The Truck Stop Killer

In the summer of 1985, somewhere near Martinsburg, Pennsylvania, the body of a young woman was pulled from a truck-stop Dumpster. I had just hitched a ride and was sitting in a nearby truck waiting for the driver to pay for gas so we could leave. When they found her, there was shouting. A man from the restaurant ran out and started yelling for everyone to stay away as a small crowd gathered around the Dumpster in the rain. Word filtered back that the dead girl was a teenage hitchhiker. I remember thinking it could be me, since I was also a teenage hitchhiker. Watching the driver of my truck walk back across the wet asphalt, a second thought arose: It could be him. He could be the killer. The driver reached the cab, swung up behind the wheel, and said we should get going. He said he didn't want to get caught up in anything time-consuming. Stowing his paperwork, he released the brake. Neither of us said anything about the dead girl. As we pulled away, I looked once more in the side mirror. They were stringing crime tape around the Dumpster just as another state trooper rolled into the lot.

That ride turned out to be fine. We drove up to Ohio drinking Diet Coke and listening to Bruce Springsteen. The trucker bought me lunch and didn't even try to have sex with me, which made him a prince in my world. Several days later, though, heading south on I-95 through the Carolinas, I got picked up by another trucker who was not fine. I don't remember much about him except that he was taller and leaner than most truckers and didn't wear jeans or T-shirts. He wore a cotton button-down with the sleeves rolled neatly up over his biceps and had the cleanest cab I ever saw. He must have seemed okay or I wouldn't have gotten in the truck with him. Once out on the road, though, he changed. He stopped responding to my questions. His bearing shifted. He grew taller in his seat, and his face muscles relaxed into something both arrogant and blank. Then he started talking about the dead girl in the Dumpster and asked me if I'd ever heard of the Laughing Death Society. "We laugh at death," he told me.

A few minutes later, he pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the road by some woods, took out a hunting knife, and told me to get into the back of the cab. I began talking, saying the same things over and over. I said I knew he didn't want to do it. I said it was his choice. I said he could do it in a few minutes. I said it was his choice. I said I wouldn't go to the cops if nothing happened to me, but it was his choice—until he looked at me and I went still. There was going to be no more talking. I knew in my body that it was over. Then he said one word: Run. Without looking back, I ran into the woods and hid. I stayed there until I saw the truck pull onto the interstate. It was getting dark. I was still in shock, so I walked back out to the same road and started hitching south. I never went to the police and didn't tell anyone for years.

This spring a friend sent a news story link about a serial killer with the subject line "Is this your guy?" The serial killer's name was Robert Ben Rhoades. Rhoades was a long-haul trucker, in jail since 1990, who had recently been convicted of a couple of new "cold cases." I didn't recognize him from the initial photos, but as I found pictures of him as a younger man, his face came to seem more familiar. The glasses were the same, the curve of the cheekbone, and something about the expression, particularly the set of the mouth. It had the same neutral arrogance. Rhoades looked like the guy who picked me up. But then, Rhoades looks like a lot of guys. He would only have been 39 at the time, and I remember the trucker as an older man with light brown or graying hair. To a teenager, though, someone pushing 40 is pretty old, and hair often looks darker in photos. The light in my memory is strange, too. It was a cloudy day just before a summer storm, and everything in the truck is cast in gray.

After receiving my friend's e-mail, I left messages with the FBI but was relieved when they were not returned. The memory was twenty-seven years old, and nothing in it was actionable. The photos stayed in my head, though, and with them came questions: What if the man who pulled the knife on me really did murder the hitchhiker? Why did he let me go? Who was the girl in the Dumpster? Why didn't I go to anyone? I needed to understand what my responsibility was and to find my own answers, if nobody else's, so I began to look.

I have no fascination with serial killers, so I didn't realize that Rhoades was famous. There are articles, TV episodes, and books on him—Driven to Kill, Roadside Prey, Killer on the Road—and from these sources I learned that every grim and secret fear I have about the human race is manifest in Robert Ben Rhoades. Rhoades was a sexual sadist. He kidnapped women, tortured and raped them for weeks before killing them. What is known about him in the 1980s is murky. He was involved in the BDSM and swinger scene in his hometown of Houston. He was married. When he was caught, he said that he had been "doing this" for fifteen years, which would put the onset of his murders back into the 1970s. His trucking logs place him in the area of fifty unsolved murders in the three years prior to his arrest alone. While not all fifty cases have been tied to Rhoades yet and Rhoades himself has admitted to only three murders, the FBI has strong reason to believe that at his peak he was killing one to three women a month.

