Meet Larry Eyler – the “Interstate Killer” whose violent spree terrified the Midwest in the early 1980s.
Between 1982 and 1984, Eyler murdered, tortured, and sexually assaulted at least 21 young men, many of whom he abducted along highways in Indiana and Illinois.
Eyler often disposed of his victims in isolated areas close to the interstate, with their trousers and underwear around their knees or ankles.
In at least four cases, Eyler disemboweled his victims due to what experts described as uncontrollable fits of rage stemming from feelings of rejection by his lover.
Eyler’s reign of terror came to an end on August 21, 1984, when a janitor named Joseph Balla discovered the remains of 16-year-old Daniel Bridges in a dumpster.
Balla told the police that other janitors had observed a tenant named Larry Eyler placing the bags in the dumpster the previous afternoon.
After a lengthy and complex trial, Eyler was sentenced to death.
In a spine-chilling jailhouse confession delivered through his attorney in a bid for leniency on December 4, 1990, Eyler provided law enforcement with a vivid account of how he and his accomplice murdered 23-year-old Steven Agan.
Eyler picked up Agan from an area frequented by gay men, offering him money for an evening of sadistic sex orchestrated by his associate, Robert Little.
The pair then took the victim to an abandoned farmhouse and bound him to the beams.
Little then began taking pictures of Eyler removing Agan’s clothes and holding a knife to the victim’s stomach, before instructing Eyler to “kill the motherfucker.”
When Agan’s body went limp, Little began to masturbate over it.
In his confession, Eyler also revealed that while mutilating Agan’s body, he felt a sudden surge of rage and began to beat the corpse with a wooden log.
Despite Eyler’s claims that Little assisted in four murders, no charges were brought against him. Shortly after his 1991 acquittal for Agan’s murder, Robert Little returned to his teaching position at Indiana State University, which he had held since 1971.
Eyler died on March 6, 1994, from complications related to AIDS.
