The Shocking Story of the Trucker Who Killed 50 People

The Shocking Story of the Trucker Who Killed 50 People

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mm hmmm.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
The nation's long web of interstates provided the perfect ton
of game for the prave bredita. He prayed on hitchhikers
wandering the rolls. He held them captive, then torture and
rape them. When that didn't satisfy his warped cravings, he

(00:32):
killed instead.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
Across the nation, a serial rapist targeted unsuspecting women. It
was only a matter of time till his dock urges
raged out of control and led him to murder. He
followed a path so random it was impossible to trace,
and all that tied him to his crimes were his
access to the highways and he bizarre sexual fetish. I'm

(01:28):
Jim Calstrom, former head of the FBI's New York office.
When investigators believed the suspect had committed dozens of murders,
the FBI was determined to put the brakes on his
nationwide rampage.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
February fifth, nineteen ninety on a road in Houston, Texas,
eighteen year old Nicole Tuttle desperately tried to flag down
passing motorists. Some one finally stopped for the brused and
leading over. The driver took her to the closest phone

(02:11):
to call police. At the Houston Police station, Nicole told
officers that she had been kidnapped and assaulted, but she'd
managed to escape. Her ordeal began in California one week earlier.
On January twenty ninth, she hitched a ride from a

(02:32):
trucker at a rest stop. He said his name was
Dusty that he was headed east through Arizona. After a
few hours on the road, she fell asleep in the
back compartment of his trunk. It seemed that was exactly
what he was waiting for. He climbed him back and

(02:53):
overpowered her. Before she was fully awake, he chained her
to the walls and gagged her with a horse bad
The trucker whipped her and pierced her with pins and fishhooks.
He also ragged and solemnized her. Nicholl told police that
she was chained inside the cab for six days. Her

(03:14):
ordeal didn't end there. Inside his Houston apartment, the trucker
allowed her to Bathe then changed her to the bed
and raped her again. She watched helplessly as he approached
her with a straight razor. He pressed the blade close
to her scalp and began to slice off her hair.

(03:36):
After three hours, he forced her back into the truck.
This time he failed to bind her. When they stopped
at a brewery, he left her alone as he walked
inside to sign for his new freight. Nichole knew this
might be her only chance. Where did she ran for it?
Still wearing a daug leash around her neck. Euston police

(04:01):
stopped a trucker in the area whose rig fit Nicholl's description.
She said he was not the man who attacked her.
Her background check revealed no outstanding warrants or convictions, so
police released the trucker.

Speaker 4 (04:22):
Nicholl told the officers to stop searching.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
She was too frightened to testify against her attacker. She
just wanted to go home to California. On February fifth,
the same day that Nicoll escaped, another young woman was
on the highway thumbing for rides just fifteen miles away
in Pasadena, Texas, Fourteen year old Regina Katy Walters was

(04:48):
running away with her new boyfriend.

Speaker 4 (04:52):
Her parents were.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
Divorced, and Regina usually stayed with her father in Houston.
She had been visiting her mother for a few days
when she fled and began hitchhiking. Whether she was following
the lead for a new teenage boyfriend or just testing
her independence. A trucker soon stopped for the pretty young girl.

(05:19):
Regina's mother, Caroline Walters, was a single mom who worked
long hours as a department store clerk. When she came
home from work, she was surprised to find her daughter
was not home. Regina, her daughter did not answer. Caroline
found no notes and saw no other signs that her

(05:40):
daughter had been back to the house. She checked the
answering machine that Regina had left no messages. Carolyn called
her daughter's friends and Regina's father in Houston. No one
had heard.

Speaker 5 (05:59):
From the girls.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
The distraught mother reported her daughter as a missing person
to Pasadena, Texas Police. She spoke with a detective from
the juvenile section, providing the officer with Regina's description. Her
fourteen year old daughter was about five feet tall, weighed
ninety five pounds, and had long, curly brown hair. The

(06:26):
detective asked Carolyn what steps she had taken so far
to find her.

Speaker 4 (06:32):
Carolyn had posted missing.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
Persons flyers, but no one had yet responded. The worried
mother hadn't heard from her daughter since they argued two
nights before. At nine thirty that night, Regina told her
mother she was going to visit a friend.

Speaker 6 (06:51):
I just think you.

Speaker 7 (06:52):
Ought to stay how too.

Speaker 2 (06:53):
When Carolyne objected, the girl insisted she would be right back.

Speaker 8 (07:00):
Why.

