Cold Open:

Ever hitchhiked? WOULD you ever hitchhike?

If you’re saying yes, you may reconsider after listening to today’s episode.

Robert Ben Rhoades, born in 1945, started driving big rigs across America’s interstates and major highways in the mid-70s, and he seemed to most like an unassuming and harmless trucker for the next fifteen-ish years.

The Iowa native’s childhood had ended abruptly when his dad was arrested for an alarming crime and, after the way his father responded to this arrest, life seemed to spiral out of control for the man who would soon introduce himself to others as either “Dusty”, or, via is CB radio - “Whips and Chains.”

Bob became a sexual sadist, obsessed with the fetish world of BDSM.

Soon, he began to completely ignore the “fun and consensual” part of bondage and submission, pivoting from pleasure through pain to pleasure through rape, torture, and murder.

Rhoades was and still is a deeply fucked-up individual who sits today in a prison he’ll never get out of. As it should be for the man who became known as the “Truck Stop Killer.”

It’s estimated that Bob killed over fifty people between roughly 1975 and 1990, most of them young women and the occasional men they were traveling with, whom Rhoades quickly disposed of before focusing on the compulsion that drove him to kill - sexual torture.

Bob overpowered young hitchhikers and sex workers in the sleeper cab of truck, tying them up with BDSM chains and restraints, and then raping and torturing them for days, sometimes longer, in a mobile dungeon with nipple clamps, belts, chains, handcuffs, fish hooks and more.

When he’d grown tired of toying with them, he’d dump their young bodies in a dumpster or out in the woods, sometimes after shaving their heads and pubic hair. Further degradation perhaps.

The majority of women’s bodies thought to belong to his victims have never been found. Their families have never given the closure of at least knowing that their daughter or son is dead.

A few victims, thankfully, were identified thanks to the disturbing photographs that Rhoades took.

How did Rhoades finally get caught? And how did he find a BDSM community in the days before the internet? When do BDSM and other fetishes cross the line from healthy kink into dangerous self-harm? Do they ever cross that line?

All this and more, in a bondage-filled, whips and chains, “How much pain is too much pain? Maybe just take an Uber,” edition, of Timesuck.

PAUSE TIMESUCK INTRO

I. Welcome!

A.Happy Monday:

Happy Monday Motherfuckers!

Hope none of you went into full cardiac arrest from a gluttonous Thanksgiving feast.

HAIL Nimrod, Hail Lucifina, Praise Bojangles, and Triple M - you better tour again in 2021. At this dark and dreary time of the year in the Northwest, I am craving yacht rock and sunshine.

I’m Dan Cummins, Suckmaster D, King of the Suck, Sir Sucks a Lot, Captain Whiskerhorn, (Fish) Peanut Butt Butter Taste Taster - JK! - and you are listening to Timesuck.

No real inspiration this week. BUT - we take some interesting side roads and pose some interesting questions today as I tell an interesting and morbid tale. B.Merch: For those of you quick to jump on the Suck the moment comes out - we’re having a sale the rest of this release day.

30% off everything at Bad Magic Merch dot com until midnight tonight PT. November 30th.

Use the code BADMAGIC at checkout. B-A-D-M-A-G-I-C. No spaces. Not case sensitive.

C.Sucksgiving Announcements: Also - thanks to everyone who everyone who made it to Sucksgiving - hope you had fun! Sorry about my allergies towards the end. Stupid eyes. Hate when the water up and my voice breaks.

I had a great time getting a little lit with our bingo drinking game. And it was nice to see some of you again virtually during the pre-show tours. And to meet others.

D.Giving Tree: I said I’d talk about the Cult of the Curious Giving Tree this week and HOLY shit. It’s crazy how much bigger this was this year than last year. The Queen of the Suck has a LOT of holiday shopping in front of her.

I’ll announce more specifics later, when I know how exactly how much we gave after we get our Patreon payout, but - the Cult of the Curious donated almost exactly $15,000.

Good on you, meatsacks!

And we said we’d match that, so now Lynze and I are giving another $15,000 from to raise the total $30,000.

AND, we have the 20% Bad Magic Patreon donation to give, which will bring the total to a little over $40,000.

And ALL of that money - a big chunk of money - is going back into our community. To our listeners. To Cult of the Curious families.

It’s being spent on bringing holiday cheer to little Space Newts who otherwise might have had to watch Santa fly on by this year.

Sorry we couldn’t make the Holidays better for every family who sent in touching emails expressing their needs. BUT - we are gonna buy presents - lots of presents - and send them to EIGHTY different households.

So special. Hail Fucking NIMROD!

So that is super fun!

And now, before moving into more fun, let me use a new recent concern as a reminder that I’m not the only one who needs to check multiple sources when sharing information - we all need to.

So much misinformation out there getting so many people worked up.

E.Black Rifle Announcement:

We’ve got a ton of emails and DMs last week asking for us to denounce our association with Black Rifle Coffee because many thought that Black Rifle Coffee either sponsored or posted bail for Kyle Rittenhouse - the Kenosha Wisconsin teen who shot and killed two BLM protestors during an August protest.

They didn’t. And while we don’t happen to have more ads lined up, I’ll still be drinking Black Rifle Coffee.

Here’s the truth.

A podcaster, Elijah Schaffer, whose podcast has been sponsored by Black Rifle Coffee, tweeted a photo of Rittenhouse wearing a Black Rifle t-shirt with the caption, “Kyle Rittenhouse drinks the best coffee in America.” And then Black Rifle contacted Elijah Schaffer, and he deleted the tweet.

And the deleted post pointed to a discount for the coffee. And then Black Rifle severed their sponsorship with him and his podcast and their CEO, Evan Hafer, released a statement saying they have nothing to do with Rittenhouse.

Black Rifle can’t control who wears their t-shirts anymore than I can control who wears a Timesuck shirt. And the emails we got made me wonder, if Kyle had been wearing a Timesuck shirt, how many would be calling for Timesuck to be cancelled?

Cancel culture - still out of control.

And now Black Rifle is also under attack AND the far fight for NOT publicly supporting Rittenhouse.

Craziness. How quickly some have forgotten all the good they’ve done for Veterans.

Peak 2020.

More of us need to stop looking to place like Reddit and Facebook and Tweets for our news.

It’s important to look to multiple outlets to confirm a story - I think Reuter’s, the AP, and Axios [Axe ee ohs] - (Greek word) provide some of the best journalism currently.

That’s what I think today. Maybe that will change soon.

Sadly, it gets harder and harder to find news without spin. Which makes it more and more important to seek that news out.

It’s annoying and time consuming, but I think, logically, your best bet is not to implicitly trust ANY one source for your information. And that includes me. Cross reference, cross reference, cross reference. Look at the left, right, and the middle. The truth will be in there somewhere.

HAIL fucking Nimrod.

We need you more now than ever you insane puppy-stomping space Sasquatch.

F. Segue to Topic:

All that out of the way - let us now dive into this week’s deplorable dirtbag.

Gonna look at someone who decided to cross one of the worst moral lines you CAN cross - to torture, rape, and to kill innocent human beings.

To kill those who had never done anything wrong to him.

Those who meant him no harm. He choose to dehumanize and sexually objectify young women - to reduce their lives to nothing more than worthless sacks of flesh that served no purpose other than to temporarily satisfy his depraved sexual needs.

Robert Ben Rhoades. The Truck Stop Killer.

PAUSE TIMESUCK INTERLUDE

II.Intro/Establish Premiss:

A life out on the open road is a perfect place for an independent minded person, one who doesn’t mind spending hours and days alone.

In the early years of my standup touring days, before I had kids, I drove to gigs instead of flying all the time.

And for a long time - I loved it!

Not for everyone, but for someone who’s naturally introverted like me - it wasn’t bad at all.

