Read The Best American Essays 2013 Online
Authors: Robert Atwan
After receiving my friend’s e-mail, I left messages with the FBI but was relieved when they were not returned. The memory was twenty-seven years old, and nothing in it was actionable. The photos stayed in my head, though, and with them came questions: What if the man who pulled the knife on me really did murder the hitchhiker? Why did he let me go? Who
was
the girl in the dumpster? Why didn’t I go to anyone? I needed to understand what my responsibility was and to find my own answers, if nobody else’s, so I began to look.
I have no fascination with serial killers, so I didn’t realize that Rhoades was famous. There are articles, TV episodes, and books on him—
Driven to Kill, Roadside Prey, Killer on the Road
—and from these sources I learned that every grim and secret fear I have about the human race is manifest in Robert Ben Rhoades. Rhoades was a sexual sadist. He kidnapped women, tortured and raped them for weeks before killing them. What is known about him in the 1980s is murky. He was involved in the BDSM and swinger scene in his hometown of Houston. He was married. When he was caught, he said that he had been “doing this” for fifteen years, which would put the onset of his murders back into the 1970s. His trucking logs place him in the area of fifty unsolved murders in the three years prior to his arrest alone. While not all fifty cases have been tied to Rhoades yet and Rhoades himself has admitted to only three murders, the FBI has strong reason to believe that at his peak he was killing one to three women a month.
Rhoades was first arrested when an Arizona state trooper found a screaming woman named Lisa Pennal
1
chained in the back of his cab. He was charged with kidnapping and assault. What put him away for life, though, was the rape and murder of Regina Walters, a fourteen-year-old girl from Pasadena, Texas. Rhoades picked her up along with her boyfriend, Ricky Jones, in February of 1990. Jones was promptly killed, and his remains were discovered later in Mississippi. Rhoades kept Regina for at least two weeks. He shaved her head and pubic hair, pierced her with fishing hooks, dressed her up in a black dress and heels, and photographed her in moments of terror, then killed her with a garrote made of baling wire, leaving her one-hundred-pound body to decompose in a barn in Illinois off Interstate 70.
Behind the tragic elements of Regina’s story, like some kind of pentimento, I saw my own. Like me, she left home with her older boyfriend. Also like me, Regina became dependent upon the grace of truck drivers. In her weeks with Rhoades, many drivers saw her, but somehow no alarm was raised. She passed through that world as if she were invisible.
In 1985 my biggest problem was sleep. There was no safe way for me to get it. I left home in early January, hitchhiking south from New York City with my twenty-one-year-old boyfriend. We had $60 and a Smith & Wesson five-shot with one bullet in it, which we accidentally fired off in a field in Maryland during a discussion about whether the safety was on. I had a guitar and a knapsack full of souvenirs of my girlhood: notes from friends, earrings, and song lyrics. I was fifteen.
People don’t leave home because things are going well; they leave because they feel they have to, and right or wrong, that’s how I felt. I lived with my mom in New York, and the fights between us were growing in intensity and emotional violence. I don’t think either of us knew what to do about it. There was talk of me going to live with my dad in Virginia, where I had traditionally spent my summers. By then, though, I had been kicked out of two schools for absences and was cutting myself regularly. My emotions were a planet around which I spun like a moon. As I saw it, it didn’t matter if I left, because in so many ways I was already gone. On my way out, I destroyed every single picture of me over the age of twelve so that there would be nothing to give to the police.
That first night my boyfriend and I stayed in an abandoned barn in Maryland. It was off the side of the freeway and probably very much like the one Regina Walters was found in. The barn had a loft with wind coming through broken slats and was surrounded by the same kind of brown grassy field and frozen mud. Like Regina, I also had a little journal and probably wrote something in it that night, because it was far too cold to sleep. We were back on the road before dawn, walking down a highway covered in black ice, shivering in our hoodies. A trucker picked us up at daybreak, and I rode in a semi for the first time.
