Speeding Up to Slow Down

Sometime in the early 1980s, while researching a play, I spent an afternoon talking with a Nebraska State Trooper about the border between local law enforcement and the state patrol. We covered jurisdiction, drugs, homicide, and how causes of death get decided in a county with more cattle than people. By then he had worked those highways for twenty years. He was a careful man with a careful voice, and when the talk turned to death on the road, he lowered it. When you read about a one-car crash that kills the driver on a Nebraska highway in the middle of the night, he said, you are usually reading about a suicide. The car alone, the road empty, the bridge or the embankment at full cruise.

Twenty years of midnight calls, of ditches walked with a flashlight, of bodies lifted from cars on roads so empty the nearest witness might be a mile of corn. Men of his place and era did not talk easily about such things, and the paperwork gave him no help. The crash report had no box for what he believed he was seeing. So he carried it the way he carried everything else that could not be said aloud, and then one afternoon he handed it to a young man researching a play.

For forty years that picture has kept office hours in my head. It arrives at two in the morning: a man alone on a straight road with nothing to hit, speeding up, in effect, to slow down, permanently. The crash report says he lost control. There is no note. There are no skid marks, because a man driving toward death on purpose has no reason to brake. His widow collects the insurance. The church buries him without awkwardness. The county paper prints the word accident, and the town understands or does not, according to its willingness. Growing up in Nebraska, under that endless sky and in that heavy summer air, I grasped the logic of such a death at once. It was a Midwestern way of dying: a private catastrophe wrapped in a public fiction so complete that even the state participates.

His twenty years ran from about 1960 forward, and for most of them the country was not even counting. The federal government’s own crash-level census, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, began only in 1975. For the first fifteen years of his career there was no national crash database at all, nothing mailed to him from Washington. Whatever he noticed, he noticed alone.

Austin Porterfield was already asking in 1960, in the American Sociological Review, why traffic deaths and suicides travel together. In 1962 Melvin Selzer and Charles Payne published “Automobile Accidents, Suicide and Unconscious Motivation” in the American Journal of Psychiatry, reporting depression and suicidal thinking at striking rates among drivers in serious crashes. The title alone was an accusation. In the Los Angeles of the late fifties, the chief medical examiner-coroner, Theodore Curphey, kept facing deaths he could not certify. He brought in the founders of the Suicide Prevention Center, and together they built the psychological autopsy: interviewing the living to learn the intentions of the dead. In 1963 Edwin Shneidman, the father of that work, gave the trooper’s category its name: subintentioned death, a death the person helps along, covertly or half-consciously, through risk and drink and self-neglect and terrible judgment. John Macdonald’s 1964 paper on suicide and homicide by automobile found previous suicide attempts common among such drivers, and listed the barriers to the truth: grieving relatives, and drivers too injured to interview.

In 1972 Charles Schmidt and his colleagues reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry that drivers who had crashed alone carried more psychiatric illness than drivers who had not. That same year Pokorny, Smith, and Finch examined 28 consecutive automobile fatalities and judged four of them suicides, three of the four in single-car wrecks. And John F. Edland, the chief medical examiner of Monroe County, New York, reviewed 112 traffic deaths for a federal volume on accident pathology. He could certify only 3 as suicides. Yet 33 of the dead had previous psychiatric histories, a rate, he wrote, “way out of line with our experience in other areas of traumatic death.” Edland recorded the machinery of silence in his office’s own rule. “If we feel that suicide is highly probable,” his office wrote, “it is signed ‘Vehicular Suicide’ with family consent, or as ‘Undetermined’ without.”

While the trooper worked his midnights, psychiatry and sociology were building, piece by piece, the exact thing he was seeing. He never read those journals. He did not need to; he had the scenes, and the scenes taught him what the journals were simultaneously proving.

In 1977 the sociologist David Phillips reported in Science that fatal crashes rise in the days after publicized suicide stories, his later work finding the rise concentrated in single-car wrecks, as if some readers answer a headline with a throttle. Roughly when the trooper and I spoke, in October 1980, the British Medical Journal ran a paper by Jennifer Jenkins and Peter Sainsbury. Its title asked his question outright: “Single-car road deaths: disguised suicides?” The lone dead, they found, carried heavier psychiatric histories and more recent life crises than drivers killed in collisions. In 1995 Dennis Peck and Kenneth Warner wrote that death by automobile offers “a unique opportunity for concealment” of suicidal intent; the forensic literature now has a name for the method, autocide. Finland sends trained teams, engineers, doctors, behavioral scientists, to every fatal crash.

