By Joshua Laing
Robert Ben Rhoades was born in Council Bluffs, 1945. His father, stationed in West Germany with the United States Army, was absent for the early years of Rhoades’ childhood. His mother raised him herself until his father returned when Rhoades had entered elementary school. He found work as a firefighter to support the family.
Rhoades kept himself busy with a multitude of extracurricular activities during his school years. This included physical activities such as football and wrestling, but extended to more sensitive activities, including choir and French club. It seems that around the age of 16 he dropped the sensitivities and began to find trouble with the law. He was arrested in 1961 for tampering with a motor vehicle. The following year he found himself in further trouble when he was arrested for publicly fighting.
Rhoades joined the Marine Corps straight out of high school. In the same year, his father was arrested for molesting a twelve-year-old cousin of Rhoades’. He killed himself in his cell whilst awaiting trial. Robert found himself dishonourably discharged from the Corps not long after, for his involvement in a robbery. He tried his hand at further education, enrolling in a college only to drop out and attempt to join law enforcement. He was unsuccessful, due to his negative history with the law.
Robert married three times between 1970 and 1980, fathering a son to his first wife. He worked a chain of dead-end jobs in supermarkets, restaurants and stores. It was during this time he found himself drawn to the world of BDSM. It was also the time, coincidentally, when he began beating his third wife viciously, and pressuring her to swing with other couples.
Arguably the most important occurrence in this decade for Rhoades, however, was his decision to become a long-haul truck driver.
Despite his killing beginning in the early ’70s, Rhoades’ first confirmed victims were husband and wife, Candace Walsh and Douglas Zyskowski. Missionaries trying to spread the word of God, they were picked up by Rhoades as they hitchhiked from Seattle to Georgia. He shot Zyskowski in the head almost immediately and dumped his body in Sutton County. His corpse spent two years unidentified. Rhoades had more sinister plans in mind for Walsh, keeping her captive for over a week. During this time, he repeatedly raped and tortured her, before he finally strangled her and dumped her body in Millard County, Utah. She was discovered by hunters several months later, and spent 13 years in the basement of the Millard County Sherriff’s office until she was identified in 2003.
Rhoades was able to keep Walsh alive and captive with such ease due to his conversion of his sleeper cab into a torture chamber, complete with points installed throughout the entire cab where he could easily affix handcuffs. This, coupled with a torture kit he refined over the course of years, allowed him to kill with ease.
A month after the abduction of Zyskowski and Walsh, Rhoades abducted an 18-year-old girl. The abductee, a drifter, managed to escape after two weeks of repeated torture and rape. She contacted police and Rhoades was put before the girl for her to identify. She did not feel, after such a period of torment at the hands of this man, that she was surrounded by enough officers to protect her and denied it was Rhoades that had tormented her. She declined to press charges, but admitted later on that it was certainly him.
Just days after Rhoades’ close call, 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters and her boyfriend, Ricky Lee Jones – both runaways from Pasadena, Texas – disappeared. Jones was killed quickly, in similar fashion to Zyskowski, and Walters was kept alive for an extended period of time. The exact length of this period is unknown, but comparisons of photos seized during a search on Rhoades’ home birthed the theory that it was quite some time given her extensive, progressive bruising.
Jones’ corpse was found on the 3rd of March, 1991 in Lamar County. It wasn’t identified until July of 2008, and in the time he remained ‘missing’ he found himself charged in absentia for Walters’ murder.
Before her murder, Walters had been pierced with fishing hooks, whipped, and humiliated. Rhoades dressed her in a black dress and heels, hacked off her hair, and when he was done with her strangled her viciously with a garrotte fashioned from baling wire. He dumped her body in a barn loft off Interstate 70 in Illinois.
In a horrifying, haunting addition to the murder of Walters, after Rhoades’ arrest, a photo was found in his house. It showed Walters, wearing the black dress and heels with her hair shorn nearly off, at the barn where her body was eventually found. In the picture, she is clearly terrified, and attempting to shield herself from Rhoades.
Officer Mike Miller of the Arizona Highway Patrol noticed the truck pulled off to the side of the I-10, hazard lights flashing, on the morning of April 1st, 1990. He immediately pulled over and approached the truck. When he shone his light through the window, a woman began screaming, and a man leapt from within the cab, splaying his hands on the side of the truck. He informed Officer Miller that he had a gun in his back pocket.
Miller, unsure what he was actually dealing with, cuffed the man, now identified as Rhoades, and placed him in the back of his patrol car. Rhoades had claimed that the act the Officer had observed was consensual, but Miller wanted to be safe. He returned to the cab and climbed inside, where he found a woman (whose name is omitted for privacy) handcuffed to one of Rhoades’ many handcuff locations. She was terribly wounded – angry red welts covered her body, and cuts surrounded her mouth. A horse bridle was strapped around her neck and a long chain was padlocked to the horse bit.
