For the communities along Interstate 70 — a 2,100-mile artery of asphalt and concrete moving the lifeblood of American commerce from Maryland to Utah -- the highway is many times more trouble than it's worth. Although the road provides a direct link between some of the American heartland's major cities -— Baltimore, Wheeling, Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Topeka, and Denver, as well as countless small, anonymous communities — the economic benefits of being located along a major thoroughfare are offset by the predators who also use I-70 for their own sinister purposes.

One of the worst of these predators, Douglas Belt, was a truck driver known as the "I-70 Rapist." He began attacking women in 1989 in the Kansas communities that dot the interstate, stopping in 1996 when he was arrested for burglary. He racked up a series of convictions for other violent crimes, but was paroled in 2001 and continued his violent ways. In 2002, Belt raped and decapitated a 43-year-old Wichita woman. For his crimes, Belt received the death penalty.

Before Belt, there was the "I-70 Killer," a maniac who police say targeted women working alone in stores located near the highway. That killer is thought to have slain seven women between 1992 and 1994. An eighth murder victim, a Terre Haute, Ind., man who wore a ponytail and an earring, may have been mistaken for a woman. One woman survived the attempt on her life.

The same .22-caliber pistol was used in six of the nine shootings during the early-'90s spree. Police say this pistol was also the murder weapon in the deaths of five women in Missouri, Indiana and Kansas and the Terre Haute man.

Although authorities have identified a "person of interest" in those cases, the killings formally remain open and unsolved.

The communities touched by the havoc wreaked by desperate criminals on the run or sociopaths out hunting for human prey have their own name for I-70. They call it America's Sewer Pipe. After Daniel Remeta killed his way through rural Kansas in 1985, a gas station owner at the intersection of Kansas 25 and I-70 summed up the feelings of the people who lived near the highway for reporters: "You just don't know what's coming down the sewer pipe next."

Remeta and his companions — some call them hostages, while others say they were accomplices — cut a swath of carnage across the south and then descended on the 400-person hamlet of Grainfield, Kansas, like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, leaving death, pain and misery in their wake.

Daniel and Lisa

Daniel Eugene Remeta and Lisa Dunn met at a party in Traverse City, Michigan in December 1984. They moved in together shortly after their fateful meeting, although at first glance, they were an unlikely pair. Remeta was the product of alcoholic parents and had been maltreated much of his life, while Dunn was — until shortly before they met — a well-cared-for child of an apparently loving middle-class home who excelled in classes and seemed to be on her way to graduating high school, attending college and building a successful life for herself.

Remeta was first adjudicated as a delinquent when he was 13 years old, although there had been numerous run-ins with the law and authority figures before his first appearance in a courtroom. He was of below-average intelligence, had a violent temper and reportedly had only two goals in life: to kill a cop and to become a hit man. Whether it was heredity, environment or dumb luck, Danny Remeta was just plain bad. His first adult conviction came for felony breaking and entering, earning him a 4-year stretch in a Michigan prison. Slightly built, he was, pound for pound, a tough character who managed to earn enough tickets in prison to spend a majority of his first sentence in the hole at Marquette, Michigan's maximum-security facility.

Even before she met Danny Remeta, Lisa Dunn was uncomfortable with the role life assigned her as a college-bound honor student. Her grades slipped, she experimented with drugs and alcohol, and she ran away from home to Florida. Dunn managed to hold it together long enough to graduate from high school and was taking some college courses when she and Remeta hooked up.

He was 27 and she was 18.

Remeta quickly established control over Dunn. In prison, Remeta managed to become a leader of several prisoner protests, which attests to his apparently magnetic personality. In a profile of Remeta, the Detroit News likened him to Charles Manson, crediting him with the "ability to control vulnerable people."

"After he gets them in trouble, then he blackmails them to get them in further," the News quoted one of Remeta's former acquaintances.

Another of the "vulnerable people" who fell under Remeta's control in the cold winter of 1984-1985 was Mark Anthony Walter, the 18-year-old son of a northern Michigan farmer who had recently moved out on his own. Walter, a former altar boy, was well-liked by those who knew him and had never been in any serious trouble. He was a hard-working young man with a full-time job, and a friend of Lisa Dunn's from school.

When the three of them set out in late January 1984 for a Florida vacation, it is unlikely that even in their darkest nightmares did Dunn or Walter envision how the trip would end.

