It was early morning1 on April Fools’ Day in 1990 when Arizona state trooper Mike Miller spotted a truck with its hazard lights blinking on the shoulder of I-10 in Casa Grande. Miller donned his trooper hat, stepped out of his patrol car, strode up to the big rig, and looked inside. That’s when the lawman saw her: a young woman shackled in a makeshift torture chamber in the rear of the cab. As soon as she saw him, she began screaming for help. The fuzzy lion slippers on her feet only magnified the fact that she was otherwise totally naked.
The driver was the quintessential killer trucker. The cops, prosecutors, and media bestowed the well-deserved moniker “Truck Stop Killer” on Robert Ben Rhoades; it was a name earned in evil. He was the one all other trucker killers would be measured against—for his volume of victims, the span of his murderous spree, and the sheer terror inflicted on his prey. He worked as a long-haul trucker for almost twenty years, and for at least fifteen of those years, Rhoades kidnapped, tortured, raped, and killed—leaving as many as fifty suspected victims in his wake. Rhoades built a traveling torture chamber in the rear of his semi, and hunted the highways for his next kill.
Rhoades was busted for kidnapping the screaming woman the trooper found, but it was the discovery of his final murder victim2—Regina Walters—that put Rhoades away for life. Regina was only fourteen years old when she and her boyfriend, Ricky, slipped out of their troubled family lives in Pasadena, Texas, to hitchhike their way to a fantasy future. But the only thing in their future was darkness. In February 1990, near Houston, Rhoades offered the two teens a ride. Ricky didn’t last long. He was a mere speed bump, slowing Rhoades down briefly but not stopping him from kidnapping Regina and raping her at times and places of his choosing. She endured endless weeks of barbaric pain; her flesh was torn by fishhooks and she was handcuffed to the ceiling of the tomb-like dungeon inside Rhoades’s rig.
The demons consuming Rhoades’s soul weren’t sated by the mental and physical torture of Regina. They demanded more. So Rhoades extended his cruelty by calling Regina’s father one month after she vanished. Without giving his name, Rhoades informed the anguished man, “I made some changes. I cut her hair.”
Indeed, the last photos ever taken of Regina confirmed her brunette hair had been roughly cut into a boyish bob. Yet for those who view those final, ghastly images of Regina, it’s not her hair that’s forever seared into their consciousness; it’s the horror on her face. Those haunting displays depict Regina in the final minutes before she was strangled to death, her body left to decompose in an abandoned farmhouse in Illinois. In the photos, Regina, forced into a black dress and high heels, stands in front of the camera, her face contorted, her eyes revealing abject fear. The teen girl’s arms are extended forward and her palms are raised as if she’s imploring Rhoades’s demons not to return. But return they did.
FBI agent Mark Young3 said Regina’s forensic report revealed “something invaluable.” He explained, “Her pubic hair had been shaved prior to death. This was the signature aspect of the killer I would be looking for.”
If only Rhoades were the last of the killer truckers for him to find. That would mean no more victims would suffer brutal deaths at the hands of highway barbarians. No more Rhoadeses, no more Reginas. There would be no need for the FBI and the police to look for serial killers’ signatures. But that would be a fool’s fantasy.
In my first book, The FBI Way: Inside the Bureau’s Code of Excellence, I shared with readers what I already knew—lessons I’d learned in over two decades as an FBI special agent. I wanted to convey how people might apply the FBI’s values-based performance methods to their own quest for excellence. I wrote about what I knew so that others might understand it.
This book is different.
Long Haul began in 2021 when an FBI criminal analyst told me about the Bureau’s Highway Serial Killings (HSK) Initiative. The analyst (whose real name I will not use to protect her identity) explained that over the years, multiple truckers had been convicted of serial murders, and today the FBI believes there are hundreds—yes, hundreds—of unsolved killings that were also likely committed by truckers. The FBI analyst told me that the Bureau had compiled a list of an astonishing 850 murders believed to be linked to long-haul truckers. I was floored by these revelations.
