The I-70 Killer

Between April and May of 1992, a series of shooting deaths took place in Midwest shops, located intermittently along Interstate 70. While the offender hasn't yet been caught, he has been linked to other crimes committed in Texas and Indiana, including a 2001 murder in which the offender was caught on surveillance footage...

The Payless Shoe Store was located at 7325 Pendleton Pike on the northeast edge of Indianapolis, a city laid out like a big wheel. Streets radiate from the city center like spokes and connect with the business loop that surrounds the metropolitan area.

This particular Payless store was located less than a quarter mile from the I-465 business loop, which itself connected with Interstate 70, just 2 miles to the southeast. The neighborhood along Pendleton Pike wasn’t fantastic but not awful, either. It was a commercial development, a typical aging thoroughfare, today three lanes one direction, two lanes the other, backed by modest residential and a few warehouses and workshops.

It was the kind of place where strip mall parking lots were allowed to degrade until grass and weeds grew between crumbling asphalt patches, and an inflatable Slenderman beckoned passersby to a video store for the biggest releases — a trio of Clint Eastwood movies, plus Roadhouse with Patrick Swayze. They had just come out on VHS.

It was April, 1992.

It was also, of course, pre-internet and pre-cellphone for most people, and if we couldn’t reach somebody by phone at home or at work, most of the time we would just wait and resolve to try again in a little while. Sometimes the person you were trying to reach would call you back before you even got around to trying again.

“Oh, I was in the shower,” they would say, “but I knew it was you.”

Or maybe they had been using the restroom.

Or maybe they had raw chicken all over their hands.

Or, if they were at work, maybe they were helping a customer.

They just couldn’t answer the phone.

So when the Payless Shoes district manager couldn’t get store manager Robin Fuldauer on the phone right away, it wasn’t alarming.

Robin was a 26-year-old Indianapolis resident and Indiana University student who had been with Payless for a little less than a year, and on Wednesday, April 8th, she was working alone.

After 45 minutes of trying, however, the district manager began to get worried and decided to call the Speedway gas station next door. Cashier LuCretia Gullett took the call and the Payless District Manager asked if she would go next door and check on Robin Fuldauer. When she walked in she could see right away the cash register drawer was open, and that was enough for her. As quickly as she’d entered, Lucretia Gullett turned around, walked out, and called the police to report a potential robbery.

You’d have to believe the district manager and cashier both likely feared the worst in those agonizing minutes, between finding the cash drawer open and the authorities’ arrival on the scene.

Those fears were realized at 2:21 pm. Police responding to the 911 call reporting a possible robbery found Robin Fuldauer dead in the office at the rear of the store.

On Thursday, April 9th, a story in the Indianapolis News hinted at the violent nature of the attack when it revealed investigators were initially unsure of Robin Fuldauer’s cause of death. From the story:

An autopsy today was expected to reveal how a 26-year-old shoe store clerk was killed in a robbery Wednesday. Head wounds to Robin Fuldauer, 3000 block of West Ramblewood Drive, could have been caused by a gunshot or by being struck by a blunt instrument, police said.

Questions about the nature of her injuries definitely come to mind. They updated the story later that day:

An autopsy today by the Marion County coroner's office showed a 26-year-old shoe store clerk was shot twice in the head In a robbery Wednesday, even though there was no evidence she struggled with the gunman. Homicide detective Sgt. Michael Crooke said the body of Robin Fuldauer had two gunshot wounds in the right side of her head. Crooke said the shots were fired "from a reasonably close range, probably with a small caliber revolver." Fuldauer's purse and coat were found inside the Payless Shoesource [...] and her car was parked outside the store.

The murder weapon was determined to be a .22 caliber handgun. The police had a person of interest they wanted to interview, too.

Crooke said he would like to talk to the purchaser of a pair of men's shoes and a pair of women's shoes at the store at 1:15 p.m. Wednesday. That was the last sale on the cash register.

Three nights later and ten hours’ drive away, Patricia Magers and Patricia Smith were working at a bridal shop in Wichita, Kansas. A customer who had recently rented a tuxedo accidentally left his cummerbund behind and made arrangements to swing by the store to pick it up. He couldn’t make it, though, until after 6pm, when the bridal shop normally closed, so Magers and Smith agreed to hang around for a few minutes so the customer could swing by and grab it.