Rhoades was first arrested when an Arizona state trooper found a screaming woman named Lisa Pennal* chained in the back of his cab. He was charged with kidnapping and assault. What put him away for life, though, was the rape and murder of Regina Walters, a 14-year-old girl from Pasadena, Texas. Rhoades picked her up along with her boyfriend, Ricky Jones, in February of 1990. Jones was promptly killed, and his remains were discovered later in Mississippi. Rhoades kept Regina for at least two weeks. He shaved her head and pubic hair, pierced her with fishing hooks, dressed her up in a black dress and heels, and photographed her in moments of terror, then killed her with a garrote made of baling wire, leaving her one-hundred-pound body to decompose in a barn in Illinois off Interstate 70.

Behind the tragic elements of Regina's story, like some kind of pentimento, I saw my own. Like me, she left home with her older boyfriend. Also like me, Regina became dependent upon the grace of truck drivers. In her weeks with Rhoades, many drivers saw her, but somehow no alarm was raised. She passed through that world as if she were invisible.

In 1985 my biggest problem was sleep. There was no safe way for me to get it. I left home in early January, hitchhiking south from New York City with my 21-year-old boyfriend. We had $60 and a Smith Wesson five-shot with one bullet in it, which we accidentally fired off in a field in Maryland during a discussion about whether the safety was on. I had a guitar and a knapsack full of souvenirs of my girlhood: notes from friends, earrings, and song lyrics. I was 15.

People don't leave home because things are going well; they leave because they feel they have to, and right or wrong, that's how I felt. I lived with my mom in New York, and the fights between us were growing in intensity and emotional violence. I don't think either of us knew what to do about it. There was talk of me going to live with my dad in Virginia, where I had traditionally spent my summers. By then, though, I had been kicked out of two schools for absences and was cutting myself regularly. My emotions were a planet around which I spun like a moon. As I saw it, it didn't matter if I left, because in so many ways I was already gone. On my way out, I destroyed every single picture of me over the age of 12 so that there would be nothing to give to the police.

That first night, my boyfriend and I stayed in an abandoned barn in Maryland. It was off the side of the freeway and probably very much like the one Regina Walters was found in. The barn had a loft with wind coming through broken slats and was surrounded by the same kind of brown grassy field and frozen mud. Like Regina, I also had a little journal and probably wrote something in it that night, because it was far too cold to sleep. We were back on the road before dawn, walking down a highway covered in black ice, shivering in our hoodies. A trucker picked us up at daybreak, and I rode in a semi for the first time.

Being up high, warm, and looking out over the traffic was a great improvement. The trucker bought us chicken-fried steak, chatted amiably, and let us nap in the cab while he drove. While we were asleep, he pulled into a small truck stop, and I woke to his hand down my shirt. I kept my eyes closed, stayed still, then rolled away from him, pretending I was still asleep. A few minutes later, I got up like nothing had happened. The trucker went to pay for gas, and my boyfriend and I went to use the bathroom. When we came back, the truck was gone and every reminder of home with it—my guitar, my knapsack, everything except the Smith Wesson, which we sold later in New Orleans.

That first ride was a preview of how it would often go for me with truckers—dodging sex and getting stranded—but I had learned one crucial lesson: When a truck slows down, you get up. Getting sleep was pretty easy with a boyfriend, because one of us could always stay awake. Six weeks later, though, we parted ways. Somewhere in Arizona we had a fight in a gas station off I-10, and we each climbed into separate trucks, and that was it. I was on my own. Without fake ID, I couldn't stay in a shelter. Sleeping by myself on the street made me a target, and having sex with some creepy old guy for a spot on a mattress also held little appeal. So I went back to hitchhiking in circles and discovered a state of half-consciousness wherein I could be asleep and not asleep at the same time. I could rest but not dream. I could tell you the last three songs played on the radio if you asked, but only if you asked. If you didn't, I had no memory of them at all.

I stuck to trucks because they were safer than cars. When you get in a truck at a truck stop, everyone notices. They chatter about it on the CB, and you are driving off in what amounts to a huge billboard advertising the name of the company. I needed visibility to stay alive. But it was also a dangerous form of brinksmanship, because if a trucker was going to cross the line, the higher stakes meant he was going to do it for real. There was a gap before that line, and most truckers wouldn't take it that far. I lived in that gap.

