Prostitute slayings may be the work of a truck driver
OKLAHOMA CITY, Oklahoma (AP) -- Prostitute Renee McCullough has started keeping a box cutter in her back pocket, in addition to the four-inch blade she always carries. She has also 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 McCullough said. "It's scary. But I take a chance every day I walk out here."
The slayings of seven women around the Midwest -- at least six of them prostitutes -- have spread fear among women working the streets and the truck stops around Oklahoma City. Investigators believe that 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 January 31. Some of the victims 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 February 27 to share information.
Jessica Brown, spokeswoman for the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, said the investigation is made more difficult because evidence is scattered in a number of states and the potential suspects are highly mobile.
"What makes it harder is that these truckers are traveling all over the country," she said. "We're thankful for computers, fax machines and telephone lines."
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 are now 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 johns over CB radios, employing such names as "Sugar" and "Kaya." They each took one too many chances.
 |  Taffney Harjo looks over the memorial to her sister, Casey Jo Pipestem. |
A father and daughter stumbled across 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.
Pipestem, 19, was a lanky girl with a bright smile. She wrote poetry and excelled at basketball in high school, even drawing the interest of a few small colleges. As a child, she was shuffled through the homes of several family members as her mother tried to get out of a difficult and abusive relationship.
By last July, Pipestem had become a prostitute at several truck stops in Oklahoma City, police said. She was arrested 11 times over six months for trespassing, a common charge when police cannot catch women negotiating payment for sex.
Hyman, 24, was found dead last August under a Tallahatchie River bridge near Oxford, Miss. Over the previous four months, she had racked up five charges in all for trespassing, offering to engage in prostitution and resisting arrest.
Hyman grew up on 4-H, Baptist summer camps and bedtime stories, said her grandmother Leona Hyman. After graduating from high school, she started taking photography and public relations classes at the University of Central Oklahoma. Many in Hyman's life said they were puzzled as to why she became a prostitute.
Taffney Harjo, Pipestem's older sister, said she hopes the attention the case is getting helps investigators.
"I don't care what she was doing in the end, she was my sister," Harjo said. "Every time I see a truck, I wonder if there's somebody else in it; every time I go over a bridge, I wonder if anybody else is down there."
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