Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters
This essay has been drawn from Vol. 1 No. 4 of the American Reader, available here. Our October 2012 interview with Veselka can be found here.
Green Screen
Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters By Vanessa Veselka
Green Screen
Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters By Vanessa Veselka
September 21, 2026
Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters By Vanessa Veselka
September 21, 2026
This essay has been drawn from Vol. 1 No. 4 of the American Reader, available here. Our October 2012 interview with Veselka can be found here.
✖
In the November 2012 GQ I wrote an essay detailing some of my experiences as a teenage hitchhiker. The article, “The Truck Stop Killer,” focused on a ride I had hitched with a possible serial killer who, I believe, had murdered other girls and was going to murder me. The piece also described some of what it was like living in truck stops, sleeping in two-hour shifts, avoiding violence daily, and experiencing the country peripherally, through the lens of the interstate.
Much of my investigation for GQ hinged on finding some record of a girl left dead in a dumpster in the summer of 1985. She was a teenage hitchhiker, and I had been there when her body was found. Two days later, a truck driver picked me up hitchhiking and led me to believe that he had killed her. He then pulled over to the side of the road, took out a huge knife and told me to get into the back of the truck—he was going to kill me. I was able, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, to escape into the woods. But I did not go to the police. I did not go for help. These were also some of the questions I was exploring through my essay.
My search for stories about the young woman in the dumpster led me back through many of the truck stops I’d known as a teenager. Covering a fourteen-county area, I asked every senior truck-stop employee I could find about a hitchhiker found in a dumpster, but no one had ever heard of her. I broadened the scope of my questions: Had they heard of any homicides in any area truck stops over the past thirty years? They didn’t remember a thing. But what I was learning from the FBI painted a landscape of extreme violence, one that matched the world of my memory. By 2004, so many women had been found dead along the interstates that the FBI started the Highway Serial Killers Initiative to keep track of them. There were girls found in dumpsters, behind truck stop diners, off the side of the road on truck turnarounds—the national database listed over five-hundred Jane Does in or near rest areas and truck stops alone. Some of these were the very truck stops I was now passing through, and yet I couldn’t uncover even rumors of past murders. The strangeness of this crystallized when I visited a Pennsylvania truck stop where I knew for a fact that two women had been killed, one found only yards from where the woman I was speaking to worked. Still, she “had never heard of anything like that.”
Now, it would be tempting to say that her reticence was rooted in a sense of company loyalty, or in a straight-out fear of getting fired. Another argument might be that people see what they want to see and look the other way when it serves them. Or, we could say that women in these truck stops—waitresses, sales clerks, bookkeepers—are functioning within a system of subliminal oppression, and didn’t “see” these murdered girls because they routinely shunned women on the margins in order to protect their own tenuous status in a violent, male-dominated world. It is not a particularly groundbreaking statement to say that brutal self-policing can be a resistance strategy.
But even if they had wanted to hide what was going on at their truck stop, they could have talked about what was happening at others, gossip ever a human pastime. And in a society as obsessed with celebrity as ours, where people claw their way to a camera or a microphone and serial killers breed fascination rather than disgust, someone should have remembered something. Who forgets the body of a murdered teenaged girl found at their place of employment while they worked there? There is no doubt that the social invisibility of these women contributed to their predation. But what exactly was that invisibility made from? These women weren’t remembered, it seemed, because they hadn’t been seen in the first place. And they hadn’t been seen partly because there was no cultural narrative for them beyond rape and death. As such, women on the road were already raped, already dead. Whereas a man on the road might be seen as potentially dangerous, potentially adventurous, or potentially hapless, in all cases the discourse is one of potential. When a man steps onto the road, his journey begins. When a woman steps onto that same road, hers ends.
✖