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The Sun
2 days ago
- The Sun
Inside Lucy Letby's diaries cops used to snare baby killer – & why expert thinks secret code PROVES her innocence
MANY serial killers from history have left a written record of their crimes - whether it's the diary entries of Dennis Rader and Melvin Rees, or the cryptic notes of The Zodiac Killer. Experts tend to agree that it comes from a combination of a pathological need for control, a twisted desire to relive their worst acts, and the thrill of the cat-and-mouse chase. 10 10 10 Detectives investigating British nurse Lucy Letby have pushed the idea that she fits into this category, describing a possible 'secret code' left in her diary. Letby, now 34, was last year given a whole life order in prison for the murders of seven babies and the attempted murders of seven more at Countess of Chester Hospital. During police raids on Letby's home after her arrest, officers took a specific interest in her diary, as well as other notes found in her bedroom. One such scrawling, which went on to form a key part of the case against her, said: 'I am evil, I did this.' It was emblazoned on a bright Post-It, alongside another saying: 'I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough.' Her diary, meanwhile, found in a bedside drawer, was thought to have contained a sadistic trail of breadcrumbs. Serial killers who leave behind diaries, notes, or cryptic messages often do so as a means of exerting control, crafting a personal narrative, or seeking attention. dates of deaths or attacks she was later found guilty of. A reference to 'twins' was recorded on April 8 2016. This was the date of the attempted murders of two twin boys, Baby L and Baby M. On the same date, there were also initials 'LD' or 'LO' added, which appeared again on April 6, 7, 8 and 9, as well as on June 23 and 24, when she tried to kill twin brothers Baby O and Baby P, the trial heard. The Sun spoke to Nicole Nyamwiza, a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at The University of Law, who explained that there is often a reason for killers to put pen to paper. She says: "These writings provide a window into the complex psychological landscape of Letby, highlighting the diverse motivations and mental states that can underlie such heinous acts. "Understanding these nuances is crucial for both criminal profiling and the development of preventative strategies in clinical settings." She added: "Serial killers who leave behind diaries, notes, or cryptic messages often do so as a means of exerting control, crafting a personal narrative, or seeking attention." 'Sinster code' The chilling cache of notes, scribbles and diaries is what police say enabled them to snare the young nurse - describing the find as a "massive surprise". DI Rob Woods, who ran the search of her home when Letby was arrested for a second time, said in Cheshire Police's Operation Hummingbird documentary: 'There appeared to be, and it became clear later that it was, almost a code of coloured asterisks, and various other things that marked significant events in our investigation." 'When we went to search the address for the second occasion, that was something we knew that we were looking for because we didn't have the complete chronology. 'There were a couple of years missing, so that was a very clear item. 'We also knew that she was a copious writer of notes. We thought that perhaps having been arrested she might stop doing that. 'It turned out when we searched that second address, she had continued to write her thoughts and all sorts of processes about the investigation.' It is unclear how the asterisks fit into the theory, as the force has only publicly released a sample of pages from her diary in June 2016, and the asterisks are not included. But the diary pages were hardly mentioned in the trial itself, and neither was there any reference to suspicions of an elaborate code used anywhere. The use of initials was brought up by the prosecution, but experts believe there could be a simple explanation. Cops appear to have initially read them as 'LO', as per what was said in court, and been baffled. There appeared to be, and it became clear later that it was, almost a code of coloured asterisks, and various other things that marked significant events in our investigation. DI Rob WoodsCheshire Police But they have since been interpreted as 'LD', meaning 'Long Day' by online sleuths, as well as references in text messages between Letby and a colleague since made public. This appears to be a colloquial abbreviation used by nurses at the hospital to signify a shift lasting 13 or 14 hours, something Letby was often doing during the period of the murders for which she was convicted. Statistical misrepresentation consultant, Professor Richard Gill told The Sun the suggestion that the nurse left a trail of cryptic clues in her diary is 'just quite simply ludicrous' and a desperate attempt by police to paint her as the classic serial killer. 'It doesn't exist, it's just bluster,' he added. But Ms Nyamwiza says: "The use of coded entries in her diaries, such as the 'LO' notation corresponding to specific dates, indicates a compartmentalisation of her actions, perhaps as a coping mechanism or an attempt to maintain a semblance of normalcy amidst the chaos." Professor Gill has previously helped free multiple medical professionals wrongfully convicted of killing patients, including Dutch nurse Lucia de Berk and Italian nurse Daniela Poggiali. He is among an increasing number of supporters who believe Letby to be innocent, and has been pushing for a retrial - although many others, including the victims' families, have blasted the campaign to free her. He described the diary as coming across 'as more of a calendar than a diary', adding: 'She's not writing down thoughts every day. 10 'It's just little notes of things that had happened or were going to happen, like many people do - professionals in jobs make little notes.' He said it was odd that police brought up the 'LD' initials in the documentary, released last year, despite the uncertainty apparently having been cleared up. 