Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - True Urban Legends: The Demon Trucker of Highway 666

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

According to the urban legends, Highway 666 is a paranormal hotspot in the remote American Southwest. The “Devil’s Highway” is cursed by ghostly hitchhikers, UFOs, and the homicidal “demon trucker” who stalks his prey along the highway. Highway 666 has since been renamed. And while the demon trucker has never been confirmed, the stories about him pale in comparison to the true case of Robert Ben Rhoades, the “Truck Stop Killer” who abducted victims and tortured them in his sleeper cab as they crossed the U.S. Keep up with us on Instagram @serialkillerspodcast! Have a story to share? Email us at [e-mail]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy October, listeners. All this month, we're bringing you a special series we're calling True Urban Legends. Every week will dissect one classic urban legend and the haunting true story that either inspired it or is eerily similar. As an added surprise, each new episode will be presented by a different host, including one with yours truly. All of us had a hand in choosing the urban legends we found the most compelling. But you'll have to tune in each week to find out which tales we chose and the true stories behind every legend. Due to the nature of this case, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of violence, abduction, kidnapping, and sexual assault of minors, rape and murder.

Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. One last streak of sunlight dips below the horizon. leaving you in near absolute darkness as you drive along Highway 666. You've heard the legends of the so-called Devil's Highway, a child dressed in white, begging for a ride before vanishing, a UFO encounter. The place was practically a paranormal hotspot if you believe all the stories. Then again, you've never actually met a single witness to any of these sightings.

So, setting off on the desolate road, alone, you put them at the back of your mind. But there's one story in particular you don't want to admit really gets under your skin, the tale of the demon trucker of Highway 666 who hunts the cursed road in search of his next victim. It was easy enough to block the stories from your thoughts during the daytime, but now as your last dying headlights struggles to illuminate the pitch black road, and a blinding pair of halogen lights moves toward you, accompanied by the blast of a deafening air horn. It's all you can think about. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and welcome to the serial killers October special, True Urban Legends. All this month, we're talking about

urban legends and the haunting true stories that either inspired them or are eerily similar. You can find us here every Monday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Today, we're covering the legend of the demon trucker of Highway 666 and the all-too-true story of Robert Ben Rhodes, the real truck stop killer. Stay with us. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Bonnie and Clyde, the lonely hearts killers, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. These are infamous criminal duels. But you don't need to break any laws to find your perfect business partner because you have Shopify. It's the commerce platform that can help you with literally everything, website design, marketing, shipping, and more.

So start your business today with the best partner, Shopify, and get that. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash killers. That's Shopify.com slash killers. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Whether you're hiring for a role or searching for a killer, the hunt can be exhausting. When detectives looked and searched to find any kind of evidence to find the person they were looking for, like Jack the Ripper, the Golden State Killer, the Unit Bomber. It's tedious work to find what you're looking for. So if you're hiring, I've got news for you. You can skip the link the investigation and the tiresome process of sorting through hundreds of resumes, just use

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This episode is brought to you by Prime. Obsession is in session. And this summer, Prime Originals have everything you want. Steamy romances, irresistible love stories, and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice. Off campus, L, every year after, the love hypothesis, Sterling Point, and more. Slow burns, second chances, chemistry you can feel through the screen. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime. Have you ever noticed how many urban legends involve driving? There's the one about a phantom hitchhiker who disappears once you've given them arrive. Another one says that if you flash your headlights at a darkened car at night, you could become the next victim of a gang member

initiation. And who could forget the slasher under the car, waiting in a parking lot late at night to swipe at your ankles with his razor? There's no proof that these particular stories were based in reality, but you'd be forgiven for believing they were. By nature, urban legends are often presented as true stories that supposedly happened to a friend of a friend. The details vary depending on where you hear the story, invoking familiar names and locations from your hometown, so the legends seem like a news story. But there are always exceptions. Some urban legends are rooted in fact, like the legend about exhausted travelers who check into a hotel room, only to be awakened by the putrid smell of a decomposing bar.

hidden under the mattress. It turns out these events have happened to travelers several times, like an Atlantic City in 1999, when two German tourists actually slept above a body for an entire night without realizing it. After they requested a new room the next day, the cleaning crew discovered a corpse below the box spring. There's also some truth to the urban legend of the demon trucker who stalks his victims along Highway 666, the Devil's Highway.