Speaker 2 (07:02):
Against her better judgments, Carolyne relented, trusting that Regina would
call if she stayed out later. Though the young teen
had a history of running away, she always returned on
her own with her parents or where she is right,
her mother believed this time is different. Pasadena, Texas Police

(07:25):
detective Suzanne Jackson and the Juvenile Division was assigned the case.
She understood Caroline's concern.

Speaker 6 (07:33):
Several days passed, and Regina would normally call her mom
when she would leave home and let her mother know
that she was okay and that she was just out.
She would be back when she was ready to come home,
and she had not done that.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
Carolyn posted more flyers at the convenience store close to
her house. She held out hope that her daughter was unharmed,
maybe she was simply with a friend. Along with Regina's
photo and description, Carolyn offered a reward for information on
her daughter's whereabouts. Five days after Regina's disappearance, Carolyn received

(08:20):
a phone call. The caller had seen Regina talking to
two young men on the evening she left her mother's house.
The person only knew the man as Billy and Ricky,
but she remembered that Billy had a girlfriend with a
peculiar name of Urana.

Speaker 4 (08:36):
Carolyn immediately called.

Speaker 6 (08:38):
Police Jackson Please.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
The following day, a second caller gave Carolyn the address
of an apartment where he had seen Regina at a
party two days before. When police arrived, no one answered.
The manager told them the apartment was rented to a

(09:02):
man named Billy Wayne Gibbs. The next morning, the detective
told her colleagues about the case. She mentioned she was
looking for Gibbs in connection with Regina's disappearance. She was
also looking for two others, a woman named Urana and
a man named Ricky. She didn't know their last names.

(09:24):
To her surprise, the officers did. Billy Wayne Gibbs had
a girlfriend named Urana Sweet and a friend named Ricky
Lee Jones. The three were wanted in connection with an
auto theft. Units were dispatched to Gibbs's apartment to wait
for his return. Officers patrolled the nearby road. After several

(09:49):
hours of Survellance. They picked up seventeen year old Gibbs
and his girlfriend Urana near his apartment, cuff the young
couple and brought them to the station for questioning. The

(10:10):
third suspect, Ricky Lee Jones, was still at large. The
arresting officer asked Gibbs if he had seen Regina or
Ricky Lee Jones. Gibbs said he had spoken to them
four days ago, but not since. He told police that

(10:31):
Ricky and Regina were in love and planned to run
away to Mexico, where Ricky had relatives. The detectives suspected
that eighteen year old Jones had another reason for leaving town.
If he were caught with Regina, he could be charged
with contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Speaker 6 (10:48):
Regina was fourteen and they obviously were boyfriend and girlfriend
at the time. When they saw the flyers that the
mother had left out with reward on her location, they
decided they'd be best to leave the area wouldn't be caught,
and that's when they decided to leave the area hitchhike
to Mexico.

Speaker 2 (11:06):
The detective learned that Ricky Lee Jones was already on
probation for theft fleeing jurisdiction was a parole violation. She
issued a warrant for his arrest. She also fed Regina's
description into the NCIC, the National Crime Information Center, a
database listing both victims and criminals nationwide. If Regina were

(11:30):
located by any police department in the country, Pasadena, Texas
police would be notified. Until then, with no known address
or vehicle, it would be difficult to find the pair.
Fifteen miles away, Houston police interviewed Jerry Walters, Regina's divorced farmer.

(11:52):
He told them he'd received a disturbing call on his
unlisted home number on the evening of March seventeenth. The
conversation was brief and Walters did not recognize the caller's voice. Hello,
the man asked, are you Regina's father. When Walters replied yes,

(12:13):
the man told him he knew where to find Rginia.
He said she was in a loft of a lawn
and that there had been some changes he had cut
the girl's hair. Regina's father asked if she was dead
or alive. The caller hung up without answering. Detective Jackson

(12:37):
asked Southwestern Bell to trace the call the company told
her it would take several days. Police would simply have
to wait. Aside from the phone records, the trail.

Speaker 4 (12:48):
Of the missing fourteen.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
Year old and her boyfriend was stone cold. In March
of nineteen ninety, Pasadena, Texas police detective Suzanne Jackson continued
her search for fourteen year old Regina k Walters. The
girl hadn't been seen since early February, when she left
a friend's house with her eighteen year old boyfriend, Ricky

(13:11):
Lee Jones. The detective's only lead was an anonymous phone
call made to Regina's father on March seventeenth. The call
had yet to be traced. On the same night, Regina's
father received his call in Houston, her mother in Pasadena, Texas,
also got a call.