I really enjoyed driving around alone. Driving anywhere from a few hours to eight or ten hours a day, doing a show in Lewiston, Idaho one night, and then maybe Elko, Nevada the next.

Out on the highway or freeway, as long as you’re not driving through a major city during rush hour, there’s very little traffic for the most part.

I could listen to whatever I wanted to listen to - and I did.

I could make ten phone calls if I wanted to - or none if I didn’t feel like taking - maybe just enjoy the scenery and let my mind wander.

I loved to daydream about whatever I felt like daydreaming about with no interruptions.

Having all that time alone - undisturbed - it gave me a lot of time to think about how to write jokes. How to tell stories. It was good for me. It worked for me.

But having too much time alone to think - maybe NOT good for everyone.

If you like to daydream about sexual torture instead of funny stories, the open road can give you way too much time to dwell on your dark fantasies, really cement them into something more than a fantasy - into a compulsion - an obsession - something you feel like you must - you need - to do.

Pulling off certain dark fantasies is something the open road can give you a much better OPPORTUNITY to do than many other careers would.

The open road is a good place - maybe the perfect place - for a serial killer to roam from state to state, or from country to country, picking up and raping whatever sex-workers and hitchhikers they don’t think will be missed - like young women who often have already cut off contact with their family and often their friends. Women who routinely go missing even when they haven’t been kidnapped or killed.

Robert Ben Rhoades may have used America’s open roads to do this for fifteen years.

The United States has a lot of open roads.

In terms of mileage, the United States has the longest and largest road network in the world, with over 4.2 million miles - over 6.8 million kilometers - of paved and unpaved roads. More - much more - than other nations with much higher populations. Nations like China, India, Russia.

The United States has more roads than the entirety of the European Union. https://www.statista.com/statistics/268157/ranking-of-the-20-countries- with-the-highest-road-quality/ #:~:text=In%20terms%20of%20mileage%2C%20the,in%20Western%20 Europe%20and%20Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_network_size

The United States is known around the world for its vast network of interconnected highways and interstates.

Our interstate system is arguably the best in the world - at least for such a large nation. The United States is the third largest country in the world - over 9.8 million square kilometers. Over six million square miles. https://www.google.com/search? q=biggest+country+by+geographical+area&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS866US8 72&oq=biggest+nations+by+geo&aqs=chrome. 2.69i57j0i22i30i457j0i22i30l2.5499j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

And our national roads - and the trucking industry today’s dirt bag was a part of - got a major upgrade in 1956. In June 29th of that year, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956.

This bill created a 41,000-mile “National System of Interstate and Defense Highways” that would, according to Eisenhower, “eliminate unsafe roads, inefficient routes, traffic jams and all of the other things that got in the way of speedy, safe transcontinental travel.”

The highways had a second darker purpose, too.

Experts wrote that “in case of atomic attack on our key cities, the road net would permit quick evacuation of target areas.”

For all of these reasons, the 1956 law declared that the construction of an elaborate expressway system was “essential to the national interest.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had tried to enact this bill into law back in 1941, but then material, funding, and manpower shortages created by US involvement in WW2 delayed the project.

Today, thanks to this act - the U.S. has over 47,600 miles of expressways. Over 273 million registered vehicles use these and other American roads. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicles-in-the- united-states-since-1990/ #:~:text=How%20many%20registered%20motor%20vehicles, %2C%20buses%2C%20and%20other%20vehicles.

And back during the 70s, when Rhoades likely started killing, it was a lot more common than now to see hitchhikers looking for a free ride - or relatively free ride - across all these roads.

According to historian Jack Reid, author of “Roadside Americans: The Rise and Fall of Hitchhiking in a Changing Nation”, “Hitchhiking was really common in the 1930s and 1940s. And then there's a bit of a dip in the 1950s and a big resurgence in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Jack says, “In the ‘30s and ‘40s, hitchhiking was really associated with necessity… in the Depression, there were people out of work and trying to find opportunity. And not everyone owned an automobile at that time. So people would take to the road in search of opportunity and work… in the 1950s, hitchhiking's popularity and acceptance waned a little bit.

But then - in the 60’s and 70’s - you had this whole generation of young people who kind of felt confined by a sense of suburban comfort and wanted to explore and get a more authentic sense of what the world is about. And so you have young people hitchhiking for adventure, people reading on the road and wanting to get out and explore the world and meet a whole cross-section of people that wouldn't otherwise.” https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/04/08/hitchhiking-america-jack- reid

Then, starting in the 80s, hitch hiking fell out of fashion again - partially due to the perception that it was a good way to get raped and murdered by a serial killer.

And sadly, that is, of course, exactly what happened to some of the characters in today’s tale.

But don’t let this story make you think that truckers are, by and large, a group of rapey killers hunting hitchhikers! They’re not!

Robert Ben Rhoades was - by FAR - the exception to the rule.

I feel like truckers get culturally maligned a lot here in the states - and I don’t want to perpetuate the baseless stereotype of long haul truckers being an especially pervey and blood thirsty group.

Also - while I don’t personally endorse or recommend hitch hiking - it doesn’t seem to be statistically as dangerous as today’s story might make it seem.

Let me lay out some stats.

From 1979 to 2009, there were 675 reported victims of sexual assault and murder along America’s Interstate Highways.

The FBI reports that “over 500” of these crimes were murders. And the Interstate accommodates roughly 24% of the nation’s road travel.

If we assume these types of crimes take equal place along both the Interstates and, proportionally, all other highways, we get 2,700 estimated victims of sexual assault and murder in twenty years.

Over that time period, the average annual population of the United States was 303,366,667…which equates to a 0.0000089% chance of any random citizen being raped or killed and then being left on the side of a random highway or Interstate.

You have a .0005% chance of accidentally falling down and dying from your injuries.

Looking at it this way - it’s more likely to fall down and die than be raped or murdered by someone picking you up hitchhiking. highwayhttps://wandrlymagazine.com/article/hitchhiking/ https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/insurance/odds-of-dying-life- insurance-2015/

Kind of!

Those stats I just shared were put together for an article in wandrly magazine dot come - a very pro-hitchhiking website.

And they don’t lay out a perfect comparison.

Because not everyone in the United States hitchhikes. Not even close.

There don’t seem to be any stats regarding what percentage of the population hitchhikes. At least not that I can find.

If we HAD that number and were able to take that number into account, that number could spike the hitchhiking murder and rape rate - maybe considerably. And - within that number we don’t have - what percentage of hitchhikers are women between the ages of say, 14 and 25, the general age range of Rhoades’ victims?

How many of them are raped and killed?

Taking it further, how many female sex workers - statistically, the favorite target of serial killers - how many of them between the ages of 14 and 35 are killed hitchhiking?

That percentage might be a lot higher than the percentage of people who just fall down and die.

Still - looking again at that total number of 675 rape and murder victims in twenty years across all of America’s freeways, it does NOT seem to be an epidemic.

Just don’t want to perpetuate any fear of hitchhiking or of truckers that is not statistically justified.

Last thing - out of those 675 reported raped and murders committed around US interstates - we don’t know how many of the perpetrators were truckers as opposed to any other type of driver.

Regardless of how dangerous hitchhiking actually is or was, the perception of dangerous it is changed around the time Truck Stop Killer started killing.

By the mid 1970s, peoples attitudes towards hitchhiking changed as a number of hitchhikers did disappear and their bodies were found.

According to then-Los Angeles Police Chief Edward M. Davis, in 1971, 22 percent of all of LA's rapes and 4.7 percent of all robberies were related to hitchhiking.

Yikes!

The California case of serial killer Ed Kemper - You’re getting my ZAPPLES riled up MOTHER! - went a long way to making people afraid to hitchhike. He’d be apprehended two years after Chief Davis threw out those numbers.

We sucked Keemper and his (Mother) “CAT HEADS ON A STICK!” back in episode 123.

