One more night, Shana, an 18-year-old prostitute, was waiting for a new client to arrive when a trailer pulled up next to her on the shoulder. The trucker invited her to get on with the excuse of needing company. However, when the young woman herself entered the back of the cabin she was met with horror.
The room was a kind of traveling torture dungeon with chains and straps attached to the ceiling, and instruments to inflict pain. The next two weeks, Shana was raped and harassed to exhaustion. And though she managed to escape and report him, she eventually dropped the charges: without evidence, it was her word against his. This is how Robert Rhoades, a sadomasochist and dangerous serial killer, was able to get away with fifteen years.
Robert Benjamin Rhoades was born on November 22, 1945 in Council Bluffs (Iowa) and was raised, at least the first years of his childhood, by his mother in the absence of his father, a soldier in the US Army in West Germany. Upon his return, he began working as a firefighter.
Despite being an average student, participating in all kinds of extracurricular activities, the truth is that Robert always had problems socializing. He was a brilliant student, but with significant social deficiencies. Hence, as a teenager, he opted for a more criminal side. At the ages of 16 and 17, he already had a record for car theft and for participating in fights on public roads.
In fact, the same year he graduated and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, his father was arrested for sexual abuse of minors: his victim was a twelve-year-old girl. But the man took his own life before the trial was held. That was a blow to Robert.
On the other hand, being a member of the military, with all that this entailed, was not an impediment for the young man to continue committing crimes.
He was arrested for robbery, and soon after, expelled from the army. The year was 1968. On his return home, Robert was married three times and fathered a son from his first marriage, and had multiple trades. He went from being an employee in stores, restaurants and supermarkets, to a trucker.
It was this last profession that helped him materialize his most extreme sexual fantasies. We are talking about BDSM scenes. That is, bondage (sexual slavery), submission, domination, sadism and sadomasochism, practices that earned him the nickname Whips and Chains (whips and chains).
Robert liked to dress in leather and chains and enjoyed causing pain and being violent and dominating with his sexual partner. He even went as far as hiring sex slaves and forcing his third wife to participate in these increasingly masochistic orgies. However, this was not enough for him.
So he figured out a way to take the torture with him on his cross-country trucking trips: He built a fully equipped dungeon in the back of the cab of the trailer, with chains, straps, and ropes attached to the ceiling, and he bought pliers, pins, hooks and dildos to use during vexatious practices.
Inside this chamber, he kept dozens of women (mainly hitchhikers and prostitutes) for several days and weeks, whom he previously kidnapped, photographed as a souvenir, and then proceeded to inflict various tortures. Many of them came to suffer the murderer’s physical and sexual ordeal for weeks on end.
Although his confirmed murders occurred in the early 1990s, police believe there were many more due to the modus operandi used to target his potential victims. Among them, Pamela Milliken, who had consensual sex with Robert after hitchhiking in 1985.
“He told me he was going to Florida and wanted me to come with him. At one point, he pointed to a sign on his dashboard that read: ‘cash, weed or ass: no one rides for free’. He did not have money. He did not smoke marijuana, so she knew what it would be, ”the young woman recalled in an interview.
Hours later, Robert dropped her off at a bus station and nothing happened to her. But, years later, after learning about her crimes, the young woman wondered: “What if she had said no? Would he have held me, tortured and chained me, and held me for weeks or months? Would he have killed me or kept me, sold me? I don’t know”.
The one who did suffer the harassment and sexual assaults by what is known as The Truck Stop Killer (murderer of the truck stop) was Shan Holts, an 18-year-old prostitute who managed to escape death. “If there was any evidence she would press charges and report him,” she told officers after she told her story. But he shot down her story: she was a mere road whore and they wouldn’t believe her.
Unfortunately, Robert Rhoades continued his itinerant sadomasochistic journey until he took the lives of four people. In January 1990 he killed a newlywed couple, Patricia Walsh and Douglas Zyskowski, whom he caught hitchhiking.
He then shot Douglas dead and dumped his body near Interstate 10, east of Ozona, Texas. His body was found at the end of the month, although he was identified two years later. As for Patricia, she kept her prisoner for a week.
The killer repeatedly tortured and raped her in his traveling dungeon, until he shot her dead and dumped her body into a Utah canyon. Her remains, located by hunters in October, were identified thirteen years later thanks to dental records.
A month after the crime of the newlyweds, on February 3, Robert returned to acting and put another couple in his truck: Regina Kay Walters, 14, and Ricky Lee Jones, 20. Both had run away from home because they were not allowed to be together and they decided to look for their lives. But the murderer trucker crossed his path.
Again, Robert shot the boy in the head and disposed of the body in Mississippi (it was found in March, but it was identified in July 2008) and, regarding Regina, he kept her for several weeks in his dungeon.
In fact, he even took several photographs of him, as a trophy, and allowed him to call his family so they wouldn’t suspect anything. The only clue he gave his father in one of those calls is that he had cut his hair.
During that time in captivity, Robert beat her countless times, tortured her with fishing hooks, and repeatedly raped her. Her hell ended when the killer strangled her with a wire and left her naked body in a barn off Interstate 70 in Illinois. When the police found her body seven months later, she was already decomposing.
On April 1, 1990, a state trooper from the Arizona Division of Highway Patrol sighted a truck on the shoulder of the highway. He approached the vehicle to see if the driver needed help when he heard unusual squeals. He had discovered a gruesome scene: a naked woman was gagged and chained inside.
Robert tried to justify the situation as a private and consensual practice, but the victim’s terrified look said it all. The officer then arrested the trucker, called for backup, and pulled the woman to safety. Inside he also located a .25 caliber automatic pistol.
Once at the police station, Robert was charged with unlawful arrest and sexual assault pending questioning. Meanwhile, the scientific police searched both the truck and his home and seized, apart from torture instruments, numerous photographs of women.
Among them, those of Patricia and Regina, murdered months before, as well as a pile of white towels. “One of which was filled with blood,” the investigation report said. It seems that the trucker forced his victims to lie on a towel spread out on the bed before torturing them.
The collected evidence led the investigators to see the same pattern and to connect the last two double murders perpetrated that same year. They had caught one of the most dangerous serial killers in America.
In 1994, Robert Rhoades was convicted of the first-degree murder of Regina Kay Walters and sentenced to life in prison without parole. He was sent to the Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois.
Once behind bars, the prisoner confessed to his first two crimes, those of Patricia Walsh and Douglas Zyskowski, for which he had not yet been charged. Hence the murders were solved in 2012, more than twenty years after they were committed. The court sentenced Robert to a second life in prison after pleading guilty: that was the deal he made with the prosecution to avoid the death penalty.
Although no further incriminating evidence has ever been found against the sadomasochistic trucker, his truck’s records match more than fifty missing-child reports over a fifteen-year interval.
Therefore, everything indicates that Robert Rhoades could have murdered close to fifty women throughout his criminal career. We are talking about one to three victims per year, cases that number in the dozens and that, to this day, are still unresolved.
