I-35 killings’—the late-’70s murders of around 20 hitchhikers and women with car trouble along Interstate 35 in Texas. By October of 1983, Lucas was admitting to 200 murders. Then Ottis Toole—perhaps greedy to share some of that airtime—confessed to having killed Adam Walsh. The son of a wealthy Florida hotel developer, six-year-old Adam had been kidnapped in 1981 from a Florida shopping mall. When Adam’s severed head turned up sixteen days later, his father, John, dedicated his life to preventing crimes against children. John Walsh went on to found the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and would eventually find his niche as host of the Fox network’s longest-running program, America’s Most Wanted.

The Lucas confessions picked up where Ted Bundy left off. Exaggerated though they turned out to be, the confessions of Lucas and Toole confirmed what many already believed: the nation was being haunted by traveling murderers.”