Truck stops in the 1980s were closed worlds where what went on passed unnoticed on the outside. The stores were dimly lit and filled with smoke, radically different from the family travel plazas of today. Magazine porn often dominated the aisles—glossies like Hustler and Barely Legal but also newsprint rags with cheap color covers. Bottles of isobutyl nitrite and rotgut aphrodisiacs like Locker Room and Spanish Fly crowded the counters by the register, along with the iconic bumper sticker ASS, GAS, OR GRASS—NO ONE RIDES FOR FREE.

Back then, though, my thoughts weren't on misogyny; they were on logistics. I needed to find rides and usually couldn't get into the restaurant. The general rule was that you were a prostitute until proven otherwise. And then you were still a prostitute. Waitresses were the first to kick you out. That forced me into asking for rides in the hallway by the showers. Over time, I learned safer ways of getting rides by having truckers navigate the CB radio for me. Women couldn't really get on the "zoo channel," as they called it then, because the sound of their voice would trigger twenty minutes of crass chatter. There was only one word for woman on the CB, and that was beaver. Even the guys who were trying to help had used it. They had to make up stories for me: "I got a beaver needs a ride to Flagstaff for her grandma's funeral don't want no trouble, c'mon back." There was always a sick mom or dead grandparent involved, and I was almost always abandoned by my jerk of a boyfriend, who'd made off with all my money and my car.

Through these stories, I jumped from truck to truck. Like a lemur in a canopy of trees, I barely saw the ground. Even so, it still wasn't safe to sleep. Adhering to my rule (that the only safe truck was a moving truck) meant I woke when a truck took an exit. I woke when it slowed for traffic. When it turned, when it downshifted, when it drifted toward the shoulder—I woke. Wearing down from lack of sleep and trying to get a handle on my risk level, I began to work off a 1-to-5 scale of sexually aggressive behavior:

1. You (the driver) kept your urges to yourself.

2. You asked me to have sex and offered to pay.

3. You told me I owed you sex for the ride and chicken-fried steak and threatened to drop me off somewhere dangerous.

4. You dropped me off somewhere dangerous.

5. I had to jump when you slowed down because you were going to rape me.

Most truckers occupied the middle of the scale, but the trucker who resembled Rhoades didn't have a place on it. Anybody who pulls a knife on you in an enclosed space like a truck is terrifying. But beyond that, it was the man's demeanor that was so chilling. He wasn't nervous, angry, or excited. He was grave and methodical as if preparing to dress a deer.

From reading about Rhoades, I knew that he preferred hitchhikers to prostitutes and specifically targeted runaways. I also knew the first thing he did was to get them into the back of his sleeper cab, which had anchor points for shackles. But I hadn't seen any shackles. I only saw the man with the knife. "It has to be him," a friend said. "How many of those guys could there be?"

According to the FBI, quite a few. In 2009 the feds went public with a program called the Highway Serial Killings Initiative in response to a rising number of dead bodies found along the interstates. Some of these were women left in Dumpsters. Narrowing the field to those last seen around truck stops and rest areas, the bureau counted over 500 bodies, almost all women. Of the 200 people on a suspect list, almost all of them were long-haul truckers.

But nobody had to tell me that people like Rhoades killed people like me and got away with it. Going through the truck stops, I'd heard about women getting their throats slit or strangled. I'd heard of at least one who got hung up on a meat hook in the back of a refrigerated trailer because a trucker thought she'd given him VD. At night I listened to the voices of prostitutes on the CB, barely intelligible between streams of name-calling: "Hello, honey. It's me, Sugar Bear, in party row. Anyone want to party?"

"Lot lizards" is what truckers call prostitutes who work truck stops, and since many drivers don't distinguish between hitchhikers and prostitutes, I was a lot lizard, too. If we went missing, months could pass before a report was filed, and by then there was little to connect the missing person in one state with the decomposed remains in another. When the Illinois state trooper who was trying to identify the body of Regina Walters, the girl Rhoades left in that barn, put her forensic description out on the national teletype, he was totally unprepared for the response. He requested information on missing Caucasian females aged 13 to 15 years old who had disappeared six to nine months earlier. He got over 900 matches.

If there was any way to connect my story to Rhoades, it would be through the body of the girl in the Dumpster. Records on her would provide a date and a place that could then be checked against Rhoades's trucking logs. To at least one of my questions—was Rhoades my guy?—I'd have a clear answer, a simple yes or no.

