The Truck Stop Killer: Robert Ben Rhodes

 

The young teenager was ecstatic.

Her and her boyfriend had decided to run away together. It was 1990, a brand-new decade to start a brand-new life in.

The truck stop was teaming with people. Some had stopped to get gas, others to take a shower and grab a quick bite to eat. Mostly what all of them had in common was that they were all on their way to somewhere else.

Just passing through.

The teenager and her boyfriend were no different. They knew where they wanted to go, but they had no fast way of getting there. It was much too far to walk, so that only left one option in their minds: hitchhiking.

They had heard all the stories and they knew how dangerous it could be. But so far, they hadn’t had any trouble. They were fine. They had no reason to expect anything bad to happen to them.

The young couple must have figured that the bad stories were something that happened to other people. And even then…what? 5 % of them? No, they decided that they were going to be just fine.

The man that they were talking to then seemed okay. He was their father’s age and had an easy-going demeanor about him. He was confident, calm, and relaxed.

The three of them went through the usual banter, with the older man asking where they were going, the couple responding, and then the trucker deciding how far he was willing to take them.

The trucker told them, and the couple agreed. Climbing into his truck, they made themselves comfortable and settled in.

Neither one of them could have known that they had just entered their 5%.

—

On April 1, 1990, Arizona Highway Patrolman Michael Miller was driving along Highway 10 in Casa Grande, Arizona, when he saw a semi pulled over on the side of the road with its emergency lights blinking. Miller noted that there were no road flares or orange traffic triangles placed on the roadway, which is what a lot of semi drivers did when pulled over for long periods of time.

Turning on the flashing lights on the roof of his patrol vehicle, Miller pulled over to the side of the road behind the truck. Something struck him as odd about the truck, and he wanted to make sure that everything was alright.

Removing his flashlight, Miller stepped up to the driver’s side door, peering through the window. He swept the flashlight beam back and forth, looking for the driver. Inside, he could see that there were some lights on in the sleeper compartment but couldn’t make out much else.

Without warning, a woman began screaming from somewhere inside the truck. Surprised, Miller looked toward the sound. For a moment, he caught a glimpse of a young woman with something inside her mouth.

Almost immediately after, a man, presumably the driver, materialized out of the dark interior of the truck, gliding out of the back and through the door. Outside, he placed his hands on the truck. In a calm voice, the man assured Miller that everything was fine. Whatever he and the woman were doing, it was all consensual.

Inside, the woman kept screaming.

The driver continued to talk to Miller, assuring him that everything was alright. He confessed that he had a handgun in his back pocket.

In an increasingly surreal situation, this statement took Miller slightly off guard. He had thought something was off about the truck, but he certainly hadn’t expected this.

He looked at the driver. He was an older white male, with an average height and build. Despite the situation, he seemed perfectly calm. And his declaration of having a handgun made him seem more honest. In Miller’s experience, only more decent people with nothing to hide did that. Bad people didn’t tell you they were armed.

Still, this whole situation was bizarre. Miller decided to take no chances and do everything by the book. Reaching into the drivers back pocket, he found a handgun, just like the man said.

Miller than handcuffed the driver’s hands behind his back, explaining that he wasn’t under arrest, but this was just a precaution. Gently, he led the man to the backseat of his patrol car and shut him inside.

With the driver safely contained, he went back to the truck.

Carefully opening the door, Miller yelled inside that it was the police so that the woman knew who it was who was coming in, and climbed inside.

The young woman in the back was completely nude and obviously terrified. She was covered in angry red welts. She was handcuffed and shackled.  In her mouth was a horse bridle that had been padlocked shut.

Miller was probably aware that there were individuals who consented into this kind of sexual activity. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but none of it felt right to him, and it didn’t seem to be consensual.

Miller called the nearby Casa Grande Police Department on his radio, explained the situation, and asked them to send another officer to the scene.

Taking a blanket, Miller wrapped the woman in it and reassured her that everything was going to be alright. The police were here and were going to take care of everything.

Miller returned to the car to talk to the driver. To his immense surprise, the trucker had somehow gotten his handcuffed hands back in front of him. He was digging through his pockets for a handcuff key that he had there, most likely for the handcuffs that were on the woman in his truck.

With a sick feeling, Miller realized that the man had been incredibly close to escaping. If he hadn’t of come back when he did, then it was very likely that he could have.

