The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘She Frequented the Truck Stop Often’: Murder Exposes Ex-Model’s Sad Decline

Posted on | February 24, 2021 | Comments Off on ‘She Frequented the Truck Stop Often’: Murder Exposes Ex-Model’s Sad Decline

Earlier this month, police found the body of 47-year-old Rebecca Landrith near an exit ramp off I-80 in rural central Pennsylvania. According to her online biography, Landrith was a former fashion model, but it appears her life had gone downhill in recent years. Perhaps the most significant passage in news coverage of her death was this:

[On Feb. 9] Milford Police in Connecticut shared that Landrith’s 2007 Honda Civic, which had South Dakota plates, was towed from a CITGO gas station there four days prior. The gas station owner reported it as having been abandoned several days, arrest papers state.
Investigators followed up with employees of a Pilot Travel Center next to the CITGO who recognized Landrith and said she frequented the truck stop often with truck drivers, according to arrest papers.

Ugh. What a horrible fate for any woman, to become a truck-stop whore and then to get murdered by one of her tricks:

The over-the-road truck driver accused of killing a woman at an Interstate 80 ramp earlier this month is in the Union County Prison without bail.
Tracy Ray Rollins Jr., 28, was arraigned Tuesday on charges of homicide and abuse of corpse following his return from Connecticut where he had been arrested Feb. 10.
Rollins said nothing as he was escorted from a state police plane at the Williamsport Regional Airport to a cruiser for the trip to the Milton state police barracks where he was arraigned by video.
Rollins, who is from Dallas, was advised by District Judge Jeffrey Mensch the maximum penalty for homicide is death.
However, District Attorney D. Peter Johnson said later it is not a death penalty case at this time but declined to elaborate.
Mensch’s stated reasons for denying bail were the homicide charge and Rollins’ lack of ties to the community. The preliminary hearing is scheduled on March 5.
Rollins is charged with killing Rebecca Landrith, 47, a model who lived in New York City.
Her body was found just before 7 a.m. Feb. 7 by a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation worker along the I-80 eastbound exit ramp at the Mile Run interchange near Loganton.
She sustained multiple gunshot wounds to her face, neck and chest area plus two on a hand that state police called defensive.
Eighteen bullets were removed from Landrith’s body during an autopsy, the arrest affidavit states. . . .
Landrith did not have any identification on her but investigators found in a jacket pocket a note containing Rollins name, cell phone number and email address along with receipts from businesses.
“A lot of incredible work” went into this case, [Pennsylvania State Police Capt. Sherman] Shadle said, citing all the state police divisions that were involved.
The victim’s brother, George Landrith, also has given investigators high marks not only for arresting a suspect but in the way they have treated the grieving family.
Rollins told investigators, according to the arrest affidavit, he had met a woman named Leslie at a truck stop near Milford, Conn., and she had been traveling with him.
Information was obtained from Milford police that Landrith had made hotel reservations in December under the name Leslie Myers, the document states.
According to Rollins, “Leslie” accompanied him to Maine, back to Connecticut, then to Brooklyn, New York and Wisconsin, where he picked up a load to be delivered in Maine.
Using the receipts found in the woman’s pockets and Rollins’ cell phone records, police said they traced his travel from Wisconsin to Maine with a stop at the Mile Run interchange from 12:11 until 12:26 a.m. on Feb. 7.
Because of the discovery of brain and flesh-like material, bullet holes and casings, it appears the shooting occurred in the cab of Rollins’ truck, police said.
No motive for the killing has been disclosed.

Eighteen bullets? Why shoot somebody 18 times?

This is just one of the mysteries surrounding Landrith’s death, but the largest mystery is how someone who was working as a New York fashion model just a few years ago could have ended up as the sort of woman who “frequented the truck stop often,” in a reporter’s euphemistic phrase.

“Lot lizards,” truckers call them, for the way they prowl around the truck-stop lots where truckers park to sleep overnight. If “lot lizards” are not the sleaziest whores on the planet, certainly they’re near the bottom of the prostitution hierarchy, and it’s difficult to fathom how a willowy blonde former New York fashion model could fall so low.

Poring over news coverage, there were a few minor clues:

Landrith’s brother, George Landrith, told PennLive she had separated from the rest of the family five years earlier.
“For that reason, he said he knows little about her life since then,” PennLive reported.
Landrith was the youngest of five children. She had never married. Her parents were divorced, and their father lived in Utah.

What accounts for Rebecca Landrith’s estrangement from her family? We don’t know, but it seems a logical inference that her lifestyle choices might be connected to why she hadn’t communicated with her relatives for the past five years. Yet even if she was alienated from her family, how does it make sense that she became a “lot lizard”?

Was she on drugs? Opioids, methamphetamine, crack cocaine?

Here’s a wild guess: In addition to being a fashion model, one might suspect that Rebecca Landrith also once worked as a stripper.

As I say, that’s only a wild guess, but it might explain her otherwise inexplicable downfall into the status of truck-stop whore.

An attractive woman can make big bucks working strip clubs, but that business disappeared when COVID-19 shut down most bars last year. So a stripper who might have been making two or three thousand dollars a week could have found herself suddenly short of cash. Again, I must emphasize that this is only a wild guess, but it’s very difficult to come up with any other guess that would explain what happened here.

In reporting on Landrith’s death, the trucker site CDL Life notes that some have made inferences about the dead woman’s fate:

Although there have been several social media posts inferring that Landrith was to blame for her own situation because she had been willingly “running around with truckers,” officers say that position has no influence on the investigation, noting that Landrith is a victim of homicide and should be treated as such.

Well, most feminists are pro-“sex worker,” and feminists also routinely denounce “violence against women,” but I don’t expect them to pay attention to the murder of Rebecca Landrith, for some reason.




 

Category: Crime, Violence Against Women

Comments

Comments are closed.