Speaker 7 (13:35):
Hello.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
She recorded the conversation as police had advised. An unknown
man told Carolyn to meet him at six thirty the
next morning at the local convenience store. He had something
to tell her about Regina, and he wanted to say
it in person. Without giving his name or description, he
hung up. Carolyn called Detective Jackson, who told her it

(13:59):
was risky to meet the man, and Carolyn insisted. Jackson
said police would go with her for protection from a distance.
Officers kept an eye on Carolyn as she waited at
the convenience store for the unknown caller. She had no

(14:21):
way of knowing if the man knew who she was,
and no way to identify him. Her only hope was
if he would approach her. She studied everyone who came
in and out and everyone who used the phone. Carolyn

(14:44):
waited over two hours. The caller never came forward. Two
days later, Pasadena, Texas police received the phone records for
both calls to Regina's parents.

Speaker 4 (15:00):
They learned that the call.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
To Regina's father in Houston was made from a gas
station in Annis, Texas, two hundred miles northwest to where
she was last seen. The call to her mother's home
in Pasadena, Texas was made from a payphone only a
few blocks away.

Speaker 6 (15:16):
At that particular time, it was obvious that we were
becoming very concerned about Regina's whereabouts with the phone calls.
In the information that we received, we were pretty sure
that there was going to be foul play involved.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
Two weeks later, Carolyn told detective Jackson that the man
who had called her before wanted to set up another
meeting at the same convenience store. Police traced the call
to a nearby payphone, the caller had already fled. On
April twenty third, police found a partial skeleton of a

(15:55):
small female near a riverbank in Pasadena, Texas. They determined
the young girl's age and weight was close to Regina's.
Detective Suzanne Jackson brought Regina's dental records to the medical examiner.

Speaker 6 (16:09):
I went to the emmy's office with my information. We
did a comparison on some dental X rays and found
that this particular person was not Regina.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
Months went by with no leaves. Regina's parents feared the worst.
On October twelfth, two boys were playing near a dirt
road in Manville, Texas, twenty six miles south of Houston.
Close to the road, they came across a woodpile. They
found something they'd never forget, human remains. They ran home

(16:50):
to tell their parents, who called police. Officers arrived and
secured the area. They could not identify the body at
the site, it was too badly decomposed and there was
no walk to identification nearby. All police could guess was

(17:14):
that the victim was a child or a young adult.
They hoped an autopsy would tell them more. The Pasadena,
Texas detective traveled to the Harris County Medical Examiner's office,
bringing Regina's dental records.

Speaker 9 (17:29):
So you almost have a match, right.

Speaker 2 (17:30):
The m E compared those records to X rays taken
of the corpse.

Speaker 7 (17:34):
Right, they did not match.

Speaker 6 (17:39):
It was a little disappointing. Although we were very relieved
that it was not Regina, her parents at this particular
point were concerned that we were going to be recovering
a body and we were not gonna be locating Regina alive,
and they were ready for some type of closure at
this point.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
As the search continued in Texas through the fall of
nineteen ninety, a farmer prepared to burn down his old
barn in Bond County, Illinois. He hadn't been inside in years.
The farmer climbed up into the hayloft to make one
last check of the place. He looked through the abandoned

(18:18):
building but found only items long since discarded. Nothing seemed
especially unusual or out of place. Then something caught his eye.
He looked closer at the strewn hay and saw a
skeleton that appeared to be human. The farmer immediately called Police.

(18:47):
In October of nineteen ninety, as Detective Jackson hunted in
Texas for fourteen year old Regina Kay Walters, a decayed
body was found in the hayloft of an abandoned barn
in Bond County, Illinois. Agent Mike Sheeley at the Illinois
State Police responded to the scene.

Speaker 8 (19:05):
I had received a call from the local sheriff's office
in Bond County, Illinois, and they had instructed me that
they had found a body in a rural setting near
the Interstate seventy, which is a major interstate that travels
through Bond County.

Speaker 2 (19:20):
Crime scene technicians conducted a thorough search of the barn.
No clothes were found on or near the body. There
was no wallet or other idea. They did find a
single white thread close to the bones that seemed too
new to have been in the old barn. For law.
Police photographed the remains from various angles. They found baling

(19:43):
wire that matched the wire wrapped around the corpse's neck.
Some hair remained on the head. Because the skull was
so small, police believed the victim.

Speaker 4 (19:56):
Was probably a child.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
The people of by Greenville had not seen a murder
in ten years. The anonymity of this crime was especially disturbing.
Police had no way of knowing if the victim was
from the area or just dumped there by someone passing
through a nearby into State seven. At first, they weren't
even sure of the corpse's age or sex. Forensic anthropologist

(20:23):
Mark Johnsy was called in to conduct an examination. He
made several discoveries that helped Illinois State Agent Mike Sheeley
begin to identify the victim.

