Robert Ben Rhoades was an over-the-road truck driver from Houston who was caught on April 1, 1990, because he left his hazard lights on. An Arizona officer stopped to check on his parked rig at the edge of Casa Grande and found a woman held captive in the sleeper. The evidence gathered from that truck, and from his Houston apartment a few days later, tied him to the death of Regina Walters, a 14-year-old runaway from Pasadena, Texas, whose body was found that September in a barn in rural Illinois. He pleaded guilty to her murder in 1992 and was sentenced to natural life in prison.
Thirteen years later a woman whose body had lain unidentified in a Utah sheriff's office was named as Patricia Candace Walsh, a young newlywed who had been hitchhiking with her husband, Douglas Scott Zyskowski. Rhoades was charged in Utah, then in Texas, and in March 2012 he pleaded guilty in West Texas to two counts of capital murder in exchange for the state not seeking the death penalty. Those three killings are the only ones proven against him. Investigators who worked the case have said they believe there were others.
Little is reliably known about Rhoades's life before 1990. In news and court records he appears as a long-haul trucker based in Houston who drove for a living across much of the country; trucking records cited by the Texas Observer in 2012 showed him regularly passing through 22 states. The Tucson Weekly, in a long 1996 profile built on interviews with the officers and FBI agents on the case, reported that he had been married three times. His third wife told agents that his sadism went well beyond the "kinky sex" he described to them. On the CB radio he used the handle "Whips and Chains," a name the woman found in his truck said he had given himself, according to the Associated Press.
Investigators described a man who seemed ordinary. Rick Barnhart, the Casa Grande police detective who handled the Arizona case, told the Tucson Weekly that Rhoades "acted so normal" and had "a knack for persuasion." The paper reported that he told the woman found in his truck that he had been doing this for 15 years. No court has tested that claim.
In the early hours of April 1, 1990, Officer Mike Miller of the Arizona Department of Public Safety saw a Peterbilt tractor parked on Interstate 10 at the Casa Grande city limits with its hazard lights flashing, the Tucson Weekly reported. He pulled over to check on it. Inside the sleeper he found a woman with no clothes on, handcuffed and chained. The Illinois Appellate Court, summarizing the evidence later presented in Bond County, described the scene the same way: an Arizona trooper found a nude, handcuffed woman chained to the sleeper of the defendant's parked truck.
Rhoades was armed and told the officer so. Miller handcuffed him and belted him into the back of the patrol car. While Miller dealt with the truck, Rhoades worked his cuffed hands from behind his back to the front and unfastened the seatbelt; Miller realized afterward, the paper said, that his prisoner could have got away. Officer Robert Gygax of the Casa Grande Police Department arrived as backup and freed the woman with keys Miller found in Rhoades's pocket. "I didn't know what I had on my hands," Miller told the Tucson Weekly.
The woman told police that Rhoades had picked her up at a truck stop north of Phoenix and had tortured her on and off through the day. Accounts of where the arrest happened differ slightly: the Texas Observer placed it on Interstate 40 about 50 miles north of Phoenix, but the Illinois court record, the Associated Press and the Tucson Weekly all put it at Casa Grande, on Interstate 10 south of Phoenix.
Detective Barnhart videotaped an interview with the woman at the Casa Grande police station and then, at about 3 a.m., interviewed Rhoades. Rhoades said she was "not playing with a full deck" and admitted to nothing more than stopping the truck, according to the Tucson Weekly. In the truck Barnhart found a briefcase holding restraints, whips and other implements. He booked Rhoades on charges of aggravated assault, sexual assault and unlawful imprisonment.
Barnhart told the paper that he knew that night he had a serial rapist, and suspected he might have a killer. He sent a nationwide teletype describing the case and faxed a superior court judge in Florence, Arizona, asking that Rhoades be held. He also contacted the Houston police, because Rhoades lived in Houston. A Houston officer, R. E. Bomar, called back to describe an earlier case that fit.
Rhoades was convicted in Arizona on charges arising from that night. The Associated Press, reporting in 2012, listed the convictions as aggravated assault, sexual assault and unlawful imprisonment. The Illinois Appellate Court said he was charged in Arizona with kidnapping and sexual assault, and the Tucson Weekly reported in 1996 that he was sentenced to six years for the kidnapping and was about to begin a work furlough program when federal agents reopened the case. The date, court and exact sentence in the Arizona case were not reported.
The Deseret News and KSL later reported that he was nearly due for release in Arizona when Illinois filed its murder case, and that he was sent to Illinois before he could be freed.
