10 Disturbing Details Surrounding Robert Ben Rhoades, The Truck Stop Killer

6 /10 A Heartbreaking Photograph

One case in which this is evident is the particularly tragic and horrifying murder of Regina Kay Walters, at fourteen years of age.

When agents revised Rhoades’ apartment after his capture (at a point where they considered him a serial rapist but had no evidence of him killing), they found a series of photographs of a young woman with short hair, staring in fear or vacantly at the camera.

The photos had been taken for several days: they turned out to be the last images of Regina Kay Walters alive.

5 /10 Ironies Of Fate

At the same time, her boyfriend, the man she ran away with from their houses in Pasadena, California, was being sought for her murder.

It turned out to be that Ricky Lee Jones, eighteen at the time, had been murdered immediately after being picked up by Rhoades, and his body was dumped in a nearby location. It was recovered in 1991 but only identified in 2008 as himself.

As a chronicler observed: “It’s his sad epitaph that he was charged in absentia in Bond County, Illinois, for the murder of the girl he loved.”

4 /10 Almost Caught

Some of his victims managed to escape, “lucky” enough to “just” have been tortured (terms that must be used relatively, in comparison with the fate of other women kidnapped by Rhoades).

One of these, an eighteen-year-old who escaped in 1990 after he forgot to close her handcuffs once, denounced him to the police and gave a clear identification of the kidnapper and his truck.

When the police brought Rhoades before her, however, she looked down and denied that it was him: she would later confess that he was his abuser, but, after spending two weeks being tortured by him, she was just too afraid to recognize him publicly. So was Rhoades let free again, ready to roam the roads and keep killing.

3 /10 Three A Month

By that year, it is estimated that his murders had risen to three a month and that they would have kept on increasing if he hadn’t been stopped.

As he traveled around the same cities between 1989 and 1990 at least thirty-six times, over fifty cold cases of desiccated bodies found in those areas are suspected of being his work and can be circumstantially connected to him.

For lack of evidence, however, probably, most of his crimes will never be identified and formally attributed to him.

2 /10 He Was Caught By Chance

In April of 1990, finally, Rhoades made his final mistake. He parked his truck with hazard lights on, which attracted Arizona State Trooper Mike Miller’s attention, who approached to investigate and offer help.

But instead of a driver in trouble, he found a woman, nude, chained, and severely beaten, screaming in fear in the back of the truck. He immediately detained the driver and released her, as he called for backup.

It was over, but it almost wasn’t: by the time backup arrived, Rhoades had managed to move his cuffed hands from his back to his front and had untied his driver’s seatbelt.

He could have killed officer Miller that day and keep on going: it lefts the chronicler to wonder if he hadn’t done so sometime before.

1 /10 Smooth, Travelin' Man

Rhoades behaved in police custody as a smooth, polite man, but his capacity for convincing others of his innocence wasn’t enough in front of all the evidence.

He was convicted first as a kidnapper, later being tried for the murders that began to be attributed to him. It remains to wonder how he could commit so many before finally being caught.

In a newspaper interview after his capture, special agent Mark Young of the FBI observed: “Killers like Rhoades often pick on vulnerable, anonymous people who won’t be reported missing immediately. The skeletonized bodies are found, and nobody knows what really happened.”