'Even at the time, people knew that LD meant Long Day, it was explained,' Prof Gill continued. 'The story that there was some kind of sinister code and that it was planned is totally ludicrous, and it tells us something about the intelligence of Cheshire Constabulary. 'They wanted to convict a killer nurse, they wanted that very strongly, very early on, because they were brought into the conspiracy by the doctors. 'The doctors went to police in March or April 2017 and we know that they told them bogus lies, they told them lies about the expected number of deaths on that unit. 'They roped the police into their own fantasy, and the police went all out to prove it. They opened an investigation and found nothing, and this was one of the nothings of which they found.' 'I believe she's innocent' Text exchanges since made public between Letby and a colleague show the latter voicing some surprise that her friend was down for four LDs in a week. Prof Gill said: 'I mean, it's a lot. You're supposed to only have one LD a week. 'It's 14 hours working strictly without a break. You're not supposed to have four LDs in a week. 'But you can see how stretched that unit was, that it was necessary, and it shows us how enthusiastic Lucy was to work overtime and get experience. 'She's an enthusiastic young nurse who wants to learn as much as she can, so she wants as much experience as she can, and she wants money. 'She's saving to buy a house. The long day paid more than the short day, Christ. 'Those long days happened to coincide with the deaths of twins. So what? 'It shows that she's often there when babies die because she worked such long hours, because the unit was short-staffed.' Prof Gill went on to say: 'There's no evidence anyone saw her kill anyone, except Jayaram said he almost saw her, but he didn't see her. 'And now there's doubts about whether he was even there or not for Baby K. But nobody ever saw her doing anything whatsoever.' Prof Gill was referring to Dr Ravi Jayaram, who testified that the nurse was seen standing over Baby K's cot as the infant's condition deteriorated. Taking the stand, the doctor said Letby failed to call for help as the newborn's condition declined, insisting the nurse had virtually been caught "red-handed". But last month, a bombshell memo appeared to cast doubt on Dr Jayaram's claims. Prior to the start of the police investigation, Dr Jayaram wrote in an email to colleagues: "At time of deterioration ... Staff nurse Letby at incubator and called Dr Jayaram to inform of low saturations." This suggests Letby had informed superiors of the child's condition. Prof Gill - who vehemently believes Letby is innocent - said the only possible indication he can see from the evidence put forward in court of wrongdoing is that insulin may have been injected into some of the babies that came to harm. I believe she's completely innocent. I've said that for a long time, but for a long time I was among the very few who dared to say it. Prof Richard GillStatistical misrepresentation consultant 'Maybe someone was trying to harm two babies,' he said, however, he added that medical experts have since clarified that newborn premature babies can have completely natural Hyperglycemia. Also known as high blood sugar, hyperglycemia is a condition where the level of glucose (sugar) in the blood is abnormally high. It's a common complication of diabetes, but can also occur in non-diabetics, particularly during illness or stress. Prof Gill went on to say: 'I think the things that convinced people of Lucy's guilt were insulin, the rota, and the Post-It notes.' One such argument put forward by the prosecution suggested that because Letby was on shift when babies came to harm or died, statistically, she must have been guilty. Prof Gill believes that this can be cleared up by the short staffing and the fact that Letby was so keen to take on extra shifts. In terms of the notes, he said it's not entirely clear what the 'I killed them' scrawling actually says. 'It's not absolutely clear what the phrase is,' he explained. 'That's not the whole sentence, there's a bit above, which you can't read.' Prof Gill said he's unsure why a handwriting specialist wasn't brought in by the defence team to decipher the full sentence and potentially quash it as evidence. Other notes said 'please help me' and 'I can't do it any more', while another said: 'I want someone to help me but they can't, so what's the point in asking. Hate my life.' Letby herself claimed she wrote the notes at a time when she feared her practices may have been at fault for babies collapsing. She said she felt 'isolated' from colleagues after being taken off the neonatal unit and put on clerical duties. In excerpts from police interviews after her arrest, shown to the jury, Letby said: 'I just wrote it because everything had got on top of me. 'It was when I'd not long found out I'd been removed from the unit and they were telling me my practice might be wrong, that I needed to read all my competences - my practice might not have been good enough. 'I was blaming myself but not because I'd done something (but) because of the way people were making me feel.' Letby's defence barrister Ben Myers KC told the court: 'You have seen the notes. They are full of distress, self-recrimination and anguish. 'They certainly do show a very distressed woman. Someone in a terrible state of anguish.' However, the prosecution said the notes were confessions of guilt and not the 'anguished outpourings of a woman in fear and despair'. Prof Gill added: 'I understand why the jury came to guilty verdicts given what they were told. 'The police and CPS were convinced Letby was an evil killer and they were forced to fill the trial with junk.' He said he is pleased to see something of a shift in the narrative surrounding Letby by many. 'I think the shift is clear,' he explained. 