The case Bomar described involved a young woman whom, according to evidence summarized by the Illinois Appellate Court, Rhoades had taken from California to Houston and kept chained in his truck for about two weeks before she escaped. The Tucson Weekly said she was 18 and got free when he failed to lock a handcuff. The Texas Observer said Houston police had not identified Rhoades as a suspect at the time. She had first picked the wrong man out of a lineup and later said she had been too frightened, the Tucson Weekly reported. No charge in her case was reported.
The Phoenix office of the FBI sent the file to Houston, where Special Agent Bob Lee took over. To get a search warrant, the Tucson Weekly reported, Lee needed a behavioral expert from the FBI at Quantico to explain why a man like Rhoades would keep evidence at home. The search of Rhoades's Houston apartment took place on April 6, 1990.
Agents seized bondage equipment, women's clothing and makeup, towels, one of them bloodstained, and a photo album. The Illinois court's summary lists women's clothing, obscene material, bondage-type instruments and photographs of nude women, among them the girl later identified as Regina Walters. Lee told the Tucson Weekly that the equipment Rhoades carried was so refined that he must have been doing this for a long time, and that sexual sadists often keep journals and photographs.
At that point nobody knew who the girl in the photographs was.
Regina Kay Walters was 14 and lived with her mother in an apartment in Pasadena, Texas. She was last seen there on February 3, 1990, according to the Illinois court. She had left with Ricky Lee Jones, 18, of Houston. Friends of Jones told the Tucson Weekly that he loved her but did not know she was only 14, and that the two planned to hitchhike to Mexico. Jones, whom friends described as meek, had been taken from his home by child protective workers when he was young. His family never reported him missing.
Rhoades picked the pair up. The Deseret News, drawing on prosecutors and investigators, placed this about a month after Patricia Walsh's death.
On September 29, 1990, Regina Walters's body was found in a barn along Interstate 70 in Bond County, Illinois, near Greenville. A farmer found her in the loft. Her body was badly decomposed, and she appeared to have been strangled, the Illinois Appellate Court said. The Texas Observer reported that she was found about five months after Rhoades's April arrest.
The link was made by FBI Agent Mark Young, who had built a profile from the Illinois scene, saw details in Bob Lee's Houston file that matched what had been found in the barn, the Tucson Weekly reported. Photographs taken from Rhoades showed the girl inside the same barn; one of them matched a crime scene photograph in angle and in the position of the body. The Texas Observer, which reproduced one of the barn photographs in 2012, described it as the last picture taken of her.
The Arizona truck evidence was almost lost. Young learned that it had been tagged for destruction, the Tucson Weekly said, and investigators saved it. Among the items was a notebook that belonged to Regina Walters. The Illinois court record confirms that her notebook was found in Rhoades's truck.
About a month after Regina disappeared, her father began receiving anonymous telephone calls. The caller said she was in a barn loft, the Tucson Weekly reported. The calls were traced to Oklahoma City and to Ennis, Texas. Investigators compared those places and dates with Rhoades's trucking logs and found that he had been in both places on the days the calls were made, the Tucson Weekly and the Texas Observer reported. The notebook from the truck contained her father's unlisted number.
The notebook also held a note reading "Ricky is a dead man," with a drawing of a gun and blood. Rhoades's wife identified the handwriting as his, according to the Tucson Weekly.
Rhoades's logs also placed him on Interstate 70 in Bond County in February or March 1990, the Illinois court said.
Ricky Lee Jones has never been found. The Associated Press reported in 2012 that Regina's 18-year-old companion had never been located, and the Deseret News and KSL reported the same in 2005, 2008 and 2012. Agent Young told the Tucson Weekly that Illinois investigators had at first looked at the missing young man, but that he believed Jones was dead and that an older man was responsible for Regina's death. Rhoades has never been charged in connection with Jones's disappearance, and nothing in the court record establishes what happened to him.
Bond County prosecutors charged Rhoades with Regina Walters's murder. A grand jury returned a seven-count indictment, and on July 2, 1992, criminal informations charging first degree murder were filed. The count on which he was later sentenced alleged a murder committed between about February 3 and March 17, 1990. On May 6, 1992, the state filed notice that it would seek the death penalty.
On September 11, 1992, Rhoades pleaded guilty to first degree murder under a negotiated agreement and was sentenced to natural life imprisonment. The plea removed the possibility of a death sentence. The Tucson Weekly reported that he pleaded after his court-appointed lawyers showed him the evidence against him. The parties agreed that the court could take judicial notice of the grand jury evidence as the factual basis for the plea: the disappearance from Pasadena, the Arizona arrest, the Houston captive, the notebook, the Houston search, the trip logs and the discovery of the body.