Once Kemper was released after spending a few years incarcerated for killing his grandparents as a teenager, he quickly returned to killing, and he primarily targeted young female co-eds hitchhiking in central California. https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/edmund- kemper#:~:text=of%20his%20family.-,Who%20Is%20Edmund%20Kem per%3F,California%2C%20area%20in%20the%201970s.

At while he was killing, at least seven unsolved homicides involving female hitchhikers also took place in Sonoma County and Santa Rosa of the North Bay area of California in 1972 and 1973.

Investigators have floated the possibility that the Zodiac Killer, Ted Bundy, or maybe the Hillside Stranglers were responsible for those murders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Rosa_hitchhiker_murders

With the rise and subsequent publicity of these crimes, some of the first laws against hitchhiking were passed and a national fear of hitchhiking began!

Local and federal law enforcement agencies began using scare tactics to get both drivers and hitchhikers to “stop doing it.”

Agencies warned people to both not hitchhike AND to not pick up hitchhikers.

A 1973 FBI poster, for instance, warned drivers that a hitcher might be a "sex maniac" or a "vicious murderer.”

I love that they used the term “sex maniac.”

“Ed Kemper, the State of California has found you guilty of being sex maniac!”

Accurate actually.

The FBI wrote that term into the caption at the bottom of an old poster.

They wrote: (stern FBI voice) “To the American Motorist: Don’t pick up trouble! Is he a happy vacationer or an escaping criminal?— a pleasant companion or a sex maniac?— a friendly traveler or vicious murderer? In the gamble with hitchhikers your safety and the lives of your loved ones are at stake. Don’t take the risk!”

Robert Ben Rhoades, AKA the Truck Stop Killer, while not a hitchhiker himself, was certainly both a sex maniac and a vicious murderer.

https://www.vox.com/2015/6/8/8737623/hitchhiking https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/26/archives/more-women-defy-risks- of-hitchhiking-young-women-taking-to-us.html

He would retrofit his long haul truck into a mobile BDSM torture chamber.

Let’s get into the life and times of Robert Rhoades in our road-trip-from- hell, ass-less-chaps clad Timesuck Timeline…

(PAUSE)

… right after a word from today’s sponsors.

(PAUSE)

Thank you for listening to our sponsors, Meatsacks. We are lucky and proud to have them! Now WE hit the road on our Truck Stop Killer timeline!

(PAUSE)

III. MIDROLL

PAUSE TIMESUCK TIMELINE INTRO

IV.Timesuck Timeline

1. November 22, 1945: On November 22nd, 1945, just about six weeks after the end of World War II, Robert Ben Rhoades, is born in Council Bluffs, Iowa to Ben Rhoades, 32, and Fay Rhoades, 31.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/35169529/fay-louise- rhoades https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/35169528/ben-rhoades

And immediately, there were concerns that he might grow up and become a “sex maniac.”

A SEX MANIAC who would first become obsessed with the BDSM sexual lifestyle, and then become a criminal sadist who kidnapped young woman, turned them into unwilling sex slaves, and murdered them.

The doctor who delivered him noticed something unusual about baby Robert. He saw an evil glint in one of his baby eyes - a glint he couldn’t see at first because young Robert’s eyes were completely covered up.

He saw it after he unzipped Robert’s baby gimp mask.

Yes, dear meat sack, Robert Bed Rhoades was BORN wearing a black latex sensory deprivation gimp mask!!

It was an unsettling sight to be sure! And it wasn’t ALL he was born wearing.

Robert also was born holding a little baby-sized leather whip in his right hand - and a little black riding crop in his right. And leather ass-less chaps and motorcycle boots. And his little baby penis with pierced, Prince Albert Style, and connected to one of his little pierced baby nipples with a stainless steel chain that was wrapped around his umbilical cord.

Most disturbing of all - immediately after being born - he tried to force his way back into his mother’s uterus.

And he yelled his first sentence - (Jig Saw Voice) “The Pain stops when you say the safe word!! AND NOT A MOMENT BEFORE, SLAVE!”

Yeah - he had a deep, scary voice.

Obviously that didn’t happen.

Also obviously - this is gonna be a VERY weird and very dark episode.

Ben Robert was a seemingly normal baby born the natural way, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, not wearing ANY BDSM attire.

Council Bluffs is an industrial city just across the Missouri River from Omaha, Nebraska that’s been around in some form since the 1840s. Officially incorporated in 1853 when less than 2,000 people lived there.

It grew quickly, and by the 1930s, it had grown into the nation’s fifth largest rail center with over 40,000 people. And just across the river, another roughly 215,000 people called Omaha home. A big metro area for America at the time.

The railroads and proximity to over thirty million acres of farmland in Iowa alone helped Council Bluffs become a major center for grain storage.

Other industries in the city that existed when Robert Ben Rhoades was born in 1945 included Blue Star Foods, Dwarfies Cereal, Frito- Lay, Georgie Porgie Cereal, Giant Manufacturing, Kimball Elevators, Mona Motor Oil, Monarch, Reliance Batteries, Woodward's Candy, and World Radio.

I tried so hard to find a vintage commercial for any one of those companies. No dice! You let me down internet! I wanted to hear me a sweet Dwarfies Cereal jingle! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_Bluffs,_Iowa

Robert’s father, Ben, was an officer in the US Army and was stationed in West Germany at the time of his birth. He was the second of four siblings. https://killer.cloud/serial-killers/show/360/robert-ben-rhoades

Info on this guy’s childhood is VERY thin, and I don’t even know the names of his siblings, or even their genders.

He told future wives very little about his childhood.

And his family didn’t seem to give any interviews about him after he was captured.

Even digging into genealogy info - very little info exists about his parents. Both of them have long since died, and you can find death locations and dates online - but you can’t find any info about their children.

It feels like information was intentionally hidden and I can’t blame the family for doing that, if that IS what they did.

I wouldn’t want anyone reaching out to me if I was Robert’s brother either.

Robert was raised at first exclusively by his mother in a two bedroom home at 2400 Avenue D until his father was discharged. When Ben returned to Council Bluffs, everything seemed normal for the Rhoades family.

It may not actually have been normal - probably not, based on what we’ll explore later - but things SEEMED normal to others in the community.

The family took trips to Colorado, about which the Council Bluff’s Daily Nonpareil [ non-puh-rel ]- it’s local paper - published accounts, including one about how of young Robert wanted to operate a lawn mower.

RIVETING, HARD HITTING COUNCIL BLUFFS NEWS!

BREAKING STORY! Young boy would like to OPERATE A LAWNMOWER! Send us your thoughts!

The Daily Nonpareil [ non-puh-rel ] also published stories about Ben Rhoades’ daring work as a driver for the Council Bluffs Fire Department.

The Daily Nonpareil [ non-puh-rel ] has been published in Council Bluffs continuously since 1857. Pretty cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Nonpareil

And - HOPING that how’s you pronounce it.

Spent literally a half-hour trying to find someone - anyone - saying the name of that damn paper online. Nope!

Even on the Daily Nonpareil [ non-puh-rel ]’s own tutorial video, describing how to sign up and use the e-version of their paper, they someone manage to NEVER say the name of their own fucking business even a single time. It was maddening. I’m saying the word Nonpareil [ non-puh-rel ] like it’s supposed to be said - it means, in the context of the paper, “a person or thing having no equal.”

Not sure if it’s properly pronounced in Council Bluffs though, because America.

I realize no one probably cares about what I just whatever, but the longer I looked - even watched a super boring ten minute tour of old buildings in downtown Council Bluffs that are no longer there - the more annoyed I got and I felt compared to share that.

May 17th, 1953, the Nonpareil [ non-puh-rel ] publishes an article on Robert’s dad Ben.