Odyssey of Mayhem

There are conflicting stories about how the .357 handgun belonging to Lisa Dunn's father ended up in Danny Remeta's possession. One account states that Dunn, who had been sexually assaulted when she ran away to Florida as a 17-year-old, took the gun for protection. Another version has Remeta convincing Dunn to steal the weapon.  Regardless, the trio probably wasn't long on the road when Mark Walter and Lisa Dunn realized that Remeta wasn't simply planning a casual trip to Walt Disney World.

Date with Death

From Ocala, the trio headed west, surfacing again in Waskom, Texas, an oil town of less than 2,000 people on Interstate 20 just across the state line from Louisiana. Two days after Chet Reeder was slain, Remeta, Walter and Dunn entered a Waskom gas station,   where 18-year-old Camilla Carroll was finishing up her Sunday evening shift. When he finished emptying the store's cash register, Remeta ordered Carroll outside and took her, Dunn and Walter into a wooded area about 300 yards from the gas station. Remeta then ordered the terrified teenager to walk away from the group. Taking aim with the pistol, Remeta yelled for Carroll to begin running, which she did. As the girl ran, he opened fire, striking her once in each leg.

Carroll crashed to the ground, her legs collapsing from the force of the slugs. Remeta walked up to her as she lay writhing on the ground and proceeded to empty the remaining shots into her stomach. Leaving Carroll to die in the woods, Remeta, Walter and Dunn got back into their car and drove away with approximately $400.

The group hadn't counted on Carroll's determination to live. With five slugs in her body, she managed to crawl a quarter-mile down the road and stop a passing car. She was taken to a hospital in Shreveport, while the desperate trio headed north to Arkansas and another date with murder.

Just south of I-40 in northwest Arkansas is the small town of Mulberry, which, in 1985 was a quiet community of around 1,500 people.  Remeta, Walter and Dunn chauffeured Death into town at about 8 p.m. on February 11, while 42-year-old Linda Marvin was working at Bob's Grocery on U.S. 64.

Bob's Grocery was near an off-ramp for I-40, and several witnesses saw two men exit a car that was later identified as belonging to Mark Walter. The two men entered the store. Inside, the gunman bought some items, and when Linda opened the register to give him change, he opened fire and shot her ten times with a .22-caliber pistol. She was dead at the scene. Remeta would later testify that he purchased the second firearm and enlisted the help of a "wino" to buy the bullets. The killer and his accomplice cleaned out the register and fled the store, leaving behind the change Linda had placed on the counter. The haul was about $500.

Although they didn't know it, as Remeta, Dunn and Walter drove northwest away from Crawford County, Arkansas, fate was directing their course. The group had already left a trail of death during their odyssey of mayhem through the south, but what was behind them would pale in comparison to what lay ahead in Kansas.

The Hitchhiker

The day before Valentine's Day 1985, the killers crossed into Kansas, apparently on their way to Colorado, where Remeta had relatives. On I-135 north of Wichita, the group picked up a hitchhiker, James C. Hunter Jr., a Missouri roofer who was looking for a ride back to his home in Amoret, Missouri, after a trip to Texas. Walter was driving at the time, Dunn was seated in the middle of the front seat and Remeta was seated next to her.

With Hunter in the backseat, the group continued north. Somewhere along the 250-mile trip from Wichita to the tiny off-ramp community of Grainfield in central Kansas, Remeta showed Hunter the pair of handguns he was carrying. Testimony later revealed that the .22 had apparently jammed and was inoperable, and Remeta gave it to the hitchhiker to repair — which Hunter did. James Hunter told authorities later that he  asked to be dropped off at the Intersection of I-135 and I-70, which was consistent with his claim that he was attempting to hitch home to Missouri.

Instead, Remeta refused to let him leave and began talking about a previous hitchhiker the group had picked up and how much he regretted not taking advantage of the opportunity to kill that rider. As if to punctuate his statement, Remeta fired three rounds from the .22 pistol out the window as Walter drove through the Kansas fields.

To further intimidate Hunter, as they pulled into Salina, Remeta pulled some .357 shells from his pocket and asked Hunter if he thought the shells would be powerful enough to kill him if he shot Hunter with the Magnum.

Shortly after 2 p.m., the group pulled off I-70 at the Grainfield exit and drove into the gravel parking lot of the Stuckey's Restaurant. A popular spot for students on their way home from the nearby high school, the restaurant was empty except for manager Larry McFarland.