Speaker 8 (20:34):
Mark was able to determine that it was a young
female between the ages of fourteen to sixteen for approximate weight,
which was ninety to one hundred and ten pounds. There
was indication that her hair had been cut. The distal
ends had begun to grow again, but the forensics had
told us that it was recent.

Speaker 2 (20:53):
The cause of death was determined to be strangulation. The
killer had almost severed the victim's head, twisting baling wire
around her neck sixteen times. That's what we found it.
From the condition of the joints in vertebrae. John Zi
discerned that the girl was killed almost a year before.

(21:14):
A forensic scientist analyzed the white fiber found close to
the body. Maybe it would yield a clue to what
the young girl or her murderer had been wearing. He
determined the fiber was mostly cotton, but it didn't come
from clothing. It likely came from a towel. Searching the
National Crime Database, state Agent Mike Sheeley listed the Illinois

(21:36):
Jane Doe as a white female fourteen to sixteen years
of age, probably killed as early as September nineteen eighty nine.

Speaker 8 (21:44):
We were alarmed to find that there was nine hundred
and fifty matches with the age group in the category
in the timeframe, which made the task very difficult. To
begin the identification process.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
He narrowed the field to about one hundred by specifying
the victim's time of death closer to the spring of
nineteen ninety. The investigator then sent teletypes to law enforcement
agencies working those cases. The detective investigating the disappearance of
Regina Walters in Pasadena, Texas, received the teletype on October sixteenth.

(22:25):
She believed the body's description fit Regina's and phoned the
Bonn County Sheriff's office in Illinois. The receptionist told her
they had gotten so many responses that the sheriff would
have to call her back. Before she hung up, the
detective remembered the mysterious phone call Regina's father had received.

(22:45):
The caller had said the girl was in a barn.

Speaker 6 (22:49):
When I asked her if the body was found in
a barn, she immediately transferred me to the sheriff, in
which I started talking to him right away, and it
was immediately heard that it was possibly Regina, and so
we immediately jumped on that and started sending the teletopes
back and forth.

Speaker 2 (23:08):
The detective asked another question, based on the March seventeenth
phone calls Regina's father, did the girl in the barn
have shorn hair? The Illinois authorities confirmed that she did.
The girl found in Illinois matched the caller's description of Regina.

Speaker 6 (23:29):
We sent a copy of dental x race to Greenville,
Illinois to the Sheriff's office, and those dental X rays
were matched with the body that was discovered there and
it was confirmed to be Regina's body.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
One question remained, where was Regina's boyfriend, Ricky Lee Jones.
Detectives called on the FBI for help. Special Agent Mark Young,
a behavioral expert in the Houston Field Office, was assigned
as case agent.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
And I tried to go in and contact every person
that had any involvement with Ricky R. Regina. I wanted
to see if there was anything that they mentioned that
would have proven valuable to locate in Ricky at.

Speaker 2 (24:17):
His former high school. Pasadena, Texas detectives also continued to
pursue Ricky Lee Jones. That's called a guidance counselor said
that Jones had not been enrolled in school for the
past year. She had little other information about him, though
she did provide his last known address. It was the

(24:41):
home of Jones's family. His sister, Tammy was the only
one there. She said that no one in the family
had seen Ricky for over a year. They had written
him off as a bad kid, believing he'd end up
in prison. The detective asked if they had relatives in Mexico.

(25:05):
Tammy said her mother had some in Mada Morris, just
south of the Texas border.

Speaker 8 (25:08):
Have you seen her?

Speaker 2 (25:09):
Jackson showed her a photo of Regina, but Tammy didn't
recognize her.

Speaker 9 (25:14):
Okay, that's the list of Ricky.

Speaker 6 (25:16):
Was already listed as wanted because he had violated his probation,
so we felt like maybe he was afraid to come
home if he did know anything about Regina's disappearance and
her death. We were in fear that he may not
want to call and tell us what had happened, or
maybe involved himself.

Speaker 2 (25:36):
Especial Agent Mark Young poured over the details the case.
He developed a profile of Regina's killer. The agent determined
that eighteen year old Ricky Lee Jones probably did not
commit the crime.

Speaker 1 (25:49):
If Ricky Lee Johns had murdered Regina, he would have
done it in a fit of anger, and that would
have been reflected in the crime saying, and you didn't
that it was a very controlled, purposeful crime scene. He
got the impression that this is an older person, a
white male, a traveler truck driver, traveling salesman, somebody that

(26:12):
had a reason to be across the country.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
The fact that the barn was close to an interstate
supported Agent Young's theory. The crime scene told the agent
more about the sadistic murderer. He had stripped off Regina's clothing,
killed her slowly by strangulation, and most notably, had cut
Regina's long hair.