It reports that Ben, forty years old in ’53, and was a veteran firefighter. Ben talks quite a bit about how folks in Omaha will pull over for a fire truck, but not folks in Council Bluffs. He thinks it’s because in Omaha the police will give you a ticket for not pulling over, but NOT in Council Bluffs.

RIVETING, HARD HITTING COUNCIL BLUFFS NEWS!

BREAKING STORY! Local Firefighter feels like Omaha motorists pull over for fire trucks more often than Council Bluffs motorists!

Send us your thoughts! https://www.newspapers.com/clip/27334127/ben-rhoades-fire- fighter-5-17-1953/

Robert’s father was apparently well liked in the Council Bluffs Fire Department - he gave to charity, played horseshoes, and at Christmas time he prepared a nice meal for the men at Station 2.

Then, after being injured while fighting a fire, Ben was promoted to Captain; he appeared more often in the newspaper, smiling from behind the wheel of a fire truck.

Ben’s son, the future serial killer Robert actually made the COVER of the Nonpareil [ non-puh-rel ] in 1957, laughing as he attempted to get his pet dog to pull him on his sled.

RIVETING, HARD HITTING COUNCIL BLUFFS NEWS!

BREAKING STORY! Local boy thinks it’s funny to try and convince dog to pull him in a sled.

Send us your thoughts!

School was pretty easy for young Robert. He was apparently a good student who was an engaged learner and involved in all sorts of extracurricular activities.

While in grade school, we could only find one report of him getting into any sort of significant trouble.

On May 13th, 1957, eleven-year-old Robert was suspended from Mrs. Kennewick’s 5th grade schoolroom for walking into class wearing a leather body suit and a zipper mouth muzzle. He had spreader bars, dungeon irons, hospital restraints, and other BDSM sex toys in his backpack.

When the other children saw his near naked body and some girls started screaming, and Mrs. Kennewick demanded he run to the principal’s office immediately, addressing him has Bobby.

Legend has it, he stood his ground and demanded she address him as (jigsaw) “Incubus! Sexual Demon of Pain.”

Before being suspended for five days, young Robert was first paddled by the principal.

He was supposed to have been given thirty swats but the principal stopped after five strikes when Bobby began screaming, (Jigsaw) “Is that all you’ve got! Give me that switch and Incubus will show you how to hurt so good, Slave!”

And of course that never happened.

He just gets SO into BDSM later, I like to pretend there were over-the-top signs in his childhood pointing to where he was headed.

After NOT getting in any trouble that we’re aware of in gradeschool or junior high - Robert attended Thomas Jefferson High School in Council Bluffs, where he played football, wrestled, and was also a member of the boy’s glee club, the choir.

He also excelled in his French classes as part of the French Club.

No fires, or abuse to animals or abusive behavior towards people that we are aware of. According to his peers and others who knew him interviewed later by local journalists, there weren’t any indications that Robert was abused, either.

However, Robert WOULD tell a few people later in life that he was abused by his father, and while a lot of serial killers lie about that sort of thing to bolster their defenses in court, we’ll soon learn that in Robert’s case, there’s a good chance this was true - in addition to being a military veteran and a distinguished and brave member of the local fire department, his dad Ben Rhoades was also a child molestin’ piece of shit. https://nonpareilonline.com/news/crime/robert-rhoades-council- bluffs-homegrown-serial-killer/article_fde3e29b- bd8b-5c29-9f03-7b04a039eec8.html

2. 1961: In 1961, when Robert is fifteen, he has his first known run-in with the law. In his sophomore year of high school, he’s arrested for “tampering with” someone’s car.

It’s thought that he was trying to steal the vehicle, but he was caught before he could actually start up the engine.

3.1962: A year later, at the age of sixteen, he was arrested again, this time for fighting in public. Despite these two run-ins with the law, he continued to get decent grades.

4.1964: In the Spring of 1964, eighteen-year-old Robert is set to graduate from Thomas Jefferson High School. And he will graduate.

And immediately afterwards, inspired by his father’s military service, he will enlist in the Marine Corps where he will be sent to San Diego for basic training.

But first - something terrible happens.

5. May 5, 1964: On May 5th, 1964, The Daily Nonpareil [ non-puh- rel ] reports that Ben Rhoades had been charged with sexually assaulting a 12-year old girl.

Some other accounts say this girl was Robert’s cousin.

Oh boy. This really is a breaking story. A bad one.

Ben was immediately fired from the Council Bluffs Fire Department. He received a suspended sentence and was then placed on parole while he awaited trial.

Then, nine months later, a second girl comes forward - perhaps another cousin according to some sources - and now a Municipal Court Judge issues a warrant for his arrest.

And then, while Robert is in San Diego with the Marines, he gets more horrible news related to his dad. https://nonpareilonline.com/news/crime/robert-rhoades-council- bluffs-homegrown-serial-killer/article_fde3e29b- bd8b-5c29-9f03-7b04a039eec8.html

6. February 25, 1966: On February 25th, 1966, shortly after his arrest - according to some sources, just two days after his arrest — while awaiting his trial, Ben Rhoades, out on bail, kills himself with a gunshot to the head while in Council Bluff’s Fairmount Park.

The arrest and death of his father devastate Robert.

According to those who knew him, his personality changed and he immediately lost interest in the Marine Corps.

Fuuuuuuck.

7. 1967/1968: Either the following year, in 1967 - or possibly in early 1968 - Robert’s change in attitude culminates in him being dishonorably discharged by the Marines for participating in a robbery.

And his downward spiral begins.

8.1969: In 1969, based on some interviews, he enrolled in a university - we’re not sure which one, it appears he never said - with the hopes of getting a college diploma. But his enthusiasm for learning wasn’t there and he reportedly dropped out shortly after enrolling.

Now he decides he’d like to become a police officer.

THANKFULLY - he was NOT hired. Reminds me of one of the serial killers we mentioned earlier - Ed Kemper. He also wanted to be a police officer at one point.

Had Rhoades became a police officer - based on his later interest in abducting women on the highway - I have to think he would’ve undoubtably used a squad car, uniform, and handcuffs for a lot of horror.

Rhoades was not hired, it seems, due to his previous arrests and dishonorable discharge for the Marines.

9. 1970s: In the early ‘70s, after his dad commits suicide before going on trial for molesting two of his cousins, after getting kicked out of the Marines, and then dropping out of college, and then not getting hired by law enforcement, Robert moves back home to live with his mother in Council Bluffs, Iowa and works a series of odd, menial jobs.

Soooo…. things are going REALLY well for him right now.

Things are going horribly.

And then things get worse.

His mom Fay throws him out of her house following a highly embarrassing incident with her son.

She said shortly after his arrest during an interview that one night, while she was playing bridge at home with a few of her girlfriends - Robert walked out of his bedroom wearing nothing but a leather buckle harness attached to a choker and a cock ring.

He turned to his mom’s coworker Trish and said, (Jig Saw Voice) “Incubus demands you wear this and follow his every wish.”

And then Robert tossed her a leather neck corset harness with a stuffer gag and some wrist and ankle restraints.

At this point he said, (Jig Saw Voice) “Submit yourself to the arm-binders and dungeon irons in my bedroom - second door down the hallway on the right across from the guest bath… I will enter shortly for suspension and submission training. Or maybe I’ll take my time, slave. Carve your safe word into the wall and prepare for sexual ascension.”

And then his mom was like, (yell) “ROBERT BEN RHOADES! That is QUITE ENOUGH! What did I tell you about taking that weird leather get-up out of your bedroom. That’s it! Get out of my house!”

Before leaving, Robert turned to Trish and said, (Jig Saw Voice) “Incubus apologizes for his mother’s disrespectful interruption. When you feel worthy of the pleasure through pain that only Incubus can bring you, slave, I’ll probably be staying at the downtown YMCA for a few days until I find a new place.”

JK!

Oh my HECK I am having too much fun with this sick fuck before he became a serial killer, showing up in bondage gear in the most inappropriate of places.