I began by Googling things like "dead girl truck stop Martinsburg." Nothing came up, but that wasn't too surprising. Her murder happened twenty-seven years ago and was essentially pre-Internet. I pulled up a map of Martinsburg, Pennsylvania, and that's where things started to get hazy. Martinsburg was nothing but a pinprick, just a dot on a minor route feeding into a midsize highway on the outskirts of Altoona, PA, not the sort of place you'd expect to find a busy truck stop. Had I confused the state? I did a search on towns named Martinsburg. There were seven within range—Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, West Virginia, and New York—all less than a day's drive apart.

A week before the girl was found in the Dumpster, though, I'd gone to see my dad in Virginia. At the time, he was struggling himself, living with several other guys in a house where you flushed the toilet with a bucket of water and working what little construction there was in the county. I quickly realized I would have been nothing but a burden. The morning I left, I asked him to take me to the closest truck stop so I could get a ride going toward California. It was a made-up destination, a Grapes of Wrath narrative of brighter futures. I was sure he would remember where he took me back then, so last spring I called him. I didn't tell him about my recent inquiries at first; I just asked where he'd dropped me off. Without any hesitation he said Martinsburg, West Virginia.

"Were there any murders that summer?" I asked him.

"There was that hitchhiker. You called and left a message a day or so after I dropped you off, saying I was going to read about a dead 17-year-old hitchhiker they found in a truck stop and that it wasn't you."

My whole body relaxed. My memory may have been bent by sleep deprivation, but I was not crazy. There was a Martinsburg truck stop somewhere in my story, and there was a dead 17-year-old hitchhiker. She had existed enough for me to call my dad all those years ago and warn him about what he would read. And if it happened, she could be found. It was just a matter of looking harder.

The original Rhoades investigation had woven a complex web, entangling local and federal agencies in five different states. Eventually the locus shifted to the Houston FBI, because at some point every thread ran through Texas. Rhoades was from Texas. His wife, Debra Davis, was from Texas. Regina Walters and Ricky Jones were from Texas. He picked up two of his other victims in Texas.

I flew to Austin to meet with two retired FBI men, special agents Mark Young and Robert F. Lee, who'd both worked on the case. Young was a profiler for the bureau as well as a field agent. Over lunch at a local sushi place, he taught me the difference between a mode of operation and a signature. Modes of operation change. They are more like habits, he said, and can adapt to circumstances or mood. Rhoades, for instance, used guns and ligature strangulation and probably knives, too. A signature, however, does not change. Sexual sadists in particular work off erotic maps established early on. They get more nuanced and elaborate, but the basic topography remains the same. One of Rhoades's signatures was shaving the head and pubic hair of his female victims. Piercings around the breasts, bruising, and other signs of torture were also frequently found.

Young, a six-foot-four Texan and third-generation lawman, opened his laptop and pulled up a picture of a woman named Shana Holts.* Only days before Regina Walters was taken, Rhoades had been detained by the police in Houston for the possible sexual assault and kidnapping of Holts. She'd been picked up in a truck stop, shackled into the back of the cab, tortured and raped for weeks. She'd escaped when Rhoades pulled into a Houston brewery. I'd always read that she got away because Rhoades forgot to chain her in, but I found out from Young that she'd not been shackled when she escaped. Rhoades had told her to "sit there and be a good girl." But Holts, 18 years old, had been on the street since she was 12. By her own account, she had been raped at least twenty times and had already had a baby. She knew how to survive. Whatever the man thought he had broken in her had already been broken and healed back stronger. She didn't do what he expected. She ran. She brought the police right back to Rhoades's truck but then balked at pressing charges, so they had to let him go. The story was that she was too scared, but I wondered if there was more.

I looked at the picture on Young's computer. Shana was a pretty girl with freckles and blank blue eyes. Her thick red-blond hair had been cropped close to her head with a knife or scissors and was now growing back. With all her freckles, she looked very Irish. Around her neck was a dog chain with a padlock attached to the ring that had been used to restrain her neck. But in the picture, with her inch-long hair and dog collar, she looked like a gutter punk, like any girl you might see in any university district.

Young then showed me some photos of Rhoades in the 1980s that had come from his wife. In one, he relaxed on the grass in a park. The natural light brought his hair closer to the color I remembered, and, again, the side view heightened the key similarities, his cheekbone shape, glasses, the expression; but as I had learned from the echo chamber of Martinsburgs, memory is strange territory. By now papers and photographs were spread out all over the table, and Young was waiting for me to tell my story. Although I'd told it more in the preceding week than in the past two decades, I still wasn't used to doing it, and the nausea still came.