A few minutes after 6 o’clock, the women saw a man approach the front door of the store. Patricia Smith unlocked the door to let the man in.

It was a fatal mistake.

The man was not the customer they were waiting for.

The man pulled a gun and led Magers and Smith to a back office.

Meanwhile, the customer who arranged to pick up his cummerbund parked his car in the parking lot and approached the store.

The keys hung in the lock.

He assumed the women had left the door unlocked for him and walked in. As he walked down an aisle in the store he was met by a man with his hand concealed under a handkerchief. It appeared he had a gun.

The gunman said something to the effect of “Hey, come in the back room. I wanna show you something.”

The customer put up his hands and began to back away. He was not going into the back room with this guy.

A verbal confrontation ensued and the customer managed to talk his way out the door. He ran to his car and fled. Lieutenant Ken Landwehr of the Wichita Police would later say the gunman “did not appear to attempt to stop the witness in any violent way. We can’t explain that.”

About an hour later, a call came in to Wichita Police, as detailed by the Wichita Eagle:

About 7:30 pm a man who refused to identify himself called 911 and told a dispatcher that he had seen a man walking toward the store with a gun. The call was traced to a pay phone at Hillside and Douglas, more than a mile from the scene.

The police responded to the bridal shop at 4613 East Kellogg  and found the women in a back room. From the Eagle:

When officers arrived at the store moments later they found Magers and Smith lying in a room at the back of the store that served as a work area and office. Magers was dead and Smith mortally wounded. Smith was rushed by ambulance to St. Joseph Medical Center where she was pronounced dead on arrival.

Norman Smith had only been married to Patricia for 9 months.

"She was supposed to get off at 6pm,” Smith told the Eagle. "She called to tell me she had a last-minute customer. I hadn't heard from her in a long time and I was getting really worried, so I went over there to check on her.”

Smith found the scene we all fear… the waking nightmare we’ve seen so many times in the movies or on the news… when a loved-one shows up to check on someone and instead finds a crime scene with police cars and yellow tape and paramedics and forensic investigators.

Smith took a moment to comprehend what was happening, perhaps to steel himself for what was to come, and then said “I need to talk to a police officer.”

Officers asked him to accompany them to the hospital, where he was told his wife and her boss were both dead, murdered in what appeared to be a petty robbery.

The first question investigators wanted to answer was who made the 911 call at 7:30? Whomever it was, they were an eyewitness at-minimum, and potentially, a person-of-interest.

As investigators sought to identify the caller, another 911 call came in. The caller said a person he knew claimed to have seen the gunman. The caller relayed the man’s name. The Wichita Eagle picks up the story, as told by Lieutenant Paul Dotson:

Dotson said Police then went to the man’s house to question him. The customer told investigators that when he entered the store he confronted a man who was carrying an Uzi-like semiautomatic weapon.

He confirmed he was the customer who went to pick up his missing cummerbund, and he told police he came face-to-face with the gunman.

The gunman was described as white 5 feet 7 Inches to 5 feet 8 Inches tall and weighing between 150 and 160 pounds. He has light red hair and a stubble beard. He was wearing a brown waist-to-thigh-length jacket and dark slacks.

The man also admitted to making the anonymous phone call from the pay phone at Hillside and Douglas.

Naturally, the customer’s behavior raised questions for investigators.

Why hadn’t he called the police immediately when he escaped from this gunman?

Why wouldn’t he identify himself when he called 911?

Who is this guy?

Does he have a record?

If the answers to any of those questions had been suspicious, investigators would likely have considered the customer a strong suspect. However, as far as we know, the man has never been considered a suspect.

Lieutenant Dotson characterized the man as an innocent party who stumbled into a terrible thing and didn’t know how to react.

“In this case the customer was very confused and frightened by his ordeal," Dotson said. “There’s a certain degree of guilt, as you can imagine, and also some relief that he was not found dead In the back of the building.”

We can only wonder what might have been if the man had called the police right away. Three women were now dead in the span of three days, 700 miles apart. Nobody had yet connected the two crimes, and a predator was on the loose.

For the rest of April, investigators in both Indianapolis and Wichita sought answers in their unsolved murder cases. Some were beginning to propose connections to other high-profile homicides.

One such case was the Kansas City murder of three employees at a bridal shop in in 1986. On April 16th, 1992, the Eagle reported:

Three employees of the Formal Wear by Sir Knight shop in Kansas City were herded Into a back room of their store and shot in the back of the head.

