The Best American Essays 2013 (10 page)

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, eighteen years old, had been on the street since she was twelve. 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 back seat 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 to 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 A&M. 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 had 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 twenty-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.”