When those teams re-examined all 1,419 Finnish driver deaths from 1987 through 1991, they called 5.9 percent of them suicides. The official Finnish statistics for those same deaths said 2.6. Country by country, the maps differ in an instructive way. In Finland the driver suicide usually dies head-on, against a much heavier vehicle; in Australia and America he dies alone against a fixed object. When Australia’s coroners examined 365 driver suicides between 2001 and 2017, they found 72 percent died in single-vehicle crashes, most against a tree or a concrete barrier. That is the trooper’s profile, feature for feature. And when Igor Radun and his colleagues gathered every study built on official counts, in 2024, the estimates ran from half a percent to ten percent of road deaths, and one Finnish year reached 17.6 percent.

The federal coding system gives vehicle-crash suicides their own code, X82, intentional self-harm by crashing of motor vehicle. A 2003 Monash University review, compiling the international numbers, found the CDC’s own database listing 190 such deaths for 1999 and 2000 combined, under a hundred a year, against more than forty thousand annual crash deaths. Maurizio Pompili’s comprehensive review in 2012 put the floor plainly: above two percent of traffic accidents are suicide behavior, probably underreported. Two percent of forty thousand is eight hundred. The code recorded fewer than a hundred.

In 1915 the state did away with individually elected coroners and handed the duties to each county’s prosecutor to save money. A coroner sued the state, arguing that “county attorneys cannot give the proper attention,” and lost. Manner of death in Nebraska has belonged to the county attorney ever since, in each of the ninety-three counties, and the state has no medical examiner. A coroner’s physician may certify the cause of death and may perform an autopsy when the coroner requests one. In the trooper’s years there was no autopsy mandate for anyone. The only mandate Nebraska has now, for children under nineteen, arrived in 1999, and even it lifts when the death came from, in the statute’s phrase, trauma resulting from an accident, absent suspicious circumstances. Picture the trooper’s midnight crash arriving at the courthouse: an adult, alone, dead of obvious trauma, on a highway.

The county attorney who signed a certificate in 1968 or 1982 lived in the county. He knew the family, or knew people who did. A suicide verdict carried a congregational stain and a financial one, and the financial clause had a pedigree. In 1898, in Ritter v. Mutual Life, the Supreme Court held that paying out when a sane man takes his own life would tempt him to die to provide for those dependent on him. The policies of the trooper’s era typically refused payment for suicide within their first two years. The word itself was a cruelty delivered to a widow in a town of eighteen hundred people. An accident verdict cost the community nothing and delivered mercy in a single word.

The researchers found the same pressure everywhere they looked. Litman’s Los Angeles team documented families destroying suicide notes. Edland watched verdicts bend to what a family could bear. And the planners themselves have confessed the disguise. In a 2007 Australian community survey, 14.8 percent of people who had planned a suicide had conceived doing it as a motor vehicle accident. Asked why, later planners told researchers a crash is quick, lethal, easy, and looks like an accident. The CDC published operational criteria for determining suicide in 1988 precisely because these calls varied so wildly. Suicide requires established intent, and a disguised suicide is a death engineered to leave intent unprovable.

Now the record disciplines the trooper, because honesty runs in both directions. He said usually, and usually fails. In 1982 federal figures show 57.3 percent of American traffic deaths were alcohol-related, the highest share since counting began. Edland’s own review found drinking before the crash in as many as 85 percent of single-vehicle deaths. In modern data, impairment among drivers in fatal crashes runs about four times higher at night than in daylight.

Fatigue on a straight empty highway produces the same physical signature as intent: no evasive action, no braking, a car that simply leaves its lane at seventy miles an hour. A sleeping driver and a suicidal driver leave identical tire tracks, and a drunk driver leaves nearly identical ones. And drink confounds everything twice, because alcohol is both a cause of crashes and a companion of suicides, the courage the impulse borrows. Suspicion, like mercy, is a story told about the dead. Both attach to the same ambiguous wreck, and evidence favors the suspicion in a minority of cases.

Nebraska’s own 1982 Traffic Accident Facts counts 261 deaths in 226 fatal crashes, one person killed every thirty-four hours, with thirty counties recording no road deaths at all. Of those 226 fatal crashes, 84 began with the car alone, fixed object, overturn, other noncollision, about thirty-seven percent. The report’s taxonomy has no category for intent; the state’s crash ledger could not even write the word suicide. Set the research band, two to six percent of lone fatal crashes, against those 84 wrecks, and Nebraska’s highways were hiding on the order of two to five suicides a year in the early eighties. Stretch the Finnish method, the only one that sends trained investigators to every scene, across Nebraska’s total driver deaths, and the count climbs toward a dozen. Recorded against the ledger’s zero, every estimate in the band says the same thing: the shortfall rode in cars. One honest limiter belongs here. Öhberg’s team found that reclassifying driver suicides barely moves a nation’s total suicide rate, because road suicides are only about one percent of all suicides.

