Eleven murders of prostitutes working out of truck stops have been linked to an Ohio serial killer. On April 19th, , the half-nude body of a woman was discovered behind a truck stop on Interstate 70 in Licking County, Ohio. She had been beaten to death, and all of her jewelry and several pieces of her clothing were missing. Despite a full investigation by local authorities, the victim was never identified.
Four years earlier, the body of year-old Shirley Dean Taylor had been found behind a traffic barrier miles to the north. A known prostitute, Shirley had also been beaten to death. Two seemingly isolated crimes were committed four years and a hundred miles apart. Murder cases often are often solved when a pattern emerges, and in these highway killings, the pattern was just waiting to be discovered.
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Investigative Reporter Michael Berens was starting to do research for a newspaper article about serial killers for the Columbia Dispatch:. So I started looking at prostitute deaths all across Ohio, primarily using newspaper stories as the way to track those deaths.
Berens began to cross reference unsolved murder cases in Ohio. To his surprise, a distinct pattern began to emerge almost immediately. Eight women, in eight different counties, had been beaten or strangled to death. Each was found alongside a major interstate, each was a known or suspected prostitute, and each was known to have worked at truck stops.
Upon further investigation, Berens says he discovered a flourishing sex-for-sale industry at truck stops throughout the state:.