'Of those who have an interest in the case many are at least coming round to the idea of them being unsafe convictions, if not agreeing she is innocent. 'People are prepared to say she's innocent. I believe she's completely innocent. I've said that for a long time, but for a long time I was among the very few who dared to say it.' The charges Letby was convicted on in full Child A, allegation of murder. The Crown said Letby injected air intravenously into the bloodstream of the baby boy. COUNT 1 GUILTY. Child B, allegation of attempted murder. The Crown said Letby attempted to murder the baby girl, the twin sister of Child A, by injecting air into her bloodstream. COUNT 2 GUILTY. Child C, allegation of murder. Prosecutors said Letby forced air down a feeding tube and into the stomach of the baby boy. COUNT 3 GUILTY. Child D, allegation of murder. The Crown said air was injected intravenously into the baby girl. COUNT 4 GUILTY. Child E, allegation of murder. The Crown said Letby murdered the twin baby boy with an injection of air into the bloodstream and also deliberately caused bleeding to the infant. COUNT 5 GUILTY. Child F, allegation of attempted murder. Letby was said by prosecutors to have poisoned the twin brother of Child E with insulin. COUNT 6 GUILTY. Child G, three allegations of attempted murder. The Crown said Letby targeted the baby girl by overfeeding her with milk and pushing air down her feeding tube. COUNT 7 GUILTY, COUNT 8 GUILTY, COUNT 9 NOT GUILTY. Child H, two allegations of attempted murder. Prosecutors said Letby sabotaged the care of the baby girl in some way which led to two profound oxygen desaturations. COUNT 10 NOT GUILTY, COUNT 11 JURY COULD NOT REACH VERDICT. Child I, allegation of murder. The prosecution said Letby killed the baby girl at the fourth attempt and had given her air and overfed her with milk. COUNT 12 GUILTY. Child J, allegation of attempted murder. No specific form of harm was identified by the prosecution but they said Letby did something to cause the collapse of the baby girl. COUNT 13 JURY COULD NOT REACH VERDICT. Child K, allegation of attempted murder. The prosecution said Letby compromised the baby girl as she deliberately dislodged a breathing tube. COUNT 14 JURY COULD NOT REACH VERDICT. Child L, allegation of attempted murder. The Crown said the nurse poisoned the twin baby boy with insulin. COUNT 15 GUILTY. Child M, allegation of attempted murder. Prosecutors said Letby injected air into the bloodstream of Child L's twin brother. COUNT 16 GUILTY. Child N, three allegations of attempted murder. The Crown said Letby inflicted trauma in the baby boy's throat and also injected him with air in the bloodstream. COUNT 17 GUILTY, COUNT 18 JURY COULD NOT REACH VERDICT, COUNT 19 JURY COULD NOT REACH VERDICT. Child O, allegation of murder. Prosecutors say Letby attacked the triplet boy by injecting him with air, overfeeding him with milk and inflicting trauma to his liver with "severe force". COUNT 20 GUILTY. Child P, allegation of murder. Prosecutors said the nurse targeted the triplet brother of Child O by overfeeding him with milk, injecting air and dislodging his breathing tube. COUNT 21 GUILTY. Child Q, allegation of attempted murder. The Crown said Letby injected the baby boy with liquid, and possibly air, down his feeding tube. COUNT 22 JURY COULD NOT REACH VERDICT. 10 10
Toronto Star
23-05-2025
- General
- Toronto Star
It would be great if young people did not squint at cursive writing like it's hieroglyphics. But the truth is it's already dead
A handwritten letter still feels special. Anyone can dash off a text full of abbreviations and emojis that is ambivalent to capitalization and punctuation. But taking the time to put pen to paper requires care. Over the years, I've been lucky to receive countless letters from Star readers. I cherish them all, even the angry ones that encouraged me to do things that are anatomically impossible. There is one letter I've been meaning to find in my files. It was sent years ago from someone who claimed an alien abduction. The first page detailed the encounter. Page two was like a Zodiac Killer cypher. The symbols were an alleged alien language this person was taught by her bug-eyed captors. But I digress. Today's question: do we still need cursive writing? It made a comeback in Ontario two years ago after it was reintroduced to the curriculum. Even still, you're unlikely to find a sixth grader holding a pencil outside of class. For young people, screens are notepads, fingers are pens. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW But across the border, there is a movement to reanimate cursive. Philadelphia Inquirer: 'Should cursive writing make a comeback?' MSN: 'Can learning cursive help kids read better? Akron Beacon Journal: 'Schools were wrong to write off the benefits of teaching cursive to kids.' NewsNation: 'Several states look to make cursive mandatory for students.' It would be great if young people did not squint at flowing, joined letters like they were deciphering hieroglyphics. But it's too late. With each passing year, cursive fades, just as fewer people can now darn socks or change a tire. A study this year found 40 per cent of Gen Z are baffled by cursive. They don't like it. They don't want it. Cursive is not avocado toast. Cursive is a bigger trauma than shopping in person or making eye contact. Cursive is a waste of their time. I'm a dinosaur who will always champion cursive. But maybe the kids, riding shotgun with unstoppable tech, are on to something. I used to think it was a myth when people said it's impossible to read a doctor's handwriting. How can that be true? Physicians are among our brightest. I've been chaperoning my elderly parents to medical appointments in recent months. At one for my dad, a specialist suggested a new drug and kindly jotted down a prescription. People? It's not a myth. I looked at that rectangle paper and wondered if the words were even in English. They looked like a seismograph. Or what a monkey might do with a Sharpie. But you know what's strange? When I handed the prescription to the pharmacist, she glanced at it for a split second and said, 'You can pick it up in 15 minutes.' That's when I realized cursive is creating winners and losers. Should we embrace change and let old skills fade into the gossamer of nostalgia? When I was a kid, we went on road trips to Harrisburg every summer. There was no GPS. My dad drove the station wagon, always too slow, as my mom sat in the passenger seat with a map in her lap. Did we often get shambolically lost? Yes. My exasperated dad once pulled over and scanned for a red building waypoint that would signal a right turn. