Rural highway stalker in white pickup with dark windows terrifying Montana women

A traveling health care worker’s terrifying escape from a highway stalker in a white pickup has prompted a flood of similar reports. Dozens of women across north-central Montana are sharing eerily similar stories of being followed and harassed on remote roads.

Lizette Lamb, 48, was driving north on Highway 19 toward Glasgow on the evening of April 10 when she noticed a newer white Ford four-door pickup with dark tinted windows behind her. She had stopped at the Ole’ Mercantile in Grass Range, population 125, and remembered seeing a pickup backed in alongside the cafe. “Kind of gave her the heebie-jeebies,” said her husband, Travis Lamb, an Iraq War combat veteran. “My wife has worked in a prison, so she’s used to going with her gut.”

About a mile and a half down the road, the white pickup was behind her. She slowed to let them pass. They slowed with her. She sped up. They sped up. By the time she reached a remote intersection 23 miles up the road, she knew something was wrong. She tried to call her husband and then 911. No service.

About two miles from the Missouri River crossing, the truck got aggressive. Travis said it rode so close that his wife could no longer see its windshield, only the grille. Then it pulled out as if to pass and swerved into her in what he described as an attempted PIT maneuver — a law enforcement technique used to spin out a fleeing vehicle. “She was fortunate, kind of timed it to when they went to turn into her and hit her, she sped up,” Travis said. “And they missed.”

That’s when Lizette pulled her Springfield XDM 9mm pistol out of the center console. She didn’t point it, but she made sure they could see it. The white pickup hit its brakes, threw a U-turn in a spray of dust and gravel, and headed back toward Grass Range.

Travis Lamb’s Facebook post about the incident went off like a flare. He tallied 36 accounts of similar experiences in the same remote stretch of Montana. The pattern was consistent: a white pickup, often a Ford, sometimes with out-of-state plates, tailgating women on isolated two-lane highways after dark.

Joni Hartford of Lewistown had her own near-identical encounter on Easter evening, days before Lamb. Heading north on Highway 87 from Billings, a big pickup rode her bumper for miles. “He was so close behind me, I couldn’t see his taillights, but I could see his marker lamps on his mirrors,” she said. She couldn’t make out the color in the dark. North of Roundup, she caught a break when an Amish buggy slowed traffic. “I darted around the Amish buggy right before a blind hill, and he couldn’t get around them, and I just gunned it,” she said. “I never saw him again.”

Penny Ronning, co-founder of the Yellowstone Human Trafficking Task Force, had a similar experience in 2022 while driving alone on gravel back roads north of Winifred. A four-door white pickup with blacked-out windows pulled in behind her. “That was what made it frightening,” she said. “It was that I was followed.” However, Ronning cautioned against framing these incidents as trafficking attempts. “Human trafficking is the use of force, fraud or coercion to compel a person into commercial sex acts or labor against their will,” she said. “Just because someone is being followed, that doesn’t rise to the level of human trafficking.”

Krista Manley, owner of the Ole’ Mercantile, reviewed her store’s surveillance footage but found no sign of the white truck at her gas station. She holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology and understands how stress impacts memory. “We’re absolutely not arguing the authenticity of the report in any way, shape or form,” she said. Her cameras remain a resource for investigators. “We know that this highway has a reputation for trafficking, drug moving, all of those different things,” she said. “That’s why we are as diligent as we are.”

Lizette Lamb said she’s thankful she was traveling with her sidearm. “Unfortunately, that’s the world we live in now. Montana, in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “This is just a reminder that it is happening. It is real.”