Speaker 1 (26:36):
Whoever did this crime was doing things beyond what was
necessary to perpetrate the crime. Maybe a sexual predator or
sexual statist, a person that had other offenses.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
Also, investigators were alerted to another crime in the town
of Marshall, Texas, two hundred miles north of Houston, partial
skeletal remains of a young man were found washed up
on a creek bank. The skull had been perforated on
the left side by a small caliber firearm. Though there

(27:09):
was little evidence to positively identify the body, the victim's
age and location led police to conclude it was probably
Ricky Lee. Jones.

Speaker 1 (27:19):
I came to the conclusion that there were now that
leads to cover in this case. For all intents and purposes,
the case was closed in our division.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
We had nowhere else to go to investigators. It looked
like the man who had killed Regina Kay Walters and
her boyfriend had gotten away with murdad As the hunt
for a sadistic killer ground to a halt in Pasadena, Texas,
one thousand miles west in Arizona, authorities encountered a problem

(27:51):
on their own highways. An Arizona Highway patrolman was at
the end of his shift when he came across a
tractor trailer parked on the sea. Either of an interstate
on ramp. The rig had to be moved it was
a hazard to passing motorists. He noticed the lights were
and the engine was still. As he approached the driver's door.

(28:17):
Officer Michael Miller recalled that a man suddenly burst out
of the cab and immediately spread his arms against the truck.

Speaker 7 (28:24):
And I asked him myself, what's going on, and he
said nothing, Officer, We're doing just fine. They said that
there's no problem. I've got a gun in my back pocket,
and he motioned to his back pocket and then put
his hands up on the side of his truck. This
was kind of unusual situation, and I could still hear
the woman screaming on the inside of the truck.

Speaker 2 (28:49):
Miller cuffed Robert Ben Rhodes and escorted the truck back
to his car. Questioned him further.

Speaker 7 (28:54):
He said, it was just fine. They were there together,
and I guess you call it consenting situation, But I
didn't know if the screams coming from the woman. With
the fact that she was startled, she was surprised, but
I was going to find out what the situation was.

Speaker 2 (29:11):
With Rodes's hands cuffed behind his back, Miller seat belted
him into the patrol car. The officer returned to the
truck to check on the fronted woman.

Speaker 4 (29:26):
We found her handcuffed.

Speaker 2 (29:27):
To the world at her wrists and ankles. The patrol
on the shortes.

Speaker 7 (29:33):
She was no longer in danger, and I told her, ma'am,
you're going to need to remain here until I can
get some help out here, because this is a criminal
or a crime scene, and some detectives are going to
have to look at this. I said, just remain calm.
This man is not going to be back to bother
you again. Just remain calm. I left the truck and

(29:55):
moved back to my patrol car.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Miller returned just in time. Rhodes had maneuvered his cuffed
hands in front of him and released his seat belt.
He was about to open the car door. The officer
quickly recuffed him.

Speaker 7 (30:13):
There is no actual routine stop out there in the
road that no matter what you come across out there,
you never know who you're dealing with. And it sent
a chill up my spine to know that this man,
as cool as he was, could have probably killed me
and the girl at the same time and still been
on the road.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
Police from the town of Casi Grande arrived on the scene.
They freed the woman and transported her and rose to
the police station for further questioning. Inside the truck, they
found a gruesome array of torture tools, chains that attached
to rings welded to the back of the sleeper compartment, fishers,
bloody towels, a horse bit, and a briefcase filled with

(30:54):
the implements of a sexual sadist. They also found a
camera in a briefcase, along with several hairs that did
not belong to the woman found in the truck. Cassi
Grande police detective Rick Barnhardt led the investigation.

Speaker 9 (31:08):
Robert Rhodes had a what I referred to as a
rape kit in his truck. He had all kinds of paraphernalia.
He had long sticks with clips on the end where
he would draw and quarter his victims. He had whips,
and just based on that, I knew Robert Rhodes was
a predator.

Speaker 3 (31:28):
Oh just the trucks.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
The woman found chained in Rhodes's truck. He was twenty
seven year old. Kathleen Fund never had any problems before.
She told the detective she had been picked up about
an hour earlier. From the Whip Griffin's truck stop north
of Phoenix.