The man could have gotten out of the car, killed Miller, and then driven off down the road. The truck would have blended in with the rest of the traffic on the road, and no one would have ever known.

Just then a patrol car from the Casa Grande Police Department pulled behind his cruiser. The officer, Robert Gygax, got out and approached Miller.

After getting a brief summary of what was going on, Gygax took the handcuff key from the driver and unlocked the handcuffs binding the woman in the truck. Miller stayed with the driver at the patrol car. They weren’t about to take any more chances with him.

The driver was identified as Robert Ben Rhodes, a 66-year-old professional truck driver from Houston, Texas.

Rhodes was placed under arrest, and then he and the woman were taken to the Casa Grande Police Department.

After taking some time to calm down, the woman told Detective Rick Barnhart what had happened.

She was 27-years old and had hitched a ride with Rhodes at a truck stop near Phoenix, Arizona. He had been charming and polite, and she felt comfortable enough with him to fall asleep in the truck.

When she woke up, she was handcuffed, and Rhodes was starting to take off her clothes. She said that she had fought back and had been able to bite him hard on the side.

He had spent the rest of the day travelling with her in the back, occasionally stopping to torture her. She explained that he had a briefcase he kept all his torture implements in.

Investigators found the briefcase in Rhode’s truck. It was filled with handcuffs, alligator clips, sex toys, leaches, pins, and whips. All of it had been very well-maintained and taken care of.

The woman’s injuries were photographed as evidence, including the welts on her torso and puncture wounds where she claimed Rhodes and used pins to pierce her nipples and genitals.

Later, Barnhart interviewed Rhodes to get his side of the story.

Rhodes was relaxed and seemed comfortable during the interview. To Barnhart, it seemed as if Rhodes was trying to make friends with him. He spent most of the interview talking around the incident in the truck, occasionally making statements that cast doubt on the woman’s character and state of mind.

Rhodes said that she was a truck stop prostitute, or “lot lizard,” and that it wasn’t a good idea to get involved with women like that. He also said that the woman was crazy, explaining to Bernhart that she wasn’t “…playing with a full deck.”

According to Rhodes, she had come on to him. She had climbed into the back of the sleeper cab and invited him to join her. He ended the interview there, telling Berhhardt that was as much as he was going to say.

Taking a camera, Barnhardt asked Rhodes to remove his shirt. At first, he resisted, but eventually relented. There, just as the woman had said, was a bite mark on his side. The detective took a picture of it and Rhodes was returned to his cell.

Rhodes bothered Barnhart. He came off as charming and personable and was an extremely smooth talker. Even though Barnhart didn’t believe his story, Rhodes came across as very convincing.

When interviewing the victim, it was obvious that she really was mentally ill. She said that she had been on the way to visit the president and had seemingly suffered from other delusions and even hallucinations.

But her story about Rhodes and her torture at his hands never changed. It was never embellished. It always stayed the same, no matter what.

For his part, Rhodes didn’t even seem fazed by the fact that a naked, handcuffed woman had been found in the back of his truck. There was no panic, no frantic pleas to talk his way out of a giant misunderstanding.

Just cool, calm, and collected, smoking a cigarette, and showing no more excitement than if they had been talking about the weather.

Rhodes was charged with unlawful imprisonment, aggravated assault, and sexual assault and was incarcerated at the Casa Grande Jail.

Even though Rhodes was imprisoned, Barnhart suspected there was something else to this smooth-talking trucker. His license showed that he lived in Houston, Texas, so Barnhart started by contacting the Houston Police Department.

A short time later, Houston Detective R.E. Bomar called Barnhart about a case in his area that matched the one in Arizona.

Just a few months prior, in February 1990, a young woman with a leach around her neck was seen flagging down traffic, screaming for help. She contacted the Houston Police Department and claimed that a truck driver had kidnapped her and held her captive in his truck for the past two weeks.

He had tortured and raped her repeatedly in that time and had also shaved her head and pubic hair.

She had escaped when her captor had forgotten to correctly fasten her handcuffs. Taking advantage, she had escaped.

The police took down her statement, and then asked if she would be able to identify the man’s truck. She said that she could.

For the rest of the day, they combed the city, looking for the truck. Finally, she identified the truck she had been held captive in. Detectives went and found the driver and asked her if he was her attacker. The woman never looked up and said that it wasn’t him.

Detectives had no choice but to let him go.

A few hours later, she told detectives that it had been the right man, but she was too terrified to identify him while he was standing in front of her, even while surrounded by police. By that time, it was too late. The trucker was already long gone.

