Inside the Mind of the I-70 Serial Killer
Dead End by Bob Cyphers
FBI profiler Larry Ankrom doesn’t just study crime scenes—he listens to the silences between the clues. And in the case of the I-70 serial killer, what he found was chilling.
“Things that seem logical to us are not logical to them.”
In this gripping installment from Dead End, author Bob Cyphers takes us into the mind of the profiler who spent decades tracing the movements—and motives—of a killer who vanished into thin air.
No signs of struggle.
No clear motive.
But a trail of eerie consistency.
The evidence may be in Indianapolis, Wichita, Terre Haute, St. Charles, Raytown, and possibly Texas. But the leads will come from Virginia.
Quantico.
“I grew up a farm boy out in the country in Ohio. I never dreamed in a million years I would have spent my life doing something like this.”
Larry Ankrom would spend most of that life at the FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, specializing in behavioral science, eventually becoming chief of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit for the western part of the United States. In layman's terms, Ankrom is an FBI profiler. And an extremely expert one. He is widely regarded as one of the top profilers and criminal investigative analysts in the world, having previously been assigned to both the FBI’s child abduction and serial killer units. He has never forgotten a simple rule.
"Things that seem logical to us are not logical to them.”
I asked Ankrom to start this pursuit at the beginning.
"I start by looking for cookie crumbs that the serial killer may have left along the way, Early on, I realized that this case in the Midwest was very, very unusual. You just do not see serial killers targeting businesses this way. I think the idea that he could just drive in and pull this off must have really thrilled and excited him. He must have spent a lot of time visualizing and fantasizing about these crimes, picturing them in his mind, over and over and over again. I do not think he even knew what store he was going to head into next. He probably thought more people in the area might help him blend in to the scene, and that made him feel more comfortable. And as we have heard from the few witnesses we had, this guy does not look like the bogeyman. There is nothing at all alarming about his mild mannered appearance.”
Ankrom says this killer was nobody's fool.
“He had to know that his first priority was to get in quickly and then get out quickly. His whole MO is in and out. We are talking minutes. He had very limited interactions with any of the victims. But yet he had enough personal skills to convince them that if they just cooperated with him, and went to the back room, they would be fine. That is why we do not see any signs of a struggle at any of the crime scenes.
“After he kills them I picture him running away quickly, His heart is now beating really hard. He probably feels like he has run a marathon. It is very gratifying to him. His thrill then is reliving what happened in his mind, over and over. He then becomes exhausted, and he might need a place to crash and hide out for a few days. He then needs to find out where that place is. This is why the hotel searches in the area of the killings were so important to detectives.”
But killer's leave behind those bread crumbs.
“The high risk nature of these crimes shows us that the killer is really criminally unsophisticated," Ankrom said. "He showed us consistent patterns, which allowed us to paint a picture and make a profile of him. And as far as his sophistication, a serious killer would never leave shell casings at the crime scene. He left us with some real potential as far as physical evidence at every single scene.”
And, Ankrom says, there is more, which goes to the heart of the killer.
“This guy likes being named the I-70 serial killer. Makes him feel like he is really big time. Makes him think he is smarter than the police and everyone else. It is also possible that he is dead. But if he is still alive, and lurking out there, his desire to kill in this fashion, without motive, did not just go away with time. The thrilling feelings he got after murdering these people did not just go away. They never will”
Read how bread crumbs, behavioral patterns, and one profiler’s intuition helped paint a picture of a murderer who may still be out there.
📘 From the book:
Dead End by Bob Cyphers
 | A guest post by
|