WARNING, DISTRESSING CONTENT: Robert Ben Rhoades is believed to have targeted vulnerable hitchhikers, sex workers, and young women alone at truck stops – kidnapping them before dumping their bodies
A twisted serial killer turned his truck into a torture chamber and killed more than 50 young girls and women in a horrifying campaign of evil – even leaving a twisted message for one of his victim’s parents.
Robert Ben Rhoades, known as the “Truck Stop Killer”, targeted his female victims and carried out his reign of terror in the US between 1975-1990. They were often vulnerable hitchhikers, sex workers, or young women alone at truck stops.
Rhoades’ trucking routes crossed state lines, and detectives believe he used the isolation of interstate travel to evade law enforcement. According to investigators, at his peak, he may have been abducting and torturing women in his rig for weeks, before killing them and dumping their bodies in remote locations across Texas, Utah and Illinois.
His first confirmed murder was 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters, who was abducted in Illinois in 1990. He raped and tortured her, took a harrowing photo of her raising her hands to defend herself, before murdering her in an abandoned barn.
Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director of the FBI for 25 years, told The US Sun: “The sheer evil and cruelty of these killers is shocking. During my FBI career, I saw a lot of horrific crime scenes but these trucker-killers are particularly gruesome in the way they carry out their evil against their victims.
“[Rhoades] hung Regina from fish hooks inside his rig, and even called her father to tell him, ‘I’ve made some changes. I cut her hair.’ Rhoades took a photo of Regina before he killed her. That photo, with Regina pleading for her life, is ghastly.” His horrifying torture rig was equipped with handcuffs on the ceiling, which allowed Rhoades to chain his female victims so that he could torture them before killing them. Two of his other known victims were newlyweds Patricia Candace Walsh, 24, and Douglas Scott Zyskowski, 25, who left Seattle and began hitchhiking toward Georgia in late 1989.
The gospel missionaries accepted a ride from Rhoades, who shot Mr Zyskowski and dumped his body next to a highway. He took Mrs Walsh alive before torturing and sexually assaulting her in the truck repeatedly over the course of a week. Her remains were found in October 1990 by deer hunters in Millard County, Utah.
After a dishonourable discharge from the Marines in the late 1960s, Rhoades became a long‐haul truck driver with a sleeper cab rig and soon began his campaign of terror. Though he has only been convicted of a handful of murders have been, law-enforcement estimates place his suspected victim count at 50 or more women and girls, citing his pattern of kidnappings, torture locations and long-haul routes.
On April 1, 1990, Rhoades was eventually arrested in Arizona on charges of aggravated assault, sexual assault, and unlawful imprisonment after a state trooper discovered a woman chained inside the sleeper cab of his truck. Four years later, he was convicted of Regina’s murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
The scourge of truck killers became so dire in the US that the FBI set up a special unit called the Highway Serial Killings Initiative to track down the depraved murderers. Mr Figliuzzi told The Daily Mail the job attracts a certain type of personality that may be predisposed to murder.
He explained: “There’s a thing that happens in years of exposure to trucking that causes clinical depression – incredibly sedentary lifestyle, incredibly bad diets. I tried very hard that week but inevitably it’s tough to get something healthy in truck stop places and food diners.”
He went on: “Part cowboy, part fighter pilot, and part hermit, long-haul truckers glide along the edge of a certain seam in the fabric of our society – the seam that separates their reality from ours. Killer truckers exploit that seam.”