Bernhart thought that this was much more than just a coincidence. They now had two separate cases, in two different states of a truck driver who had kept a victim in the back of his truck and had tortured and sexually abused them.

Because these similar attacks had crossed state lines, Barnhart contacted the FBI office in Phoenix and told them about Rhodes. Special Agent Bob Lee was given the case.

After reviewing the file on Rhodes, Lee came to the belief that he was a sexual sadist, an individual who was sexually aroused by the suffering of others.

According to Lee, many sadists and rapists of this kind have what law enforcement refer to as a rape kit. This is something portable, like a bag or toolbox, that contains items the sadist needs to not only satisfy their desires, but also to restrain and possibly kill their victim with.

Many kits start out small, with just a handful of items. Over time, the sadist will refine their kit, adding or taking away items as they see fit.

The briefcase in Rhode’s truck and described by his victims was almost definitely his rape kit. It was extensive and well cared for, indicating that he was an experienced sexual sadist who had been doing this for a long time.

On April 6, 1990, the FBI acquired a search warrant for Rhode’s apartment in Houston. Inside, they found women’s clothing and makeup, as well as sadomasochistic bondage material. This included chains, whips, and handcuffs.

Both the victim in Arizona and the one in Texas described how Rhode’s had carefully put down white towels underneath them before he tortured them. In the apartment, investigators found several white towels, including one still covered in blood.

Investigators also found several photographs of a young woman, possibly a teenager. Many were sexually explicit, depicting her in various stages of undress, including several nudes and partial nudes. Of note was the fact that her hair had been cut short and her pubic hair had been shaved, just like the victim in Houston had described had been done to her.

Examining the photos, Lee determined that, judging by the fading of certain bruises and the regrowth of her hair, the pictures had been taken in chronological order over a period of some time.

It was time to learn more about their suspect.

Robert Ben Rhodes had been born in 1945 in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

His father was a military man, and was frequently stationed abroad, leaving the young Rhodes to be raised primarily by his mother. When his father was discharged, he returned home and became a fireman.

Robert’s father was far from a loving man toward his son. He was often strict and even brutal, even abusive.

When Robert was fifteen, his father was convicted of sexually assaulting a twelve-year-old girl. Before he could go to prison, Robert’s father killed himself.

After graduating high school, Rhodes joined the Marine Corps. He was later dishonorably discharged for his role in committing a robbery.

When he returned home, he tried going to college, but dropped out. Later, he tried becoming a police officer, but was disqualified due to his dishonorable discharge. Rhodes was married twice, but both unions ended in divorce.

After working a series of jobs, he finally turned to being a truck driver. It was a profession that he seemed ideally suited for.

When he was in his forties, he married a third time. Over the course of their marriage, Rhodes became more and more interested in sexual bondage and sadomasochism. Once, he even hired a man to be her sex slave without her knowledge. When the man came to their house and identified himself, his wife kicked him out.

Later in 1990, Rhodes was offered a reduced sentence through a plea deal if he pled guilty to kidnap and sexual assault charges of the woman in Arizona. He pled guilty and was sentenced to 6 years in prison.

As he began his sentence, the pictures of that young woman with the short hair continued to eat away at Bob Lee. Although there was no evidence to prove it, his instincts screamed to him that she was also one of Rhode’s victims.

But instinct isn’t fact and won’t hold up in a court of law. The truth was that the woman in the photo could have been a consensual participant with Rhode’s in his sexual activity. If he were to distribute these photos of her to find her identity, then it could be a violation of her rights.

Instead, Lee carried a photo of the young woman with him. When he went to different police departments, he would ask if anyone there recognized her, or if they had any missing persons cases involving a girl of her description. He got no results but kept looking.

Then in early 1991, nearly a year later, Bob Lee overheard another FBI agent at the Houston FBI office talking about a case he had been involved with in Illinois. The agent, Mark Young, related how a girl had been murdered, and then mentioned that her hair had been cut short and her pubic hair had been shaved.

This caught Lee’s attention. This sounded a lot like Robert Ben Rhodes. He began to listen as the agent continued his story.

In September of 1990, a farmer in Bond County, Illinois, called the police saying that he had found a body.

He had donated an old barn on his property to a local fire department that they could burn down and practice putting it out. The farmer had decided to walk through it one last time to make sure there was nothing inside that he wanted to keep.