Bloody Kansas

Albright spotted a red-and-blue car matching the description the highway patrol had broadcast near the Levant, Kansas, interchange, which is about 45 miles from the Colorado line. He stopped the vehicle, but before he could take any action, Remeta jumped out of the passenger's side of the car and fired the .357 through the deputy's car. Remeta pulled off four shots, hitting Albright twice: once in the right arm and in the chest. As Albright slumped to the side, lying on the front seat of the cruiser, he recalled later that he expected to die.

"I just closed my eyes and waited for another shot," he told the Topeka Capital-Journal several years later.

Instead, Remeta, thinking  the shots had done the job, got back into the car and sped off.

Before he lost consciousness, Albright watched the car leave I-70 for U.S. 24. He radioed for help and told the dispatcher what had happened.

Albright didn't know everything that occurred, and in his semi-conscious state, the officer, who would later testify that he was shot by Hunter, possibly saw Hunter raise the .22 pistol and fire — except that by all accounts, Hunter was trying to shoot Remeta. Believing that he had just one chance to escape, Hunter tried to shoot Remeta as he returned to the vehicle. Instead, the hitchhiker managed to shoot Dunn in the leg.

Remeta knew he had to ditch the car and find new transportation. About 10 minutes after he shot Albright, he directed Walter to drive to a grain elevator nearby.

There were three men working that day at the grain elevator. Maurice Christie was inside the shack that served as an office and 29-year-old Rick Schroeder, a friendly, well-respected father of two toddlers, and Glenn Moore, 55, were outside near Moore's pickup truck when the outlaws roared in.

The gang bailed out of Walter's car with guns drawn, forcing Schroeder and Moore into the bed of the truck. Remeta saw Maurice Christie watching through the window of the office, and when Hunter kicked in one of the office windows and Christie turned, Remeta shot him in the back and left him for dead.

Years later, Randy Jones, Chief of Police for Colby, reflected on why Remeta took the two men. At the time of the spree, Jones was a Colby patrolman.

"I'm sure things were happening very fast, and they took them not knowing how they were going to utilize them," Jones said.

With Walter again driving, the wounded Dunn and the panic-stricken Hunter in the cab, the gang fled the grain elevator and drove for several minutes before Remeta ordered Walter to stop.

Remeta then told Schroeder and Moore that he didn't want or need any hostages, and ordered them out of the truck. He told the men to lie down in the road and proceeded to shoot each of them in the back of the head.

Shoot Out

The law enforcement officers pursuing Remeta and his gang came upon Schroeder and Moore just moments after the killers left the scene. At first, they stopped some distance away from where the two men lay, wondering if it wasn't some kind of trap.

"I approached them really cautiously because at the time, from a distance, it just looked too perfect the way they were lying there," Jones said. "I was really concerned somebody was going to roll over and take a shot at me, until I got closer and could see the blood."

It soon became all too clear that the men were dead. Jones called for support and the hunt for the killers intensified. Across northern Kansas, every law enforcement agency within 50 miles of Grainfield was alert and looking for Remeta and his crew. Closer to the scene of the latest crimes, authorities set up roadblocks, intent on putting a stop to Remeta's brutal killing spree.

The killers approached one of the roadblocks, stopped, and turned around. Then what had been a dragnet around some of the most barbarous killers Kansas had seen in 100 years became a chase.

The chase ended at a farm about 17 miles north of Colby, in Rawlins County. The bandits stopped at the farm and jumped from the truck. Remeta and Walter were both armed and firing at police as they ran for cover, witnesses said. When Walter stood up and took a couple of shots at a state trooper, he was shot in the forehead by a reserve officer from Colby's police force.

With Walter dead and Dunn wounded, Danny Remeta had managed to take out almost everyone except himself. He continued to fire at police, stopping only when he was shot in the buttocks. Only James Hunter emerged unharmed.

Dunn, cradling her arm, nicked by a shotgun blast and wounded by Hunter's earlier shot, screamed at police that they had killed an innocent man, possibly referring to the notion that Walter had been an unwilling participant in the ordeal. Then, she turned to Remeta.

"I love you, Danny," she shouted as the pair were being restrained.

"I love you, too," Remeta called back.

In the Courts

In May 1985, Remeta opted to put Kansas behind him and pleaded guilty to the three murders committed in that state. He subsequently waived extradition to Florida, which wanted a shot at him for the slaying of Chet Reeder.

"I want them to pull the switch," the killer said at the time.

Many connected to the mayhem concurred with Remeta's idea.

"They had a total disregard for life," said Colby Police Chief Mark Spray.   "Money can't be neglected as some of the motive, but the shootings and killings — why, that's a totally different motive when you get to abduction and killing."