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Instead, we were surrounded by cows. Map reading is like cursive. It's a lost art. I can't imagine handing a map to one of my teen daughters and expecting them to find their way to a circled town. It would be like leaving them in a corn maze during a solar eclipse. Google Maps is how they navigate their world. Our ancestors knew how to preserve jellies or make their own soap. You know what would happen if I tried to make my own soap? I'd give myself skin cancer. Or I'd come out of the shower smelling like moonshine. Skills come and go over generational time. What if you were lost in the woods during winter? Could you start a fire with two sticks? Forage? Seek shelter in the foliage? Nope. You're going to freeze to death before your iPhone runs out of juice. Why are there fewer suicide notes these days? Nobody can write! Why do airport arrivals take so long? Agents can't read the customs declarations! So is it time for cursive writing to die of natural causes? Going to the market would be much easier if my wife typed out her shopping lists. She was a doctor in a past life. I am standing in Aisle 4 and scrutinizing her handiwork and have to guess if I should be buying pineapples or papayas. The growing movement to keep cursive alive warms my heart. But the cold reality is it is already dead.
Yahoo
27-04-2025
- Yahoo
Does Anyone Still Hitchhike?
Most summers since I was 17, I've gone hitchhiking. In California, at 19, I rode with a stuntman who estimated he'd sustained 50 concussions. A few years later, in Utah, a young man said God told him to pick me up; the next morning, a mother coming off a night shift told me she regretted her disinterest in the Church. In Wyoming, an oil-field geologist steamed about his divorce after months alone in a trailer. 'You're the first person I've talked to,' he said. The next year, around Tennessee, a bounty hunter argued to me that the Earth was flat, and a Mexican American man told me why he kept a 'Make America great again' hat on his dashboard: In his town, he said, not showing support for Donald Trump could lead to your mailbox getting smashed. Near Pennsylvania, a young salt-factory worker showed off hands so callused, he couldn't use gloves without developing blisters. He dreamed of driving a truck to Kansas. The freedom of the road beckoned to us both. The reason I hitchhike is, in part, practical: I can't drive. I flubbed the test the summer after high school, and since then, I've mostly lived in New York City, where a car would be more of a hindrance than a help. But I also hitchhike because I love it. The rides I've caught across America have opened my sense of the country. Each was an encounter with someone whose perspective I could hardly have imagined, as someone who's spent much of his life on the East Coast and in politically siloed bubbles. Especially when politics feels intense, hitchhiking has kept me from forgetting that decent people are everywhere. It's a way of testing the tensile strength of the social safety net. It shows that when you're at your most vulnerable, whether by circumstance or choice, people will be willing to help. You hitchhike to know you're not alone. Hitchhiking isn't as common as it once was. In the 1960s, hitchhikers were a regular sight on highway-entrance ramps. The practice declined in the '70s, in part because popular narratives claimed that it was unreasonably dangerous. 'The Zodiac Killer had bumped off a bunch of people,' the director and novelist John Sayles, an avid hitchhiker who stopped in the mid-'70s, told me. 'I got the feeling that the psycho-killer-to-normal-person ratio of drivers who would pick you up was getting worse.' That perception was somewhat overblown. In 1974, the highway patrol of California—at the time, a popular state for hitchhiking—conducted a study on the practice's safety. It found that, out of an estimated 5.2 million rides during a six-month period, two homicide cases with hitchhiker victims were opened. That's a murder rate of 0.38 per 1 million rides. It also estimated there had been roughly 2,000 major crimes in which hitchhikers were the victims, a rate of about 390 per 1 million rides. Another explanation for the hitchhiking decline is that more young people were able to afford cars, and seeking help from others was no longer the norm. [Read: Hitchhiking in Europe] Now, if you want to compare notes with other hitchhikers, you need to go out of your way to find them. No good, recent studies look at how many are doing it, Jonathan Purkis, a sociologist who has studied hitchhiking, told me. 