Because he pleaded guilty, there was no trial and no jury. The Texas Observer's statement that the barn photograph was shown to jurors is not supported by the Illinois record, which describes a negotiated plea.
Rhoades spent most of the 1990s trying to undo the plea. After sentencing he filed a timely motion to reduce the sentence, which the trial court denied after a hearing. On his first appeal, the Illinois Appellate Court, Fifth District, reversed in 1994 because his lawyer had not filed the certificate required by Illinois Supreme Court Rule 604(d), and sent the case back. The opinion in that appeal was captioned with his name misspelled as "Rhodes."
In September 1994 the trial court received a letter from Rhoades saying that he withdrew his guilty plea and that his three trial lawyers had not answered his letters. On remand the trial court again denied his motion, this time without appointing a lawyer for him. In a second appeal, decided on February 7, 1996, the Fifth District reversed again and told the circuit court to find out whether he wanted counsel and, if he could not afford one, to appoint a lawyer.
With counsel, he filed a motion to withdraw the guilty plea in December 1996 and an amended motion to withdraw the plea or reduce the sentence in April 1997. The circuit court ruled that the request to withdraw the plea came too late, because Illinois required such a motion within 30 days of sentencing, but it let the defense make an offer of proof. On December 4, 1998, it denied the motion to reduce the sentence.
The third appeal, People v. Rhoades, No. 5-98-0821, was decided on July 13, 2001. Justice Goldenhersh wrote for the court, with Presiding Justice Chapman and Justice Hopkins concurring. The court held that the circuit court had read its earlier mandate correctly, that a timely motion to withdraw a guilty plea is a condition for appealing from the plea, and that his argument about the 1994 letter was waived and in any event had no merit. Rhoades also argued that his natural life sentence violated the United States Supreme Court's decision in Apprendi v. New Jersey. The court disagreed: he had been warned before pleading that natural life was possible, and had received a sentence within the range he had been told about. "By pleading guilty, the defendant gives up the right to challenge a sentence within the statutory range," the court wrote. It affirmed the Bond County judgment. No later decision by the Illinois Supreme Court was reported.
Patricia Candace Walsh, who went by Candace, was 24 and from the Seattle area. Her husband, Douglas Scott Zyskowski, known as Scott, was also from Seattle. The Associated Press gave his age as 28; the Deseret News and KSL gave it as 25. The two had recently married and were traveling by thumb. The AP said they left Seattle in November 1989 to hitchhike to Georgia, where they meant to preach, and accepted a ride from Rhoades near El Paso; KSL quoted the Utah prosecutor as saying they were hitchhiking in Texas to spread their Christian faith. The Deseret News, in its 2012 report, said instead that they had married in Texas in early 1990 and were hitchhiking home to the Seattle area. The sources agree that Rhoades picked them up in Texas.
Prosecutors believe that he killed Scott Zyskowski almost immediately and left his body in Texas. Zyskowski had been shot. His body was found in January 1990 along Interstate 10 east of Ozona, about 320 miles east of El Paso, the AP reported, and he was not identified until 1992.
Investigators in Utah believe Rhoades kept Candace Walsh captive for about seven days before shooting her several times and leaving her body in Millard County, in central Utah, near Interstate 15. Deer hunters found her remains in October 1990, about 22 miles south of Fillmore. She had been dead for several months.
For 13 years nobody knew who the woman found south of Fillmore was. Her remains were kept in the basement of the Millard County Sheriff's Office. The Deseret News reported in 2005 that a series of mistakes by other law enforcement agencies had held up her identification, and that the break came by chance: an employee of the California Department of Corrections, talking with a Texas Ranger about the Zyskowski case, helped set the process in motion. Dental records from Washington State confirmed who she was. Millard County sheriff's detectives made the identification in 2003, and the Deseret News reported that investigators then found enough evidence to link Rhoades to her death.
Captain John Kimball, who had worked the case from the start, said he had always believed that once she was identified, investigators would learn who killed her. The Texas Observer reported in 2012 that DNA evidence had led to Rhoades's indictment while he was in prison in Illinois; the reports do not describe the DNA evidence.
In February 2005 Utah Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. sent an executive agreement to the governor of Illinois asking that Rhoades be handed over for trial. Rhoades, then 59, was serving life without parole at the Pontiac Correctional Center in Pontiac, Illinois. In Utah's Fourth District Court he was charged with murder and aggravated kidnapping, both first degree felonies, and the case could carry the death penalty. A judge imposed a gag order and sealed the arrest warrant affidavit.