Speaker 3 (31:44):
He was trying to rape.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
When she dozed off from the sleeper compartment. The trucker
climbed back, assaulted her, and changed her to the walls.
The man told her his name was Whips and Chains
and that he'd been doing this for fifteen years. Po
Lice photographed her injuries, wrisk burns from the handcuffs and

(32:07):
welts from the beatings. She tried to fight off her attacker,
but her hands were changed. All she could do to
defend herself was to bite him. She managed to injure
his left shoulder enough to distract him from raping her.
Kathleen agreed to press assault and kidnapping charges, but Detective

(32:28):
Barnhardt believed she might be problematic for the prosecution.

Speaker 9 (32:33):
My interview with Kathleen was really sort of bizarre. She
would talk about this reality, this terrible assault that she endured,
and then periodically she would revert back to a story
about her traveling across the country to see the president.
She told me she wanted to give the president a microchip,

(32:53):
and she talked about the underground prison where no one
escapes from and all this time. My heart was sinking
because I needed Kathleen to tell a very lucid story
about this, the horrible incident that happened to her.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
The detective asked trucker Robert Ben Rhoades for his version
of events. Rhodes said Kathleen was crazy and described her
as a lot lesser, the trucker's term for a woman
who trade sex for rides. He claimed that she solicited
him and that she liked it rough, though they never
actually had sex. He refused to provide any details about

(33:34):
what happened in the trucks sleeper compartment. He talked around
the subject, never admitting to any crime. Police photographed Rhodes's wound.
It looked like a bite mark on his left shoulder,
just as Kathleen had described. Rhodes claimed he sustained the
injury while loading his truck, but Detective Barnhardt believed Kathleen's story.

Speaker 9 (34:00):
Told me, she tried to bite his throat, but he
moved and she bit him on the left upper shoulder.
And we've got a photo of her bitemark, and her
story completely corroborated. You know what happened in that sleeper cap.

Speaker 2 (34:17):
Local prosecutors arrested Robert Ben Rhodes and held him for
aggravated assault, sexual assault, and unlawful imprisonment, but their only witness,
Kathleen Vine, suffered from paranoid delusions. To keep him behind bars,

(34:37):
they needed additional witnesses. Kathleen's claim that Rhodes had been
kidnapping women for fifteen years haunted Detective Barnhart. He entered
Rhodes's name into the NCIC in case other agencies had
reported similar crimes. As the detective pursued, the case had

(35:00):
made headlines across the Southwest. A Houston police officer was
among those who read about it. The trucker detained in
Arizona sounded like the same men who stopped outside of
Houston earlier in the year. Police suspected Rhodes had held
a woman captive in his truck for six days, raping

(35:20):
and torturing her until she finally escaped. They were unable
to press charges since the woman failed to identify him.
Houston Police Sergeant Beaumar described the case to Detective Barnhardt.

Speaker 9 (35:34):
I was contacted by Sergeant Beaumar. His was the case
where the young lady escaped. I was fairly positive that
Robert Rhodes was at least a serial rapist. I had
suspicions that he might be a murderer.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
Since Rhodes had crossed state lines since his last crime.
Detective Barnhart contacted the FBI to request assistance. He hoped
that with the FBI's support, he could gather enough evidence
of the Trucker's serial sex crimes to build a case
that would stick. Special Agent Bob Lee the Houston FBI
Field Office knew the place to start was in Rhodes's

(36:10):
Houston apartment.

Speaker 4 (36:13):
He spoke to Rhodes's landlord.

Speaker 2 (36:15):
She had checked the apartment after the Trucker's arrest and
was horrified to find bloody torture devices. Based on her statement,
Agent Lea secured a warrant to search the premises.

Speaker 5 (36:27):
We know that serial rapists often keep souvenirs from their victims,
whether it be a piece of clothing or a piece
of jewelry or whatever. When we went in, we found
this bondage paraphernalia. We found chains, We found handcuffs, We
found a rack that someone could be tied to. We

(36:52):
found a lot of women's jewelry.

Speaker 2 (36:58):
Agents in Houston police found bloody white towels, women's clothing,
and stacks of photographs. The snapshots depicted some women with
shorn hair in various states of undress, bound and bruised.
Investigators believed that Rhodes shot the photos as souvenirs of

(37:18):
his crimes to relive his victim's terror. Though agents now
had evidence that Rhodes was likely a serial rapist, they
were unable to identify any of his victims from the photos.
With no additional witnesses, the case in Arizona was still weak.
Prosecutor's only witness, Kathleen Vine, was questionable. The trial would

(37:40):
be a contest of he said, she said, and a
mentally disturbed woman might leave Juras unconvinced. By December nineteen
ninety the best Arizona prosecutors could do was to offer
Roads a deal six years, including time served and work
release eligibility if he pled guilty to the charge against Vine.

