Overview
- New reporting Wednesday revisits the case by spotlighting the last photograph of 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters and survivor accounts tied to Robert Ben Rhoades.
- Rhoades, who was arrested April 1, 1990 in Arizona after a state trooper found a woman shackled in his truck’s sleeper cab, was then linked to Walters’ disappearance and other cases.
- Investigators say he forced Walters into a posed photo in a barn and then strangled her with a wire, with a farmer later finding her body after the killer shaved her hair as part of his pattern.
- In 1994, a court sentenced Rhoades to life without parole for Walters’ murder, and he later received another life term for killing Patricia Candace Walsh and Douglas Scott Zyskowski.
- Authorities suspect he could be tied to more than 50 deaths, citing a torture setup in his rig with chains and hooks and forensic markers like pre-death shaving that point to a wider spree.