While going through the barn loft, he came across what looked like a dead human body.

The Bond County Sheriff’s Department immediately came out to the property. They verified that the body was human, and it was obvious that they had been murdered. The Sheriff contacted the Illinois State Police, who assigned ISP Special Agent Michael Sheeley to the case.

When Sheeley arrived in Bond County, the sheriff briefed him on what they had found. The body had been in the barn for a while and was in a state of advanced decomposition. They had obviously been murdered; strangled to death with a piece of baling wire.

Investigators concluded that the victim had been handcuffed over a large beam, which raised their hands above their head. The baling wire was then placed around their neck and twisted with a piece of broken board at least sixteen times.

When the remains were examined by a forensic anthropologist, they were able to determine that the body was of a young teenager, between 14 – 16 years old. She had been in the barn for about six months.

Unfortunately, when Sheeley used this information to discover her identity, he was shocked to find that there were about 950 other girls fitting the same criterion for that time period.

Disappointed but undeterred, he sent the information to police departments across the country in the hopes of finding out who this victim was.

Sometime later, Sheeley was contacted by a detective with the Pasadena Police Department in Texas. She informed him that she was working on a case involving a young teenage runaway named Regina Kay Walters.

Regina had run away with her boyfriend, 18-year-old Ricky Lee Jones, and had been missing for several months. During that time, Regina’s father had received bizarre phone calls from a man he didn’t know.

Regina’s father had an unlisted number, meaning that there was no public access to it. Not only that, but even a lot of people that he knew didn’t have it. Somehow, though, this stranger was able to call him, not once, but twice on two consecutive days.

Over the course of the two phone calls, the stranger said that he had cut off Regina’s hair, and knew where she was. Regina Walter’s father asked where. The stranger replied that she was in a barn loft. When the father asked if she was okay, the stranger hung up and never called back.

The first call had been traced to Oklahoma City, and the second to Ennis, Texas. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything else the police could find out.

This matched a lot of the information on Sheeley’s victim, but they needed something definitive. Regina’s dental records were sent to Illinois, where they were used to positively identify the body found in the barn as fourteen-year-old Regina Kay Walters.

Authorities in Bond County thought that it was Regina’s boyfriend, Ricky Lee Jones. He must have murdered her and ran off.

When the FBI was called in, they sent Special Agent Mark Young, a trained behavioral expert.

He completely disagreed with their assessment. He believed that the killer was an older man who travelled and had several well-developed sexual fetishes. This didn’t match Jones at all.

Jones was 18, and, outside of a few run-ins with local police, was quiet and unassuming. His friends said that he hadn’t known that Regina was only 14. Jones was completely in love with her, and the two had decided to run away together and hitchhike to Mexico.

Young also believed that the suspect had already killed Jones.

This disagreement led to tensions between Young and the law enforcement officials in Illinois, who wanted him to find the missing Jones.

In the end, the killer remained unidentified, and Ricky Lee Jones was never found. The case quickly went cold.

Now, months later, in an FBI office in Texas, Bob Lee had a strong suspicion he knew who the killer was.

Approaching Young, Lee told him that he had a file that he should see.

Examining it, Young was shocked. This Robert Ben Rhodes closely matched his profile of Regina Walter’s killer.

The most important thing about it to him was the hair fetish. It denoted a signature, an aspect about the crimes committed by an individual that never changes and gives them the psychosexual gratification that they seek.

Rhodes was also an experienced older man who travelled.

When Lee showed Young the photographs found in Rhodes’ apartment, the girl seemed familiar to him. He wondered if it might be Regina Walters but wasn’t sure. In the photo of Walters that Young had, the girl had long hair.

Blocking out part of the photograph, they sent a copy of one of the photos to Walter’s father. He said that yes, the girl was Regina. He even pointed out three birthmarks on her neck that could be seen in the photo that matched his daughter.

Lee and Young had photo experts compare the barn in the pictures taken from Rhode’s apartment with those taken at the crime scene in Bond County. They were a match.

Satisfied they had found their killer, the agents began the process of amassing evidence and prosecuting Rhodes for the murder of Regina Walters.

When they contacted Arizona, they were surprised when they were told that the evidence in the Casa Grande case was marked to be destroyed. Thankfully, the FBI was able to obtain it before that happened.

When they examined it, they found a notebook that had belonged to Regina Walters. Inside, she had written her father’s unlisted number.