"One thing I always did," I told Young, "was rifle through a trucker's cassette case as soon as we were out on the highway." This gave me a screen behind which to observe drivers when they thought I was distracted. It allowed me to pretend not to hear scary red-flag comments so I could act dumb and get away later, and this is what I was doing that day, going through a tape case, chatting like an idiot and watching the driver—which is why I saw him change. I told Young about the Laughing Death Society. He'd never heard the phrase. I asked about the knife. Every trucker I ever met had a gun, so the knife seemed significant. He said a gun was about control but a knife is personal. I'd seen the page from Regina's little notebook on which Rhoades had drawn a picture of a gun and a huge dagger dripping blood next to the words RICKY IS A DEAD MAN.

"So was the trucker I met a true psychopath?" I asked.

"What I find interesting is that he told you about the body of the girl and talked about the Laughing Death Society while he was still driving. You were not under his control. This tells me that he liked manipulating through terror. That it turned him on, just like Rhoades."

"But a real serial killer wouldn't have let me go, right?" I asked.

"Maybe he didn't think you'd run."

Even at the time, I'd wondered if my running was part of the game. Rhoades was a great lover of games. His favorite book was Games People Play, wherein each social encounter is treated as a transaction or "game." One game in the book is called "Courtroom." Another is called "Beat Me Daddy," another "Frigid Woman." In that one, driven by penis envy, a woman's inner child taunts a man into seducing her so that she can be freed from guilt for her own "sadistic fantasies." Games People Play was a bible for Rhoades. He talked about it frequently and applied its ideas. In a letter to his wife on the subject of psychological games, he wrote: "I always told you there were three things you could do: play, pass, or run." The phrase "play, pass, run" is used twice in the letter. Reading it, I found it hard not to hear the man telling me to "run."

On the table in front of Young was a snapshot of Regina Walters that I hadn't seen, taken not very long before she was abducted. In it, she's sitting in the backseat of a car. The sun is coming down on her long hair, and she's laughing. She looks like any other skinny kid just out of middle school. She looks happy. The picture was given to Young by Regina's mom. Initially, agents had disagreed over whether the young girl on Rhoades's film was Regina. It was agent Young who recognized the small gap in Regina's teeth and noticed that a few freckles were in the same place.

Young pulled out one last picture and slid it across to me. The photo was of a beautiful young girl, possibly Native American. "She was on the end of the roll with Regina," he said. She's shown sitting in Rhoades's truck wearing a gray hoodie. Her eyes are partly closed, as if she's stoned or sleepy. Rhoades must have just picked her up, because he hasn't cut her hair yet. It is glossy black and long.

No one knows who she is.

On the phone, agent Robert F. Lee was civil and to the point but not overtly warm. I arrived at his door melting in the hundred-degree heat. He welcomed me into his spacious living room. Tall and square-jawed, Lee looked like he could probably still tackle a bank robber. Behind him was a shoulder-high pink plastic castle.

"Granddaughter," he said.

On the couch beside me was a large pillow with the FBI seal.

"That's from my old SWAT jacket." He grinned. "They don't use that emblem now. Looks too much like a target."

The question of what you do with your old SWAT jacket when you retire had never entered my mind. Clearly the answer is: Make a throw pillow.

I got the sense Lee appreciated brevity, so I dispensed with small talk and went straight to my questions, but he stopped me.

"I just want you to know," he said, looking me squarely in the eye, "that what Rhoades did to women, he did to women. You didn't do it."

Everything I expected from Bob Lee changed in that moment. I had not told him or anyone else how I felt about failing to go to the cops. These were my private feelings. The idea that I might have been responsible for what happened to girls like Regina was devastating, and Lee's directness startled me. It was a raw moment. So I told him the truth, which I had not told others—that I didn't say anything because I didn't think anyone would believe me.

"Well," said Lee, sitting back after I finished, "you're probably right. Look at Lisa Pennal."

Pennal was the woman chained into Rhoades's truck when they arrested him in Arizona. When rescued, she was wearing fuzzy lion slippers, talking secret prisons and being on a mission to see the president—just the kind of testimony that makes most detectives stop taking notes, since they're looking at someone who can't stand trial. Her statement was videotaped the night she was freed from Rhoades's truck. Lee still uses the tape when he trains police detectives in interrogation. He shows it and asks what they think is going on. Most say she's a prostitute and that it's a "transaction gone bad." Between Pennal and Rhoades, it's Rhoades they believe. "Of course," Lee says, "Lisa was talking all sorts of crazy stuff. Microchips in her brain. Holes in the ozone layer. She was wearing those slippers—but she was telling the truth."

