Between October 1982 and August 1984, a man in a pickup truck drove the Interstate highways between Indianapolis and Chicago and killed at least twenty-one young men. He knew something that no single law enforcement agency had yet understood: the roads between the two cities crossed so many county and state jurisdictions that no one authority could see what he was doing whole.The Highway Killer is the definitive account of the Larry Eyler serial homicide case — one of the most consequential true crime investigations in American history. Drawing on court records, forensic science documentation, and decades of investigative reporting, Emmet Walsh reconstructs the full arc of the case: the two years of murders that a fragmented law enforcement system failed to connect; the arrest whose evidence was thrown out on constitutional grounds, releasing the killer back to the street; the murder that finally put him on death row; and the forty years of cold case work that eventually restored names to the victims the system had left unnamed.This is a book about what happens when institutions fail — and about the journalists, scientists, genealogists, and coroners who refused to accept that failure as the final word. Rigorously researched, precisely argued, and written with the urgency of the best narrative nonfiction, The Highway Killer is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how justice works, and how it doesn't.

Between October 1982 and August 1984, a man in a pickup truck drove the Interstate highways between Indianapolis and Chicago and killed at least twenty-one young men. He knew something that no single law enforcement agency had yet understood: the roads between the two cities crossed so many county and state jurisdictions that no one authority could see what he was doing whole.The Highway Killer is the definitive account of the Larry Eyler serial homicide case — one of the most consequential true crime investigations in American history. Drawing on court records, forensic science documentation, and decades of investigative reporting, Emmet Walsh reconstructs the full arc of the case: the two years of murders that a fragmented law enforcement system failed to connect; the arrest whose evidence was thrown out on constitutional grounds, releasing the killer back to the street; the murder that finally put him on death row; and the forty years of cold case work that eventually restored names to the victims the system had left unnamed.This is a book about what happens when institutions fail — and about the journalists, scientists, genealogists, and coroners who refused to accept that failure as the final word. Rigorously researched, precisely argued, and written with the urgency of the best narrative nonfiction, The Highway Killer is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how justice works, and how it doesn't.