Robert Ben Rhoades was a long-haul trucker who kept a torture chamber in the cab of his rig. He is known as the Truck Stop Killer, holds three murder convictions in two states, and was caught by chance.
He was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa on November 22, 1945 and worked in shops, warehouses and restaurants before becoming a trucker. The compartment in his cab was concealed between the seats and fitted with handcuffs bolted to the ceiling, so that women could be chained upright and tortured over days. It is described in Alva Busch's book about the case, Roadside Prey.
Douglas Scott Zyskowski and his wife Patricia Candace Walsh left Seattle in November 1989, hitchhiking to Georgia to preach, and accepted a ride from him near El Paso. He killed Zyskowski immediately and left his body beside Interstate 10 near Ozona, Texas, where it was found in January 1990 and identified in 1992. He kept Walsh for over a week, raping and torturing her, then shot her several times and left her in Millard County, Utah, where deer hunters found her remains that October. She was Jane Doe for thirteen years until forensic scientists at the University of Arizona matched X-rays of her jaw in May 2003.
A month after Walsh's death he picked up two teenage runaways from Texas, Regina Kay Walters, fourteen, and Ricky Lee Jones. He killed Walters in a derelict barn in Illinois and photographed her; Jones's body has never been found and no one has been charged over him.
He was caught on April 1, 1990 when Arizona police stopped at his semitrailer, parked on the highway with its hazard lights on, and found him torturing a woman inside. He was convicted of that and imprisoned, and a search of his house turned up photographs of Walters and of Walsh. He was extradited to Illinois before his Arizona release and convicted of the first-degree murder of Regina Walters, receiving life without parole at Menard Correctional Center; sources give the conviction as 1992 or 1994.
Utah extradited him in 2005 for Walsh and Zyskowski, then dropped the charges in 2006 so that the families would not have to testify in two states, and Texas took the cases. In March 2012, in Sutton County, he pleaded guilty to two counts of capital murder in exchange for the state not seeking death, and received two life sentences stacked behind the Illinois term. He was sixty-six.
Estimates of a much higher toll circulate. A 1996 report cited officials who believed he had been killing about three women a month by the early 1990s, and published victim ranges run to fifty or more. None of it has been established, and this roster records the three convictions and the missing boy.