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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Weyborg Thun. A fair warning.
This episode contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence and serial murder. If you do not wish to hear such content, consider yourself warned. Tonight, I wish to take you on a cross-country journey. We travel from the hot Mexican sun and teeming streets of Mexico City and travel north, across the border to the United States of America.
There, we put our thumb out and hitchhike, taking on the endless road leading off towards the horizon into the dark night. I am, dear listener, constantly trying to improve the content I deliver to you.
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America has approximately 3.5 million truck drivers at any time, driving along the 68,872 kilometers long national system of interstate and defense highways. The majority, 66.7%, of those truck drivers are white, working class men, and only 4.1% are women drivers.
It's a demanding occupation, with long hours spent on mostly monotonous roads in solitude. Many of the truckers have families that they support back home, and many are single young men just starting out in their careers.
Being such a large portion of America's workforce, there are many legends and myths surrounding truckers, and there have been thousands of books and films made with the trucker on the road as the central theme. Often, truckers are depicted as ominous beings, sitting inside large steel beasts, looking for prey.
Naturally, the vast majority of truckers are honest, hard-working people who would never hurt anyone. But, as the saying goes, where there is smoke, there must be a flame. The flame in question in tonight's episode is indeed a trucker. He roamed America's highways and picked up prey along the way. His victims were both men and women.
and the women he picked up endured torture, rape, and murder. No one knows with certainty how many people lost their lives to the truck stop killer, but at least four met their fate at the hands of Robert Ben Rhodes.
Rhodes was not the first, nor was he the last serial killer who used the open highway as his hunting ground. Many serial killers, and many are still on the loose, prey upon hitchhikers and so-called lot lizards. Rhodes is, in this regard, just one more killer on the road, but he is, for some reason, more infamous than most mobile killers.
I think the main reason for this is one photograph. The photograph shows an attractive young girl of about 45 kilos with short, cropped, dark hair. She has on a black dress and black high-heeled shoes. Her face shows an expression of pure fear, and she holds her hands out in front of her in a defensive position.
The location of the photograph is a deserted and ruined barn, and it is apparently broad daylight. The photo is easily available online, and is usually listed high up on top ten lists of disturbing photographs of true crime.
The girl in the photo was Regina K. Walters, and she was only 14 years old when Robert Ben Rhodes kidnapped her and her 18-year-old boyfriend, Ricky Lee Jones. In February 1990, Regina and Ricky ran away from home by way of hitchhiking. They were in love.
The kind of all-consuming, passionate, and crazy kind of love that teenagers experience and that, unfortunately, often result in poor judgment. No one knows, unfortunately, where Rhodes picked up Regina and Ricky precisely. All that is known is that they were picked up in Texas, and the body of Regina was found in September 1990 all the way up in Illinois.
Ricky's body was found near El Paso, Texas. The location of Ricky's body suggests that he had been killed shortly after the couple was picked up. Ricky had not been sexually assaulted, and Rhodes probably killed him just to remove a threat to his plans for Regina. Rhodes kept Regina for at least two weeks.
He shaved her head short and completely shaved her pubic hair. He tortured her extensively by piercing her flesh, often her vagina and breasts, with fishing hooks, and of course raped her over and over and over again. When he became bored with her, he killed her with a garrotte made of bailing wire.
The garotte was a piece of wire strung around her neck, tied together at the back of her neck with a piece of wood. This piece of wood Rhodes had tightened more and more and more until the steel wire had completely shut off her breathing. It was a slow and very painful death.
The barn in the photograph of a terrified Regina was located near Interstate 70 in Bond County, just east of St. Louis, Illinois. We know this because Regina's decomposed body was found in it. But killing Regina was not enough for Rhodes. Six weeks after abducting her, he called her father and told him how he had cut his daughter's hair.
and left her in a loft in a barn. Regina's father asked if Regina was alive, but Rhodes just hung up the phone. Later, he phoned Regina's mother and suggested she meet him at a specified location. She did, but he never showed. After that, he called both parents a few more times, taunting them with vague details, leading them on, prolonging their suffering.
The photo of Regina easily available online is not the only one the authorities found among Rhodes' possessions. He had many photographs, and Regina was featured on many of them, often completely nude and tied up. Understandably, the FBI has never released these photos to the public, but there are a few cropped versions of them available online.
These censored photos show many different locations, none of which, except the barn, has ever been identified by the authorities. Rhodes, being an interstate truck driver, had the entire continental USA as his place of work. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were no computerized tracking tools for trucking companies as there is today.
and it is impossible to completely track his movements. Rhodes' truck had a spacious sleeping compartment, and it's there he tied up his many victims and inflicted heinous torture over long periods of time. What is rather unique about Rhodes is that there are several survivors among his victims that in various ways managed to escape before he decided to kill them.