In real life, after moving back in with mom in the early 70s, Robert meets a woman not named in any of our sources, and turns his attention to starting a family.

Shortly after retuning home, he married his first wife.

There isn’t really any information on her.

Understandably, kind of like his siblings, many of the women who were unfortunate enough to be involved with Robert have had their names changed or omitted from records over the years.

All we know about this first marriage is that the young couple moved back in with Bob’s mom, had a son together, and spent around four years as a married couple before they divorced.

10. 1973: According to Council Bluff records, 1973 was when Robert, who would eventually call himself “Dusty” first became a truck driver at the age of twenty-seven after working in supermarkets, warehouses, restaurants, and random retail stores the previous few years.

While he now will introduce himself to others as “Dusty Rhoades,” he begins to introduce himself to other truckers out on the road via his self-given CB handle of “Whips and Chains.”

Clearly, by 1973, Bob has become very interested in the sexual fetish world of BDSM.

Before I briefly describe a bit about what the BDSM life entails, and how he may have found others who shared his sexual interests, a quick note about “Dusty Rhoades.”

Crazy coincidence! Another man - born just the month before Robert - would become a popular professional wrestler, wrestling under the name, Dusty Rhodes. I used to watch him a lot as a little kid.

Dusty Rhoades the American Dream. Not Dusty Bob Rhoades the American Nightmare.

The wrestling Dusty Rhodes would co-headline some big Madison Square Garden matches for Vince McMann’s World Wide Wrestling Federation - the WWWF - between 1977 and 1984. And go on to be a star in the early days of the WCM after that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Dusty_Rhodes_(wrestler)#National_Wrestling_Alliance_territories _(1974%E2%80%931984)

Good thing for him the Truck Stop Killer didn’t get caught around this time, and that he didn’t become more infamous - he would’ve had to change his name, right?

Imagine a famous wrestler named Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer when those guys were making front page news.

Super awkward to be Ted Bundy the professional wrestler.

(Announcer voice) “This Wrestlemania - Ted Bundy will take NO PRISONERS!!!”

Eeeek.

Now a bit about BDSM.

Robert’s “Whips and Chains” CB handle was a reference to his favorite activity…- “bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.”

BDSM.

So what is it?

UK sex, relationships, and bondage expert Annabelle Knight says that “in some cases BDSM doesn't have to involve sex at all – the mental connotations of some acts are more of a turn-on than the particular sexual act.”

But is usually about a specific type of sex. A 50 shades of Gray kind of sex.

Tying up your sexual partner, role playing that your partner is your sex slave, spanking them, putting a dog chain around their neck and making them crawl around on all fours - just a few examples of various BDSM themed acts.

In a two-personal BDSM sexual relationship - one person is the dom or dominant or top, and the other is the sub or submissive or bottom.

Robert seemed to have only been interested in being the dominant.

The dom controls the role play.

The dom dishes out the spanking, bondage, clamping, whipping, etc. The dom controls the behavior of the sub to whatever degree they decide before hand: tying them up, deciding when they get to speak, use the restroom, be untied, stand up instead of walking on all floors, etc.

For the dom, the sexual fantasy is based around power and control.

For the sub, there is a sexual thrill found in release and submission. They don’t know what the dom will do to them next. Or allow them to do.

For the sub, BDSM is also about true masochism - pleasure through pain and humiliation.

In a healthy BDSM relationship, the submissive and the dominant agree on a “safe word” before the games begin. And when the sub says this safe word, the role playing stops and they can ask to be untied, be whipped with a bit less enthusiasm, be all done with the role playing for the night, etc.

And all of this can be a lot of fun when everyone keeps a healthy perspective about it. When the Dom has concern for the Sub’s well being. When there is true consent and when it’s not all coming from an unhealthy psychological place.

Bob won’t keep it safe and healthy for very long.

We’ll talk more about how all this shit can be taken way too far after the timeline. https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/love-sex/sex/a44875/bdsm- bondage-beginner-information/

Bob got really, really into the world of BDSM in the early 70s. It soon became more than a fantasy or hobby - it became a true obsession.

His identity became rooted in it.

And since it didn’t say in any of our sources, I started wondering - how did one even find a BDSM community in the 70s?

Today - it’s easy!

There are numerous BDSM apps, such as KinkD, a sort of Tinder for Doms and Subs, where you can swipe left and right to find a partner to meet.

There’s WhipLR, an app where you can meet other BDSM fans and not only meet them and possibly meet up with them. You can also video chat with them through the app.

And there are LOADS of other BDSM apps.

And there are now tons of online BDSM communities, like fetlife.com which boasts over 9.3 million members worldwide. It describes itself as “the Social Network for the BDSM, Fetish & Kinky Community. Like Facebook, but run by kinksters like you and me…” Fet Life users post comments, pictures, and videos on their profiles with very little censorship.

And there are many other online BDSM communities like “the Cage,” and “fetish.com". And there tons of BDSM local communities and clubs around the world that you can find, primarily, through postings in this international communities.

But none of this stuff existed in the early 70s. So how did Robert find other BDSM lovers? Especially - the straight BDSM culture he got into?

He had to work a lot harder. Be way more open about what he was into with people.

In the US, in the early and mid-70s, the BDSM culture was small and primarily rooted in the gay male culture, based mainly in San Francisco. The Leatherman’s Handbook - an early guide to BDSM rules, was first published in 1972. And it was written with gay men in mind. In 1978, a lesbian BDSM organization was founded in San Francisco - Samois.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/10/28/from-freud-to- america-a-short/

In the 70s, Robert would have had to have head to sex shops and buy really small circulation, niche fetish magazines, short run bondage porn series and books with names like “Bondage World,” “The Bondage Zone,” “Bondage Bordello,” “Bondage Photo Treasures,” “Bridled,” “Box of Slave Girls,” “Rope, Garters, and Gags,” “Roped,” “Trampled,” “Hogtied,” “Bondage Behind Bars,” and “Bound to Please.”

Those are all real names, actually.

And yes - I did do a LOT of research into all this that was probably unnecessary - HAIL LUCIFINA!

Lynze and I have may have gotten some new bedroom ideas based on this part of my research. Some of those photos are fucking HOT.

Bettie Page type shit. Big fan.

Three publishers were responsible for basically all of these magazines in the mid-70s and 80s, - the biggest by far being House of Milan, ran by fetish photographer Barbara Behr. https://www.bondagesex-xxx.com/bondage-world- magazine.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Milan

These House of Milan magazines are now collectibles, and based on some sales sites describing various issues, it seems they had personal ads in the back where you could pay to list your phone number or a mailing address so you could be contacted by someone else into BDSM. https://www.alta-glamour.com/advSearchResults.php? action=search&publisherField=House+of+Milan+ %5BHOM%2C+Inc%5D

And THAT was one way you could find other BDSM doms and subs in the 70s. Writing them a letter or giving them a call.

Another was spending a lot of time in clubs and bars. You had to figure out where the right bar was where the BDSM crowd hung out. You had to meet a guy who knew a gal who knew a group of people into BDSM.

I find all of this fascinating.

You had to put in so much more work back then to be kinky!

You couldn’t just do everything at home on your keyboard, browsing discreetly in incognito mode. You had to go to the porn shop in town. Had to first see if they had any BDSM magazines in stock. If not, you had to talk to the clerk and have them order some in.

Or you had to explore the bar scene in your town or city, try and find someone who knew where that scene was.

Also, like Robert Ben Rhoades, maybe you give yourself the CB handle of “Whips and Chains” and constantly talk about BDSM, playing the numbers game.

You constantly advertise what you were into, not caring how many more prudish types judge you. It was all worth it if you made some new kink contacts.

And apparently, this is exactly what Bob did. He talked about his sexual interests ALL the time with lots of people all across the country.

Back to Bob’s life now.