For starters, Route 666 is actually real. Or it was. It was the sixth offshoot of the famous Route 66 and covered portions of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. The road was eventually renamed, partially after uproar about the so-called Number of the Beast. In Christianity, 666 is typically associated with the Antichrist. Not everyone appreciated that the road was simply following common naming conventions.

The highway is still there, but most of it is now known as U.S. Route 491. While there's no evidence that a demon trucker stalks the old Route 666 specifically, the horrible truth is the FBI suspects there have been a few homicidal truck drivers operating over the years, crisscrossing interstate highways all over the U.S. And one of the most notorious of all is Robert Ben Rhodes, the truck stop killer. You might recall that we covered truck driving serial killers on our show back in 2021. Ever since then, Rhodes' story stuck with me. Anytime I'm driving on the freeway and see trucks, which is almost daily, a voice in the back of my mind wonders,

could that one be? Now, I actually personally know truck drivers, so I don't want to be. a stereotype. But we know there are aspects of long-haul trucking that may attract serial killers. And I want to dig deeper into road story this time. If the demon trucker of Highway 666 is the stuff of legend, the story of the real truck stop killer is the stuff of nightmares. On April 1st, 1990, Arizona State Trooper Mike Miller pulled his car to a stop near the city of Casa Grande. Just ahead, he'd spotted an 18-wheeler, stopped along the shoulder of a freeway on-ramp. Its flashers were on, and the engine was running, so he thought the driver might need help.

As Miller approached the truck, he saw a woman inside the sleeper cab. She was nude, gagged, and restrained. Chains bound her to the inner walls of the truck, and she wasn't alone. A man, presumably the truck's driver, realized the trooper had seen them, so he jumped out of the cab and began trying to smooth over the situation. This was Robert Ben Rhodes. He claimed that whatever was going on between him and the woman in his truck was totally consensual. Miller wasn't so sure.

The woman was screaming. Plus, Rhodes was acting jumpy, placing his hands against the cab before the trooper even asked, and pointing out that he had a gun in his back pocket. Miller found the behavior unusual, so he had. handcuffed Rhodes, confiscated the gun, and left him in the backseat of his patrol car. Back at the truck, Miller assured the woman that she was safe and detectives were on the way. While he did that, Rhodes maneuvered his cuffed hands in front of him and was apparently about to escape. Miller caught him before he could open the car door and run off into the night.

At the local station, investigators took a statement from the woman, who will call Jenna. She'd met Rhodes at a coffee shop in Buckeye, just over 80 miles away, and took him up on his offer for a ride. On the open road, it wasn't long before she dozed off. Shortly after falling asleep, though, Jenna was abruptly awoken as Rhodes chained her to the walls in the makeshift torture chamber he'd built inside the sleeper cab. He used various torture devices on her, including a whip as he sexually assaulted her. Rhodes told authorities a different story. He claimed Jenna was a sex worker who solicited him, but investigators weren't buying it. All of the evidence, including her wounds, supported her version of events.

Rhodes was taken into custody. He now faced charges for aggravated assault, sexual assault, and unlawful imprisonment. But one detective got the feeling this case might go much deeper. Investigators descended on Rhodes' truck and found bloody towels, the horse bit used to gag Jenna, fish hooks and chains. They also recovered a camera and several hairs that did not match Jenna, along with a briefcase. While giving her statement, Jenna mentioned that Rhodes told her he'd been doing this to victims for 15 years. The more evidence they collected, the more investigators thought that confession could be true because inside Rhodes briefcase were various items that one detective

referred to as a rape kit. In custody, Rhodes refused to offer any more details, but authorities believed they had enough to move forward with charges and further investigation into Rhodes' past. If there was any truth to what he'd told his captive, it was going to take investigators some time to go down the rabbit hole of Rhodes' 15 years. crime spree. Robert Ben Rhodes was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa in 1945. His father served in the military and was often absent for long stretches of time. When he returned home, he was abusive. Then when Rhodes was 16 years old, his father died by suicide. He'd just been convicted of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old. As an adult, Rhodes tried and failed to land a job as a police officer,