And so it was. In the summer of 1985, somewhere near Martinsburg, Pennsylvania, the body of a young woman was pulled from a truck stop dumpster. It was like from out of a movie. The rain was pouring down and blurred the scene in a sheet of water flowing over the windshield.
Vanessa Vasilka had just hitched a ride and was sitting in a nearby truck, waiting for the driver of the truck she was hitting in to pay for gas so they could leave. When they found the body of the young girl, there had been shouting. A man from the dingy truck stop diner ran out and started yelling for everyone to stay away as a small crowd gathered around the dumpster in the rain. Word filtered back,
that the dead girl was a teenage hitchhiker. The girl could easily have been Vanessa. She too was an attractive young teenage girl, and she too was hitchhiking. The truck driver walked quickly back towards the truck where Vanessa sat, his body a dark mass, moving in the shifting rain across the wet asphalt. For all Vanessa knew, he might be the killer.
But she was cold and tired and wanted to get away. So she stayed inside the warm cab of the truck. The driver reached the cab, swung up behind the wheel and said they should get going. He said he didn't want to get caught up in anything time-consuming. Stowing his paperwork, he released the brick. Neither of them said anything about the dead girl.
As they pulled away, the police were stringing crime tape around the dumpster, just as another state trooper rolled into the lot.
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Work. You really, really want it all to work out while you're away. Monday.com gives you and the team that peace of mind. When all work is on one platform and everyone's in sync, things just flow. Wherever you are, tap the banner to go to Monday.com. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. As a family man with three kids, I know firsthand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care.
But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night. For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it.
But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Everyone needs someone to talk to, even psychopaths, even your humble host.
Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. That ride turned out to be fine for Vanessa. They drove up to Ohio drinking Diet Coke and listening to Bruce Springsteen.
The boss had just released his enormously successful album Born in the USA and was probably playing inside trucks all over the country. Perhaps they listened to Working on the Highway, a snippet of which you, Dale Isner, heard in the beginning of this episode, as they pulled over to buy lunch. The trucker bought her lunch and didn't even try to have sex with the young woman.
In her eyes, this made him seem like a regular saint, compared to many other truckers she had ridden with. Several days later, though, heading south on I-95, through the Carolinas, she got picked up by another trucker who was in no way a gentleman. Today, Vanessa doesn't remember too much about him.
He was taller and leaner than most truckers, and didn't wear jeans or T-shirts. He wore a cotton button down with the sleeves rolled neatly up over his biceps, and he had the cleanest cab she had ever seen. To Vanessa, a clean truck and healthy body signaled a straight-aged kind of guy, and thus she thought he might be okay to ride with. Once out on the road, though,
He changed. He stopped responding to Vanessa's conversational questions. His bearing shifted. He grew taller in his seat, and his face muscles relaxed into something both arrogant and blank. Then he started talking about the dead girl in the dumpster, and asked her if she had ever heard of the Laughing Death Society. We laugh at death, he told her.
A few minutes later, Rhodes pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the road by some woods, took out a gleaming, mean-looking hunting knife and told Vanessa to get into the back of the cab. She began talking, saying the same things over and over. She said she knew he didn't want to do it,
She said it was his choice. She said she wouldn't go to the cops if nothing happened to her. But it was his choice. Until he looked at her and she went still. There was to be no more talking. Vanessa knew that it was all over. She started to mentally prepare to be raped and possibly worse. Then, for some unknown reason, he said one word.
Run. Vanessa knew immediately not to dawdle, and without looking back, she leapt from the truck, ran into the shadowy woods, and hid. There she hunkered down and stayed there, until she saw the truck pull onto the road again. It was twilight by then, the sun having set and the shadows grew around her. Still in a state of shock, she walked back out to the same road, started hitching south.
She kept her promise to the lean trucker with the clean cab. She never went to the police and didn't tell anyone for years what had happened to her. Many years later, Vanessa realized the lean trucker of her youth had been none other than Robert Ben Rhodes.
She remembered how the glasses were the same, the curve of the cheekbone, and something about the expression, particularly the set of the mouth. It had the same neutral arrogance. What is known about Robert Ben Rhodes in the 1980s is murky. He was involved in the BDSM and swinger scene in his hometown of Houston. Interestingly enough,
Just ten years earlier or thereabouts, Houston had been the hunting ground of another serial killer, Dean Correll, whom I have covered recently on this podcast. It is highly doubtful Dean and Robert knew each other at the time, and Correll was only interested in young boys, while Robert had never expressed sexual interest in males. Robert was also a married family man,
Dean was not. When he was caught, he said that he had been quote-unquote doing this for 15 years, which would put the onset of Rhodes' murders back into the 1970s. His trucking logs place him in the area of 50 unsolved murders in the three years prior to his arrest alone.