There was also a picture in the notebook of a gun and a bloody knife. Across the page, the message saying “Ricky is a dead man” had been scrawled. The handwriting was later identified as belonging to Rhodes by his third wife.

When investigators looked at Rhodes’ trucking logs, they found that he had been in Oklahoma City on March 16 and then Ennis, Texas on March 17. This matched the times of the mysterious phone calls to Walters’ father and the places that they had been traced to.

The Bond County district attorney, however, still wasn’t convinced there was enough evidence to bring a conviction against Rhodes. Officials in Texas and Illinois worked together to amass as much as they could, and, finally, just before Rhodes was due to be released from prison in Arizona, the district attorney issued a warrant for his arrest for the murder of Regina Walters.

Michael Sheeley flew to Arizona to serve the warrant to Rhodes. This was the first time he had met Rhodes and found him to be very cold and calculating. Rhodes looked Sheeley directly in the eye and told him, without hesitation, that he hadn’t murdered Walters.

Sheeley produced a photo of Walters and put it down in front of Rhodes. He told the former trucker that she was his victim.

Instead of showing any sign of remorse for his crime, Rhodes became angry. He abruptly stood up and informed Sheeley and the others present in the room that the interview was over. After that, he stopped talking.

While the prosecution continued to build their case against Rhodes, the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI had examined his trucking logs in detail. When they cross-referenced them with missing person cases, there were not only several possible matches, but also several bodies that had been found in these areas where Rhodes had travelled.

This led to an ever-growing belief that Robert Rhodes was a serial killer.

By September 1992, Rhodes realized that the evidence against him was too great, and there was no way he was going to talk his way out of a conviction. After consulting his lawyer, he made a plea deal, pleading guilty to the murder of Regina Walters in exchange for not being given the death penalty.

Part of that required Rhodes to give a complete confession of what had happened to Regina Kay Walters. After so long, the truth was revealed of what had happened to the young teenager.

Regina and her boyfriend, another teenager named Ricky Jones, had decided to run away together. It was 1990, a brand-new decade to start a brand-new life in. They were going to hitchhike their way from their home in Pasadena, Texas, to Mexico.

Jones, known as a quiet and gentle young man, had fallen hard for Regina. His friends later said that he didn’t know that Regina was only fourteen. All that he knew was that he loved her and wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.

For whatever reason, they had decided to run away together. Before too long, the young couple now found themselves talking to an average-looking trucker and asking him for a ride.

The man had an easy-going demeanor about him, confident and relaxed. During their conversation, he had probably mentioned that his name was Robert Rhodes. They had gone through the usual banter: Rhodes asked where they were going, Walters and Jones responded, and then the three of them negotiating deciding how far Rhodes was willing to take them.

When they had all settled on a decision, the young couple climbed into Rhodes’ truck and made themselves comfortable, settling in for the ride.

As they travelled, the three of them became friendly. At some point, however, Rhodes showed them his true nature.

After subduing them, Rhodes killed Jones. For the next several days, Rhodes subjected Walters to horrific torture, sexual abuse, and rape in his sleeper cab. He had converted it into his personal torture chamber and had even welded brackets onto the walls and floor where he could shackle his victims.

Throughout all of it, he documented her abuse by taking numerous photographs.

Finally, they stopped in Illinois. Rhodes forced Walters to wear a long black dress, then made her get out of the truck. They went into an abandoned barn, where he started taking pictures of her. In every one of them, Regina seems terrified.

They climbed into the loft, where Rhodes handcuffed her hands over a beam above her head. Then, using a wire garotte and piece of broken board, he strangled 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters to death.

After posing her body for one last photograph, Rhodes got back in his rig and drove away.

The guilty plea was accepted, and Rhodes was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Over a decade later, in 2003, a Texas Ranger named Brooks Long opened an investigation into the murder of Douglas Zyskowski and the disappearance of Patricia Walsh in 1990. Both in their twenties, they had recently been married and had decided to move from their home state of Washington to Georgia.

The two of them had sold off most of their belongings and decided to hitchhike their way across the country.

Douglas Zyskowski’s remains were found in Texas in 1990, but were unable to be identified for two years, when his identity was confirmed using dental records.

An autopsy revealed that he had been shot in the head multiple times by a Jennings J22 semi-automatic handgun.

Long was interested in the ammunition that had been used in the murder. Forensic analysis of rounds removed from the body, as well as shell casings found at the crime scene, were determined to having been manufactured by a company named Tarson. The casings were marked with a distinctive “T” headstamp.

