50 Victims, One Predator: The Gruesome Secret Hidden in a Stranger’s Sleeper Cab
The nation’s long web of interstates provided the perfect hunting line for a depraved predator. He preyed on hitchhikers wandering the roads. He held them captive, then tortured and raped them. When that didn’t satisfy his warped cravings, he killed instead. Across the nation, a serial rapist targeted unsuspecting women; it was only a matter of time until his dark urges raged out of control and led him to murder. He followed a path so random it was impossible to trace, and all that tied him to his crimes were his access to the highways and a bizarre sexual fetish. “I’m Jim Kalstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office. When investigators believe the suspect had committed dozens of murders, the FBI was determined to put the brakes on his nationwide rampage,” said the former official.
On February 5, 1990, on a road in Houston, Texas, 18-year-old Nicole Tuttle desperately tried to flag down passing motorists. Someone finally stopped for the bruised and bleeding girl. The driver took her to the closest phone to call police. At the Houston police station, Nicole told officers that she had been kidnapped and assaulted, but she’d managed to escape. Her ordeal began in California one week earlier on January 29. She hitched a ride from a trucker at a rest stop. He said his name was “Dustin,” and that he was headed east through Arizona. After a few hours on the road, she fell asleep in the back compartment of his truck. It seemed that was exactly what he was waiting for. He climbed in back and overpowered her before she was fully awake. He chained her to the walls and gagged her with a horse bit.
The trucker whipped her and pierced her with pins and fish hooks. He also raped and sodomized her. Nicole told police that she was chained inside the cab for six days. Her ordeal didn’t end there. Inside his Houston apartment, the trucker allowed her to bathe, then chained her to the bed and raped her again. She watched helplessly as he approached her with a straight razor. He pressed the blade close to her scalp and began to slice off her hair. After three hours, he forced her back into the truck. This time, he failed to bind her. When they stopped at a brewery, he left her alone as he walked inside to sign for his new freight. Nicole knew this might be her only chance. She ran for it, still wearing a dog leash around her neck.
Houston police stopped a trucker in the area whose rig fit Nicole’s description. However, she said, “He is not the man who attacked me.” A background check revealed no outstanding warrants or convictions, so police released the trucker. Nicole told the officers to stop searching. She was too frightened to testify against her attacker; she just wanted to go home to California. On February 5, the same day that Nicole escaped, another young woman was on the highway thumbing for rides just 15 miles away in Pasadena, Texas. Fourteen-year-old Regina Kay Walters was running away with her new boyfriend. Her parents were divorced, and Regina usually stayed with her father in Houston. She’d been visiting her mother for a few days when she fled and began hitchhiking.
Whether she was following the lead for a new teenage boyfriend or just testing her independence, a trucker soon stopped for the pretty young girl. Regina’s mother, Carolyn Walters, was a single mom who worked long hours as a department store clerk. When she came home from work, she was surprised to find her daughter was not home. Her daughter did not answer. Carolyn found no notes and saw no other signs that her daughter had been back to the house. She checked the answering machine, but Regina had left no messages. Carolyn called her daughter’s friends and Regina’s father in Houston. “Hello, Chris?” she asked, but no one had heard from the girl. The distraught mother reported her daughter as a missing person to Pasadena, Texas police.
She spoke with a detective from the juvenile section, providing the officer with Regina’s description. Her 14-year-old daughter was about five feet tall, weighed 95 pounds, and had long curly brown hair. The detective asked Carolyn what steps she had taken so far to find her. Carolyn had posted missing persons flyers, but no one had yet responded. The worried mother hadn’t heard from her daughter since they argued two nights before. At 9:30 that night, Regina told her mother she was going to visit a friend. “I just think you ought to stay home,” Carolyn told her. When Carolyn objected, the girl insisted she would be right back. “Regina!” she called out, but against her better judgment, Carolyn relented, trusting that Regina would call if she stayed out later.
Though the young teen had a history of running away, she always returned on her own. Her mother believed this time was different. Pasadena, Texas police detective Suzanne Jackson of the juvenile division was assigned the case. She understood Carolyn’s concern. Several days passed, and Regina would normally call her mom when she would leave home and let her mother know that she was okay and that she was just out. She would be back when she was ready to come home, but she had not done that. Carolyn posted more flyers at the convenience store close to her house. She held out hope that her daughter was unharmed; maybe she was simply staying with a friend. Along with Regina’s photo and description, Carolyn offered a reward for information on her daughter’s whereabouts.
