OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Prostitute Renee McCullough has started keeping a box cutter in her back pocket, in addition to the 4-inch blade she always carries. She also has stopped working the truck stops.
She says it is just too frightening to climb into the sleeping compartment of a big rig.
“Once you get in that sleeper, you’re trapped,” the 35-year-old said. “It’s scary, but I take a chance every day I walk out here.”
The slayings of seven women across the Midwest — at least six of them prostitutes — have spread fear among women working the streets and the truck stops around Oklahoma City. Investigators think the killings may be the work of a serial killer, perhaps a long-haul trucker.
The nude or partially clothed bodies were found in Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Arkansas, discovered at a rate of about one a month from July 11 to Jan. 31. Some had been strangled; others had been beaten to death. Most if not all of the women turned tricks at truck stops in Oklahoma City and the surrounding region.
No suspects have been identified despite hundreds of tips received after investigators from several states met in Oklahoma City on Feb. 27 to share information.
Jessica Brown, spokeswoman for the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, said the investigation is difficult because evidence is scattered in several states and the potential suspects are mobile.
Around Oklahoma City, prostitutes have been warned by police or trusted customers to be extra careful. On a recent night, prostitutes at the truck stop where two of the victims were last seen were using cell phones to keep tabs on each other as they walked near big rigs parked in a lot along Interstate 35, a few miles north of Oklahoma City.
Cookie, a 19-year-old prostitute who has been working the truck stops since she was 14, said that women who once saw one another as competition now are sticking together.
“We call each other and tell each other which truck we’re in,” she said. “Once one group of girls leaves, the rest of us pretty much leave.”
The two victims last seen at the truck stop — Casey Jo Pipestem and Jennifer Hyman — used to solicit customers over citizens band radios, employing such names as “Sugar” and “Kaya.”
A father and daughter stumbled across Miss Pipestem’s bloodied and bruised body in January in a creek bed in Grapevine, Texas. Her body had been thrown 37 feet from a bridge along a highway in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Miss Hyman was found dead in August under a Tallahatchie River bridge near Oxford, Miss. Over the previous four months, she had racked up five charges for trespassing, offering to engage in prostitution and resisting arrest.
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