As a 15-year runaway hitchhiker, a trucker nearly killed the writer. Twenty seven years later, she investigates whether her attacker was truck stop serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades, who often kept his victims chained in the back of his truck for weeks before killing and dumping them.

A little after 9 a.m. on Sept. 15, 1990, the owner of a steel-products company pulled up to her office in Vinegar Hill, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and spotted a black garbage bag sitting on the sidewalk out front. She parked her car and went to move the bag when she noticed it leaking blood. The woman called 911. Within the hour, Ken Whelan, a homicide detective from the 84th Precinct, peered into the bag. It was full of human body parts.

On H.H. Holmes “an old hand at corpse manipulation and insurance fraud,” who built a house of death in 1890s Chicago.

Using his good looks and charm to lure over young women into his VW, Bundy terrorized the Pacific Northwest and then Utah, leaving over 30 corpses in desolate forest gravesite clusters. After being caught in Colorado, he escaped twice, the second time fleeing to Florida by train and going on a murderous rampage.

The coldest of cases: During 1884-85, seven women and one man were brutally murdered in Austin, Texas.