Scary Stories

Possible Encounter With Handcuffed Man

When I was a teenager, I lived in a small town located about 30 miles south of Atlanta, Georgia. I did not get my driver’s license or my first car until I was almost 20 years old, so between the ages of 16 and 19, I hitchhiked frequently. This was in the early 70s when people still hitchhiked and many drivers were still willing to pick people up, in spite of the dangers and risks posed to both driver and rider.

For the most part, I never had any trouble with the people who offered me rides, but occasionally, I would get picked up by someone who would totally creep me out. This is a story about one creepy ride I accepted and how 25 years later, I would discover to my great shock that I may have been much luckier at the time than I had ever imagined.

This incident occurred sometime in the summer of 1974 when I was 17 years old. At that time, I was a 6 foot tall, 175 pound, blond hair and blue eyed guy who did not have any trouble connecting with girls for dates. In fact, my story begins with me standing on the side of the highway with my thumb out as I was trying to get back home after spending the weekend with my girlfriend who lived in downtown Atlanta. (I was traveling south, away from the city and out into the country where I lived with my parents).

I recall that I had only had my thumb out for about 15 minutes when a man in a big white Lincoln Town Car (a very large and expensive car at the time) pulled over. As I walked up to the car, I scanned the inside and looked at the driver, trying to size the situation up as I always did, just to be safe. What I saw was a tidy car with a man in the driver seat who looked to be in his late 30s or mid-40s, dressed in an expensive suit and tie. He had short black hair, wore black rimmed eye glasses and appeared to be rather on the thin side with a gaunt face and dark eyes. I never learned his name, but for the sake of this story, we’ll call him “Town Car Man.”

When I got up to the passenger side of the car, I leaned down toward the open window and told him where I was heading to and asked him if he was going that far, to which he replied that he was in a soft voice, and waved me into the car. I was not at all wary of him, as by all appearances, he was just an ordinary middle class business man, and I opened the door and got into the front seat next to him without any hesitation.

Generally when I accepted rides from strangers while hitchhiking, I liked to try to engage them in chat, sort of as a way to “pay” them for the ride by providing good conversation and also to put them at ease about picking me up by showing them that I was harmless and not a creep (even though I felt that I did not at all look dangerous, only if you could call having long hair and dressing in the hippie fashion of the time “dangerous”).

However, when I began trying to chat with Town Car Man in my normal fashion, with typical small talk, I instantly started getting bad vibes from him, as I could tell that he was mostly ignoring what I was saying and instead, kept trying to steer the conversation toward asking me personal questions about myself, such as how old I was, where I went to school, if I had a girlfriend, etc. I tried to answer his questions politely as possible, without really giving away much real information. But Town Car Man kept getting more and more personal, asking questions that hinted at whether or not I was sexually active with my girlfriend, telling me that when he was my age he went around “horny about half of the time” and had always been on the lookout for sexual adventures, ha ha ha.

As the ride progressed and we were going further and further out into the country, I began to get very uneasy as I started to sense that something was not quite right with him. We had left the populated city behind and were now traveling down an old two lane highway through countryside that was sparsely populated. There seemed to be hardly any other cars on the road. The more that Town Car Man continued to ask me questions about myself, wanting to know very personal things about me, like if I had ever had sex with my girlfriend, all while glancing over at me from time to time with a sort of creepy “knowing” look in his eye, as if he was privately enjoying some dirty secret that only he knew about, the more uncomfortable I became. I don’t know how better to describe it than that and it really began to make me feel uneasy, as his manner seemed very cagey and I totally sensed that there was some underlying motive to his questioning. It really put me on guard. I began to think about what I should do next, as in, should I ask him to pull over and let me out, even though I was only about half the way to my destination and out in the middle of nowhere. For the first time, I began to realize just how vulnerable I felt.

But what really made me start to feel uneasy was when he started asking me if I wanted a drink of liquor, indicating that he had several bottles with him in the trunk and that if I wanted some, he would pull over to the side of the road and “mix me up a stiff drink.” Because I was growing more and more uncomfortable, I declined his offer, saying that I did not drink (which was a lie, as even at that age, I was already regularly drinking with friends). But he would not take no for an answer and he kept insisting that I should really “just have one drink” because he was such a great drink mixer and it would only take a minute for him to fix a “very special one” for me.

After I had declined this offer for something like the fourth time, he abruptly changed tactics again, and began telling me a story about when he was about my age and a young guy in the Army and how he used to hitchhike a lot too, and that he would sometimes get picked up by men who wanted to pay him money to have sex with them, ha ha ha, and had anything like that ever happened to me? By this time I had had quite enough of all of this and I looked him straight in the eye and said, “No, that has never happened to me and nobody had better ever offer that to me.” Well, the “knowing” look vanished instantly from his face and I could tell that he was totally irked by how I had just reacted to his story.

That exchange between us totally changed the dynamic inside of the car and he became very quiet. After a few minutes of this uneasy silence, he spoke up and told me that he was turning at the next intersection and that I would need to get out there (even though he had told me when he first picked me up that he was going my entire way). At this point, I was actually very relieved and now only wanted to get out of the car. When the car came to a stop, I had just barely gotten out of the car and pushed the door closed when he stepped on the gas and zoomed off, literally jerking the handle of the car out of my hand.

I remember that I stood there watching him drive away until he had disappeared down the road and that my heart was beating very fast. I was both scared and angry at what had just happened. After I had calmed down, I resumed hitchhiking until I got another ride that took me home without further incident.

Fast forward 25 years: It’s 1999 and I had all but forgotten about my creepy ride with “Town Car Man.” I’m on the Internet reading through a true crime website when I stumbled onto a story about an ultra-creepy guy named Robbert Bernett, a man who had been arrested after a series of vicious attacks on men whom he had picked up in his car, drugged, handcuffed, and then set their genitals on fire with a flammable liquid. The attacks took place over a 20+ year period, starting around 1968 in the Atlanta area and ending with his arrest in 1991. Prior to Bennett’s arrest, this attacker became known as “The Handcuff Man” and talk within the local gay community was that he was targeting men whom he thought were gay prostitutes.

When I saw the photo of Bennett that accompanied the article, my jaw literally dropped open, and the memories of my ride that day in 1974 came flooding back. I was certain I was looking at a picture of “Town Car Man” and I was absolutely floored.

I do not have any way to prove that the creepy guy who picked me up was in fact this Robert Bennett. But the physical resemblance between what I remember about Town Car Man and the photo of Bennett is absolutely uncanny. And the persistent offer by “Town Car Man” to mix me a “special drink” and his questions about whether or not I ever had sex with men for money also seems to indicate that possibility.

I should point out that, even though this story took place in the early 70s in the “deep south” of Georgia, I was actually OK with gay people at the time and even knew a few people back then who were gay. So I did not have a problem with homosexuality at all (and still don’t). But being heterosexual, I also had zero interest in having sex with other men. And even if I had been game for that sort of thing, I always found it highly distasteful when people assumed that they could act in such an unwanted, cagey fashion regarding sexual matters with complete strangers. I always have and always will find that to be extremely creepy.

Tl;dr: As a 17 year old teenage boy, I was picked up while hitchhiking by a creepy middle-aged man who kept trying to get me to have a “special drink” he wanted to prepare for me, and who was trying to determine whether or not I was the type who was willing to have gay sex for money. 25 years later, I discovered that he might have been the serial offender known as “The Handcuff Man” who assaulted and maimed gay men, and people whom he thought were gay, over a 20 year period in Georgia and Florida.