Somewhere in the arithmetic is a man with a feed bill on the kitchen table and a wife asleep under a fan, a man who kissed no one goodbye because goodbye would have given it away. Somewhere in the arithmetic is the trooper himself, young once, walking his first ditch, learning that the dead do not always announce what they meant. He carried their faces for twenty years, and the paperwork never once asked him what he saw. That is the part of this story that still heats my blood.

Both certainties, the coroner’s and the trooper’s, die at the same scene. The only mind that knew is dead. The car is towed and crushed. Rural counties had no psychological autopsy tradition and no reconstruction budget. Case by case, the truth of any particular midnight wreck is unrecoverable, and anyone claiming certainty about one, in either direction, is guessing. What is recoverable is the pattern, and the pattern is consistent across five decades and four continents: disguised crashes are a real, recurring slice of lone-vehicle deaths, and systems that never look for them never find them. The trooper was wrong about most and right about existence. His error and the coroner’s error were unequal in consequence. Mercy mislabels a suicide as an accident. Suspicion mislabels an accident as a suicide. The first hides a death by despair from every prevention system that might have answered the next one. The second insults a grieving family.

Urban legends do get braided in Nebraska. The Platte is a braided river, thousands of shallow channels splitting and rejoining across an apparently simple bed, and the state’s folklore works the same way, stories splitting and rejoining until nobody can find the main channel. Folklore scholarship, Jan Harold Brunvand’s Encyclopedia of Urban Legends and the literature of occupational tales, defines the legend as a false story believed true and told as local fact. His tale runs the current backward. The false story believed true was the official one, printed weekly in the county papers: driver lost control. It wore a byline and a dateline. The whispered version, passed hand to hand among troopers and ambulance drivers, stood closer to the peer-reviewed record than the death certificates did.

The arrangement bought something final with value. Widows kept their insurance. Congregations buried their dead. Sons grew up believing their fathers had been unlucky instead of desperate. I will not mock that mercy; every small town in America has banked on it. The cost arrived later and elsewhere. A county that never records its despair never counts it, and a state that cannot count a problem cannot fund its answer. Today Nebraska records roughly 280 to 300 suicides a year, more than the 227 people killed on its roads in 2023. The state joined the federal violent death reporting system in 2016, and that program gathers its data with the same county attorneys who serve as coroners. Training for coroners was not required until 2009. In 2025 the Flatwater Free Press found that on average 87 percent of Nebraska’s unattended deaths are never autopsied. And when Washington barred its prosecutors from doubling as coroners on January 1 of that year, Nebraska’s ninety-three counties may have become the last in the country where the elected prosecutor also rules on the dead. A disguised death still defeats the ledger. The official suicide count remains what it has always been, a floor, and somewhere above that floor, on the order of a handful of deaths a year, the roads are still absorbing the difference.

The car now remembers. Under a federal rule finalized in December 2024, event data recorders must capture the twenty seconds before a crash: speed, brake, throttle, ten times a second, where the old rule captured five. Industry petitioned, and in May 2026 the government set a slower clock, phasing full compliance in through September 2031. Still, the direction is fixed. Within a decade the black box will testify about the last twenty seconds of nearly every fatal drive, whether anyone asks it to or not.

So the trooper’s kept secret survives investigation in a corrected shape. The phenomenon is real, and it was already being measured in the journals of his own working years. His claimed proportion runs too large; the honest share is a stubborn minority of cases. The justice question he raised is the durable one: a classification system that routes mercy through a prosecutor’s pen will always undercount despair. Every undercounted death leaves the next desperate driver without a sign that anyone else ever made his turn. In the Nebraska of his twenty years the answer is as close to settled as the evidence permits. Some of the cars that left those roads at night meant to leave.

Forty years on, the image still keeps its office hours. An empty two-lane west of Grand Island at two in the morning. The Platte braiding itself beneath a truss bridge. A speedometer needle pressed against seventy-five, no skid marks, a county attorney’s signature in a courthouse ledger, a claim check that clears in six weeks. The trooper told the truth too large, and he told it to a playwright because the state gave him no other place to put it. The evidence tells it in a smaller, harder shape, and the smaller shape still haunts: the count is the mercy, and the road keeps the rest.