By Kristina Stancil
If you think about the era I was born to investigate true crime and the paranormal…and it goes back even further than the Amityville Horror movie opening in 1979 (the year i was born) and the fact that the first time I watched the movie, I was also the same age as Allison Defeo was when she was murdered. My mom went to the drive-in to see this movie. I do not know if I was asleep in my car seat or if this was a date night for my parents. My mom was ten years old and living near the mountain range in which the Manson Family claimed as the basis of their cult. She’d also be a teenager who would not be afraid to hitchhike in the 1970s when several serial killers were known to prowl on unsuspected hitchhikers. One in particular liked what she represented. The Red Headed Murderer hunted across several states. He liked young red headed women who had the body type of someone who had previously given birth. It is believed this killer began in the 1970s and has bodies attributed to him up until the 1990s. To this day, he has never been caught.
The irony that I would be thirteen when allowed to watch Amityville for the first time was that it was not my first horror movie, as I originally believed, nor did it or any of the other horror movies I saw traumatize me as much as a movie that was based on a real event. By the time I watched Amityville I had already seen Nightmare on Elm Street 1 & 2, the original Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Sleepaway Camp. While Freddy Krueger gave me night terrors and has warped me in a way most of my life, it did not bother me as much as the movie, Mississippi Burning. Why? It was not necessarily a horror movie, but it was horrible just the same.
The movie concerns James Chaney, Mickey Schwarner, and Andrew Goodman. They were freedom riders in Mississippi attempting to register black men to vote. They were murdered and the investigation into their disappearance was the subject of the 1988 movie, Mississippi Burning. Edgar Ray Killen, a Mississippi pastor, and a member of the Ku Klux Klan was considered the point man on the murders. He was not the only one involved as his actions were green lit by the leader of the Klan, Samuel Bowers. The horrors of this movie was the treatment of the black people in this movie as well as a lot of inaccuracies about the way they were presented by characters interviewed about the disappearances of the college kids. They showed cross lightings that were used as a scare tactic to prevent people from coming forward or to frighten them away from registering to vote.
I am not sure how old I was when I watched this movie but the movie was not very old. I believe it was 1990 and it was the first summer that I spent with my mother and step-father in their own home away from my grandmother. For some reason, my step-father felt that this was appropriate viewing for my age due to historical ‘accuracies’ about life in the south. His family was old Arkansas money with ties to state politics. I was maybe ten or eleven at the time. It was used, I believe, as a study guide for raising a young southern white girl in a notable family.
The idea of fear presented in the film traumatized me far more than any fictional monster because it was humans who were the monsters presented by this movie. Humans are by far the most dangerous creatures on Earth, one author even denotes humans as the most dangerous prey. The ability to rationalize their actions as well as to consciously plot strategies make them dangerous. An idea which was embellished upon by Robert Ben Rhodes, and perhaps many other serial killers.
Rhodes, known as The Truck Stop Killer, would prey on hitchhikers. They were his favorite target and he did not mind picking up couples. It allowed him an even greater position of power by making his female victim not only watch him murder her male companion but dispose of him like he was little more than trash. This initial brutal shock would then place his true target, the female in the correct presence of mind. In order to ensure compliance while on the road, he would spin tales of a vast network of serial killers who prowled the nation’s roadways. They were a private group with secretive ways of communicating with each other. If one selected a target, they would alert the others, in the event ‘the prey’ escaped. The mental conditioning would be imposed and frightened the victims into submission. Rhodes’ game was he only wanted a sadistic round of brutal sex or two, with the idea of if his victim complied, he would let them go, if he got what he wanted.
The amount of unidentified bodies of runaways and hitchhikers near truck stops led to the fear conditioning that men like Rhoades would use to intimidate his victims. At the height of Rhoades’ killing spree, the authorities were slowly placing importance on these victims, other than disregarding them as prostitutes, who were worth very little. It is believed, based on his own admission, that Rhoades began stalking victims in the 1970s, when runaways, hitchhikers, and prostitutes were all considered the same thing. For decades the expression, “Gas, Cash, or ass,” was even a popular bumper sticker that indicated the means in which a hitchhiker would be required to pay for a ride.
Using this as an indication it is easy to see how these nomadic serial killers were able to hunt and escape authorities for decades before the paradigm shifted into the idea that all lives matter. How many of these victims, still unidentified, were the victims of nomadic serial killers that were not linked to other victims due to the lack of cooperation between jurisdiction and the belief that their lives were disposable? Glen Rodgers, Henry Lee Lucas, and Samuel Little would all boast great numbers of victims, but only Little’s claims be validated. His uncanny ability to not only remember victims, disposal sites, as well as his ability to draw realistic renderings of his victims’ faces made him invaluable to investigators.
The type of fear that Rhoades and other like minded serial killers are attempting to condition a response of such a state as to inspire a phobia. Psychology Today defines this level of fear as “Agoraphobia: the fear of situations that would be difficult to escape from or from which it would be difficult to get help.” Certainly, the cab of Rhoades’ semi was difficult to escape from. He had even converted the bunk space of his cab into a mobile torture chamber with thumb screws and chains embedded into the walls of the truck.
An author for Vanity Fair discussed having been a teenage hitch hiker who she feels was Robert Ben Rhoades. The first leg of her trip was lovely. They spent the trip drinking Diet Coke and listening to music. This driver would stop at a truck stop and make sure she had a hot meal before continuing on his own trip. The next driver to pick her up was not so lovely. He would make light of the fact a young girl’s dead/nude body was being removed from a dumpster while they were getting ready to leave. He immediately gave her odd vibes and she felt that he would attempt to solicit some form of sexual act for repayment of the ride. She expected this as she had hitched before. The problem would then come after they were on the road a few miles. He would then refer to himself as a member of a society that relished and enjoyed death. He was using this to heighten the state of fear she found herself in, from her own intuition. She would somehow convince him to stop and then he would tell her to run. She fled into the woods where he chased her for some time before going back to his truck.
Was this just a scare tactic that Rhoades used in order to determine whether or not he could determine whether or not he could extort the appropriate response from a potential victim? Was a fight or flight response indicative of who he could subjugate into his collection or are we faced with the terrifying prospect that there is a secret society of death merchants out there prowling the highways searching for victims? With the advent of the internet and its acceptable place in the modern era as a way of life, especially with accessibility of smartphones, we are now living in a world where the reality is, the dark web provides those inclined to participate in these macabre activities, a place to network with each other. If it was not an accepted or even believable narrative at the time of Rhoades and Rodgers arrests, one must face the possibility that it is a viable option in 2023.
Editor's note: this piece ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written. It is a personal essay about what the author read and watched growing up, not a case report, and the cases it touches are checked here rather than in the text. Henry Lee Lucas is recorded in this archive with eleven convictions, around three regarded as credible, and some six hundred confessed; the gap between those numbers is the whole Lucas problem. Samuel Little has eight convictions, sixty confirmed by the FBI and ninety three confessed, all of which the FBI considered credible, which makes him the opposite case to Lucas and worth the contrast. Robert Ben Rhoades, whose surname is spelled Rhodes here, is carried at three to four. The Mississippi killings of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman in 1964 are correctly described; the state brought no murder charges at the time, and Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter in 2005, forty one years later.