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Cruising With the Whore Cop

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She was found January 31, 2004, in a ditch in Grapevine. The crime scene photos are the sort that stick in your mind. The first one was taken from the highway bridge, 32 feet and 7 inches above her body, through the gray branches of a tree covered in frost. In the black of the night, the flash illuminated the naked body, the twisted legs, the dark silky hair fanned out around her head.

The way investigators figured it, she was thrown from the bridge, probably by a trucker who killed her. Eventually, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and tribal police in Seminole, Oklahoma, Grapevine police located her family. They looked at the photos, saw the tattoos and told the police they had seen enough. Yes, that's her, they said, but please, take those pictures away.

They wanted to remember her differently. They wanted to remember the girl who taught Sunday School at the Methodist church, who danced in the traditional ceremonies. They used to call her "Bonez" because she was so skinny. They didn't want to remember her facedown on a creek bed, one foot in the black water.

When did things start going wrong? Maybe when her grandmother died. Maybe when her stepfather was killed in a knife fight. Maybe when she met Kelvin Scott at a party. That was probably it, more than anything else.

First he was her boyfriend, then her pimp. She started using cocaine with him. She started working truck stops. She started calling herself "thugarific" and writing bleak, foreboding lines of poetry. On one occasion, she told her uncle, a trucker picked her up and held her against her will for three days, sexually assaulting her along the way from Oklahoma to Los Angeles. She found her way home, and her family tried to help her, but it was too late.

Barry McLead was one of the last people to see her alive. He ran a truck stop ministry near Oklahoma City. A few days after her body was found, he discovered two notes stuffed in the door of his horse trailer, which he'd converted into a chapel. One read: "Hey Minister, you need to get busy for Jesus and clear the whores out of here." It was signed, "Warning."

From the beginning, investigators thought Pipestem's death could be the work of a serial killer. Other truck stop prostitutes had been found in other states, killed the same way--strangled, beaten, discarded. None of their murders had garnered much attention. Pipestem's death was different. Maybe because it happened so close to a big city, maybe because the media loves stories of serial killers--for whatever reason, the press latched on to the story.

Throughout that spring and summer, the killing continued. Buffie Rae Brawley, a 27-year-old out of Toledo, was found March 24 in the parking lot of a former truck stop about 35 miles out of Indianapolis. Her mouth and nose had been taped shut. "It appears the guy pulled up in a semi--you can tell by the tracks--and tossed her out," the local sheriff told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "She was dead before she hit the ground." She was wearing a shirt and bra when they found her, the sheriff said, and had injuries from bindings around her wrists and ankles. "This guy in my opinion tortured her," he said. "He beat her over the head. There were four distinct trauma injuries to the head that caused 3-inch gaps. This guy didn't care if she was found or not. He ran over her right foot with one of his rear tires. This may have been out of contempt."

In August, two more hookers were found dead; one in Mississippi, the other in Oklahoma. Cops throughout the South began working on the case, meeting once that summer in Oklahoma City and once in Grapevine to discuss the unsolved murders of 15 truck stop prostitutes. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations, which ran lead in the investigation, estimated that at least 10 of the killings were linked.

The big break came in the summer of 2005 when America's Most Wanted aired a program on Pipestem's murder. Shortly after, Grapevine police got a tip that the murderer was already in jail in Mississippi. The caller on the other end was a relative of the man in question, 29-year-old John Robert Williams.

Grapevine police detectives traveled to Mississippi to interview Williams. For two days they questioned him. "He was pleasant to talk to," Grapevine Corporal Larry Hallmark remembers. "If you met him at the truck stop, you'd think, 'Oh, there's just a likable old truck driver.' But after you sit and start talking about some of these murders and talk about some of the specific things that occurred and you see the lack of emotion, then you realize that you're dealing with someone that's different than you and I.

"I'm absolutely convinced that he is the one that killed Casey. Even the first day he admitted some knowledge in the murder and gave us some information that only the killer would have known."

Hallmark thinks Williams has killed at least eight truck stop prostitutes. Williams has already agreed to plea bargains in the deaths of two of them. To avoid interfering with any open investigations, Grapevine police have held off on arresting him for Pipestem's murder, but it's only a matter of time.

If there is any good to come out of Pipestem's murder it is this: It created a network for cops pursuing truck stop killers. There are now regional meetings, such as the one held in Grapevine, every couple of months, and at least weekly, Hallmark talks to cops such as Peters, who are on the front lines, so to speak. Without a doubt, Hallmark says, there are other killers out there.

"I'm not saying that most truck drivers are serial killers or that if you're a truck driver there's a good likelihood that you're a serial killer. But if you're a serial killer, truck driving would be a good profession."

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