I had a vision of Lisa Pennal as a truck-stop Kali roaming the back lots in her denim skirt and fuzzy slippers with an ozone hole for a halo. She would be easy to dismiss. Rhoades intentionally chose women who lacked credibility. Sometimes, as with Shana Holts, the girl who had escaped in the brewery, the sense of not being credible was internalized. Lee told me that the final lines of Holts's police statement read, "I don't see any good in filing charges. It's just going to be my word against his. If there was any evidence, I would file. I would file charges and sue him."

It took me a second to understand those last sentences. What evidence was she lacking? She was found running naked, screaming down a street in Houston with DNA all over her body, her head and pubic hair shaved, still with his chain around her neck. How could she lack evidence? But I thought about what she'd said—"It would just be my word against his," which was clearly followed by the unvoiced thought: And who is going to believe me? I could easily imagine my own teenage voice whispering those same words.

The more I learned about Rhoades, the more I saw parallels between us. It wasn't lost on me that while I was hitchhiking and he was driving, we would both have struggled with some of the same challenges—sleep deprivation and the hypnotic dullness of going through identical locations over and over, a world constructed of boredom and violence. And while I was getting more adept at survival, he was very likely getting more adept at killing. We both had our own systems, our own rituals, and our own beliefs about what people were really like and how they acted under pressure.

I'd put off writing Rhoades, mostly because I didn't want him to write me back. The time had come to do it anyway. Mark Young said Rhoades likes to feel like an expert and that I should ask him to "educate" me, so while writing my letter I used permissive language, saying I wanted him "to teach me what I did right and what I did wrong" when I was traveling. Knowing the capacity of his sadism made this unbearable. Rhoades didn't live a double life as much as a shadowed one. There's a picture of him in leather and chains that floats around the Internet. It's actually from a Halloween party in Houston where he went as a "slave," led on a chain by his wife, who was dressed as a dominatrix.

Debra Davis and Rhoades met in the early '80s at a Houston bar called Chipkikkers. Rhoades was dressed that night as an airline pilot, and it was months before Davis found out he wasn't one. The remarkable thing is that when she did, she didn't dump him. But Rhoades was cunning and highly charismatic. When the FBI extradited him to Illinois, he was able to get a phone number off a waitress while shackled hand and foot and wearing an orange prison suit. This obviously doesn't recommend the waitress's judgment, but at least some of the credit has to go to Rhoades.

I finally got to Davis through agent Young. He sent me a text just as I was leaving Texas saying that "Debbie" was ready to talk. I called as soon as I landed. Today, Davis lives in College Station, Texas, and her kids, the product of a previous marriage, are grown. She occasionally speaks on domestic violence at conferences and in classrooms at AM. She's tried to put the years with Rhoades behind her but still gets letters from him sporadically. Sometimes they're threatening, sometimes cajoling, but always manipulative.

According to her, in the summer of 1985, Rhoades was driving for a trucking company based in Georgia that has an office right on I-95. I ran my story past her. When I got to the part about the sudden switch in his behavior, she got excited. "That's him! That's exactly like him!" she said. She also said Rhoades often left his gun at home in the beginning and could have used a knife. There were other points where she saw similarities and would say, "That sounds like Bob," but these were less emphatic, and it was hard to tell what she really thought. Like Young and Lee, she had never heard of the Laughing Death Society, and since it had featured so strongly in my experience, I thought it salient.

"Don't you think that fact starts to rule him out?"

"Oh no, not at all!" she said. "Bob was fascinated by secret societies."

Davis mentioned the case of Colleen Stan, a 21-year-old hitchhiker who had been kidnapped in 1977 by a couple who tortured her and kept her as a sex slave for seven years while she slept in a box under their bed. Eventually she was left unbound. They kept her from running away by convincing her that a secret society called The Company would find her and bring her back. "Bob was obsessed with how they used an imaginary secret society to keep her from running away," Davis said.

It made sense. As a true sexual sadist, Rhoades would have been interested in a level of submission requiring no chains. He'd told Shana Holts to "sit there and be a good girl." Regina Walters had been seen in Chicago standing freely outside his truck in a public place.

