Highly recommended: The confessions of a dying Grand Rapids serial killer

He described prostitutes he encountered in his trucking job as "pieces of meat," just pay them and get them out of the truck afterward. But that's not how everyone values life, now is it? And these were girls who could have then ended up dead at the cold hands of Garry Artman, a Florida trucker in his 60s arrested in Mississippi in 2022 and suspected of killing up to 11 women in the Grand Rapids area of Michigan in the 1990s.

WOOD-TV Channel 8 in Grand Rapids has just done a truly gripping documentary on Artman. It is a really well-done look at the case, giving heart and life to the victims of this killer through interviews with their family members, showing these prostitutes as real human beings who did not deserve to die. I loved every minute of the doc.

To see and hear this man talking after his arrest is just chilling. To watch the expression on his face. I could barely close the gaping jaw on my own face as I watched his interrogation.

It was DNA evidence that signaled the end for this killer. But DNA only tied him to one of the murders. He was convicted of that murder in 2023, and shortly thereafter he was terminally ill with cancer in prison and wanted to talk.

Like the Michigan serials that I have researched, John Eric Armstrong and Benjamin ("Tony") Atkins, Artman left survivors. Unlike Armstrong and Atkins, Artman took souvenirs from his victims -- police found lots of women's garments in his storage unit. Another difference: he used a knife a lot of the time, strangled some of the time, whereas Armstrong and Atkins only strangled, and usually with their bare hands.

Artman's statement "They needed to die" is very telling. One would tend to classify him as a mission-oriented killer, according to the classifications established for serials over the years. Whatever the motive, Artman died in 2023, so the rest of the story, we'll never know.