So sometime in the 1970s, he began his career as a long-haul trucker. At 41 years old, Rhodes decided to settle down with his girlfriend, Deborah. The way she saw it, their relationship hadn't always been perfect. She nearly left him after he'd tricked her into attending swingers' parties, not once, but twice. Deborah even recognized when he tried to manipulate her feelings afterward, telling her she was being immature. But she loved him, and eventually things felt normal between them. Then he proposed.

While we don't know when his crimes began, Deborah did notice a few clues over the years that something was off with Dusty, the nickname he used. One time he presented her with a ring. He made it out to be a surprise, like a grand romantic gesture, only Deborah couldn't help it notice that the ring had obviously been worn by someone else, And it didn't come in a box or a gift bag. It was just loose. When she balked, Rhodes shrugged it off, explaining that he'd found it at a truck stop. But Deborah always had a bad feeling about that ring.

Then there was the time she found a locked briefcase in her now husband's car. It seemed odd that a truck driver would need to carry one around, but Rhodes always offered an answer. He explained he had to keep his travel logbooks and purchase orders somewhere safe. Deborah accepted what he said, but she never forgot the moment either. Then one day, toward the end of their marriage, he came home with what looked like a series of fingernail scratches on his body. His knuckles, too, were red and irritated. It wasn't the first time Deborah noticed strange wounds and bruises,

but this time she felt compelled to ask. It was just a bar fight, he told. told her. There'd been so many strange incidents that raised questions, but one glaring issue brought their marriage to an end, and that was when Dusty raped and beat Deborah. She'd always warned him she would leave if he physically harmed her, and by 1989, that's exactly what she did. Roads, now in his mid-40s, moved to his own apartment in Houston, Texas, but continued to spend a lot of his time on the road, working, and claiming countless new victims for the next several months without anyone noticing a pattern. That is, until after his arrest in Arizona, in April 1990,

the story of the truck driver with a mobile torture chamber made national news, which is how another detective stationed in Houston read about roads and connected him to a similar case from earlier that year. On February 5th, 1990, less than three months before roads would be arrested in Arizona, a woman who will call Laura had escaped from a violent truck driver. She managed to flag down a car and went straight to the police with her story. Lara told them she'd hitched a ride a week earlier in San Bernardino, California. The first night, after she nodded off in the sleeper cab, she awoke to find that the driver had chained her up. But that wasn't all.

The man allegedly held Lara for six days, torturing and raping her multiple times, before he took a razor and cut off her hair. She didn't know much about him, but she was able to describe his truck, and she told police he said his name was dusty. Detectives brought her with them to ID a truck driver they believed might be their guy. The man they detained was, in fact, Robert Ben Rhodes.

Laura didn't want to deal with pressing charges, so initially she said he wasn't her attacker. She believed it would come down to her word against his. Later, in a secure hospital, she revealed that Rhodes was the man she escaped. By then, police had already let him go after a clean background check. But now, with Rhodes' arrest in Arizona, Arizona, he'd been connected to crimes across two states. With a possible serial sex offender on their hands, local investigators reached out to the FBI for help. In Houston, Special Agent Bob Lee got to work on a search warrant for Rhodes apartment where he would uncover a mountain of damning evidence and more questions about the truckers passed. Snoring, gasping during sleep, feeling fatigued, ask your doctor about Zepbound, terseptite. The first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine

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Enjoying Activia twice a day for two weeks as part of a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle may help reduce the frequency of minor digestive discomfort, which includes gas, bloating, rumbling, and abdominal discomfort. As Rhodes awaited trial in Arizona, FBI agents in Houston searched his apartment. Although search might be the wrong word, it didn't seem like Rhodes had bothered to hide much. Investigators quickly spotted various bondage and torture devices, as well as bloody towels. Rhodes had also kept women's jewelry and clothing, items that detectives believed might be trophies from his victims. According to FBI profiler Greg Cooper, Rhodes fit the description of the quote,

anger excitement rapist, also called a sexual sadist. It was becoming clear that Rhodes took pleasure in inflicting pain onto his victims, the main motive for offenders in this category. It's not uncommon for sexual sadists to choose victims who are strangers and detain them over several days, just as Rhodes had done with Jenna and Lara. and they typically utilize bondage and torture devices. This type of offender can be hard to track down because they blend in. They can be outgoing and well-liked.

They can carry on long-term romantic relationships, and they often have no history of seeking mental health treatment. But Cooper points out in his book, Predators, Who they are and How to Stop Them, that once a sexual sadist is discovered, it's easy to secure evidence against them. That's because they keep not only trophies, but also videos or photographs too, so that they can relive their crimes. During the search of Rhodes' apartment, detectives uncovered several pictures of multiple women. Some had been beaten, others disrobed.

One teenage girl had been photographed several times across different locations, including a barn. Like Laura, her hair has. had been cut short. In one photo, the girl wore a black dress that looked just like one discovered in Rhodes' apartment. But for now, the identities of the women and girls in the pictures remained unknown. It was by sheer coincidence that the FBI got their next break. In October 1991, Special Agent Bob Lee overheard a co-worker's conversation that piqued his attention. FBI profiler Mark Young had been working the missing person's case of a 14-year-old Regina K. Walters. She was last seen back in February of 1990, running away from her home in Pasadena, Texas,

just outside of Houston, with her 18-year-old boyfriend, Ricky. Ricky had been considered a person of interest early on, but as Agent Young dug deeper into the case, he began to think Regina Walters had actually been targeted by an older white male offender who traveled frequently, such as a salesman or a truck driver. A month after Walter's disappearance, on March 17th, her father received an anonymous phone call. The man on the line claimed he knew what happened to Mr. Walter's daughter, and he said she could be located in the loft of a barn. But he didn't specify where. All he added was that her hair had been cut off. The exchange was brief.

Regina's dad had no idea who the man might be or how he'd even gotten his phone number. It was unlisted, meaning that strangers couldn't find it in the phone book. When Mr. Walters reported the conversation, police went straight to the phone company to request information about the caller. A couple days later, they learned the call came from Ennis, Texas, about 200 miles outside of Houston. But the anonymous man had used a pay-funker.

so officials couldn't identify him. The trail went cold for Agent Young, until that day in October 1991, over a year and a half later, when, by chance, Special Agent Lee overheard his conversation. Lee realized Regina Walter's disappearance sounded a lot like the two cases he had worked on,

Jenna's abduction in Arizona, and the case of Laura, who'd fled her attacker in Houston on February. February 5th, 1990, the same day Regina Walters went missing from nearby Pasadena. From there, suspicions quickly turned into certainty that Rhodes had something to do with Walter's disappearance. Agent Young became aware of Rhodes' photographs showing an unidentified teenage girl at a barn, the ones that had been recovered from his apartment. Young compared these with family photos of Walters and recognized her immediately, despite the change to her hair.

Then another thought occurred to him. Cutting Walters and Laura's hair seemed like a signature. In other words, the aspect of the crime that gave Rhodes gratification. There were other similarities between what happened to Laura and what was happening to Walters in the photographs, but one glaring difference between the two cases stood out. Laura had been held. Laura had been held for six days before escaping. Walters had been missing for about 20 months. That's when the FBI began treating Regina Walters as a potential homicide. Authorities considered the fact that Rhodes was a long-haul trucker.

