Cruising With the Whore Cop

Being guardian angel of the place, Hillbilly has seen a lot. He's had to break windows to get girls out of dangerous situations. He points to a "No Parking" sign lying in the dirt. Once, he says, he had to pick one of those up and smash a driver's window to get his attention. Only then did he let the girl out.

A call comes over the radio. Spearmint's got a driver. "Gotta go," Peters says. As we pull away, Hillbilly is still talking, telling me that Peters is one of the good ones, a man to be trusted. "You take care of yourself, you hear?" Hillbilly calls out.

We find Spearmint down on the other end of Peterbilt, in the middle of a long row of trucks. He spits when he sees us. He's got the girl next to his car. The trucker is still in his rig.

"Now you asked me earlier what kind of guy would buy these girls?" Peters asks. "You're about to find out."

Spearmint tells the trucker to step out of the cab.

"See what I mean?" Peters asks. "He must weigh 400 pounds."

The man, I will soon learn, goes by Mojo, and he's on his way to Ohio. Originally from New York, he's been a trucker for 14 years. If he's like most of the truckers Peters arrests, he's got a wife at home. As he steps down from the chrome steps of his rig, he hitches up his sweatpants, up over his hairy crack. Besides loneliness, he suffers from a severe stuttering problem. Every other question, he gets stuck on a word. "She was wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-walking by, I called her over, she jumped in, we hid in the back."

Hearing this, the hooker in question, who Peters doesn't recognize, smiles as if this is a lie.

"How often do you get a hooker?" I ask.

"Whenever I get a chance."

"How much do you spend?"

"It de-de-de-de-de-de-depends on how hot they are. High dollar? I might spend 100 bucks. A cheap one's like $20."

The girl tells a different story. They were just talking. Men pay her for that. She's a great conversationalist.

Peters looks up at me. "Can you believe the shit I hear every day?"

---

Spend any time with Peters and there's one murder he's sure to bring up. Of all the truck stop hookers ever killed, none generated the attention Casey Jo Pipestem did.

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.