"Do you remember what he was wearing?" Davis asked quietly.

She was the only person who asked me this, and of course I did. Or rather, I remember what he was not wearing. He was not wearing jeans. He was not wearing a T-shirt. He was not wearing flannel. His clothes were gray or blue, but that may have been the light. Debra told me that "Bob" always wore matching Dickies, usually dark blue. "He liked people to think he was in uniform," she said.

The airline pilot's outfit came to mind.

"Do you remember what his cab looked like?"

"Meticulously clean."

"That sure sounds like Bob. When I first saw his apartment, I thought I'd walked into the showroom of a furniture store. Even in jail, his shirt and pants were always ironed and pressed."

In Martinsburg, West Virginia, where the truck stop should be is a massive Walmart stretching flat and endless along a parking lot the size of a lake. Five years ago, the truck stop was demolished along with its restaurant. The only thing they neglected to take down is a website with the words Martinsburg TravelCenter of America flashing like a beacon online.

The whole thing seemed so uncanny. Everywhere I looked, evidence of these girls was disappearing. I hadn't been able to get a copy of Shana Holts's police report because I was told there was no official suspect. Lisa Pennal's full statement, it turned out, had been destroyed for file space. Now the whole Martinsburg truck stop had been swallowed by a Walmart Supercenter.

I knew from talking to the Martinsburg police that the truck stop had been under the jurisdiction of the Berkeley County sheriff. I called the office. A chipper recorded voice told me to press 1 for tas, press 2 for guns—"all other callers stay on the line!" I finally spoke to a woman and asked if they had a homicide record for a girl who may have been found in the Martinsburg truck stop during the summer of 1985.

"We don't have any records," she told me.

I thought she meant digitized.

"I can come down," I said.

"We don't have any records."

In the 1990s, the Berkeley County sheriff's department's computer crashed and burned. The paper records had been destroyed for file space, and so nothing from the 1980s remained. I asked to speak to any senior officer who might have been there at the time. She told me there was only one and he had gone fishing.

I spent a week on the road in Appalachia, visiting truck stops, interviewing the older truckers and waitresses. At first, I would ask about the girl in the Dumpster, but no one had heard of her, so I asked if there had ever been any women found in truck stops. Wherever I went, I was told nothing "like that" ever happened, which was remarkable given the numbers of bodies the FBI had tracked over the past thirty years. The newspapers were equally silent. It seems our profound fascination with serial killers is matched by an equally profound lack of interest in their victims. One library archivist explained that I was looking for the kind of news nobody wanted to read. The girl, he said, "wasn't one of our own. She was a drifter." I'd never heard the word "drifter" used in earnest. It touched a nerve I didn't know I had. I had been a drifter. If what he said was true, the trail I was on had disappeared into a field.

Out of desperation I made one last attempt and swung by a smaller truck stop in Hancock, Maryland. I spoke to a woman who had worked there a long time and told her about the dead hitchhiker while she fingered the gold cross on her neck and listened. Had she ever heard about it? I asked. She shook her head; then her eyes clouded some. "Wait a minute. There was that one girl. She was a prostitute. They found her near a Dumpster behind the restaurant at the Gateway Travel Plaza in Breezewood. She had a stocking down her throat, I think. That was way back in the early '70s, though."

It wasn't the early '70s, it was 1987, and the woman killed was 19-year-old Lamonica Cole. I found her in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette later that night. She had been strangled at Breezewood. Another prostitute had been grabbed there as well, in 2006, but was found farther down the road with her throat slit. Neither of these women were the one I was looking for, but a sentence in the article caught my attention. It said there had been a string of prostitute murders in truck stops in the area beginning in June of 1985, which was right on the edge of my time frame.

The next morning, I drove to the Gateway Travel Plaza in Breezewood, Pennsylvania. I thought that maybe in a truck stop where known murders had occurred, people would be more forthcoming. Maybe they would remember something the others hadn't. I parked in front of the family travel plaza, then walked back past a sign that read TRUCKS ONLY. The store for professional drivers was clean and quiet. I asked around until I found someone who had been there in 1985. It was a woman, probably in her midfifties. She came over and gave me an open smile. I asked her the same questions I was asking everybody: Did you ever hear about a hitchhiker in a Dumpster?

"No," she said.

"Did you ever hear of anything like that at all, in other times, any other bodies of women found along this stretch of I-70?"