According to the report, police did not believe the two cases were linked:

Police In Wichita and Kansas City doubt that a [...] triple homicide In Missouri is connected to the slaying of two women in a Wichita bridal shop despite several similarities. Kansas City police said they believe the Missouri murders were committed by a black man now serving a jail sentence for robbing another formal wear shop. The suspect has never been charged because of lack of evidence.

In the Indianapolis and Wichita cases, the circumstances of the crime were puzzling. Although money was taken, it wasn’t much. Murders like these are very commonly robberies, and if they aren’t, then it’s usually a crime with some kind of personal connection — a dispute over money, a revenge plot, or maybe a domestic dispute.

None of those things fit the case of Robin Fuldauer in Indianapolis or the murders of Trish Magers and Patricia Smith in Wichita.

They did not appear to have ben sexually asaaulted, none of them were the sort to make enemies and there were no obvious entanglements from lovers.

About 4:30 pm on the afternoon of April 27th, 1992, a Monday, someone walked into Sylvia’s Ceramics at 2615 South 3rd Street in Terre Haute, Indiana, and, as he knelt to stock some shelves, shot Michael “Mick” McCown twice in the back of the head. He was working alone.

Full disclosure from our research team: either the murder of McCown did not get a lot of contemporaneous news coverage, or we just weren’t looking in the right place because there wasn’t much to be found. Much of what is available on the killing of Michael McCown came after the fact. And we’ll get to that.

On Sunday, May 3rd, Nancy Kitzmiller was working at Boot Village, a western store in a shopping center just south of Interstate 70 at Zumbehl Road in St. Charles, Missouri. She had been working at the store for a year and a half and she was the only employee on duty. The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported:

Kitzmiller unlocked the Boot Village at noon Sunday. Four customers went into the store about 2:30 p.m. When they could find no clerk, they went looking for one and found Kitzmiller's body lying on the floor of an office in the rear of the store. Kitzmiller's own purse was undisturbed.

The details of the crime had become a common refrain across the beltline of the Midwest, all along Interstate 70.

The victim was shot once in the back of the head, authorities said. [...] A small amount of cash was taken from the cash register.

An interesting fact noted by police Sgt. Pat Morici:

"On one side of the store Is a veterinarian and on the other is a hair salon; both are closed on Sundays.”

Sarah Blessing was murdered on Thursday, May 7th, 1992. She was an herbalist who also counseled customers on healthcare matters at a quirky shop called The Store of Many Colors in Woodson Village Shopping Center in Raytown, Missouri, a suburb not far from Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City.

The Kansas City Star would later report Sarah Blessing’s husband, Sonny, said he spoke to her that afternoon:

At 2:12 pm before he left for work Sonny called Sarah. “Everything seemed normal,” he said. That was the last time he spoke to her.

In this instance, there was a lengthy witness statement to take because an employee of a video store in the strip mall saw the killer.

According to police and witnesses, Blessing was alone in the store about 6:15 pm when a man dressed in a gray sport coat, slacks and dress shoes walked across the parking lot toward the store. His actions drew attention because most people at the shopping center pull their cars up to the store fronts instead of walking, a store owner said. The man was “cool, calm and collected,” a witness said. [The suspect] smoothed his hair back in the wind and continued into Blessing’s store.

The witness described what happened next.

About 6:30 pm there was a loud pop that sounded like a gunshot, said a witness who called the police. Police think the man forced Blessing into one of the two back rooms where he shot her in the back of the head.

If there was any doubt this killer planned his crimes elaborately, a separate witness statement to the killer’s getaway puts that doubt to rest.

He then left the store, turned the corner of the building and walked northeast, probably up a steep hill to Woodson Road. Witnesses think they saw the man briskly walking north on Woodson and east on 59th Street about 10 minutes after the shooting.

It seemed quite likely the killer planned his escape route, probably to a spot up the hill where he had parked his vehicle — either to confound any potential pursuing authorities or perhaps to avoid having his vehicle seen by any eyes or cameras that might be in the area. According to a number of published reports, the police have investigated numerous hotels and campgrounds and other nearby sites where a trucker or traveler might spend some time and/or park their vehicle, to no result.