The information we have for this era of Bob’s life is all over the place, so the dates are a bit sketchy, but almost immediately after his first divorce, he married his second wife.

We don’t have much information on her, either.

This marriage would also fall apart quickly.

Years later, he’ll meet his third wife - Debra - a woman we actually know something about.

We’ll get to Debra’s story in a minute. First, let’s bounce back to 1975.

11. Around 1975: First - around 1975, based on their interviews with him years later, the FBI believes Dusty Bob began his serial rapist career and started to kill.

Since his job kept him constantly on the move across the whole of the country, and he was often approached by hitchhikers and sex workers, he felt like he was able to explore his fantasies now and not have anyone back in Council Bluffs find out about it.

And Bob’s fantasies included a sex dungeon. So he builds one. A mobile one.

He customizes the sleeper cab of his truck into a a moving sexual torture chamber with dildos, hooks, whips, restraints, gags, surgical tools, and more.

And while he was drives around the country, now likely raping, torturing, and killing, he also courts his future third wife, Debra Davis.

Before she had even met Dusty Bob, Debra’s life was already a bit tragic and challenging.

a) DEBRA DAVIS:

Debra was the youngest of six sisters in a working-class family, born in November 1957, in Tullahoma, Tennessee.

She was raised from the age of four in Houston. “I was very quiet and very shy, a real loner,” Debra later recalled about her childhood. “I was sick quite a bit.”

Then, at the age of only six, Debra was molested by an eighteen- year-old neighbor boy. Although the boy and his family moved away a week later, Debra’s world did not grow any sunnier.

Depression, a common consequence of sexual molestation, became her burden. She was given to mood swings—“feeling out of control,” as Debra described it—plus she had bouts of low self- esteem and guilt. Whatever went wrong, Debra tended to blame herself for it.

Described as a pretty girl, just four feet nine inches tall, Debra got pregnant at age seventeen in 1975 and left home to marry the child’s father, her high school sweetheart.

Their first son was born later that year. A little brother came along in 1978, followed in 1981 by Debra’s third and last child, a daughter.

In 1983, Debra, suffering from depression, made a serious attempt at suicide using pills.

That same year, life with her husband, Jimmy, fell apart. Too broke to divorce and set up separate households, Debra and Jimmy decided to go on sharing the same residence.

Also that same year - 1983 - 37 year-old Dusty Bob came into poor twenty-six or twenty-seven year old Debra’s life.

She met him at a Houston nightclub. He was wearing an airline pilot’s uniform and the two danced a few times that night.

Rhoades reappeared a week later at the same club, this time in western wear. His fashion sense seemed to be oriented around the Village People’s “YMCA” era.

Debra liked his easy, reassuring manner. They danced some more and had a few drinks together. It’s reported that she started calling him Bob, “in the way she might refer to an uncle.”

She had no idea she would fall in love with him. To Debra, the relationship was a welcome change of pace from her stressful living situation and three young children.

“We talked all the time,” she recalled later. “He was my best friend. I told him everything.”

Bob, however, spoke little of himself. “He only told me what he wanted me to know, and that was very limited, no details.”

Probably because he was doing a bunch of evil shit out on the road.

(Normal Bob voice) “You like roller skating and drive in movies? Cool. Me? I’m more into kidnapping hitchhikers and and torturing them in the rolling fuck dungeon I built. Another drink?”

Bob did tell her he was a long haul truck driver. He told her about growing up in Council Bluffs, his father’s arrest and death, and also hinted that he’d been molested by his father as a child.

Gradually, Bob began to win Debra’s trust.

He gave her money, listened to her problems, sent her flowers, and took her out to dinner.

Still, they remained just friends in Debra’s mind until one night when Bob called from the road. “I gotta tell you something,” he said. “I really love you.”

And Debra told him she love him as well.

And then Bob’s voice changed,

(Jig Saw Voice) “GOOD, Slave. Now listen carefully to what Incubus demands.

Under your bed you will find a black leather straight jacket, sensory deprivation hood, steel handcuffs, submission collar, nipple clamps, mummification tape, ass-up doggy-style strap, water-based lube, large dildo drill, pussy pump, a clitoral vibrator, and a small generator.

Lay it all out carefully upon the bed.

Remove your clothes, put the hood on, handcuff yourself to the bedpost, and await the sexual ascension only Incubus can bring to his slave.”

Nah.

That didn’t happen.

Debra said she loved him as well.

Ol’ Bob’s timing was apparently perfect.

Debra was vulnerable. When he returned to Houston, Bob took her out to a romantic dinner, and afterwards, the two of them slept together for the first time.

According to Debra, that night, they began a serious relationship.

He’d won her over. She’d later say that she felt like she was the only thing that mattered to him. He did anything and everything she wanted, even going as far as welcoming her three children to live with him after moving to Houston himself.

According to Debra, they all got along fine and life with Dusty Bob was great.

At first.

You knew that caveat was coming, right?

Soon, she learned that Bob was controlling. Of course he was - he was a Dom!

Soon, when they would go out, she said she was like his “paper doll” - he dressed her with no regard for the fact that she liked to wear jeans and t-shirts. He demanded she wear dresses, garters, and lingerie-like bras and panties. Or no panties.

He told her what makeup to wear and how to wear it.

And then, she met Bob the Dom for real.

Just for a moment.

When they were on a date one night in his car outside a dance club when he suddenly slapped a handcuff onto Debra’s wrist.

The gesture was somewhat playful, but it freaked her out.

Debra told him she didn’t think it was funny and he took it off.

But he was far from done trying to bring her into his fetish.

A little while later, on one Saturday night in Houston, Bob took Debra to a swingers’ club. She said she first assumed when he said “swingers” he meant swingers in the country music dance style sense of the word.

She thought they were going swing dancing!

Not even close. Less dose-ee-doh and more lots of dicks in lots of holes.

Almost as soon as they got to the swinger’s club, a woman slipped her hand up Debra’s leg.

When she realized what was going on and where they were, Debra got angry, slapped Bob, and told him they had to leave.

Afterwards, he berated her, telling her how close-minded and naive she was.

Bob didn’t give up. He continued to work on her. He eventually got her to go back to that club, and from there, into the spouse- swapping scene in Houston.

One night, they went to a couple’s house.

The husband was trying to get Debra to go to the bedroom with her when Debra decided she wasn’t comfortable with it, so she went to get Bob, who took her into the living room and tried to have sex with the man’s unconscious wife while Debra watched.

Understandably, it freaked her out.

As it should’ve! What the fuck? Why was she unconscious?? That is a creepy detail. Who lets random dudes fuck their unconscious wife? And who fucks unconscious women?

Oh yeah - rapists do.

Bob was rapist. A murdering rapist. This was right up his alley.

Despite Debra freaking out about this, she doesn’t leave him. And he keeps pushing for her to be kinkier.

Despite a lot of this bothering her to SOME degree, she also felt like Bob had rescued her. That he was her kinky knight in shining armor who was going to fix everything and turn her life from a disaster into a fairytale.

And she later said that she thought briefly that if she had to have group sex with strangers to keep Dusty Bob happy and in her life, she thought she could be okay with that. She eventually agreed to his insistence that they try group sex.

One Halloween night, she agreed to attend a costume party as a dominatrix, leading Bob, her collared sex slave, on a chain.

One of the pictures that most often shows up when you do an image search for Bob is a picture of him this night wearing this outfit - dressed head-to-toe in black leather and chains.

Funny that he’s dressed as the sex slave when on the road he was a brutal dominant.

The costume won first place in the costume contest that night, but then something went wrong. Something Debra never fully explained. I’m guessing they had a night of hardcore BDSM sex that freaked her out.

After that night, Debra refused any further sexual experimentation.

No group sex, no BDSM outfits, nothing.