Five days after Regina’s disappearance, Carolyn received a phone call. The caller had seen Regina talking to two young men on the evening she left her mother’s house. “Okay,” the mother noted. The person only knew the men as “Billy” and “Ricky,” but she remembered that Billy had a girlfriend with a peculiar name of “Urana.” Carolyn immediately called police. “Detective Jackson, please,” she requested. The following day, a second caller gave Carolyn the address of an apartment where he had seen Regina at a party two days before. When police arrived, no one answered. The manager told them the apartment was rented to a man named Billy Wayne Gibbs. The next morning, the detective told her colleagues about the case. She mentioned she was looking for Gibbs in connection with Regina’s disappearance.
To her surprise, the officers knew the names. Billy Wayne Gibbs had a girlfriend named Urana Sweet and a friend named Ricky Lee Jones. The three were wanted in connection with an auto theft. Units were dispatched to Gibbs’ apartment to wait for his return. Officers patrolled the nearby road. After several hours of surveillance, they picked up 17-year-old Gibbs and his girlfriend Urana near his apartment. Police handcuffed the young couple and brought them to the station for questioning. The third suspect, Ricky Lee Jones, was still at large. The arresting officer asked Gibbs if he had seen Regina or Ricky Lee Jones. Gibbs said he had spoken to them four days ago but not since. He told police that Ricky and Regina were in love and planned to run away to Mexico, where Ricky had relatives.
The detectives suspected that 18-year-old Jones had another reason for leaving town. If he were caught with Regina, he could be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Regina was 14, and they obviously were boyfriend and girlfriend at the time. When they saw the flyers that the mother had left out with a reward on her location, they decided they’d be best to leave the area so they wouldn’t be caught, and that’s when they decided to hitchhike to Mexico. The detective learned that Ricky Lee Jones was already on probation for theft. Fleeing jurisdiction was a parole violation. She issued a warrant for his arrest and fed Regina’s description into the NCIC, the National Crime Information Center.
Fifteen miles away, Houston police interviewed Jerry Walters, Regina’s divorced father. He told them he’d received a disturbing call on his unlisted home number on the evening of March 17. The conversation was brief and Walters did not recognize the caller’s voice. The man asked, “Are you Regina’s father?” When Walters replied, “Yes,” the man told him he knew where to find Regina. He said she was in a loft of a barn and that there had been some changes; he had cut the girl’s hair. Regina’s father asked if she was dead or alive. The caller hung up without answering. Detective Jackson asked Southwestern Bell to trace the call. The company told her it would take several days. Police would simply have to wait.
In March of 1990, Pasadena, Texas police detective Suzanne Jackson continued her search. The girl hadn’t been seen since early February when she left a friend’s house with her 18-year-old boyfriend, Ricky Lee Jones. The detective’s only lead was the anonymous phone call made to Regina’s father on March 17. On the same night Regina’s father received his call, her mother also got a call. “Hello?” she said as she recorded the conversation. An unknown man told Carolyn to meet him at 6:30 the next morning at the local convenience store. He had something to tell her about Regina and he wanted to say it in person. Without giving his name or description, he hung up. Carolyn called Detective Jackson, who told her it was risky to meet the man, but Carolyn insisted.
From a distance, officers kept an eye on Carolyn as she waited at the convenience store. She had no way of knowing if the man knew who she was and no way to identify him. Her only hope was if he would approach her. She studied everyone who came in and out and everyone who used the phone. Carolyn waited over two hours, but the caller never came forward. Two days later, police received the phone records. They learned that the call to Regina’s father was made from a gas station in Ennis, Texas, 200 miles northwest of where she was last seen. The call to her mother’s home was made from a pay phone only a few blocks away. “At that particular time, it was obvious that we were becoming very concerned about Regina’s whereabouts,” the detective noted.
Two weeks later, Carolyn told Detective Jackson that the man who had called her before wanted to set up another meeting at the same convenience store. Police traced the call to a nearby pay phone, but the caller had already fled. On April 23, police found a partial skeleton of a small female near a riverbank in Pasadena. Detective Jackson brought Regina’s dental records to the medical examiner. “I went to the M.E.’s office with my information. We did a comparison on some dental x-rays and found that this particular person was not Regina,” she stated. Months went by with no leads. On October 12, two boys playing near a dirt road in Manville, Texas, found human remains in a wood pile. Again, the dental records did not match.
As the search continued in Texas through the fall of 1990, a farmer prepared to burn down his old barn in Bond County, Illinois. He hadn’t been inside in years. The farmer climbed up into the hayloft to make one last check of the place. Then, something caught his eye. He looked closer at the strewn hay and saw a skeleton that appeared to be human. The farmer immediately called police. Agent Mike Sheely of the Illinois State Police responded to the scene. “I received a call from the local sheriff’s office. They had instructed me that they had found a body in a rural setting near Interstate 70,” he said. Crime scene technicians conducted a thorough search. They found baling wire wrapped around the corpse’s neck.