'I think everyone's just guessing,' he said. And knowing the exact number of people who hitchhike is something of a fool's errand: Part of the practice's appeal is its under-the-radar quality. But after talking with dozens of hitchhikers—many for a newsletter I edit on no-money travel and a podcast I hosted about how hitchhiking shaped artists—I've found that in some ways, hitchhiking is easier than ever, and plenty of people are taking advantage. Cellphones and the internet have made it feel more accessible and safe. Riders can take a picture of a license plate and text it to a friend when they get into a car, letting their friend and the driver know they're being responsible. And the steady growth of online hitchhiker communities, prominently Hitchwiki and its guest-hosting and couch-surfing offshoot, Trustroots, which has more than 120,000 members, speaks to a quiet resurgence. The hitchhikers I speak with generally feel safe, but the practice does still come with risks. Those who have hitchhiked extensively, myself included, have had to fend off creeps who have grabbed at them aggressively or made lewd propositions—and asking to get out of the car could mean landing in a place where it's hard to catch a new ride. Hitchhiking can also be just plain challenging. Being out by the open road, you can get dirty and uncomfortable, you have to learn to read people, and there's absolutely no predictability. But embracing the challenges is one of the joys—you might think of it as something of an extreme sport. 'Few transport experiences involve being repeatedly catapulted into other people's lives with such intensity,' Purkis wrote in his 2022 book, Driving With Strangers. Studies have shown that conversations with new people make us happier. In a time when social connections with strangers are so often algorithmically regulated, the unexpected, serendipitous meetings from hitchhiking can be all the more powerful because they're so much rarer. The word hitch-hiking made its print debut in a 1923 Nation column about three women from New York thumbing to Montreal. 'There are thousands of us,' one said. 'We know girls who have hitched all the way to California.' Then the twin crises of the Depression and World War II made picking up hitchhikers feel like not only a nice thing to do but an ethical imperative. When you ride alone you ride with Hitler! proclaimed one government poster encouraging ride-sharing to conserve resources such as gas during the war. Eventually, thumbing became aligned with progressive movements. Feminists framed it as an expression of women's liberation; the pioneering civil-rights preacher Vernon Johns was an avid hitchhiker; and as bus boycotts spread through the South in the mid-'50s, hitchhiking became a main way to get around Black communities. This aroused the ire of conservatives such as the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who waged a propaganda campaign against the practice. Yet then, as now, it was completely legal in most states as long as hitchhikers stayed off the roadway and stood on the shoulder of the road, a sidewalk, or grass. Contemporary hitchhikers stick out their thumbs for all sorts of reasons. Some might be able to travel in greater comfort but choose hitchhiking because they enjoy the adventure. Others can afford to see new cities or get where they need to only by catching a ride. The differences come when people encounter a problem. If a traveler is stuck in a place for days and has some money, they can get food and a room or a bus. If they don't, they might end up flying a sign asking for cash. On jaunts around the country, I've gotten to see the variety of people who give rides. The drivers tend to be about evenly split between men and women, young and old, and are of all different races. The only deviation from the general population is that a lot of the drivers have previously hitchhiked. 'Most people give lifts for two reasons: to repay past hitchhiking debts and because they want company,' Purkis writes in his book. The first reason helps explain the demographics of hitchhikers, too: If a diverse group of people have karmic hitchhiking debts to pay back, the pool of hitchhikers will generally remain diverse. Women may be seen on the roadside less often than men—but they're there. When Elijah Wald was on tour for his 2006 book, Riding With Strangers, he was surprised that most of the readers telling him hitchhiking stories were women. 'The assumption we all make is based on who we see on the road,' he told me. 'When women stand out on the road and stick out their thumb, they get picked up very quickly, so you don't see them.' For some people, hitchhiking is a response to their concerns about the environment. One pair of travelers I spoke with hitchhiked from Germany to Vietnam recently because they wanted to see the world but couldn't stomach the climate effects of flying to every destination. [Read: You've probably already met your new best friend] But, far and away, the most common reason I hear when I talk with people about why they hitchhike is they enjoy the unexpected connections they form. The conversations you have in a stranger's car can be startlingly intimate. 'You can meet people when you're flying or on the train,' Jack Reid, the author of Roadside Americans, a history of hitchhiking, told me, 'but the trust involved and the risk involved elevate whatever conversation you're having.' Drivers tend to unload everything: their closeted sexuality, wartime traumas, crimes they've committed. Kenny Flannery, a Connecticut native who's been hitchhiking regularly since 2007, remembered a driver taking advantage of their mutual anonymity to say he'd gotten away with murder. 'He even said that out loud: 'You don't know anyone I know; you never will,'' Flannery recalled to me. 'I might be the only person he's ever told that he killed some dude.' Reporting any driver's confession to the police felt like it would be a dead end, Flannery said: 'By the time I would have had phone service or anything, it would have been, 'Someone I can't describe told me a story you won't believe coming from a place they didn't tell me.'' You also can't believe everything you're told in such an untethered situation. 