Whips and Chains

Robert Ben Rhoades drove long haul out of Texas and turned the sleeper of his rig into a cell, with restraints anchored to the ceiling and a kit of chains, cords and whips stowed behind the seats. Through the 1980s he picked up hitchhikers and runaways on interstates across the country, and he photographed what he did to them.

Patricia Walsh, 24, and Douglas Scott Zyskowski, 26, were newlyweds who left Seattle in November 1989 to hitchhike east. Rhoades picked them up in Texas, killed Douglas quickly and left him beside Interstate 10 near Ozona. Patricia he held for days. Her remains were found in Utah in 1990 and identified only in 2003. In February 1990 he took 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters and her boyfriend, Ricky Lee Jones, 18, out of Texas; Jones’s body was left in rural Mississippi, and Regina was held for weeks before being strangled with wire in an abandoned barn in Illinois.

On April 1, 1990, an Arizona trooper stopped to check a truck on the shoulder of Interstate 10 near Casa Grande and found a woman chained naked inside. Rhoades was convicted of Regina’s murder in Illinois in 1994 and sentenced to life without parole. On March 30, 2012, he pleaded guilty in Sutton County, Texas, to killing Walsh and Zyskowski and received two more life sentences.