With the killing of Sarah Blessing, a map of the Midwest with the murder locations plotted on it — almost equidistantly between Robin Fuldauer in the east and Trish Magers and Patricia Smith in the west — started to show what was becoming obvious. Someone was stalking victims along the Interstate 70 corridor.

On the surface, there was initially little more than MO to connect the crimes. Physical evidence was nearly nonexistent and the police had mostly eyewitness reports to go on. But, like that scene in The Hunt for Red October when the sonar tech adjusts the sound of the Soviet sub to 10 times normal speed and says “That’s got to be manmade,” one couldn’t help but be convinced looking at a map of the 6 murders that took place along I-70 in April and May of 1992.

The Springfield News Leader reported:

Authorities in three states will meet to exchange information on the cases of six store clerks killed in the past month, a police chief said Friday.

Then, on May 9th, 1992 the Indianapolis Star inked their front page with a bold headline: Police call deaths of 4 store clerks work of a serial killer. There were no more rumored connections. The authorities were on record. From the story:

Police in Indiana and Missouri are intensifying their search for a man they have linked to homicides at four stores along I-70 from Indianapolis to Kansas City. Mo. Police believe that the same man is responsible for the fatal shootings of store clerks in Indianapolis and Terre Haute bin Indiana and in St. Charles and Raytown, Missouri, since April 8.

By this point in the investigation the authorities were beginning to get into the head of the killer a little bit.

Although robbery appears to be a motive, detectives think the suspect may have an overriding appetite for murder.

It had become obvious it wasn’t about robbery, and it wasn’t about a sick sexual appetite because the victims hadn’t been sexually assaulted, they had been quickly executed. According to the Star story, by May, Indianapolis investigators started referring to the suspect as the “I-70 Serial Killer.”

"I think we are definitely dealing with a serial killer," Indianapolis PD Sgt. Crooke said. "He's not really getting much money out of the shops. We don't know why he's killing people.”

Terre Haute Assistant Police Chief Joseph Newport agreed.

"I Just think he wants to kill people," he said. "He's going into places that don't have money. If he'd have gotten every dollar in there, it wouldn't have amounted to much."

Cathy Spatz Widom, a professor of criminal Justice and psychology at Indiana University in Bloomington told The Star:

“...the suspect in the gunshot slayings of four store clerks is characteristic of an "organized" serial killer who wants to avoid capture. ; . "There are actually different kinds of serial killers," she said, adding that unorganized and asocial types are easier to catch. "It sounds as if this is the more organized non-social who doesn't necessarily know the victim but selects a particular victim type and then doesn't leave a lot of evidence at the crime scene."

And for those of us who have forgotten what it was like to live in a world where the internet did not exist, the difficulty investigators faced can serve as a reminder. Professor Widom continued, as interpreted by the Star:

In addition, the difficulty investigators face with so-called "traveling killers" is the wandering nature of their crime and the inability of police in different areas to quickly link the murders.

This killer was moving up and down the interstate and taking advantage of slow communication between agencies in far flung locations.

At that point in the investigation there were already a lot of commonalities among the cases.

●       The location of the murders near I-70.

●       The non-robbery MO.

●       The execution-style killings.

But with so many things the same, other things stuck out.

Like, why all women, except Michael McCown?

On May 16th, 1992, the Kansas City Star reported some investigators believed McCown may have been mistaken for a woman. McCown was a former touring musician and the story said he wore his long hair in a ponytail. Investigators said it appeared he had been leaning over a shelf, completely unaware he was about to be shot. Which also means the killer would not have been looking McCown in the face at the moment he shot him.

On a side note: McCown’s own father doubted the theory that he had been mistaken for a woman because he was 6’4’ tall and 170 pounds. Furthermore, McCown’s sister and mother have reportedly told a local blogger that he no longer had long hair or wore a ponytail at the time of his murder.

I am never one to disagree with families who’ve already lost so much, but it would be one way to explain why “Mick” was the only confirmed male victim of the I-70 Killer. Whether or not it’s plausible, we have to admit it’s possible.

Another oddity that seemed to beg for examination was: why two victims in Wichita? In every other attack, the killer struck only when he was sure his intended victim was alone. So, why take the risk of attacking Trish Magers and Patricia Smith at the same time?

Investigators now believe the killer thought Patricia Smith was alone and simply killed Trish Magers because she happened to be there.