'I have routinely created characters when I was hitchhiking,' Wald told me, 'and I have no reason to think drivers don't.' Outright lying about who you are while hitchhiking isn't something I've heard from anyone but Wald, yet trying on new affects with strangers, the way a kid in a new school might, seems relatively common. It makes hitchhiking a process of self-discovery, as well as a discovery of people around you. Not everyone hitchhikes by choice. Alynda Segarra, the singer of the band Hurray for the Riff Raff, started hitchhiking as a teenage runaway in 2004. In the outsider crust-punk music scene Segarra came up in, hitchhiking and train hopping were common modes of exploration. Segarra was inspired by Beat Generation writers, such as Jack Kerouac, Herbert Huncke, and Gary Snyder, who stamped a 20th-century iteration of the counterculture traveler into the national mythology. Train hopping was preferable, but Segarra couldn't always make it onto one. 'When I hitchhiked, I felt it was necessary,' they said. 'I was out in the middle of nowhere with no money and had to get out.' The exercise had its dangers. Though Segarra didn't experience anything violent, when they were 18, a friend around the same age was killed while hitchhiking. 'The whole experience deepened my reliance on spirituality,' they said. 'I'd pray to guardian angels or a dead grandparent or ancestors.' Segarra carried mace and a knife, and never hitchhiked alone. They became frustrated by how much less stressful hitchhiking was when they were accompanied by a man, they told me: 'It was like all these dynamics cooled, and it would be a normal ride.' Despite all of that, Segarra believes we'd live in a better world if more people had hitchhiking experience. The practice exposed them to people they didn't agree with politically—the type who might have seemed scary in media depictions but who turned out, in real life, to be friendly. Many who hitchhike become devotees of the practice for precisely this reason; after experiencing a sense of unity with such different people, they tend to proselytize. 'It's helped me trust people more,' Samuel Barger, a traveler from the New Jersey Pine Barrens, told me when we spoke about hitchhiking the Pan-American Highway for my newsletter. 'I personally think everyone should hitchhike, at least once or twice, just to see what it feels like to be in need and to have someone help you.' Sometimes, the intense connections people make while hitchhiking develop into lasting friendships. Ten years ago, Flannery caught a ride in Mississippi with a tattoo-shop owner who said he had to run some errands but could go farther afterward. They got on so well that when the errands were done, the driver invited Flannery to meet his family. Flannery ended up staying with them for a week. They kept in touch. Years later, when the pandemic made hitchhiking impossible, Flannery got stranded near the driver and ended up living with him for two months. Now they see each other once or twice a year. 'You wind up,' Flannery told me, 'in places you would never wind up.' When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
27-04-2025
- Atlantic
The Enduring Joy of American Hitchhiking
Most summers since I was 17, I've gone hitchhiking. In California, at 19, I rode with a stuntman who estimated he'd sustained 50 concussions. A few years later, in Utah, a young man said God told him to pick me up; the next morning, a mother coming off a night shift told me she regretted her disinterest in the Church. In Wyoming, an oil-field geologist steamed about his divorce after months alone in a trailer. 'You're the first person I've talked to,' he said. The next year, around Tennessee, a bounty hunter argued to me that the Earth was flat, and a Mexican American man told me why he kept a 'Make America great again' hat on his dashboard: In his town, he said, not showing support for Donald Trump could lead to your mailbox getting smashed. Near Pennsylvania, a young salt-factory worker showed off hands so callused, he couldn't use gloves without developing blisters. He dreamed of driving a truck to Kansas. The freedom of the road beckoned to us both. The reason I hitchhike is, in part, practical: I can't drive. I flubbed the test the summer after high school, and since then, I've mostly lived in New York City, where a car would be more of a hindrance than a help. But I also hitchhike because I love it. The rides I've caught across America have opened my sense of the country. Each was an encounter with someone whose perspective I could hardly have imagined, as someone who's spent much of his life on the East Coast and in politically siloed bubbles. Especially when politics feels intense, hitchhiking has kept me from forgetting that decent people are everywhere. It's a way of testing the tensile strength of the social safety net. It shows that when you're at your most vulnerable, whether by circumstance or choice, people will be willing to help. You hitchhike to know you're not alone. Hitchhiking isn't as common as it once was. In the 1960s, hitchhikers were a regular sight on highway-entrance ramps. The practice declined in the '70s, in part because popular narratives claimed that it was unreasonably dangerous. 'The Zodiac Killer had bumped off a bunch of people,' the director and novelist John Sayles, an avid hitchhiker who stopped in the mid-'70s, told me. 'I got the feeling that the psycho-killer-to-normal-person ratio of drivers who would pick you up was getting worse.' That perception was somewhat overblown. In 1974, the highway patrol of California—at the time, a popular state for hitchhiking—conducted a study on the practice's safety. It found that, out of an estimated 5.2 million rides during a six-month period, two homicide cases with hitchhiker victims were opened. That's a murder rate of 0.38 per 1 million rides. It also estimated there had been roughly 2,000 major crimes in which hitchhikers were the victims, a rate of about 390 per 1 million rides. Another explanation for the hitchhiking decline is that more young people were able to afford cars, and seeking help from others was no longer the norm. Now, if you want to compare notes with other hitchhikers, you need to go out of your way to find them. No good, recent studies look at how many are doing it, Jonathan Purkis, a sociologist who has studied hitchhiking, told me. 