Came across this interesting article in GQ, titled "The Truck Stop Killer." In it, a woman recounts her experiences hitchhiking as a runaway teen. In particular, she focuses on one ride where the driver got very grim and stopped responding to her questions, and then pulled out a hunting knife and attempted to force her into the sleeper cab.
After the incident, she realized that this man was likely a serial killer named Robert Ben Rhoades. He kidnapped and tortured many (possibly dozens) of women between the seventies and 1990. His M.O. was to keep them restrained in his sleeper cab for weeks before killing them.
The article recounts her investigation into whether her trucker was really the Truck Stop Killer, Robert Rhoades. In the article, the author also gives lots of interesting details about her defense mechanisms on the road. For example, she developed a habit of staying half-awake whenever she was a passenger in a truck - the rationale was that the trucker wasn't dangerous as long as he was driving. Once he stopped the vehicle, that's when things got dangerous. The downside was that she never got a decent night's sleep.
Here's a link to the full article: https://www.gq.com/story/truck-stop-killer-gq-november-2012?printable=true