That belief dovetails with another commonality in the case… the killer’s apparent preference for young, pretty girls with long brunette hair. To one degree or another, Robin Fuldauer, Patricia Smith, Nancy Kitzmiller, and Sarah Blessing all met that description, leaving only McCown (who may have looked young and brunette, from behind as he leaned over a shelf) and Trish Magers as the outliers.

With a number of eyewitnesses and several composite sketches available to the public, Mark Magers and Norman Smith expected… more than they were getting as far as the investigation of their wives murders was concerned.

On May 28th, 1992 Mark Magers told the Wichita Eagle he wanted “residents to become more involved in solving the April murder of his wife and a co-worker.”

“Somebody has seen this guy,” Magers said. "If he’s got a car he's getting gas somewhere. He's eating somewhere. People are seeing him every day. Either they don’t want to get involved or they don't know what he’s doing.”

Magers’ frustration at the apparent lack of progress in the investigation of his wife’s murder was quite apparent.

“People need to start to be aware of what's going on. People need to be assertive. Sure, it would be nice to live in a hole but things aren’t going to change unless we all take some responsibility for the freedom we have here.”

Mark Magers and Norman Smith established a reward fund for information leading to the conviction of the serial killer and donated the first three thousand dollars.

The reward has not been claimed.

Those murders — six killings in five locations — are what constitute the acknowledged, accepted victims of the I-70 Killer.

Robin Fuldauer.

Trish Magers.

Patricia Smith.

Michael McCown.

Nancy Kitzinger.

And Sarah Blessing.

They would not remain the only victims, however.

The Interstate 70 Serial Killer was not done.

Interstate 70 does not go through Texas but investigators now believe the I-70 Killer may be responsible for crimes in Texas in 1993, beginning with the murder of Mary Ann Thacker.

Side note: for cybersleuth true crime types who might be listening with the intent to search for her name, Mary Ann Thacker was also known by her former married name Mary Ann Glasscock.

Mary Ann ran a store called Emporium Antiques Etc at 4708 Bryce Avenue in Fort Worth, about six blocks off Interstate 30. Police believe her killer struck between 11:30am and 12:15pm, Saturday, September 25th, 1993.

Thacker was found crumpled on the floor between the kitchen and another room at the back of her store, shot in the head. She had been working alone.

On November 1st, 1993 Arlington, Texas 911 operators received a call from a woman but they could not understand her. The woman was Amy Vess, and when the authorities arrived at her dance supply store, The Dancer’s Closet, they found Vess in the back room with the phone still in her hand. She was shot multiple times in the face.

The Fort Worth Star Telegram relayed the comments of department spokesperson Dee Anderson:

“They asked her if there had been a robbery, and she nodded in the affirmative,” Anderson said. “They asked her if she had been robbed by a male, and she nodded in the affirmative.”

Amy Vess had been working alone.

Rescuers took heroic measures and flew Amy to the hospital in Dallas. As dawn broke on Tuesday, November 2nd, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported:

Vess was taken by helicopter ambulance to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas where she was in critical condition in surgery this morning. Police said at least one bullet remained lodged in her body.

Unfortunately, it was not to be.

The following day the Star-Telegram reported, after initially speaking to investigators at the scene, Vess’ condition deteriorated:

A 22-year-old Irving woman shot several times in the head and neck at a southwest Arlington dance-supply store died last night after she was taken off life support systems.

Vicki Webb was next to meet the I-70 Killer, who at this point needed a more accurate descriptor, since his Texas attacks all took place near other interstates. There was, however, very little cooperation between Texas authorities and the interstate task force set up by Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas authorities. According to KSDK, Texas’ law enforcement never fully bought into the theory that the Texas gunman was the same perpetrator as the I-70 Serial Killer.

Vicki Webb, like Michael McCown, was working alone at her store in Houston, an eclectic shop called “Alternatives.” And like McCown, her shooting was the subject of very little local press at the time she was attacked. Almost everything we were able to find about the attempted murder of Vicki Webb on January 15th, 1994, comes from a report via KSDK:

Webb was working alone in her gift shop when a man came in, chatted with her, browsed, then shot her in the head. She survived the initial shot because a quirk in her anatomy — unusually large vertebrae — prevented the bullet from penetrating into her head. She pretended to be dead. The shooter put his weapon to her head again and pulled the trigger — the gun misfired. He laughed, stepped over her and left.