The job could make it easy for him to commit crimes across multiple jurisdictions and escape detection. So they obtained Rhodes logbooks and receipts from his former employer, intending to create a timeline for his movements. It would be a monumental task since he'd been driving for nearly two decades, and his work had taken him across more than 20 states. In the meantime, a gas receipt was recovered, showing that roads had stopped in Ennis, Texas, on March 17, 1990, the day Mr. Walters got a call from the same town.

As for his unlisted number, a notebook had been found in Rhodes' possession that, it was now clear, had belonged to Regina Walters. She'd written her parents' phone numbers inside. The notebook offered another possible clue, too. Along with Walters, her boyfriend Ricky was still missing. At the back of the notebook was a drawing of a gun and a knife, next to the words, Ricky's a dead man in Rhodes' handwriting. Regina's case finally had more answers, but there was still one major question left hanging. Where was she? Up in Illinois, state special agent Mike Shealy pressed send on yet another teletype.

It was a memo about a Jane Doe he'd been trying to identify for months. Forensics placed her age between 14 and 16, just a kid, so he hoped some other department out there was looking for her. She'd been discovered on September 29th, 1990, in an abandoned barn in Bond County. By that time, the body was in a state of advanced decomposition. Yet examiners were certain they could determine her cause of death. Ligature strangulation. A baling wire had been twisted around her neck so many times that she'd nearly been decapitated.

Shealy had taken everything he knew about the girl and ran it against open cases. in a national database. He narrowed down the field as much as he could, but there were still about 100 cases his Jane Doe might be connected to. All of his work paid off when he heard back from investigators in Pasadena, Texas. One detective who'd worked the Regina Walters case early on saw Shealy's memo and reached out. She had two questions. Was there Jane Doe found with her hair cut short? And was she found in a bar? The answer to both questions was yes. They had found Regina Walters.

Rhodes was charged with capital murder and extradited to Illinois. In September 1992, he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder to avoid a possible death sentence. Instead, he'd stay behind bars for life without the possibility of parole. But that wouldn't be his last conviction. By now, the FBI had finished compiling their timeline of Rhodes Travel based on his logbooks and receipts. Then they ran it through Vicar, their national crime database, where they were able to search for unsolved cases that might line up with the killer's whereabouts. And they came up with a long and troubling list. Every outfit starts with a choice.

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Rhodes travel logs had placed him in the vicinity of 50 unsolved murders and unidentified persons discovered along the highways. To this day, authorities haven't ruled him out as a suspect in these cases. Some believe he attacked up to three people per month toward the end of his crime spree. A few years after Rhodes' arrest, the FBI began looking into unsolved crimes along highways, and by the early 2000s, analysts had identified a shocking number of bodies, some of which they thought might be connected. The FBI believes learnings from one case could help solve the next. Yet the possibility of actually making those connections was a huge logistical challenge, since they were being investigated by separate

agencies. In pursuit of an easier way to detect patterns across these cases, the FBI began compiling information into what they call the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, or HSK. They included details on solved and unsolved crimes, with the goal of helping law enforcement agencies everywhere make connections between victims and crimes that might share a common perpetrator. The HSK turned up a lot of useful information, like similarities between victims, most of whom were vulnerable and somewhat off the grid. Many were sex workers, last seen alive at a truck stop, only to turn up dead in another city or state. Over the years, the HSK has helped close several cases, which revealed something else. Many were committed by truck drivers.

Of course, as I mentioned earlier, it's rare that a truck driver is a murderer or criminal of any kind. They work hard, and they provide an essential service we all rely on. In fact, the trucking industry cooperates with the HSK. Frank Figluse is a former FBI assistant director who researched the HSK for his book, Long Hall, hunting the highway serial killers. As he put it, killer truckers are practically living in their own world out on the road, one where they can make themselves almost undetectable by choosing vulnerable victims and spreading their crimes across different states. Exactly like Robert Ben Rhodes did. In November 1989, Patricia Candice Walsh, known as Candy, left her home in Seattle with her boyfriend Douglas Scott Ziskowski.