'I think everyone's just guessing,' he said. And knowing the exact number of people who hitchhike is something of a fool's errand: Part of the practice's appeal is its under-the-radar quality. But after talking with dozens of hitchhikers—many for a newsletter I edit on no-money travel and a podcast I hosted about how hitchhiking shaped artists—I've found that in some ways, hitchhiking is easier than ever, and plenty of people are taking advantage. Cellphones and the internet have made it feel more accessible and safe. Riders can take a picture of a license plate and text it to a friend when they get into a car, letting their friend and the driver know they're being responsible. And the steady growth of online hitchhiker communities, prominently Hitchwiki and its guest-hosting and couch-surfing offshoot, Trustroots, which has more than 120,000 members, speaks to a quiet resurgence. The hitchhikers I speak with generally feel safe, but the practice does still come with risks. Those who have hitchhiked extensively, myself included, have had to fend off creeps who have grabbed at them aggressively or made lewd propositions—and asking to get out of the car could mean landing in a place where it's hard to catch a new ride. Hitchhiking can also be just plain challenging. Being out by the open road, you can get dirty and uncomfortable, you have to learn to read people, and there's absolutely no predictability. But embracing the challenges is one of the joys—you might think of it as something of an extreme sport. 'Few transport experiences involve being repeatedly catapulted into other people's lives with such intensity,' Purkis wrote in his 2022 book, Driving With Strangers. Studies have shown that conversations with new people make us happier. In a time when social connections with strangers are so often algorithmically regulated, the unexpected, serendipitous meetings from hitchhiking can be all the more powerful because they're so much rarer. The word hitch-hiking made its print debut in a 1923 Nation column about three women from New York thumbing to Montreal. 'There are thousands of us,' one said. 'We know girls who have hitched all the way to California.' Then the twin crises of the Depression and World War II made picking up hitchhikers feel like not only a nice thing to do but an ethical imperative. When you ride alone you ride with Hitler! proclaimed one government poster encouraging ride-sharing to conserve resources such as gas during the war. Eventually, thumbing became aligned with progressive movements. Feminists framed it as an expression of women's liberation; the pioneering civil-rights preacher Vernon Johns was an avid hitchhiker; and as bus boycotts spread through the South in the mid-'50s, hitchhiking became a main way to get around Black communities. This aroused the ire of conservatives such as the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who waged a propaganda campaign against the practice. Yet then, as now, it was completely legal in most states as long as hitchhikers stayed off the roadway and stood on the shoulder of the road, a sidewalk, or grass. Contemporary hitchhikers stick out their thumbs for all sorts of reasons. Some might be able to travel in greater comfort but choose hitchhiking because they enjoy the adventure. Others can afford to see new cities or get where they need to only by catching a ride. The differences come when people encounter a problem. If a traveler is stuck in a place for days and has some money, they can get food and a room or a bus. If they don't, they might end up flying a sign asking for cash. On jaunts around the country, I've gotten to see the variety of people who give rides. The drivers tend to be about evenly split between men and women, young and old, and are of all different races. The only deviation from the general population is that a lot of the drivers have previously hitchhiked. 'Most people give lifts for two reasons: to repay past hitchhiking debts and because they want company,' Purkis writes in his book. The first reason helps explain the demographics of hitchhikers, too: If a diverse group of people have karmic hitchhiking debts to pay back, the pool of hitchhikers will generally remain diverse. Women may be seen on the roadside less often than men—but they're there. When Elijah Wald was on tour for his 2006 book, Riding With Strangers, he was surprised that most of the readers telling him hitchhiking stories were women. 'The assumption we all make is based on who we see on the road,' he told me. 'When women stand out on the road and stick out their thumb, they get picked up very quickly, so you don't see them.' For some people, hitchhiking is a response to their concerns about the environment. One pair of travelers I spoke with hitchhiked from Germany to Vietnam recently because they wanted to see the world but couldn't stomach the climate effects of flying to every destination. But, far and away, the most common reason I hear when I talk with people about why they hitchhike is they enjoy the unexpected connections they form. The conversations you have in a stranger's car can be startlingly intimate. 'You can meet people when you're flying or on the train,' Jack Reid, the author of Roadside Americans, a history of hitchhiking, told me, 'but the trust involved and the risk involved elevate whatever conversation you're having.' Drivers tend to unload everything: their closeted sexuality, wartime traumas, crimes they've committed. Kenny Flannery, a Connecticut native who's been hitchhiking regularly since 2007, remembered a driver taking advantage of their mutual anonymity to say he'd gotten away with murder. 'He even said that out loud: 'You don't know anyone I know; you never will,'' Flannery recalled to me. 'I might be the only person he's ever told that he killed some dude.' Reporting any driver's confession to the police felt like it would be a dead end, Flannery said: 'By the time I would have had phone service or anything, it would have been, 'Someone I can't describe told me a story you won't believe coming from a place they didn't tell me.'' You also can't believe everything you're told in such an untethered situation. 