There is still debate about whether the same person is responsible for the Texas shootings and the murders along I-70. One reported sticking point is the weapon.

In the murders of all six I-70 victims, investigators were able to conclusively say the slugs came from the same .22-caliber handgun. Even more compelling, it was a very unique handgun. Exceedingly rare.

According to authorities investigating the I-70 killings, the killer murdered with an antique handgun used primarily for target practice by the German Navy in World War I, a Erma Werke ET22.

The ET22 is a primitive firearm, for sure, and detectives think it’s kind of an odd choice as a murder weapon, number one, because it’s difficult to conceal.

You see, if you’ve been imagining a modern .22 caliber handgun as the murder weapon, you’ve been misled. Instead picture this: a .22 caliber handgun where the knuckled butt looks like a German Luger, but with a barrel that is more than a foot long and which wears a miniature wooden grip on the underside for two-handed firing. Honestly, the weapon is a monstrosity and a really strange choice. It also explained why the first eyewitness, the customer at Trish Magers' shop, described the gunman's weapon as looking like an Uzi.

The weapon also had a terrible habit of jamming or misfiring which led to the killer unwittingly leaving a clue for investigators.

In all 6 of the murders committed in five locations along I-70, the killer used a particular jewelry cleaner on the shells beforehand to lessen the likelihood of a malfunction during the crime. The cleaner left a red residue, though, which made it simple work for investigators to conclude the same gun had been used.

However, the Texas shootings in ‘93 and ‘94 used a different gun (also a .22) and according to the FBI, there are potentially as many as 300 highway serial killers crisscrossing the nation and killing at random. Until they discover something more concrete, law enforcement is reluctant to conclusively say the I-70 and Texas killers are the same man.

Nearly 7 years later, there would be another murder that looked suspiciously like the I-70 murders and the Texas shootings. And it would take another 20 years beyond those 7 before investigators realized they might be overlooking the best clue they could ask for. A high quality video of the killer.

In November of 2021, investigators in Indiana shocked everyone when they announced a renewed push to identify and apprehend the I-70 Serial Killer, largely due to the murder of a liquor store clerk named Billy Brossman in 2001.

“Where was the liquor store?” you might ask.

In Terre Haute, Indiana.

Where in Terre Haute?

Seven blocks from the site of Michael McCown’s murder, nine years earlier.

Much like the murder of Michael McCown, the murder of Billy Brossman largely escaped notice by the news media at the time; perhaps understandably considering liquor store clerk murders are pretty common but no less tragic in the grand scheme of robberies that turn violent.

After the murder itself took place, though, there was very little that any media outlet would consider newsworthy. In 2002, the authorities even turned to America’s Most Wanted in an attempt to draw attention to the case

In 2021 the authorities announced they were pursuing a new line of investigation that linked the murder of Billy Brossman to the perpetrator known as the I-70 Serial Killer. With the announcement, it became clear the public had already seen video of the perpetrator on America’s Most Wanted in 2002. At the time, nobody made the connection that the shooter of Billy Brossman in 2001 could be the same person who shot Michael McCown seven blocks away in 1992.

So in November of 2021, everyone took another look at the surveillance video from inside the liquor store, 20 years earlier.

Full disclosure: when our chief researcher saw the video for the first time, he stood up and said “Holy shit. That’s the fucking guy.”

The gunman on the video looks just like the descriptions of the I-70 Killer. Thin, medium height, strawberry-blondish hair in a neat haircut.

The very next thing that strikes you watching the video is the heartless, inhuman disregard for precious life exhibited by this killer.

The killer pulls a gun, makes Billy Brossman slide the cash drawer across the counter, and then grabs a handful of bills. He orders Billy out from behind the counter and into a back room. The killer follows Billy down the liquor store’s center aisle and you can see the cashier raise his hands, as if to say “Easy man. I’m not gonna give you any trouble.”

It made no difference to the killer, who followed him into the back room and executed him with a gunshot to the back of the head.

Our research crew is convinced that the man who murdered Billy Brossman is the I-70 Serial Killer, and there are still a lot of questions and avenues of investigation to be traveled.

What does the killer do for a living? Some have suggested he is a long haul truck driver, which is by any accounting, the first conclusion true crime sleuths usually jump to when analyzing highway murders like these. Others have suggested perhaps he’s a transient who hitchhikes from place to place, or rides the rails, but neither of those conclusions seem to fit the facts.