"He needs to pay for what he did here," said Brent Berkley, the chief deputy Millard County attorney, who said failing to bring Rhoades back to Utah would be a "gross miscarriage of justice." Candace Walsh's brother, P. Adam Walsh, told the Deseret News that the family felt a sense of relief, and said he hoped a Utah trial would lead to more investigation of other possible victims.
Rhoades was brought to Utah in early 2005 and held in the jail in Fillmore.
On September 11, 2006, prosecutors asked the Fourth District Court in Millard County to dismiss the charges, and a judge in Fillmore granted the motion. Utah could prosecute only the death of Candace Walsh. Texas, where the kidnapping began, could try both killings together. The witnesses in both cases were the same, Berkley said, and it made more sense for them to testify once. Court papers said Walsh's family had expressed concern about going through multiple hearings and strongly preferred that the case go forward in Texas. "It's in the best interest of justice and the victims' families," Berkley said. "It was worth it, I think we'd do it again."
Alva Busch, who wrote Roadside Prey, a book about the case, told KSL that Rhoades was "a very evil man." He said he had interviewed two women who escaped from Rhoades and described days of torture. Prosecutors said he would be returned to the Pontiac prison in Illinois, and Texas would then seek to extradite him.
Texas filed murder charges for both deaths. The case belonged to District Attorney Laurie English, whose office prosecuted it from Ozona. In June 2008 she told the Deseret News that she believed Rhoades was still in Illinois and had not yet been brought to Texas, that the families knew about the delays, and that she could not comment further on an open case. A trial set for September 2008 was postponed to 2009 after Rhoades got a new defense lawyer. Prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty, and the AP reported that the trial was delayed repeatedly from 2009 on.
The Texas Observer reported that in March 2012 Rhoades was moved from Illinois to Ozona to face the charges, and the Deseret News and KSL reported that at one point he was held in the same Texas jail as Warren Jeffs, the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
A trial was scheduled to begin in March 2012. Instead Rhoades pleaded guilty to two counts of capital murder, for the deaths of Scott Zyskowski and Candace Walsh, before a West Texas judge. The Deseret News and KSL, in reports datelined Sonora, said the plea was entered in Sutton County. The AP reported on March 30 that the agreement had been accepted that Monday. Prosecutors agreed not to seek a death sentence. He received two life sentences with no chance of parole and gave up his rights to appeal and to parole. The sentences mean that if he were ever released from his Illinois sentence, he would serve the rest of his life in Texas, the Texas Observer said.
The AP reported that District Attorney English was unavailable for comment and that Rhoades's lawyers did not return messages. The Texas Observer reported that English regarded the case as among the worst crimes she had prosecuted. An FBI spokeswoman in Houston, Shauna Dunlap, said the bureau could not comment because investigations concerning Rhoades were continuing. It was unclear at the time whether he would be held in Texas or returned to Illinois, the AP said.
On February 24, 2019, APTN News reported that Rhoades was serving life sentences in Illinois. Reports in 2005 and 2006 placed him at the Pontiac Correctional Center.
Investigators have long believed that the three proven killings were not the only ones. These views have never been tested in court, and no charge has followed from them.
Agent Mark Young told the Tucson Weekly in 1996, "We're positive he's killed before." He believed that by early 1990 Rhoades had stepped up to about three victims a month. Rhoades's logs placed him in Tucson or neighboring cities 36 times in late 1989 and early 1990, the paper reported, and analysts at the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program compared his routes with skeletal remains found in places he had passed through. The paper said investigators could not rule out about 50 such bodies nationwide. Young noted that the people at risk were often those who would not be reported missing quickly. The Deseret News, KSL and NBC News later repeated the three-a-month estimate, citing the Tucson Weekly. As of 1996, Rhoades had not talked about any other case.
Prosecutors in Texas also suspected him of more killings, the Texas Observer reported in 2012, and the FBI has said only that its inquiries continue.
"He took a lot of photos," the writer Vanessa Veselka told APTN News. In 2019 APTN News reported on one of them: a picture of a young Indigenous woman that, according to Veselka, came from Rhoades's apartment. She said she had received it from Mark Young, by then retired from the FBI, while researching a 2012 magazine article; Young told her it came from the same roll of film as a photograph of Regina Walters, although APTN noted that the two events appeared to be about five years apart. After a social media appeal, a woman in Alberta said she recognized herself as a hitchhiker in 1985. She told APTN that the driver had photographed her before she rode with him and that he had dropped her off unharmed in Winnipeg. The FBI referred her to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who said an officer would meet her to confirm her identity. No outcome was reported.
