Interesting thought. I'm picturing a speeding truck sort of zig zagging and swerving down the road? Perhaps. I'm not convinced you could get up sufficient speed on any of the roadways where she was found. I went back and looked at the map again. There aren't any straight always to get up that kind of speed. My DH got a huge dent in the back side of the cab of his truck, beneath the back window of the cab, from a beer keg once. 1. It was very heavy, 2. It was slick and smooth, 3. It was rounded, 3. It went forward when he stopped, banging into the cab, not backward out of the tailgate.
As another poster commented, you'd have to accelerate extremely rapidly for something to slide or roll backward out of the bed of a truck. And I definitely think the tailgate would need to be missing or open, and no ordinary car (or "production vehicle" as another poster put it) can accelerate that fast. We've carried all kinds of loads around in that truck, and I've ridden back there at highway speeds. It's acceleration or deceleration that would cause stuff to move. Or wind. We lost a wardrobe box on an access road once because one thin edge poked up over the top of the cab where the wind could catch it. A 50 pound body down in the cab, even in a tarp wouldn't catch that kind of wind on a residential street. He also lost a mattress once: again wind.
I presented you scenario to him, and we looked at the map together.
He will allow, somewhat reluctantly: IF someone loaded a body foot first, so that the majority of the weight was toward the tailgate; and IF they were zigging and zagging swerving violently back and forth, and IF there was no tailgate a body *might* work its way toward the end and then momentum, and the lopsided weight of a torso going overboard first and pulling the feet along after, rather than the other way around then maybe with really reckless speeding this could happen.
But he also says that if HE were loading a body into a truck bed, he'd put it head and torso first because that's how you carry a person, you hold the weight, set that down, and the slide the rest of the body into the bed. He says we've had loads of loads back there that never move at all. Most of the time they don't. We bring plastic bags of groceries home in the truck, and they never move. We do take care to put them near the cab, not out on the end near the tailgate.
He has driven trucks with both a solid tailgate and the kind with a mesh net. He says, "stuff doesn't fall out of trucks."
schmae SCHMAE where are you, you must remember?