The official FBI profile for the killer does note, however, that in all of the I-70 shootings and the Texas shootings, the killer’s vehicle was not on site, never seen in a parking lot, nor was it ever seen approaching or leaving a crime scene.

No trace of a vehicle.

The person who wrote this episode, Troy, well his brother is a truck driver. Whenever he comes through town for a visit, Troy has to direct him to the nearest discount store, where he’ll park his truck in the parking lot.

Is the I-70 Serial Killer a truck driver who leaves his 18-wheeler parked somewhere nearby?

Today, the authorities believe the perpetrator is between 53 and 71 years old, and in 2021 they released age-progressed sketches of the suspect based in part on the video from the Terre Haute liquor store. The murderer’s physical description has remained largely the same over the years with the exception of potentially graying hair and an added physical characteristic some have started to focus on — the killer is described as having “lazy eyelids.”

Where does the killer live? We felt an initial knee-jerk reaction when we learned that the authorities suspected Billy Brossman’s murderer in the Terre Haute liquor store in 2001 of being the same man who murdered Michael McCown in 1992. Both of those crimes took place in the same neighborhood, 9 years apart, and it really made us wonder whether the killer is from Terre Haute, someone who lives nearby, perhaps.

The authorities apparently do not favor that theory and believe he’s from somewhere else.

Maybe his job brings him to the neighborhood regularly?

Why the long gap, only to return to the same neighborhood? Was he in prison?

The more about this story we read, particularly the initial murders along I-70, the more something started to feel familiar.

Is he punishing a woman by proxy?

In the case of the Golden State Killer, Joseph DeAngelo, his surviving victims sometimes reported he used the name “Bonnie” as he attacked them, because he was fixated on an ex, Bonnie, who dumped him. His attacks on his victims were his sick revenge fantasy by proxy.

Similarly, we know about Ted Bundy’s preference for brunettes, and Son of Sam David Berkowitz’ preference for brunettes… while the motives might be different, the psychology seems plausible.

Robbery was incidental.

The victims were not sexually assaulted.

Killing seemed to be the only motivation.

Perhaps the I-70 Serial Killer got dumped by a petite, attractive woman with long brown hair and has since stalked innocent victims of similar appearance with sinister calculation so he can take revenge in his own sick way.

Maybe it’s an actual ex-love interest’s rejection that set him off, or maybe it’s a more psychological thing — some kind of Freudian grudge against all brown-haired women by a psychopath who perceives to have suffered under (or was neglected or molested by) a cruel adoptive mother with brown hair.

We don’t know. We can speculate for days but there are people more qualified to answer these questions.

If there were one overriding thing to take away from this podcast, it would be that the I-70 Killer is still on the loose, and if you believe as we have come to believe that the killer of Billy Brossman is the I-70 Killer, then we have him on video.

I urge every single person listening to this episode to look for the link in the show notes and watch the video with the killer’s description in mind.

●       White male.

●       5 foot 7 to 5 foot 9.

●       150 to 160 pounds.

●       At present, 53 to 71 years old.

●       Formerly strawberry-blondish hair, now possibly going gray.

●       Lazy or droopy eyelids.

●       Possibly a truck driver or former truck driver.

●       Possibly a resident of a town along I-70.

●       Possibly has job or family connections in Texas.

●       Might have been in prison between 1994 and 2001.

●       Likely a collector of antique or unique firearms.

Watch the video above and ask yourself, “Do I know someone like that? Do I know this person?”

Someone out there knows him. Someone went to truck driving school with him or met him at the local swap meet. An ex-girlfriend is out there somewhere who was so frightened by him that she left him behind and couldn’t get him out of her mind fast enough.

Was that you?

Because if it was, the families of these victims need your help. They need you to come forward and speak to the FBI, and tell them what you know. Someone needs to identify this guy by name, and give the authorities the final clue to take a psychopath off the highways of this country.

Until that happens, the identity of the I-70 Serial Killer will remain Unresolved.

Episode Information

Episode Information

Research and writing by Troy Larson

Hosting and production by Micheal Whelan

Published on April 30th, 2022

Music Credits

Original music created by Micheal Whelan through Amper Music

Theme music created and composed by Ailsa Traves

Sources and other reading

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