Being up high, warm, and looking out over the traffic was a great improvement. The trucker bought us chicken-fried steak, chatted amiably, and let us nap in the cab while he drove. While we were asleep, he pulled into a small truck stop, and I woke to his hand down my shirt. I kept my eyes closed, stayed still, then rolled away from him, pretending I was still asleep. A few minutes later, I got up like nothing had happened. The trucker went to pay for gas, and my boyfriend and I went to use the bathroom. When we came back, the truck was gone and every reminder of home with it—my guitar, my knapsack, everything except the Smith & Wesson, which we sold later in New Orleans.
That first ride was a preview of how it would often go for me with truckers—dodging sex and getting stranded—but I had learned one crucial lesson: when a truck slows down, you get up. Getting sleep was pretty easy with a boyfriend, because one of us could always stay awake. Six weeks later, though, we parted ways. Somewhere in Arizona we had a fight in a gas station off I-10, and we each climbed into separate trucks, and that was it. I was on my own. Without fake ID, I couldn’t stay in a shelter. Sleeping by myself on the street made me a target, and having sex with some creepy old guy for a spot on a mattress also held little appeal. So I went back to hitchhiking in circles and discovered a state of half-consciousness wherein I could be asleep and not asleep at the same time. I could rest but not dream. I could tell you the last three songs played on the radio if you asked, but only if you asked. If you didn’t, I had no memory of them at all.
I stuck to trucks because they were safer than cars. When you get in a truck at a truck stop, everyone notices. They chatter about it on the CB, and you are driving off in what amounts to a huge billboard advertising the name of the company. I needed visibility to stay alive. But it was also a dangerous form of brinksmanship, because if a trucker was going to cross the line, the higher stakes meant he was going to do it for real. There was a gap before that line, and most truckers wouldn’t take it that far. I lived in that gap.
Truck stops in the 1980s were closed worlds where what went on passed unnoticed on the outside. The stores were dimly lit and filled with smoke, radically different from the family travel plazas of today. Magazine porn often dominated the aisles—glossies like
Hustler
and
Barely Legal
but also newsprint rags with cheap color covers. Bottles of isobutyl nitrite and rotgut aphrodisiacs like Locker Room and Spanish Fly crowded the counters by the register, along with the iconic bumper sticker
ASS, GAS, OR GRASS—NO ONE RIDES FOR FREE
.
Back then, though, my thoughts weren’t on misogyny; they were on logistics. I needed to find rides and usually couldn’t get into the restaurant. The general rule was that you were a prostitute until proven otherwise. And then you were still a prostitute. Waitresses were the first to kick you out. That forced me into asking for rides in the hallway by the showers. Over time I learned safer ways of getting rides by having truckers navigate the CB radio for me. Women couldn’t really get on the “zoo channel,” as they called it then, because the sound of their voice would trigger twenty minutes of crass chatter. There was only one word for
woman
on the CB, and that was
beaver
. Even the guys who were trying to help had used it. They had to make up stories for me: “I got a beaver needs a ride to Flagstaff for her grandma’s funeral don’t want no trouble, c’mon back.” There was always a sick mom or dead grandparent involved, and I was almost always abandoned by my jerk of a boyfriend, who’d made off with all my money and my car.
Through these stories, I jumped from truck to truck. Like a lemur in a canopy of trees, I barely saw the ground. Even so, it still wasn’t safe to sleep. Adhering to my rule (that the only safe truck was a moving truck) meant I woke when a truck took an exit. I woke when it slowed for traffic. When it turned, when it downshifted, when it drifted toward the shoulder—I woke. Wearing down from lack of sleep and trying to get a handle on my risk level, I began to work off a 1-to-5 scale of sexually aggressive behavior:
Most truckers occupied the middle of the scale, but the trucker who resembled Rhoades didn’t have a place on it. Anybody who pulls a knife on you in an enclosed space like a truck is terrifying. But beyond that, it was the man’s demeanor that was so chilling. He wasn’t nervous, angry, or excited. He was grave and methodical, as if preparing to dress a deer.