I decided I had to know more, dig deeper, comprehend what was happening. As Stephen Covey wrote in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Writing about what I had lived was easy. Writing about other people’s reality—the reality around the HSK—would be harder. I needed to experience the components and cultures in the HSK myself. I spent months considering how to accomplish this and a year of my life learning and then writing about what I had found.
I’m trained to discern what isn’t necessarily apparent to others. The pedophile on the edge of the playground. The chalk mark that signals a spy’s dead-drop site. The surveillance team that tracked me on a business trip to China. To see those things, you must first learn everything you can about what you are trying to find, who you are looking for, and where to look. For this book, I needed to see the good and the bad to have any hope of understanding the ugly. What I discovered were entire subcultures that most Americans know little about.
I understand more now. I understand enough to share what I came to grasp: Hundreds of murders have been committed along our nation’s highways. Many of those homicides are connected, but many are not. Those murders were committed by multiple—yes, multiple—serial killers. Some of those homicides have been solved, some of the killers apprehended, but many—far too many—have not.
According to the FBI, in most cases of highway homicide, long-haul truckers are responsible.
Long-haul truckers exist for days or weeks at a time in a world of their own. They speak their own language, eat at their own establishments, sleep in their own rigs. Part cowboy, part fighter pilot, part hermit, long-haul truckers glide along the edge of a certain seam in the fabric of our society—the seam that separates their reality from ours.
Killer truckers exploit that seam—that little-known long-haul subculture, the one where we share the same roads but different realities.
There is a second seam to this book, the one that separates the truckers’ victims from the justice they deserve. That line divides the drug-addicted truck-stop female sex workers from their estranged families, many of whom don’t know—or don’t care to know—the women’s whereabouts. It is the nature of those victims and their victimology that keeps overworked, underpaid cops from prioritizing those cases. It’s who those victims are and what they have been made to do to eke out an existence that keeps communities from becoming outraged and demanding answers to the murders in their midst.
These victims—many of them, at least—live in their own roadside subculture, seen but unseen, known but unknown. Same world, different reality.
Seam three is where cops and crime analysts do their thing, mostly apart from the people they protect, the people they investigate, and, often, one another. This is the seam that separates one police jurisdiction from the one a mile away, five hundred miles away, two thousand miles away. It is the border between the state where a killer finds his female victims, the state where he murders those women, and the state where the bodies are dumped. It’s in that seam where city cops, state investigators, county deputies, and FBI crime analysts—all in different places—try to connect dots they don’t know exist among murders they’ve never heard of in locations they’ve never looked.
Those puzzle solvers also have their own subculture, their own language, their own way of moving through their world. A world inhabited by them, the truckers, and the trafficked.
For this book, I pulled on the threads of those three seams to try to unravel the mystery of multiple murders. Along the way I discovered something as intriguing as the murders themselves—maybe even more so. There are three fascinating, largely obscure subcultures, separate yet braided together, that sometimes collide atop cold autopsy tables at county coroner’s offices. Those subcultures—of truckers, trafficked victims, and investigators—and their stories make this book less of a whodunnit and more of a “Who are they?”
Who are they, those largely unknown entities who exist beyond the bubbles in which most of us spend our isolated, oblivious lives?
Who are the truckers who transport the food we eat, the furniture we sit on, the clothing we wear? What makes them choose to ride the roads solo for weeks or months on end? When do they see their kids, their spouses—if they even have any? How much do they earn? Are serial killers drawn to this job, or does the job cultivate the killer? Or is it both?
And who are the trafficked victims we choose not to see, the ones on the other side of the interstate rest stop—the truck side? The women who advertise on the internet that they are “trucker-friendly”? The ones with the long-sleeved shirts that hide their track marks who are trying to earn some cash so they can make more track marks? How does this become their reality? Whose daughters are they? Whose mothers are they? When they go missing, does anyone know? Does anyone care? Who are the people who control them?
Which law enforcement minds, which crime analysts in which jurisdictions, figure this all out? Who realizes that some of these murders are connected? What is the FBI doing about it? Can they stop it from continuing?
In pursuit of answers to these mysteries, I submerged myself in others’ sometimes dark, sometimes desperate, sometimes murderous realities. I heard it from them and saw it for myself. It became my own personal long haul.