Forensic anthropologist Mark Johnsy was called in. He determined it was a young female between the ages of 14 to 16, weighing approximately 90 to 110 pounds. “There was indication that her hair had been cut. The forensics had told us that it was recent,” he reported. The cause of death was determined to be strangulation. The killer had almost severed the victim’s head by twisting baling wire around her neck 16 times. Searching the national crime database, Agent Sheely listed the Illinois “Jane Doe.” The detective in Pasadena received the teletype on October 16. She remembered the mysterious phone call to Regina’s father about a barn. “When I asked if the body was found in a barn, she immediately transferred me to the sheriff,” Detective Jackson recalled.
The Illinois authorities confirmed the girl in the barn had shorn hair. “We sent a copy of dental x-rays to Greenville, Illinois, and those dental x-rays were matched with the body that was discovered there. It was confirmed to be Regina’s body,” Jackson said. One question remained: Where was Regina’s boyfriend, Ricky Lee Jones? FBI Special Agent Mark Young was assigned as case agent. At Jones’s former high school, a guidance counselor provided his last known address. His sister, Tammy, was the only one there. She said no one in the family had seen Ricky for over a year. She also confirmed they had no relatives in Mexico. “That’s the last time,” the detective noted. They feared Ricky might be involved or afraid to come home.
Agent Mark Young developed a profile of the killer. He determined that Ricky Lee Jones probably did not commit the crime. “If Ricky Lee Jones had murdered Regina, he would have done it in a fit of anger, and that would have been reflected in the crime scene. You didn’t see that. It was a very controlled, purposeful crime scene,” Young explained. He believed the killer was an older white male, a traveler like a truck driver. The crime scene showed a sexual sadist who had stripped Regina’s clothing and cut her hair. Meanwhile, in Marshall, Texas, remains were found that police concluded were likely Ricky Lee Jones, who had been shot. It appeared the man who killed both Regina and her boyfriend had gotten away with it.
A thousand miles west in Arizona, a highway patrolman noticed a tractor-trailer parked on an on-ramp. Officer Michael Miller approached the door. A man suddenly burst out of the cab. “What’s going on?” Miller asked. “Nothing, officer, we’re doing just fine. I’ve got a gun in my back pocket,” the man said, motioning to his pocket while putting his hands up. Miller could hear a woman screaming inside the truck. He cuffed Robert Ben Rhodes and returned to the rig. He found a woman handcuffed to the wall by her wrists and ankles. “Ma’am, you’re going to need to remain here until I can get some help out here because this is a crime scene,” Miller told her. Rhodes was taken into custody.
Inside the truck, police found a gruesome array of torture tools: chains, fish hooks, a horse bit, and a briefcase filled with the implements of a sexual sadist. They also found a camera and hairs that did not belong to the woman in the truck. Detective Rick Barnhart noted, “Robert Rhodes had what I refer to as a ‘rape kit’ in his truck. I knew Robert Rhodes was a predator.” The woman in the truck was 27-year-old Kathleen Vine. She had been picked up at a truck stop and assaulted. “He was trying to rape me when I dozed off,” she said. Rhodes claimed it was a consensual encounter and called her a “lot lizard.” However, a bite mark on his shoulder matched Kathleen’s story perfectly.
Arizona prosecutors offered Rhodes a deal of six years if he pled guilty to the charges against Vine. Meanwhile, FBI Agent Bob Lee in Houston recognized the “signature” of the crime. He had heard about the hair-cutting and the barn. He remembered the case of Nicole Tuttle, who had escaped from a trucker named Robert Ben Rhodes earlier that year. When Agent Young saw the photos found in Rhodes’s apartment, he was chilled. “This is Regina Walters,” he said. The photos showed Regina in a barn, wearing a black dress and shielding herself from the camera. The FBI began to build a murder case. They found fuel receipts that placed Rhodes in the exact locations where calls were made to Regina’s parents.
They even found Regina’s spiral notebook in Rhodes’s possession. On the back, a message believed to be written by Rhodes read, “Ricky’s a dead man,” with a drawing of a knife and gun. A search of Rhodes’s former truck—even though it had been cleaned—yielded a single strand of hair consistent with Regina’s and a fingerprint on the upholstery. In January 1992, with Rhodes’s parole hearing approaching, investigators convinced the Bond County prosecutor to press charges for capital murder. On February 6, investigators traveled to the Arizona prison to serve the warrant. Rhodes remained unfazed. “He was very, very firm in his denials,” Agent Sheely said.
Ultimately, Robert Ben Rhodes lost his nerve. In a Bond County courthouse, he pled guilty to first-degree murder to avoid the death penalty. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Investigators believe Regina Kay Walters was not his only victim. There are pictures of other unidentified women in Rhodes’s possession that remain a mystery. “Anybody that gets into the comfort zone of the truck of a serial killer may potentially be another murder victim,” an investigator warned. To this day, the search continues to identify those women and bring closure to their families.