At one time, Rhodes had been looked at as a possible suspect, but was ruled out. A box of ammunition for the handgun that had been on his person when he was arrested in Arizona was found in his truck. Authorities noted that it was labeled as being made by a company named Armscore, not Tarson.

After coming across this in his own investigation, Long became curious about that box of ammunition. Calling authorities in Arizona, he asked them if they still had it in held in evidence. After a short check, it was confirmed that it was.

On a hunch, Long asked them to open the box and check the headstamp on the rounds inside. To everyone’s surprise, all of it was marked with the distinctive “T” of the Tarson brand.

This made Rhodes a viable suspect again, and Long was determined to follow up on it.

Next, Long set out to find Patricia Walsh. He suspected that she was dead, and now that they had evidence making Rhodes a viable suspect, a new possibility had opened.

Long learned that the FBI had cross referenced Rhodes’ truck logs with areas where bodies had been found in the same time frame that he had been present in the area. Nearly 50 bodies were found that matched that criterion.

Long theorized that one of the women found might very possibly be Patricia Walsh. This meant that she had been found, but she hadn’t been identified yet.

Walsh had been a redhead in her mid-twenties. Long began looking for women matching this description that had been found nude and without identification. To narrow it further, he theorized that Walsh would probably been shot by the same kind of handgun that her husband had.

Very quickly, a possible match came up in Utah.

Long contacted law enforcement in Utah and asked them if the case was still open. They confirmed that it was. It was listed as an unsolved murder, and they still had possession of the remains.

The Ranger told them that he believed he knew who the woman was and, just as importantly, who had killed them. Arrangements were made, and Patricia Walsh’s dental records were sent to Utah. They were a match.

Examining Rhodes’ truck logs, authorities noted that he had travelled in the areas where Zyskowski and Walsh’s remains were found within the time frame that they had been found.

A bloody towel had been found in Rhodes’ truck and had been put into evidence. DNA evidence taken from it was able to be positively matched to DNA taken from Walsh’s remains.

Robert Ben Rhodes had also murdered Patricia Walsh and Douglas Zyskowski.

By this time, Rhodes had already served twenty years in the Illinois prison system for the murder of Regina Walters. When authorities went to charge him with the murders of Walsh and Zyskowski, they were shocked to find out that he was due to be released.

Moving quickly, Texas authorities were able to indict him for both murders. Before things went to trial, Rhodes, just as he had with Regina Kay Walters, pled guilty.

According to his confession, Rhodes had picked up Zyskowski and Walsh in Texas, then had murdered Zyskowski almost right away. He had then spent a week raping and torturing Walsh before killing her and dumping her body in Utah.

Rhodes was sentenced to two more life sentences.

Authorities suspect that Robert Rhodes killed several more victims, but there is insufficient evidence to prosecute him for them. Such was the case of Ricky Lee Jones, Regina Walters’ boyfriend, who was identified in Mississippi. Although they found his remains, there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Rhodes for his murder.

Robert Ben Rhodes is currently serving out his life sentences in an Illinois prison.

 

 

Sources

All That’s Interesting. Edited by John Kuroski. Inside the Brutal Murders of Robert Ben Rhodes, The Truck Stop Killer. 10/27/2021

Brandel, Karen. Dead End. Tucson Weekly, 2/29/1996

Margaritoff, Marco. The Chilling Story of Regina Kay Walters, The Final Victim of The ‘Truck Stop Killer.’ All That’s Interesting.com, 2/22/2022

Robert Ben Rhodes. Murderpedia.com

Verma, Astha. Robert Ben Rhoades: The Truck Stop Killer Who Raped and Murdered For Over 15 Years. Thoughtnov.com, 6/22/2022

McAuliffe, Cat. Highway Horrors: Robert Ben Rhoades, The Trucker With A Mobile Torture Chamber. Ranker.com, 9/15/2017

Veselka, Vanessa. The Truck Stop Killer. GQ, 10/24/2012

Ng, Christina. Trucker With Traveling Torture Chamber Admits to More Murders. ABC News, 3/30/2012

Parmiter, Cindy. Dark Ride: The Horrific Crimes of Vicious Rapist and Serial Killer Robert Ben Rhodes. Medium.com, 2/1/2023

The Truck Stop Killer: A 15-Year Reign of Terror. World’s Most Evil Killers, Real Crime. Youtube.com