While not all 50 cases have been tied to Rhodes, at least not yet, and Rhodes himself has admitted to only three murders, the FBI has strong reason to believe that at his peak he was killing as many as one to three women per month.
In January of 1990, Robert Ben Rhodes ate at a truck stop diner in San Bernardino, California. His mind was not on his meal. He had other appetites that gnawed at him and demanded satisfaction. As with so many other truck stops, young women hang around asking for rides.
Some of them were genuinely poor women looking for rides to specific locations, but most of them were prostitutes. Among truckers, they were all known as lot lizards. One of them was a pretty young girl of eighteen, named Shana Holtz. She asked Rhodes for a ride, and he happily accepted. When they were on the road again, she soon fell asleep.
completely unaware of the extreme danger she was in. She awoke when Rhodes pulled in to the side of a deserted highway. Frightened, she tried to get out of the cab, but he slapped her hard across the face and pushed his pistol into her ribs. He then forced her, at gunpoint, into the sleeper compartment where he handcuffed her to chains which hung from a ceiling bar.
He also cuffed her ankles and adjusted her until she was spread-eagled on the bed. As if working on autopilot, he then ripped the terrified girl's blouse off before forcing a horse's bit into her mouth and buckling it around her head. Now he had utter dominance over her, just the way he liked it.
For several weeks he kept her chained up, usually completely naked. He tortured her by sticking pins into various parts of her body. Other times he used fishhooks to suspend her body or force her labial lips apart. At semi-regular intervals he would drive into secluded areas far from the prying eyes of neighbors and passing cars.
There, he would remove her shackles and take her naked, with a leash strapped to her neck, outside to defecate and urinate. She was forced to be on all fours doing this, like a dog, probably to maximize her humiliation and emphasize his absolute dominance. Once finished, he would chain her to the side of the truck, in a standing position, facing the truck.
Then, he would use a leather-tongued whip to flog her naked body bloody, before again chaining her up inside the sleeping compartment. As with other sadists, Rhodes couldn't achieve orgasm, or an erection, unless he inflicted pain, suffering, and humiliation upon women.
Once he had ejaculated, he would leave the girl alone for a few hours, perhaps giving her some scraps of his remaining fast food to eat, but it didn't last long until his urges for violence resurfaced. Just after the teenage girl had fallen asleep, he would wake her up and violently rape her, telling her how worthless she was while doing so.
Then, he would force an oversized dildo into her vagina and into her anus, becoming aroused by her shrieks of extreme pain, horror, and despair. After almost a month, on the 1st of February, Rhodes took Shana back to his apartment, where he allowed her to have a bath and fed her. Then, he anally raped her and took her back to his truck.
and drove to a Houston brewery for a work assignment. The public story is that she got away because Rhodes forgot to chain her in. But the fact is, according to Shana herself, is that she'd not been shackled when she escaped. Rhodes had told her to, quote-unquote, sit there and be a good girl. But Holtz, 18 years old, had been on the street since she was 12.
By her own account, she had been raped at least twenty times and had already had a baby. She knew how to survive. Whatever the man thought he had broken in her had already been broken and healed back stronger. She didn't do what he expected. She ran. She brought the police right back to Rose's truck, but then balked at pressing charges, so they had to let him go.
The story was that she was simply too scared at the time. But the final lines of Holt's police statement read, and I quote, End quote.
Unfortunately, the police doesn't seem to have pressed the matter, and she left the police station, her abductor and violator free to hunt again. Robert Ben Rhodes is an enigmatic figure. He is still alive.
But finding information about his youth, his normal married life, and general background is difficult. Rhodes didn't live a double life as much as a shadowed one. There is a picture of him in leather and chains that floats around on the internet.
It's actually from a Halloween party in Houston, where he went as a quote-unquote slave, led on by a chain by his wife, who was dressed as a dominatrix. His wife, Deborah Davis, and Rhodes, met in the early 80s at a Houston bar called Chip Kickers. Rhodes was dressed that night as an airline pilot, and it was months before Davis found out he wasn't one.
The remarkable thing is that when she did, she didn't dump him. Rhodes was cunning and highly charismatic. Years later, when the FBI extradited him to Illinois, he was able to get a phone number off a waitress while shackled hand and foot and wearing an orange prison suit.
This obviously doesn't give much credit as to the waitress's judgment, but it does speak to Rhodes's charisma.
Whoa, easy there. Yeah.
We'll be right back.
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And so, we come to the end of part one out of two episodes covering Robert Ben Rhodes. Next week, I will finish his saga. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned.
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