Rhoades's case is often cited in discussions of killings along the interstates. In 2009 the FBI announced its Highway Serial Killings Initiative, which began in 2004 after an Oklahoma analyst noticed women's bodies being left along the Interstate 40 corridor. The bureau said its Violent Criminal Apprehension Program had built a list of more than 500 victims found along or near highways and about 200 possible suspects, most of them long-haul truck drivers. The Texas Observer, in its 2012 report, used Rhoades's arrest to make the point that such offenders are often caught by chance: without the hazard lights on the shoulder at Casa Grande, the paper said, he might never have been caught at all.
Proven by final judgment: the murder of Regina Walters (Illinois, guilty plea, 1992, affirmed 2001) and the capital murders of Scott Zyskowski and Candace Walsh (Texas, guilty pleas, 2012, appeal rights waived). He was also convicted in Arizona over the woman found in his truck; the exact charges and sentence differ between sources.
Charged and dismissed: the Utah murder and aggravated kidnapping charges for Candace Walsh, dropped in 2006 so Texas could try both killings.
Suspected, never charged: the disappearance of Ricky Lee Jones, who has never been found; and the further killings investigators believe he committed, including the "about three a month" estimate attributed to FBI agent Mark Young and the possibility of about 50 bodies that the Tucson Weekly said investigators could not rule out. His own statement to the woman in Arizona that he had been doing this for 15 years is his claim, as reported, and has never been tested.
Details that differ between sources: Scott Zyskowski's age (28 in AP reports; 25 in the Deseret News and KSL); the couple's route and purpose (leaving Seattle for Georgia to preach, per AP; heading home to Seattle after marrying in Texas, per the Deseret News); the place of arrest (Interstate 10 at Casa Grande in the court record, AP and Tucson Weekly; Interstate 40 north of Phoenix in the Texas Observer); the Arizona offenses (aggravated assault, sexual assault and unlawful imprisonment per AP; kidnapping and sexual assault per the Illinois court; a six-year sentence for kidnapping per the Tucson Weekly); the place of the Texas plea (Sutton County per the Deseret News and KSL; Ozona per the Texas Observer); and his age at the plea (66 per AP; 65 per the Deseret News).
November 1989: Candace Walsh and Scott Zyskowski leave Seattle hitchhiking, according to the AP (the Deseret News places their trip in early 1990).
January 1990: Scott Zyskowski's body is found along Interstate 10 east of Ozona, Texas.
February 3, 1990: Regina Walters, 14, is last seen in Pasadena, Texas; she has left with Ricky Lee Jones, 18.
February or March 1990: Rhoades's logs place him on Interstate 70 in Bond County, Illinois.
April 1, 1990: Officer Mike Miller finds a woman restrained in Rhoades's truck at Casa Grande, Arizona; Rhoades is arrested.
April 6, 1990: FBI agents search his Houston apartment.
September 29, 1990: Regina Walters's body is found in a barn in Bond County, Illinois.
October 1990: deer hunters find a woman's remains south of Fillmore, Utah.
1992: Scott Zyskowski is identified.
May 6, 1992: Bond County prosecutors file notice that they will seek the death penalty.
July 2, 1992: informations charging first degree murder are filed in Bond County.
September 11, 1992: Rhoades pleads guilty to the murder of Regina Walters and is sentenced to natural life.
1994: first appeal; the case is sent back over a missing Rule 604(d) certificate.
February 7, 1996: second appeal; the case is sent back for appointment of counsel.
February 29, 1996: the Tucson Weekly publishes its profile of the investigation.
December 4, 1998: Bond County court denies his motion to reduce the sentence.
July 13, 2001: Illinois Appellate Court affirms the judgment.
2003: the Utah remains are identified as Patricia Candace Walsh.
February 2005: Utah seeks his transfer from Pontiac Correctional Center to face murder and aggravated kidnapping charges.
September 11, 2006: Utah charges dismissed so Texas can try both killings.
2008: Texas trial set for September is postponed to 2009.
March 2012: Rhoades pleads guilty in West Texas to two counts of capital murder and receives two life sentences.
November 7, 2012: the Texas Observer reports on Texas's unsolved highway killings, citing his case.
February 24, 2019: APTN News reports him serving life sentences in Illinois.