(38:01):
His attorney accepted. In about a year, Roads could be
out on parole stalking new prey. By October nineteen ninety one,
a year after fourteen year old Regina k Walters was
found murdered in Illinois, her case remained unsolved. Special agent

(38:24):
Mark Young an FBI profiler predicted the murderer was probably
a trucker, a traveling salesman with prior sexual offenses. His
signature behavior was to hack off his victim's hair. Agent
Young spoke to area law enforcement agencies hoping they had
open cases that might match the profile.

Speaker 1 (38:43):
One day, Bob Lee and I was an agent in
the FBI on the Violent Crime Squad, overheard me talking
on the phone to a police officer and he said, Hey,
I had a case I had worked a few months back,
where as a truck driver kidnapped a young and her
head hair was cut just like your Sayah.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
The victim's name was Nicole Tuttle. She had also been
raped repeatedly and had escaped the day. Regina Walters and
Ricky Lee Jones were last seen alive on Monday, February fifth,
nineteen ninety. That same day, Houston police had stopped a
trucker named Robert ben Rose, who fit Nicole's description of

(39:25):
her attacker. At the time, she told the officers it
was the wrong man. Special Agent Bob Leef in the
FBI's Houston Field office recalled that Nicole later changed her
story in the hospital as she was treated for her wounds.

Speaker 5 (39:44):
Later that night, she told the detectives that Robert Ben
Rhodes was in fact the individual that had kidnapped her.
When I asked if she wanted to press charges, she
told the police officer that all she wanted to do
was go home.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
Told agent Young that Nicole was not the Trucker's only victim.

Speaker 4 (40:05):
Rhodes was serving.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
Time in an Arizona prison for the assault of Kathleen
Vine and was eligible for work release in just three months.
The agent then described the search of the trucker's residence, and.

Speaker 1 (40:17):
He said, we found some photographs in his apartment, some
of his own pictures with somebody else with short hair
who it seems like she was at a barn.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
The chilling photos portrayed a young girl at different locations,
wearing a variety of seductive outfits. At the barn, she
was in a black dress, shielding herself from Rhodes's camera.

Speaker 1 (40:41):
When I thought I was I said, this is Regina Walters.
In order to verify that, I went to the family
and I got several of their pictures, and there are
facial characteristics and markings that exactly duplicated the pictures Rod's tug.

Speaker 2 (41:03):
The FBI began to build a kidnapping and murder case
against Robert Ben Rhodes. They revisited the evidence from the
search of Rhodes's apartment and found more photos of Regina.
They also found several articles of women's clothing, including a
black dress, which lab examiners confirmed as the dress Regina
had worn in the photos. Illinois State Agent Mike Sheeley

(41:25):
was notified. He forwarded the evidence found in the Greenville
barn to the FBI lab in Houston. Lab examiners discovered
that the cotton fiber recovered in Illinois was consistent with
the bloody towels found in Rhodes's Houston apartment, but the
results were inconclusive since that type of town was so common.

Speaker 4 (41:47):
Detective Jackson from Pasadena, Texas.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
Met with agents Sheeley, Young, and Lee at the Houston
FBI Field office to discuss what they needed for a
solid indictment against Rhodes, not only for Regina's murder, but
for crimes against his up nameless victims. With Roads nearing
his release date, Illinois State Agent Mike Sheeley knew they
were racing against the car.

Speaker 8 (42:10):
He was eligible for parole. And that he was actually
eligible to work outside the prison almost on a release system,
and so we were under pressure to have the indictments
and to get him arrested on our charges.

Speaker 2 (42:27):
Our agents interviewed Rohase's former Houston employer, Mike Eggleton. The
trucking firm owner was not surprised to see him. Eggleton
had been questioned by authorities about Roads before. A few
years back. Local police suspected the trucker of assaulting a
woman in the back of his rig, but no formal

(42:47):
charges were ever filed. The truck Roads had driven had
been sold, but Eggleton provided its vehicle identification number, as
well as Rosie's trucking logs and fuel receipts. While agents
waited for a trace to come back on the truck's
ID number, the team began to assemble a timeline of
the trucker's travels. Agents found fuel receipts from a gas

(43:10):
station in Ennis, Texas, dated March seventeenth, nineteen ninety, the
same place and date as the call made to Regina's father,
Jerry Walters.

Speaker 4 (43:18):
Ocahoma City.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
Several of the local calls to Regina's mother, Karl, also
coincided with Rhodes's time in Houston. One question about the
calls remained. The killer could easily have gotten Carolyn's number
from missing persons flyers posted around town, but how had
he gotten Jerry Walters's unlisted home number. Agent Young found

(43:41):
the answer in evidence stored in Arizona.

