Lengthy and interesting article. rbbm.
Robert Ben Rhoades: The Truck Stop Killer
By
Vanessa Veselka
October 24, 2012
"Several days later, though, heading south on I-95 through the Carolinas, I got picked up by another trucker who was not fine. I don't remember much about him except that 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 had the cleanest cab I ever saw. He must have seemed okay or I wouldn't have gotten in the truck with him. Once out on the road, though, he changed. He stopped responding to my 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 me if I'd ever heard of the Laughing Death Society. "We laugh at death," he told me.
A few minutes later, he pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the road by some woods, took out a hunting knife, and told me to get into the back of the cab. I began talking, saying the same things over and over. I said I knew he didn't want to do it. I said it was his choice. I said he could do it in a few minutes. I said it was his choice. I said I wouldn't go to the cops if nothing happened to me, but it was his choice—until he looked at me and I went still. There was going to be no more talking. I knew in my body that it was over. Then
he said one word: Run. Without looking back, I ran into the woods and hid. I stayed there until I saw the truck pull onto the interstate. It was getting dark. I was still in shock, so I walked back out to the same road and started hitching south. I never went to the police and didn't tell anyone for years."
"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 aged 13 to 15 years old who had disappeared six to nine months earlier. He got over 900 matches."
"Rhoades was a great lover of games. His favorite book was
Games People Play, wherein each social encounter is treated as a transaction or "game." One game in the book is called "Courtroom." Another is called "Beat Me Daddy," another "Frigid Woman." In that one, driven by penis envy, a woman's inner child taunts a man into seducing her so that she can be freed from guilt for her own "sadistic fantasies."
Games People Play was a bible for Rhoades. He talked about it frequently and applied its ideas. In a letter to his wife on the subject of psychological games, he wrote:
"I always told you there were three things you could do: play, pass, or run." The phrase "play, pass, run" is used twice in the letter. Reading it, I found it hard not to hear the man telling me to "run."