I was in the one place where I knew for certain women had been found, one less than a hundred yards away from where she was standing. "No," she said, "I never heard of anything like that anywhere."

Listening to her, it occurred to me that this investigation of mine wasn't a detective novel. It was a ghost story. The prisms of Regina Walters, Shana Holts, and Lisa Pennal refracted into a set of icons—one in the backseat of a car laughing as she leans on the headrest, one with the shorn red-gold hair and an expression of resilience, one slightly crazy and ready to fight—each casting her own light, each a hologram of girlhood.

Recently, the New Jersey State Supreme Court handed down a statement on memory, describing it as complex and often unreliable. The ruling went on to question the admissibility of eyewitness testimony. "Human memory is not like a video recording," they said. And they're right. It's more like a set of still photos. I remember coming down through the Blue Ridge Mountains in a truck with its brakes on fire and dropping over Chester Gap in the middle of the night when it was still hot and the air was loud with the chirping of bugs. I remember sitting in the drizzle in a truck while the crime-scene tape was strung around a Dumpster. I remember driving around Ohio howling along with Bruce Springsteen and buzzed out of my brain on Diet Cokes and being sad that the ride ended because it was a safe one and I had almost been able to be myself for a second, but that second had passed. I remember a fuel island in the blue morning light and a driver with a white shirt that stood out like a flag, and taking the turn back east, then south, and a gray day just before a storm so pressurized my ears hurt. And I remember being in the woods off I-95. I only ran about a hundred yards before I turned and hid, because I didn't know if I was being chased and needed to see. I crouched on netted twigs and breathed into my shirt to muffle the sound. The woods were blue in the gray light, which was either dusk or a coming storm. At the center of everything was my own breath. The birds went silent, and I didn't know what it meant. I watched the truck idle on the side of the road until it finally pulled off.

One snowy night several months later, I was hitchhiking through Amherst, Massachusetts, and a carful of students from Hampshire College picked me up and let me stay with them. In the morning, they talked me into applying to the college. I was accepted, and that provided a thin strip of pride on which to stand while I made contact with my family. My mother was happy to pay for school. Being 16 and in college is an easier thing to talk about. It was a solution that worked for both of us and looked like redemption but didn't last. The dissonance between my emotional world and the one around me was still too great, and soon I left again, but in a more sanctioned way. I hitchhiked in Europe and settled in Vienna for a few years. I lived among artists in the Lower East Side squats. These are narratives we know. Unlike those of other young women on the road, my story was now recognizable.

When I got home from West Virginia, a letter from Rhoades was waiting. It said he would see me if I promised never to say that I had seen him or what had passed between us. It was just the kind of promise a sexual predator or child molester would try to extract. He also wanted $500. I wrote him back and told him that journalistic standards wouldn't allow me to pay for interviews. I expected that to be the end of it, but I got another letter. Young was right. Rhoades liked to think of himself as an "expert," and now Rhoades suggested he be paid as one. But an expert in what, I thought, killing? At the bottom of the yellow legal paper, scrawled in all caps, he wrote, "IT WASN'T ME!!!" I looked at the letter. He may be right, but certainly not because he's innocent. I imagined for a moment flying to Illinois. I go through the paperwork, get fingerprinted and led through a channel of air-locked doors into a room with him. He's there with his neatly pressed shirt and colossal arrogance. We do the interview, but I don't take notes. It doesn't matter what he says. After all, it's just going to be his word against mine. And who's going to believe him? That's where my fantasy ends, in a game of "Who Is Credible Now?"

The same week that I got the letter from Rhoades, the senior officer from the Berkeley County sheriff's department who had been fishing returned. He said that no girls had ever been found in a Dumpster at the Martinsburg, West Virginia, truck stop, and I had no reason not to believe him.

One story Debra Davis told still haunts me. She was on a trip with her husband, Bob, the last she ever took in his truck. They were heading west on I-10 and stopped somewhere in Arizona at a busy truck stop. By the restaurant door was a young woman with a baby, trying to get a ride. Debra said she looked about 18 or 19 and desperate. Debra wanted to give her money or do something. Her own sister had been on the street, and she was overwhelmed by the woman at the door and didn't want to just walk away. Rhoades saw what Debra was looking at. He came around behind her and grabbed her shoulders. He turned her slowly toward the girl and pointed. "You see that, Debbie," he whispered in her ear. "She's one of the invisible people."

Vanessa Veselka is the author of Zazen (Red Lemonade), which won the 2012 PEN/ Bingham Prize for fiction