She said she now understood the outfits weren’t just costumes to him. She’d seen his elaborate case filled with toys, from dildos to hooks to nipple clamps and more. And that just wasn’t was Debra was into. At all. She wanted nothing more to do with any of it.

Going forward, if she found that shit around the house, she told Bob she’d throw it out.

Dusty Bob, of course, wasn’t ready to say goodbye to the BDSM lifestyle.

Bob wanted what Bob wanted. And ol’ Whips and Chains kept pushing kinky sexual shit on Debra.

One day, an odd-looking stranger appeared at the front door and announced that he was a love slave Bob had ordered for her.

(Monotone Sex slave) “Incubus demands I undress and that you tie me to the toilet, stomp on my balls, piss on me, and beat my ass bloody with this switch!”

I don’t actually know what this dude said.

Maybe he said, (FISH) “Showbiz! Albert Fish is my name and peanut butt butter’s my game! Now tie me up and slap my fat bottom bloody you bimbo bearcat!”

Debra didn’t know what to do except to shut the door in the visitor’s face after telling him that there must be some kind of mistake.

Probably the best thing she could’ve done in that moment.

Maybe funnier though if she would’ve told him, “Oh you’ve got the wrong address! Debra lives two doors down. She’ll tell you her name is something else though, all part of the game.”

12. Early 80s: In the mid-80s, Debra finds Bob’s porn stash and she further disturbed.

It freaked her out. So much of it seemed to involve violence. She frequently found magazines - quite possibly some of the ones I mentioned earlier - hidden around the house.

She also discovered he’d run up an enormous phone-sex bill.

Dude could not get ENOUGH. Dusty Bob was one horny, horny motherfucker.

I hadn’t thought about phone-sex numbers for years until this episode.

Back in the 80s and 90s, 1-900 phone-sex numbers were huge.

You can still call phone sex numbers.

And you have to pay to talk to a phone-sex operator.

Back in the 80s, it might be five dollars for the first minute, and then two dollars a minute after that. They were expensive. And there were tons of phone-sex operators. Some lady with a sexy voice who would play this improv game of “Yes, and…”, going along with whatever fantasy you were into.

When I was a kid, at a sleepover we found my friend’s dad’s Penthouses and we found one of these numbers.

And my buddy’s older brother called it and was on the phone for over an hour. And he got in SO much trouble when his parents got that gigantic phone bill. Haha.

When Debra saw her Dusty Bob’s bill, it was becoming more clear that Bob wasn’t just into kinky sex - he was obsessed with it. Hiding shit around the house, running up their phone bill.

She was also, thanks to the porn she’d found, and some other clues, beginning to sense that Bob strongly connected sex to violence and pain.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, she’d also started to noticed how fucking creepy and horny he got when she was in physical pain that had nothing to do with sex.

This is so disturbing.

When she got sick and developed painful headaches, he’d sometimes lie down with her, just to watch her suffer.

And he’d get super aroused.

When she was diagnosed with lupus and hospitalized, her evident pain and discomfort really turned him on. Once time, he climbed into her hospital bed while she was in agony and tried to have sex with her.

What the FUCK!?!

That shit would be a deal breaker for me.

I picture Debra at home sick with the flu, laying on the couch under a blanket, hair matted to her head with fever sweat. Garbage can for puke nearby. Bottle of Tylenol on the side table. Clammy skin, moaning in pain, and then Bob walks into the room wearing assless chaps, a rip harness set, and holding a giant whip.

(Jigsaw) “Incubus demands release, Slave! He desires to use your flop sweat as his Pain Lube. You will be hogtied and if your fever doesn’t break you - Incubus will.”

And then Debra’s like, “Fuck OFF, Bob. Leave me alone you creep!”

And then wearing that get up, Bob walks off all sullen and sad. (Sad Jigsaw) “Incubus will be in the bedroom flogging and choking himself if you change your mind, slave.”

Debra got even MORE freaked out when Bob wouldn’t shut the fuck up about this book he was really into around this time. She said Bob’s 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 of sorts for Rhoades.

Bob 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."

I bought Games People Play, by Eric Berne on Amazon to see what it was all about.

First published in 1964, it’s sold over five million copies despite being written not for the general public, but instead for therapists to use as a treatment guide.

Eric created the theory of transactional analysis and it’s too complex to try and describe here in any detail, but essentially, he believed that we are defined by our social interactions and our social actions are games where we are always wining or losing to some degree. And win or lose - we are always getting some type of payoff.

And we are also always unconsciously playing a role that was determined largely by parental interactions in childhood and our emotional makeup.

And I don’t know enough about it to speak any more about it.

I do know that, if you’re not a trained therapist, you could easily dangerously misinterpret some of it’s passages, though.

Check out the following passage, that I’ll read verbatim, from Chapter Nine: Sexual Games. White is the name for a random women, and Black is the name for a random man in this excerpt:

“Third-Degree ‘Rapo’ is a vicious game which ends in murder, suicide or the courtroom.

Here White leads Black into compromising physical contact and then claims that he has made a criminal assault or has done her irreparable damage.

In its most cynical form White may actually allow him to complete the sexual act so that she gets that enjoyment before confronting him.

The confrontation may be immediate, as in the illegitimate cry of rape, or it may be long delayed, as in suicide or homicide following a prolonged love affair.

If she chooses to play it as a criminal assault, she may have no difficulty in finding mercenary or morbidly interested allies, such as the press, the police, counselors and relatives.

Sometimes, however, these outsiders may cynically turn on her, so that she loses the initiative and becomes a tool in their games.” http://www.ericberne.com/games-people-play/rapo/

I don’t know what you all heard, but, it sounded to me like Berne just wrote about how some women like being raped.

“In its most cynical form White may actually allow him to complete the sexual act so that she gets that enjoyment before confronting him. The confrontation may be immediate, as in the illegitimate cry of rape.”

Is Eric Berne actually promoting rape here?

I highly, HIGHLY doubt it.

I don’t think the book would be consistently well reviewed still today, and that it would’ve been a New York Times best seller when it was released in the 60s if it actually promoted rape.

I think I’m missing a lot of the meaning here because I haven’t taken a lot of time to study up on transactional analysis.

But - if you aren’t psychologically educated - and Dusty Bob certainly wasn’t - could you mabye use passages like this to convince yourself that some women - or most women - or even ALL women - like to be raped and when they go to the police, it’s just part of some game? Could thinking that help you justify and rationalize raping?

I think so.

Speculating a lot here! Admittedly. But I think so. Seems like a dangerous book in the wrong hands.

Back to a bit more info about Bob as told by Debra before moving on down the timeline.

But first - one more sponsor.

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Hi oh, Sarsaparilla, AWAYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!

PUSH STOP

Wow.

Sounds like a good sale. Nice to have Captain Whiskerhorn back on the sponsor list.

Now back to a bit more info about Bob as told by Debra before moving on down the timeline for real now.

On the the last trip Debra ever took in Dusty Bob’s truck, sometime in 1984 or 1985, the two were heading west on I-10 and stopped somewhere in Arizona at a busy truck stop.

Standing by the restaurant door was a young woman with a baby, hoping to get a ride with someone.

Debra said she looked about 18 or 19 and desperate.

Debra wanted to give her money - do something to help her.

Her sister had once been living out on the street - she knew more than most how hard that life could be - and she was overwhelmed with sadness. She didn't want to just walk away.

Rhoades saw what Debra was looking at, came around behind her and grabbed her shoulders.

He turned her slowly toward the girl and pointed, and whispered into her ear, "You see that, Debbie. She's one of the invisible people." https://www.gq.com/story/truck-stop-killer-gq-november-2012

Debra took this “invisible” description to mean that Dusty Bob thought the girl’s life had no value. That she didn’t matter.

She began to think she was living with a monster.

But she still had no real idea as to just how truly evil Bob really was.

