As a 15-year-old, the author left home and became a hitchhiker, hopping from semi to semi on the interstate. The morning I left, I asked him to take me to the closest truck stop so I could get a ride going toward California. I said it was his choice. Reading it, I found it hard not to hear the man telling me to "run.". Robert Ben Rhoades (defendant), pursuant to negotiations with the State, on September 11, 1992, pled guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to imprisonment for natural life. "That's from my old SWAT jacket." They had to make up stories for me: "I got a beaver needs a ride to Flagstaff for her grandma's funeral don't want no trouble, c'mon back." His wife, Debra Davis, was from Texas. Lisa Pennal's full statement, it turned out, had been destroyed for file space. I ran my story past her. I began by Googling things like "dead girl truck stop Martinsburg." What is known about him in the 1980s is murky. They found her near a Dumpster behind the restaurant at the Gateway Travel Plaza in Breezewood. He grinned. And who's going to believe him? Debra told me that "Bob" always wore matching Dickies, usually dark blue. Eventually, law enforcement discovered Robert Ben Rhoades was a serial killer, in addition to being a sexual sadist who enjoyed torturing women and girls. Griselda Blanco. "She was on the end of the roll with Regina," he said. Bottles of isobutyl nitrite and rotgut aphrodisiacs like Locker Room and Spanish Fly crowded the counters by the register, along with the iconic bumper sticker ASS, GAS, OR GRASSNO ONE RIDES FOR FREE. I remember coming down through the Blue Ridge Mountains in a truck with its brakes on fire and dropping over Chester Gap in the middle of the night when it was still hot and the air was loud with the chirping of bugs. One snowy night several months later, I was hitchhiking through Amherst, Massachusetts, and a carful of students from Hampshire College picked me up and let me stay with them. Silence fell over the Sacramento County courtroom as Judge Loyd H. Mulkey . The whole thing seemed so uncanny. We both had our own systems, our own rituals, and our own beliefs about what people were really like and how they acted under pressure. The 27-year-old woman, who had been restrained by both her hands and ankles, was freed by the officer, and once at the police station, she told the officers the horrifying story of how she'd ended up shackled inside the truck and covered in red welts and lacerations. Robert Ben Rhoades Father Killed himself after being charged with Women couldn't really get on the "zoo channel," as they called it then, because the sound of their voice would trigger twenty minutes of crass chatter. * Only days before Regina Walters was taken, Rhoades had been detained by the police in Houston for the possible sexual assault and kidnapping of Holts. He said he didn't want to get caught up in anything time-consuming. There was no safe way for me to get it. It was off the side of the freeway and probably very much like the one Regina Walters was found in. The case of Robert Ben Rhoades serves as an excellent example of the type and nature of case to which VICAP s services would provide critical assistance and support. Regina Kay Walters is remembered among his victims for the terrifying photograph he took of her moments before he murdered her. Akin to the murders of Douglas and Patricia, Robert killed Ricky immediately and disposed of his body but held Regina captive for a long period of time, periodically calling her father from a payphone. Robert Ben Rhoades Is A Member Of . That's exactly like him!" There's a picture of him in leather and chains that floats around the Internet. Although he was convicted of three murders, the police have always believed he was responsible for many more. Back then, though, my thoughts weren't on misogyny; they were on logistics. Regina Kay Walters 14 years old died by the hands of Robert Ben When authorities in Texas were notified, they recognized her as being the same girl in some eerie photographs they seized from Rhoades' home after his April 1990 arrest. I don't think either of us knew what to do about it. But nobody had to tell me that people like Rhoades killed people like me and got away with it. Rhoades saw what Debra was looking at. The body was found in 1990, but not identified until 1992. He said a gun was about control but a knife is personal. You didn't do it.". If Rhoades hadn't been stopped by a patrolman on I-10 in Casa Grande, Ariz., in 1990, his crimes might never have been discovered. "So was the trucker I met a true psychopath?" People don't leave home because things are going well; they leave because they feel they have to, and right or wrong, that's how I felt. "Bob was obsessed with how they used an imaginary secret society to keep her from running away," Davis said. I only ran about a hundred yards before I turned and hid, because I didnt know if I was being chased. He requested information on missing Caucasian females aged 13 to 15 years old who had disappeared six to nine months earlier. In 1994, Rhoades was convicted of the first degree murder of Regina Kay Walters and was slated to be tried for two more before charges were dropped due to the wishes of victims' families. Rhoades didn't live a double life as much as a shadowed one. The phrase "play, pass, run" is used twice in the letter. Smith said prosecutors believe Rhoades killed Zyskowski relatively soon after picking him up and dumped his body along Interstate 10 in Ozona, Texas. The remarkable thing is that when she did, she didn't dump him. In January 1990, Douglas Zyskowski and his wife Patricia Candace Walsh were hitchhiking to Georgia from Seattle on their honeymoon when they accepted a ride from Robert. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. She never reported the incident, as she had promised Robert. We do the interview, but I don't take notes. I watched the truck idle on the side of the road until it finally pulled off. The prisms of Regina Walters, Shana Holts, and Lisa Pennal refracted into a set of iconsone in the backseat of a car laughing as she leans on the headrest, one with the shorn red-gold hair and an expression of resilience, one slightly crazy and ready to fighteach casting her own light, each a hologram of girlhood. Rhoades was identified as a suspect . Truck stops in the 1980s were closed worlds where what went on passed unnoticed on the outside. This tells me that he liked manipulating through terror. They kept her from running away by convincing her that a secret society called The Company would find her and bring her back. "We laugh at death," he told me. I had to jump when you slowed down because you were going to rape me. There was that one girl. She was a drifter." 2023 Cinemaholic Inc. All rights reserved. Martinsburg was nothing but a pinprick, just a dot on a minor route feeding into a midsize highway on the outskirts of Altoona, PA, not the sort of place you'd expect to find a busy truck stop. "Were there any murders that summer?" At the center of everything was my own breath. She ran. I left home in early January, hitchhiking south from New York City with my 21-year-old boyfriend. Robert found pleasure in taunting Reginas father about his daughters disappearance and the fact he had cut off her hair. There was talk of me going to live with my dad in Virginia, where I had traditionally spent my summers. Approximately one month after killing Patricia Walsh, Robert Ben Rhoades picked up 18-year-old Ricky Lee Jones and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Regina Kay Walters, not far from their hometown of Pasadena, Texas. He kidnapped women, tortured and raped them for weeks before killing them. As many he would have picked up were transients themselves, they would most likely not be reported missing for some time after he abducted them. Your IP: Douglas remains were identified in 1992. In that one, driven by penis envy, a woman's inner child taunts a man into seducing her so that she can be freed from guilt for her own "sadistic fantasies." I said he could do it in a few minutes. But in the picture, with her inch-long hair and dog collar, she looked like a gutter punk, like any girl you might see in any university district. I asked. He may be right, but certainly not because he's innocent. His bearing shifted. And while I was getting more adept at survival, he was very likely getting more adept at killing. He was not wearing jeans. The sentence of death had been a possibility because on May 6, 1992, the State had filed a notice that it intended to seek the death penalty. She had a stocking down her throat, I think. Regina Kay Walters 14 years old died by the hands of Robert Ben Rhoades. Her facial expression could be described as a combination of desperation and abject fear. Robert Ben Rhoades Father Killed himself after being charged with Fondoleding a fourteen year old girl. When you get in a truck at a truck stop, everyone notices. A few minutes later, he pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the road by some woods, took out a hunting knife, and told me to get into the back of the cab. Truck stop killer: Robert Ben Rhoades, described by authorities as a sadistic killer, was first jailed in 1990 for killing a 14-year-old runaway girl in Illinois (left), also pleaded guilty to. He could be the killer. This is the last picture ever taken of Regina Walters. Ex-Wife Of Serial Killer Robert Ben Rhoades Speaks Out | Evil Lives Here: After the Evil. But, months later, she learned that Robert wasnt a pilot. Her murder happened twenty-seven years ago and was essentially pre-Internet. Since 1957, GQ has inspired men to look sharper and live smarter with its unparalleled coverage of style, culture, and beyond. Even at the time, I'd wondered if my running was part of the game. Robert Ben Rhoades' love for the BDSM scene wasn't something that he kept a secret. On the couch beside me was a large pillow with the FBI seal. In Martinsburg, West Virginia, where the truck stop should be is a massive Walmart stretching flat and endless along a parking lot the size of a lake. The FBI theorized Robert had killed at least three women per month. These are narratives we know. Friend, 43, says she wants "California voters to know what kind of offenders are on death row," men like Robert Boyd Rhoades, who sodomized, tortured and killed 8-year-old Michael Lyons two . Being 16 and in college is an easier thing to talk about. You called and left a message a day or so after I dropped you off, saying I was going to read about a dead 17-year-old hitchhiker they found in a truck stop and that it wasn't you.". He was convicted for three murders, and slated to be tried for two more before charges were dropped due to the wishes of victims' families. Around the same time that Robert joined the military, his father was arrested for molesting a twelve-year-old girl and ultimately committed suicide while awaiting trial. Like Regina, I also had a little journal and probably wrote something in it that night, because it was far too cold to sleep. He talked about it frequently and applied its ideas. I remember driving around Ohio howling along with Bruce Springsteen and buzzed out of my brain on Diet Cokes and being sad that the ride ended because it was a safe one and I had almost been able to be myself for a second, but that second had passed. Six weeks later, though, we parted ways. 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