The two belonged to a religious group that eschewed material possessions. They planned to head for Georgia, hitchhiking and proselytizing along the way. At some point during their trip, Walsh and Ziskowski got married and contacted their families to tell them the good news. The last anyone heard from them, they had reached San Antonio. They likely accepted a ride from roads soon after that. Greg Cooper, the FBI profiler, sometimes uses Rhodes as a textbook example of a sexual sadist. He says they tend to plan out their crimes ahead of time.

Then they lure their victims with a polite demeanor, but it's all a facade. Once they're alone, the sadist changes his behavior and even his voice to frighten his victims. In January 1990, Ziskowski's body was discovered off the I-10 Freeway in Ozone, Texas, about 200 miles from San Antonio. He'd been beaten and shot. Authorities believe Rhodes killed Zaskowski shortly after picking up the couple. He then kept Walsh alive for about a week before shooting her multiple times in the head. A few months later, two deer hunters discovered Walsh's remains in Millard County, Utah, just east of I-15. Her identity, however, remained unknown for years. But after her husband's remains were IDed in 1992, Walsh's brother grew more

determined to find her. Her case was featured on America's Most Wanted, resulting in new tips, none of which panned out. The case grew cold, but few gave up on it. In 2003, the investigators working independently on Walsh's case in Utah and Ziskowski's unsolved murder in Texas were introduced to each other by a mutual acquaintance. They followed a hunch and were able to identify Walsh via dental comparisons. Now, both newlyweds had been located and officials believed their crimes were linked. Meanwhile, the Millard County Sheriff's Office in Utah brought in FBI agent Cooper. He was there to speak on a number of unsolved cases in the Great Basin area, which covers a portion of Utah and five other states. That day, one detective had Walsh's case in mind,

particularly when he heard Cooper talk about Robert Ben Rhodes. It turned out the bloody towels from Rhodes apartment had been held in evidence ever since 1990. When they were sent for forensic testing, one showed a match for Walsh's DNA. In 2012, Rhodes pleaded guilty to murdering both Walsh and Ziskowski and received two more life sentences. He remains incarcerated in Illinois. Truck drivers are most certainly a major part of the fabric that holds our country together. I even had a stepdad who was a long-haul trucker. It is a tough career with time away from the family, a lot of responsibility, and long hours.

As a line of work, it's clear that it lends itself to some scary possibilities, as we've heard today. The first time I thought about the lore around truck drivers is when I saw Peewee's Big Adventure, where they featured the ghost of a disturbed truck driver named Large Marge. Some urban legends are nothing more than funny or thrilling stories. They fit right in at sleepovers or around a campfire. We can laugh them off because they're just a little too uncanny, full of coincidences and illogical behaviors.

and it's next to impossible to trace most of their origins. But there are good reasons we continue to tell our modern-day legends, for fun, connection, or as a cautionary tale, like when the fictional demon trucker pales in comparison to the real-life killer stalking his prey along the highways. And then there are those urban legends whose stories can be traced to terrifying and tragic murders, Like the story we'll be covering next week, when our special guest, Kaylin Moore, of the Heart Starts Pounding podcast drops by,

she'll help us separate fact from legend in the case of the Hex Hollow murder. Thanks for tuning in to serial killers, a Spotify podcast. We'll be back Monday with another episode. Among the many sources we used, we found the FBI Files episode, Driven to Kill, The Evil Lives Here episode, Deadly Fetish, and the book Predators, Who They Are and How to Stop Them, by Gregory M. Cooper and Michael R. King, extremely helpful to our research. Stay safe out there.

This episode was written and researched by Mickey Taylor, edited by T.T.U. Fact-checked by Lori Siegel and sound designed by Alex Button. Our head of programming is Julian Borrow. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Vanessa Richardson. A beloved 75-year-old man washing up, getting ready for bed, is brutally beaten and killed. Despite an exhaustive investigation, the killer avoids arrest and then strikes again. I'm Global News crime reporter Nancy Hicks.

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