Prosecutors in Kansas turned their attention to convicting Lisa Dunn and James Hunter. Dunn's family secured defense counsel for her, but with their limited resources, there was little they could do. The same month the judge accepted Remeta's guilty pleas, he rejected motions from Dunn and Hunter to have their trials moved out of the small community surrounding Levant. The judge also refused to provide funds Dunn sought for a psychologist to examine her and testify as an expert witness about hostage  syndrome and the compulsion to commit crimes.  This type of defense was used by Patty Hearst to explain why she started out as a victim and ended up as a participant.  A month later, the pair went on trial for murder.

Both defendants presented significant evidence that they had been forced to participate in the spree by Daniel Remeta. Dunn described physical and verbal abuse, sexual assaults and threats that left her unable to make rational choices and spot opportunities to escape from his control.

During the trial, Remeta, who was serving four consecutive life sentences in Kansas and awaiting extradition to Arkansas, Texas and Florida, took full responsibility for the spree and said that Dunn and Walter and later Hunter — were tricked into participating. He said he had planned to kill everyone but Dunn, about whom he hadn't made up his mind. The entire trip, he implied, was a long, drawn-out suicide attempt.

The Kansas jury, however, didn't buy Remeta's story, Dunn's claims that she was a hostage, or Hunter's plea that he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. After 13 hours of deliberation, they returned guilty verdicts against the pair for the murders of Schroeder and Moore.

Lisa Dunn and James Hunter were each sentenced to two life terms for the felony-murder convictions, two life terms for the aggravated kidnapping convictions, 15 years to life for aggravated battery of a law enforcement officer, 15 years to life for aggravated robbery, and 5 to 20 years for aggravated battery, and quickly disappeared into the Kansas correctional system. There was a brief scuffle between Kansas and Arkansas over Dunn's extradition, because Kansas's governor adamantly opposed the death penalty and wouldn't send her to face a capital murder charge, but most of the attention for the next several years was focused on the appeals she and Hunter launched shortly after their convictions.

Hunter argued that the trial court erred when it refused to give the jury specific instructions about how compulsion can mitigate a person's guilt.  Most laws that provide for a defense of compulsion stem from the age-old legal belief that a person, when faced with a choice between suffering death or serious bodily harm and committing some lesser crime, should not be punished for committing the lesser offense.

Under Kansas law, the coercion or duress "must be present, imminent, and impending, and of such a nature as to induce a well-grounded apprehension of death or serious bodily injury if the act is not done.  The doctrine of coercion or duress cannot be invoked as an excuse by one who had a reasonable opportunity to avoid doing the act without undue exposure to death or serious bodily harm. In addition, the compulsion must be continuous and there must be no reasonable opportunity to escape the compulsion without committing the crime."

Additionally, the common law does not allow a compulsion defense when a person is accused of murder, because, in the words of one legal treatise, "When confronted by a choice between two evils of equal magnitude, the individual ought to sacrifice his own life rather than escape by the murder of an innocent."

Hunter, who was charged with a felony murder — that is, a killing that occurred during the course of the commission of a felony — argued that he was entitled to use a compulsion defense to excuse his conduct because he was forced to choose between his own death and the kidnappping — not the killing — of Moore and Schroeder. The judge in his trial disagreed, and did not include instructions to the jury about compulsion.

In July 1987, the Kansas Supreme Court handed down its decision on Hunter's appeal, overturning his convictions and ordering a new trial, at which time he would be allowed to offer the compulsion defense. The court reasoned that if compulsion is available as a defense to the underlying felony, it must also be available as a defense to the murder committed by someone else that accompanied the felony.

Kansas prosecutors quickly moved to retry James Hunter, but after the defense presented the evidence of Remeta's abuse and the judge delivered the required instructions about compulsion, the jurors returned a not-guilty verdict.

Hunter had little time to enjoy his newfound freedom, however. Four days after his acquittal, he suffered a fatal heart attack brought on, his father told the press, by the stress of the retrial.

"Poor Judgement"

In Kansas, not far from where trucks rush by on Interstate 70, reaction to his statement was, for the most part, unforgiving.

"I could care less what Daniel Remeta says 13 years later," said Colby Police Chief Randall Jones. "What lasts with me was how he was the day he took lives here in Kansas."

Rick Schroeder's father, John, summed up the paradoxical closure that survivors of crime victims feel when the ultimate punishment is carried out.

"It takes so long to get something over with," he told reporters. "It doesn't sound like he felt sorry for anyone. It sounded like he didn't have any remorse. But when you kill someone, it's not a happy day."