Overview
- Authorities estimate Rhoades is suspected in 50 or more killings, often targeting hitchhikers, sex workers and young women alone at truck stops from the mid-1970s to 1990.
- Investigators say he outfitted his sleeper cab with restraints for torture and photographed victims, including a widely cited image of 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters.
- A state trooper arrested Rhoades in Arizona on April 1, 1990 after finding a woman chained in his truck, and he is serving life without parole for Walters’s murder.
- Newlyweds Patricia Candace Walsh and Douglas Scott Zyskowski are among the identified victims, with Zyskowski shot and Walsh later found in Utah after a week of assaults.
- A hitchhiker later identified as author Vanessa Veselka recounts a 1985 encounter in which she escaped his truck, and the FBI established the Highway Serial Killings Initiative to link similar cases.