Victim of notorious highway killer who slaughtered 20 identified 40 years on
The identity of one of the victims of notorious Highway Killer Larry Eyler has finally been identified.
Officials in Newton County say the victim known as "Adam Doe" since his body was discovered in 1983 has been identified as Keith Lavell Bibbs. Bibbs was 17 years old at the time of his disappearance from Chicago.
Bibbs remains were discovered along with four other young men at an abandoned farm in Lake Village, Indiana on Oct. 18, 1983.
They had been drugged and murdered by Eyler — better known as the Highway Killer — who confessed to killing at least 20 young men and boys before he died in an Illinois prison in 1994.
Highway Killer Larry Eyler claimed more than 20 victims (Chicago PD)Bibbs was the final victim to be identified. The others are Michael Bauer, John Bartlett and John Ingram Brandenburg Jr.
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The coroner's office said testing was "conclusive".
Eyler first came to the attention of cops on Aug. 21, 1984
The janitor of a Chicago building, noticed that the trash cans felt heavy. Inside, the curious cleaning man discovered a human leg.
"I knew right away it wasn't a ham," Joe Balla later told the Chicago Sun-Times.
There was more. The rest of the human body had been severed into eight pieces and stuffed in the bags. An autopsy revealed that the victim had been stabbed in the heart and lungs, then dissected with a hacksaw.
Before the kid's death, he had been handcuffed and tied up. Detectives soon had a name: Daniel Bridges, 16.
He was from the impoverished Chicago neighbourhood known as Uptown, where poor emigrants from Appalachia had settled, looking for a better life and not finding it.
Bibbs was the final victim to be identified of Larry Eyler (Newton County Coroner)Just a few years earlier, the seedy neighbourhood had been the hunting grounds of notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who by the date of the macabre discovery was a resident of Illinois death row.
Bridges, like some other kids in the neighbourhood, had fallen into the world of prostitution.
Now, Chicago homicide detectives had a killer to find.
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Balla had told another janitor about the grisly find. Yeah, the man said, a man in his building was lugging around large garbage bags.
His name was Larry Eyler, a 31-year-old house painter.
Detectives quickly found a hacksaw in the man's apartment. The teeth matched the gruesome marks on Bridges' body.
And there was much more. Eyler was born into a dysfunctional home in 1952 in Crawfordsville, Ind. By the time he was 14, Eyler knew he was gay. In his late teens, he began cruising the Indianapolis homosexual scene.
He soon developed a reputation as having a penchant for leather and rough sex. Some of his former partners said Eyler was sadistic and had violent tendencies that emerged during intimate encounters.
Daniel Bridges' body sparked the search for a serial killer in the midwest (Chicago PD)He acquired a sugar daddy in the form of Indiana State University library science professor Robert David Little, but sources later said the relationship was platonic.
Little was more of a father figure. Now, in the summer of 1984, with Chicago still reeling from the twisted handiwork of Killer Clown Gacy, another monster was on their doorstep.
Even before the Bridges murder, cops suspected Eyler was the so-called Highway Killer or Interstate Killer who had left a trail of corpses of young men throughout Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Ohio over the previous two years.
The first victim came in October 1982, when Steven Crockett, 19, of Kankakee, Ill., was found in a cornfield near the Indiana border.
Crockett had been mutilated. The following April, workers discovered the remains of 28-year-old Gustavo Herrera under a pile of brush.
Ervin Gibson, 16, was found on a heap of trash on top of a dead dog.
More victims began turning up. Some were missing their heads. Others had no hands. Then, in September 1983, a sheriff's deputy in Lake County, Ind., stopped Eyler on I-65.
He had a hitchhiker in the passenger seat. They were brought in for questioning.
Inside the truck: a knife, boots, handcuffs and clothesline. Blood on the boots matched an August homicide victim named Ralph Calise.
But a soft-on-crime judge ordered Eyler released because his rights had been breached.
Bibbs remains were discovered along with four other young men at an abandoned farm in Lake Village, Indiana on Oct. 18, 1983 (Gay Times)The killer vanished until August, when poor Daniel Bridges had his fateful encounter.
Eyler was convicted of Bridges'murder in 1986 and was given a one-way ticket to death row.
In 1990, he sent a letter to authorities offering to share a list of his victims and an accomplice if they dropped the death penalty in exchange for life without parole.
"I am asking you to spare my life," he wrote. "I can never undo what I have done, but I do believe that I have good qualities. I love my family, and I know I have positive things to add to their lives."
He named his sugar daddy, Little, as an accomplice and copped to the slaying of Steven Agan, 23.
It was the academic, he said, who dealt the death blows in the BDSM murder sessions.
Little was acquitted. But before Illinois could claim its pound of flesh, Eyler was dead on death row on March 6, 1994, from a more insidious executioner: AIDS.
In his dying days, Eyler found the decency to release the names of his victims - a staggering 21 young men and boys in total.
Yet Eyler never copped to the murder that ended his killing frenzy: Daniel Bridges.
His lawyer would later blame his upbringing and frequent fights with a married lover for her client's bloodlust. She noted he kept his victims' shirts as souvenirs.
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