In the early hours of April 1, 1990, Trooper Mike Miller of the Arizona Highway Patrol stopped to check on a tractor-trailer parked on the shoulder of Interstate 10 near Casa Grande with its hazard lights flashing. Inside the cab he found a naked woman, handcuffed and screaming, and a man who said he was the driver. The man tried to talk his way out of it, then handed over a gun he had on him. He nearly escaped from the back of Miller's patrol car. His name was Robert Ben Rhoades, and the compartment behind his seats, concealed between the seats and fitted with handcuffs bolted to the ceiling so that a woman could be chained upright, was the sleeper cab he had turned into a torture chamber. Alva Busch described it in Roadside Prey, his 1995 book about the case.
He was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on November 22, 1945. His father was an army soldier stationed in West Germany during his early years and became a firefighter after his discharge. At Thomas Jefferson High School, Rhoades played football, wrestled, sang in the choir and joined the French club; he was also arrested at sixteen for tampering with a vehicle and at seventeen for fighting in public. He graduated in 1964 and joined the Marine Corps. That year his father was arrested for molesting a twelve-year-old girl and killed himself while awaiting trial. Rhoades was dishonorably discharged over a robbery, dropped out of college, and was turned down by a police force because of his discharge. He married three times and worked in stores, warehouses and restaurants before he became a long-haul trucker. In the 1980s he was drawn into the BDSM scene, and his third wife, Deborah, has said he abused her.
The Arizona case was aggravated assault, sexual assault and unlawful imprisonment, and he was convicted of it. The arresting detective, Rick Barnhart, connected him to a case in Houston, where he lived, and found a pattern going back at least five months. Rhoades had been reported before. Less than a month after the murder of Patricia Walsh, an eighteen-year-old named Shana Holts had escaped from his truck after two weeks inside it and gone to the police. She declined to press charges, telling them it would just be her word against his. Later accounts said she was afraid of him.
Douglas Scott Zyskowski and his wife, Patricia Candace Walsh, twenty-four, left Seattle in November 1989, hitchhiking to Georgia to preach, and accepted a ride from Rhoades near El Paso. Zyskowski's age is given as twenty-five in some accounts and twenty-six in others. Rhoades killed him almost at once and left his body beside Interstate 10 near Ozona, Texas, where it was found in January 1990 and identified in 1992. He held Walsh for more than a week, raping and torturing her, then shot her several times and left her body in Millard County, Utah. Deer hunters found it on October 26, 1990. She was known as Jane Doe 1 for thirteen years, until forensic scientists at the University of Arizona matched X-rays of her jaw in May 2003. After the identification the Utah police contacted the Texas Rangers, and still nobody knew who had killed the couple until Rhoades confessed.
On February 3, 1990, Regina Kay Walters, fourteen, ran away from her home in Pasadena, Texas, with her eighteen-year-old boyfriend, Ricky Lee Jones. Rhoades picked them up. A farmer found Walters's body on September 29, 1990, in the loft of an abandoned barn near Greenville, Illinois. She had been strangled in early March. When the police searched Rhoades's house in Houston they found photographs of her being tortured, and photographs of Patricia Walsh. On May 26, 1990, a partial skeleton identified as Jones's was found near Harleton, Texas. He had been shot in the head. Rhoades has never been charged with his death.
Illinois tried him first. He was convicted of the first degree murder of Regina Walters and sentenced to life without parole at Menard Correctional Center in Chester; the year is given as 1992 in some sources and 1994 in others. Utah extradited him in 2005 over the deaths of Walsh and Zyskowski, then dropped its charges in 2006 at the families' request so they would not have to testify in two states, and Texas took up the case. Prosecutors in Ozona sought the death penalty, and the trial was delayed repeatedly from 2009.
In March 2012, at sixty-six, he pleaded guilty in west Texas to two counts of capital murder in exchange for the state not seeking death. He received two life sentences without parole, stacked behind the Illinois term, and waived his rights of appeal and parole. He was returned to Menard.
The official count is three. When he was caught, Rhoades claimed to have been doing this for fifteen years. A 1996 report cited officials who believed that by the early 1990s he was killing about three women a month, and estimates built on his truck routes and on women who went missing along them, going back to 1975, run to fifty or more. The FBI has said its investigations concerning him are continuing. None of those figures has been tested in any court.