Miller called for backup, and upon returning to his patrol car found that Rhoades had made a spectacular escape attempt, bringing his handcuffed hands from behind himself, under his legs so his hands were now of use to him, and had unfastened his seatbelt. He could have easily killer Officer Miller had he had just a fraction more time, and subsequently disappear into the anonymous abyss of American freeways.
The woman in the cab told of a horrific tale of abuse. Her ordeal lasted for days on end, during which she was ritualistically raped and tortured, like Rhoades’ other victims. Rhoades had grown so confident he would not be caught, he even allowed the woman out of the car on desolate highway stretches, collared at the neck and fastened to a leash like a dog. Rhoades had picked her up at Rip Griffin’s truck stop, located to the north of Phoenix. During the drive she had fallen asleep, only to be woken by Rhoades dragging her through to the sleeper cab and handcuffing her to the wall. During her captivity, Rhoades bragged of two facts police took great interest in; his CB radio handle, ‘Whips and Chains,’ and perhaps the most chilling of all; he bragged of doing this exact act for 15 years.
Although she denied being raped, the woman’s nipples and labia had been punctured with sharp objects – objects retrieved, no doubt, from his briefcase, which contained alligator clips, leashes, handcuffs, whips, pins and dildos, all neatly arranged neatly in disturbing order.
Rhoades was insistent that this woman was nothing more than a ‘lot lizard,’ a woman who would hang about truck stops and trade sex for rides. He spent his entire police interview carefully manoeuvring about and snaking his way through questions with a collected, convincing calm that interviewing Detective Rick Barnhart found disturbing.
Rhoades was charged with aggravated assault, sexual assault, and unlawful imprisonment. After the arrest, Barnhart was able to connect Rhoades to the Houston case and noticed that there may be many, many more killings Rhoades was potentially responsible for.
After booking Rhoades, Barnhart sent a nationwide teletype. He requested the permission of a Superior Court Judge in Florence, Arizona, to keep Rhoades in custody until further information was acquired. Detective Bomar quickly contacted Barnhart, with information regarding the Houston kidnaping that could further link Rhoades to the case.
Barnhart reached out to the Phoenix branch of the RBI, where Rhoades’ growing file was sent to the Houston office. Once there, it was picked up by Special Agent Bob Lee. Lee reviewed both kidnap victims’ accounts, and examined Rhoades’ briefcase thoroughly. He came to the conclusion that, as sexual sadists start with a limited, unorganised rape kit, Rhoades must have certainly been doing this for a long time. His kit was well stocked, contained a variety of twisted implements, and was impeccably organised.
A warrant was executed on Rhoades’ Houston apartment. Police found photos of a naked teenager, later identified as Regina Kay Walters, whose body was discovered in September 1990. Also discovered in his apartment were photos of Walsh, whose body had been recovered in October of that year. A large collection of white towels was also recovered. Both living victims recalled being placed atop a white towel before the torture began. One of the recovered towels was stained heavily with blood.
While Walters was missing, Rhoades used a number located inside the cover of a journal she owned to call her father’s unlisted phone number. Rhoades spent two days tormenting him, telling him at one point ‘I made some changes. I cut her hair.’ He also informed her father that his daughter was in a barn; when queried as to if she was alive or not, Rhoades hung up.
At a later date, the FBI were able to cross-examine Rhoades’ truck logs with the dates and locations of the calls, confirming that it was indeed him contacting Walters’ father.
The notebook contained a final piece of chilling evidence. Rhoades had drawn in it a crude rendition of a gun, and a knife dripping with blood. Cryptic notations accompanied, including ‘Ricky is a dead man,’ and ‘water tank, fun and hide.’ The FBI fear that these notations are locations or clues to some of his other murders.
Rhodes was tried and convicted of the first-degree murder of Regina Kay Walters. He was sentenced to life without parole at the Menard Correctional Centre in Chester, Illinois. It was an open and shut case, considering Rhoades had chronicled the entire experience with Walters in a photo album, his own twisted log of torture.
In 2005, Rhoades was extradited to Utah to be tried for the deaths of Candace Walsh and Douglas Zyskowski, killings he didn’t admit to until more than twenty years down the track. The charges were dropped in 2006 as per the victims’ families request, and Rhoades was returned to Illinois. He found himself extradited a second time not long after, pleading guilty to the murders of Walsh and Jones in a plea-bargain to avoid the death penalty. He received a second life sentence.
Rhoades continues to live out his days in the Menard Correctional Centre – a quiet retirement for a man the FBI suspect of killing at least 3 woman a month during his peak, behind the wheel of a mobile torture chamber.
Editor's note: this article ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written. Robert Ben Rhoades is recorded in this archive at three to four deaths, which is the convicted and pleaded figure the article itself sets out: convicted of the first degree murder of Regina Kay Walters, and later pleading guilty to Candace Walsh and Ricky Lee Jones. The suggestion that he was killing three women a month at his peak is an FBI suspicion, not a charge, and nothing has been proved beyond those cases. The surviving woman found in his cab in April 1990 is unnamed here, as she was in the original. Rhoades is serving life without parole at Menard.