Speaker 1 (43:45):
It was in that evidence that we located Regina Walter's.

Speaker 2 (43:49):
Little spiral notebook.

Speaker 1 (43:52):
In the front cover was all of her personal information,
her mother's address and phone numbering her father's.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
When Young flipped the notebook over, he found something even
more disturbing, a message that he believed was written by
Rhodes himself. A knife and gun were drawn above a
phrase that appeared to have blood dripping off its letters.
The phrase read Rickie's a dead man. Only a DNA
test would confirm if the partial remains of the young

(44:22):
man found in Southeast Texas was Rickie Lee Jones. Unfortunately,
investigators lacked a known source of Jones's DNA to perform
a comparison.

Speaker 3 (44:32):
And everywhere else.

Speaker 2 (44:34):
Since Rhodes claim to have been abducting and torturing his
victims for the past fifteen years, the team submitted their
time line to vitcap the violent Criminal Apprehension Programs, an
FBI database that lists thousands of solved and unsolved crimes nationwide.
Despite the limited information in gaps in the time line,

(44:57):
Detective Jackson was not surprised when the system returned over
fifty possible matches with open homicide and missing persons cases.

Speaker 6 (45:06):
His trips from Houston to Baltimore to la and back
in a matter of four to five days at a
time could just give you an idea of how many
people he has access to and remote locations that he
could abuse these people and dispose of them.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
A week later, agents tracked down Road's truck in Houston.
Two years had passed since Rhodes had driven the rig.
The cab had since been steam cleaned, repainted, and used
by other drivers, but evidence of his crimes somehow survived.
Investigators recovered a single strand of head hair that was

(45:43):
consistent with Reginis. Miraculously, they also found a small fingerprint
on the vinyl upholstery in the sleeper compartment that matched
her prints That proved she had been in the truck,
but it did not prove when or whether she'd been
there against her will. By January of nineteen ninety two,

(46:04):
almost two years after Regina had disappeared. Investigators determined the
evidence was not decisive enough to prove into state kidnapping.
They dropped the federal case. With Rose's parole hearing just
a week away, investigators convinced the Bond County prosecutor to
press charges in Illinois for capital murder. They knew the
evidence was circumstantially they pressed off.

Speaker 8 (46:27):
I feared that he could escape, and I also believe
that due to the overcrowding in the prison prison systems
and those sort of things, that he could be released.

Speaker 2 (46:38):
On February sixth, investigators traveled to the Arizona State Prison
in Florence to serve the war to Rhodes. The plan
was to confront Roads with photos of Regina, hoping to
prompt a confession and incriminating statement in bolster their case.
The suspected serial killer was unfased, even smoke.

Speaker 8 (47:02):
We spent approximately an hour with him, but Rhodes was
unwilling to speak with us and denied any involvement in
the death and was very firm in his denials. And
at that point we knew that we were going to
have to prove our case.

Speaker 2 (47:22):
Agents believed Rhodes knew they were fishing for a confession
because their evidence was weak. Clearly, they suspected this arrogant
man was betting he could beat the charges. Maybe he
believed that they didn't care enough about his victims to
earn a conviction.

Speaker 1 (47:42):
A lot of serial offenders, whether they're killers or other
sexual predators, will pick victims that they consider the forgotten
people because they're banking on that element that law enforcement
in society doesn't really care about hitchhikers or less wealthy people,
less established folks. He preyed on that type of person

(48:06):
in the hopes that he wouldn't get the attention that
did happen.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
Almost two years after the death of Regina K. Walters
and the kidnapping and sexual assault of at least two
other women, Robert Ben Rhoades was extriguarded from Arizona to
stand trial in Illinois. He and his attorney managed to
delay the trial date for six months. On September eleventh,
the overconfident trucker lost his nerve in a Bond County,

(48:36):
Illinois courthouse. His attorney pled down the capital murder charge
that carried a possible death sentence. He accepted an offer
of first degree murder with a penalty of life. Rhodes
was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Even as he serves his time in a maximum security

(48:57):
prison in Chester, Illinois, investigators have not abandoned the case.
They continue to gather evidence committed to proving that Reginie
Kay Walters was not Rhodes's only murder victim.

Speaker 1 (49:11):
There is one other picture of a female, as yet unidentified,
that got into the truck with him. We're somewhat concerned
whether that might be another victim. Anybody that gets into
the comfort zone of the truck of a serial killer
may potentially be another murder victim.

Speaker 2 (49:30):
Investigators continue to work in identifying the unknown women from
Rhodes's past in hopes of bringing the small comfort of
closure to their grieving families.