EP296: Highway of Silence

Crimes and Consequences

True Crime, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.6 • 869 Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2026

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On the highways that cut through the American Midwest, where headlights stretch into darkness and exits blur past without memory, a predator moved unnoticed for years. Larry Eyler didn’t look like a killer; he blended in, a quiet man drifting between Indiana and Illinois, offering rides to young men who would never be seen again. Their bodies would later be found miles apart, scattered across counties and backroads, each discovery raising questions no one yet knew how to connect. It wasn’t until the pattern emerged—too late for many—that investigators realized they were chasing not separate crimes, but a single, methodical force moving along the highways themselves. And even after his arrest, the full truth of what Eyler had done would remain buried, waiting until the very end to surface in a confession that revealed a scale of violence far greater than anyone had imagined.

SOURCES:
1) Crime Library: Larry Eyler, the Highway Murderer
2) The Roanoke Times: Killer Confesses to Killing 21 Men
3) Crime Online: "Highway Killer" Larry Eyler's Victim Identified after 40 Years
4) UPI: Lawyer: Eyler was serial killer
5) The Washington Post: Killer Confessed to 21 More Deaths
6) The Midwest Crime Files Podcast: The Highway Killer: The Victims of Larry Eyler
7) Larry Eyler's Wikipedia Page

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode may contain content of a graphic nature, including descriptions of physical and sexual violence against adults, children, and animals.
0:21.4	Listener discretion is advised.
0:34.3	Hi, this is Tanya.
0:36.5	Hi, this is Shannon. And we are Crimes and Consequences, a hardcore true crime
0:41.5	podcast. Hello, Shannon. Hey, beautiful. How are you doing? I am doing really good. How are you? Good, good. Getting
0:51.3	ready for Mr. Levi's baptism. Yeah, this coming weekend. So nice. What about you? What you got going on besides Levi's baptism. I know. Little baby boy's baptism is coming up. Almost hitting that one year mark. Yes. I can't believe that. I know. And he's just so big. He's like 32 pounds. He is a big.
1:14.6	Oh, he's a bruiser. Oh, my brother calls him tank. Hey. I love babies. They're just so great. I love it.
1:26.4	Me too. Oh, you know, same old shit on my end. Just working. Doing your good stuff with the law firm. That's awesome. I love it. But you know what I'm missing is a story from you. Oh, I know. Because I've been waiting for this. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, girl, I have a really good story today, so I'm just going to get into it.
1:48.8	In the early 1980s, the highways of the American Midwest were arteries of movement, long,
1:55.2	uninterrupted stretches of pavement, connecting cities, towns, and cross-country ambitions. They were the kind of roads you
2:02.6	drove at night when your destination was too far to reach before sunrise, the kind of roads that
2:07.9	demanded your focus on the horizon ahead, never on what might be following you, or what might be
2:14.2	waiting deeper in the dark between exits.
2:18.0	That same anonymity, the landscape where drivers felt invisible and untethered,
2:24.2	is what made those highways appealing to someone who understood that hiding in plain sight
2:29.3	often means moving too fast for the rest of the world to catch up.
2:33.6	To the casual observer, what was happening
2:36.1	along those stretches of asphalt was easily dismissed as misadventure, random disappearance,
2:42.6	the kind of thing America's highways have always swallowed without consequence. But for a stretch
2:48.3	of roughly two years between 1982 and 1984, something far more sinister
2:54.4	was writing its own pattern into the rural counties that bordered those main roads.
3:00.1	Bodies began appearing.
	...

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