'I have routinely created characters when I was hitchhiking,' Wald told me, 'and I have no reason to think drivers don't.' Outright lying about who you are while hitchhiking isn't something I've heard from anyone but Wald, yet trying on new affects with strangers, the way a kid in a new school might, seems relatively common. It makes hitchhiking a process of self-discovery, as well as a discovery of people around you. Not everyone hitchhikes by choice. Alynda Segarra, the singer of the band Hurray for the Riff Raff, started hitchhiking as a teenage runaway in 2004. In the outsider crust-punk music scene Segarra came up in, hitchhiking and train hopping were common modes of exploration. Segarra was inspired by Beat Generation writers, such as Jack Kerouac, Herbert Huncke, and Gary Snyder, who stamped a 20th-century iteration of the counterculture traveler into the national mythology. Train hopping was preferable, but Segarra couldn't always make it onto one. 'When I hitchhiked, I felt it was necessary,' they said. 'I was out in the middle of nowhere with no money and had to get out.' The exercise had its dangers. Though Segarra didn't experience anything violent, when they were 18, a friend around the same age was killed while hitchhiking. 'The whole experience deepened my reliance on spirituality,' they said. 'I'd pray to guardian angels or a dead grandparent or ancestors.' Segarra carried mace and a knife, and never hitchhiked alone. They became frustrated by how much less stressful hitchhiking was when they were accompanied by a man, they told me: 'It was like all these dynamics cooled, and it would be a normal ride.' Despite all of that, Segarra believes we'd live in a better world if more people had hitchhiking experience. The practice exposed them to people they didn't agree with politically—the type who might have seemed scary in media depictions but who turned out, in real life, to be friendly. Many who hitchhike become devotees of the practice for precisely this reason; after experiencing a sense of unity with such different people, they tend to proselytize. 'It's helped me trust people more,' Samuel Barger, a traveler from the New Jersey Pine Barrens, told me when we spoke about hitchhiking the Pan-American Highway for my newsletter. 'I personally think everyone should hitchhike, at least once or twice, just to see what it feels like to be in need and to have someone help you.' Sometimes, the intense connections people make while hitchhiking develop into lasting friendships. Ten years ago, Flannery caught a ride in Mississippi with a tattoo-shop owner who said he had to run some errands but could go farther afterward. They got on so well that when the errands were done, the driver invited Flannery to meet his family. Flannery ended up staying with them for a week. They kept in touch. Years later, when the pandemic made hitchhiking impossible, Flannery got stranded near the driver and ended up living with him for two months. Now they see each other once or twice a year. 'You wind up,' Flannery told me, 'in places you would never wind up.'
The Guardian
22-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Jimmy Kimmel on the pope's death: ‘Now we know JD Vance is bad at praying, too'
With several hosts on post-Easter holiday, Jimmy Kimmel recaps Donald Trump's hypocritical messages on religion and the death of Pope Francis at the age of 88. 'Between Easter and 4/20, a lot of stuff got rolled yesterday,' said Jimmy Kimmel on Monday evening, and 'our Peep-headed president got in the Easter spirit yesterday' with an 'unusually warm' message on Truth Social wishing 'peace and joy for all who celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ'. But Trump then followed up with a darker message: 'Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country.' (The post went on at length in similar fashion.) 'It's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde your tax returns,' Kimmel joked. 'We have a president who addresses the nation like the Zodiac Killer on Easter Sunday.' Kimmel then pivoted to the death of Pope Francis, who 'seemed to be a kind and humble man'. At 88, Francis had endured months of poor health, 'but he sucked it up, he rallied, he delivered a message at Easter mass, and then he passed away this morning,' Kimmel explained. 'Is there anything more Catholic than waiting until Monday to die so you don't upstage Jesus Christ? I don't think there is. It's the pope version of a mic drop, really.' In the hours before he died, the pope met with JD Vance, vice-president of the US and a recently converted Catholic. 'What a way to go', Kimmel deadpanned. ''Holy Father, do you have any last wishes?' 'Not this, not this.'' Following the meeting at the Vatican, Vance took to X, posting: 'Today I met with the Holy Father Pope Francis. I am grateful for his invitation to meet, and I pray for his good health.' 'So now we know JD Vance is bad at praying, too,' Kimmel laughed. Kimmel also remarked on the White House Easter egg roll, for which both Trump and his wife appeared at the White House. 'We see Melania and the Easter Bunny on the same schedule – once a year at this time,' Kimmel quipped. Trump took the opportunity to say a few words about the late pope: 'He was a good man, worked hard, he loved the world and it was an honor to do that.' 'What a beautiful farewell,' Kimmel deadpanned. 'What are the chances that Trump declares himself pope? They're not zero.' Naturally, Trump also used the opportunity to claim that he was 'bringing religion back' in America. 'Seems notable to mention that the guy who is bringing religion back did not go to church yesterday,' said Kimmel. 'He took a mulligan on mass this year' and instead played golf at his own club outside Washington DC. 'Trump spent his Easter praising Jesus on the golf course,' Kimmel mocked. 'He's never closer to God than when he's out there on the grass cheating at golf with his friends.'