From reading about Rhoades, I knew that he preferred hitchhikers to prostitutes and specifically targeted runaways. I also knew the first thing he did was to get them into the back of his sleeper cab, which had anchor points for shackles. But I hadn’t seen any shackles. I only saw the man with the knife. “It has to be him,” a friend said. “How many of those guys could there be?”
According to the FBI, quite a few. In 2009 the feds went public with a program called the Highway Serial Killings Initiative in response to a rising number of dead bodies found along the interstates. Some of these were women left in dumpsters. Narrowing the field to those last seen around truck stops and rest areas, the bureau counted over five hundred bodies, almost all women. Of the two hundred people on a suspect list, almost all of them were long-haul truckers.
But nobody had to tell me that people like Rhoades killed people like me and got away with it. Going through the truck stops, I’d heard about women getting their throats slit or strangled. I’d heard of at least one who got hung up on a meat hook in the back of a refrigerated trailer because a trucker thought she’d given him VD. At night I listened to the voices of prostitutes on the CB, barely intelligible between streams of name-calling: “Hello, honey. It’s me, Sugar Bear, in party row. Anyone want to party?”
“Lot lizards” is what truckers call prostitutes who work truck stops, and since many drivers don’t distinguish between hitchhikers and prostitutes, I was a lot lizard too. If we went missing, months could pass before a report was filed, and by then there was little to connect the missing person in one state with the decomposed remains in another. When the Illinois state trooper who was trying to identify the body of Regina Walters, the girl Rhoades left in that barn, put her forensic description out on the national teletype, he was totally unprepared for the response. He requested information on missing Caucasian females thirteen to fifteen years old who had disappeared six to nine months earlier. He got over nine hundred matches.
If there was any way to connect my story to Rhoades, it would be through the body of the girl in the dumpster. Records on her would provide a date and a place that could then be checked against Rhoades’s trucking logs. To at least one of my questions—was Rhoades my guy?—I’d have a clear answer, a simple yes or no.
I began by Googling things like “dead girl truck stop Martinsburg.” Nothing came up, but that wasn’t too surprising. Her murder happened twenty-seven years ago and was essentially pre-Internet. I pulled up a map of Martinsburg, Pennsylvania, and that’s where things started to get hazy. Martinsburg was nothing but a pinprick, just a dot on a minor route feeding into a midsize highway on the outskirts of Altoona, Pennsylvania, not the sort of place you’d expect to find a busy truck stop. Had I confused the state? I did a search on towns named Martinsburg. There were seven within range—Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, West Virginia, and New York—all less than a day’s drive apart.
A week before the girl was found in the dumpster, though, I’d gone to see my dad in Virginia. At the time he was struggling himself, living with several other guys in a house where you flushed the toilet with a bucket of water and working what little construction there was in the county. I quickly realized I would have been nothing but a burden. The morning I left, I asked him to take me to the closest truck stop so I could get a ride going toward California. It was a made-up destination, a
Grapes of Wrath
narrative of brighter futures. I was sure he would remember where he took me back then, so last spring I called him. I didn’t tell him about my recent inquiries at first; I just asked where he’d dropped me off. Without any hesitation he said Martinsburg, West Virginia.
“Were there any murders that summer?” I asked him.
“There was that hitchhiker. You called and left a message a day or so after I dropped you off, saying I was going to read about a dead seventeen-year-old hitchhiker they found in a truck stop and that it wasn’t you.”
My whole body relaxed. My memory may have been bent by sleep deprivation, but I was not crazy. There was a Martinsburg truck stop somewhere in my story, and there was a dead seventeen-year-old hitchhiker. She had existed enough for me to call my dad all those years ago and warn him about what he would read. And if it happened, she could be found. It was just a matter of looking harder.
The original Rhoades investigation had woven a complex web, entangling local and federal agencies in five different states. Eventually the locus shifted to the Houston FBI, because at some point every thread ran through Texas. Rhoades was from Texas. His wife, Debra Davis, was from Texas. Regina Walters and Ricky Jones were from Texas. He picked up two of his other victims in Texas.