Serial Killers Still Roam America’s Highways — Here Are Some Of The Most Notorious Roadway Murderers Of All Time

Since the 1950s, hundreds of bodies have been found off America’s highway system, including most of the victims of the Colonial Parkway murders.

about the idea of a road trip: piling into the car, rolling down the windows, and hitting the highway for some interstate travel. It’s a quaint picture, but America’s roadways have a dark underbelly. They’re the hunting ground for some of the country’s most prolific serial killers.

After all, highways are a prime spot to ensnare victims. They can be quite dark and isolated, and the brush surrounding them makes for easy disposal. And while many of these freeway killers have been caught — check out "Mark of a Serial Killer," airing Monday, April 12 through Friday, April 16 at 8/7c on Oxygen as part of a nine-night special event, Serial Killer Week, to learn about some of them —other cases have never been solved, including the Colonial Parkway murders, which are the focus of Oxygen’s limited series “Lovers’ Lane Murders,” 

Here are some of the most notorious roadway serial killers of all time.

Patrick Kearney

Kearney seemed like a slight, unassuming man to those who knew him. In his downtime, however, he was targeting and killing transient young men along California highways in the 1970s. He picked up hitchhikers or men in gay bars, and would then rape and murder, occasionally torturing his victims. Afterward, he would usually dismember the bodies (after sometimes committing necrophilia) and dispose of them in industrial trash bags along the highways, the New Zealand Herald reported in 2017. It’s how he earned both of his monikers: “the Freeway Killer” and “the Trash Bag Killer.”

Kearney is suspected of killing up to 43 men but pleaded guilty to killing 21 people in exchange for prosecutors taking the death penalty off the table. He claimed he committed the murders as an outlet for his rage stemming from the bullying he endured in his youth.

He was given 21 life sentences in March 1978, according to a 2019 New York Daily News story. 

William Bonin

Bonin was another California highway serial killer dubbed “the Freeway Killer.” The former truck driver was arrested in Hollywood, California on June 11, 1980 while raping a teen runaway, the Los Angeles Times reported in 1996. Police on the scene found gear in Bonin’s van that he used for raping and murdering all his victims.

He primarily strangled his victims, typically ranging in age between 12 and 19, and worked with a series of accomplices. He then disposed of their nude bodies along the highway.

Bonin was found guilty of 10 murders in Los Angeles County in 1982 and another four in Orange County in 1983. He was executed in 1996, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Randy Kraft

The third serial killer to be nicknamed the Freeway Killer is Randy Kraft, who also was referred to as “The Scorecard Killer,” as he kept a coded list of his 61 murder victims. For example, one entry was “Iowa,” believed to be a U.S. Marine named Oral Alfred Stewart Jr., an Iowa-born man killed by blunt force trauma in Long Beach in 1974, the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reported in 2019.

Kraft, too, killed a series of people off California highways, although he usually went after older men, especially servicemen, that he lured in with drugs and alcohol, according to the New York Daily News. He was arrested in 1983 and eventually convicted of killing 16 people. He was sentenced to die and remains on death row to this day in San Quentin State Prison.