The FBI thinks he has kidnapped, raped, and killed numerous women by this point. Women he thought of as “invisible people.”

Not long after this encounter, Bob would pick up one of these invisible people, a fifteen year old girl who survive a ride with Dusty Bob and would later share her story with GQ magazine.

It was published in October of 2012.

14. January 1985: Fifteen-year-old Vanessa left home with her twenty-one-year-old boyfriend in January of 1985. She’d lived with her mom in New York, enduring more frequent fights and more intense arguments. She had been kicked out of two schools for absences and regularly self-harmed.

They were inexperienced, both at life and traveling. They had $60 and a Smith Wesson five-shot with just one bullet in it, which they accidentally fired off in a field in Maryland during a discussion about whether the safety was on, leaving themselves with a gun and no bullets.

Their first night out on the road, Vanessa and her boyfriend stayed in an abandoned barn in Maryland. They were back on the road before dawn, hitchhiking down a slippery highway covered in black ice, shivering in their hoodies.

A trucker picked them up at daybreak and they rode in a semi for the first time.

After getting dropped off, they hitchhiked and caught another ride.

And then another and another and another…

They continued riding one semi after another until Vanessa and her boyfriend parted ways after having a fight in an Arizona gas station, over 2300 miles from home.

Now Vanessa was on her own. She climbed into yet another truck alone, still aimless bouncing around the country.

Unable to stay in a shelter because she didn’t have an ID, she just kept hitchhiking.

She stuck to trucks because she felt they were safer than cars.

When she got out of a truck at a truck stop, people noticed. They talked about her on the CBs and she felt like she was riding in moving billboards for whatever company the truck drove for.

In the summer of 1985, six months after leaving home, she’s STILL hitchhiking. She’s made it all the way back across the country.

She found herself sitting in a truck somewhere near Martinsburg, Pennsylvania, and was waiting for the driver to pay for gas when she noticed a commotion- the body of a young woman had just been found in a truck stop dumpster.

A small crowd gathered around the dumpster and Vanessa suddenly wondered if her driver was the killer.

As she’s thinking this, the driver jumped in the cab, swung up behind the wheel, and pulled away, saying he didn’t want to get caught up in anything time consuming.

She was terrified, but then that driver turned out to be safe.

Several days later, she was now heading south on I-95 through the Carolinas, when she got picked up by yet another trucker.

He was taller and leaner than most truckers and didn’t wear jeans or a t-shirt, just a cotton button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled neatly up over his biceps.

He had the cleanest cab she’d ever seen in over a half-a-year out on the roads.

He was friendly when he picked her up.

But then, once they got out on the road, his demeanor changed.

He suddenly just stopped responding to her questions. He sat up straighter in his seat. His face changed from laid back to arrogant.

And he started talking about the dead girl in the dumpster.

Fuuuuuuuck. How terrifying.

He started saying all kind of creepy, disturbing shit.

He asked Vanessa if she’d ever heard of the Laughing Death Society. "We laugh at death," he told her.

Then, a few minutes later, he pulled the truck over onto the shoulder of the road by some quiet woods.

He took out a hunting knife and told her to get in the back of the cab.

Vanessa was terrified she’d soon be another girl in a dumpster. She start babbling. Crying. Saying the same things over and over. She said she knew he didn’t want to do it.

She said it was his choice, that she wouldn’t go to the cops, but it was his choice.

Then he looked at her and went perfectly still.

And he said one word.

“Run.”

And she did.

Without looking back, she ran into the woods and hid.

She stayed there until she saw the truck pull out onto the interstate, around the time it was getting dark.

Without anything other option, she walked back to the interstate and started hitching south.

She never did go to the police, but years later, she later saw a photo of Dusty Bob Rhoades and identified him as the man with the knife that day.

How lucky did she feel then to have escaped with her life? https://www.gq.com/story/truck-stop-killer-gq-november-2012

Also - why did he let her go?

Bob would say, after he was arrested years later, that he let her go because a lot of his BDSM stuff was at the Cleaners.

He’d found a special shop that specialized in cleaning bondage gear, and that day, all he had in the truck were a pair of back up nipple clamps he’d stopped using because the in-between breast chain was too long, and a red, silicone penis extender.

All his A+ good stuff was gone.

The enema nozzles, the glass butt plugs, the eight piece deluxe wrist and ankle spreader combo kit, the spiked breast binders, the neoprene full body strap set, the ball stretcher with attached leash - ALL OF IT WAS GONE!

He didn’t say any of that.

But - all of the terms I’ve used to today in these BDSM rants are real products.

But for real - why DID he let her go? Did he feel a moment of actual empathy? Did she do a good job presenting herself as more than just an “Invisible” victim?

There has been a bit of research done into the best way to escape from a serial killer’s clutches.

Stephen Harbort, a German criminologist and former police commissioner, conducted a study to find out what factors contribute to escaping a serial killer. He looked at 155 German serial killers active between 1945 and 1995, who had committed a total of 674 crimes counting both murders and assaults that did not result in murders.

He spoke with 107 victims of various serial killer attacks. And based on his research - and this is, not surprisingly, not great news - victims have only a 15.9% chance of surviving once a serial killer begins an assault of abducts them.

What factors play a role in escaping a serial killer?

Harbort found that 43% of the surviving victims escaped because the killer’s attack didn’t result in fatal injuries. 36% escaped because they fought back physically, verbally, or a combination of both. 15% of the killer’s thought the victim was dead and left the crime scene. 15% lived because someone else came along and scared the killer away. 8.4% escaped when the killer unintentionally gave them a chance to flee. And 4.7% escaped because the victim outwitted the killer.

And, in some cases, more than one of these factors were involved in an escape.

Basically - young Vanessa got really, REALL lucky.

Harbort also discovered that if a victim engages in self-defense, it almost never works unless the self-defense attack is significant.

He found that mild resistance literally never helped. In 73.3% of the cases he studied, mild resistance had no effect on the killer. And in the other 26.7%, it led to greater violence and a continuation of the crime. Sadly, in 82.4%, significant resistance also led to making the killer more violent. But in 17.6% of the cases, it allowed the victim to escape. https://www.annmarieackermann.com/escaping-a-serial-killer- victim-strategy/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ 10.1177/1088767901005004005

So - if you’re gonna fight back - give that motherfucker everything you’ve got.

Seriously.

Don’t try to hurt him - try to kill him.

This all reminds me of a movie where someone being victimized smashes their attacker in the head with some heavy object, knocking them to the ground where they’re dazed and semi- conscious.

And then the victim runs.

FUCK that!

If they’ve just attacked you - your life is still in danger - and now you’ve severely stunned them and have immediate access to a weapon like a rock, knife, pipe, etc - bash their fucking head in!

Smash them until you know they are either NEVER getting up again - or won’t be getting up anytime soon.

You have that right.

In the United States, and I believe most other nations - a homicide may be considered justified if it is done to prevent a very serious crime, such as rape, armed robbery, manslaughter or murder. Justifiable homicide is a real thing. Like they used to tell me in Krav Maga classes - neutralize the threat and save your life!

Back to our timeline.

15. Late 1986: In late 1986 - still with no idea what dirty deeds Dusty Bob has been committing out on the road - Debra decides that she’s had enough. While he was on the road for a three month stretch, she told him over the phone that she wanted to break up.

And Bob responded by sending her “an avalanche” of love letters.

He could apparently be quite the charmer.

“It’s true there are other things in my life,” read one letter he sent from the road, “but for the life of me I can no longer find any value in them without your warmth; the nights are dark without your fire.”

Bob, sensing that he was losing Debra, came home, and the two were married on Valentine’s Day, 1987, in Houston.

And Bob’s third wife stayed married to him for two and half years.

And as he got away with more rapes and likely murders on the road, he put more pressure on her to be kinkier.

Debra would later say, “His thing was control. It drove me nuts. Even when we had sex he never lost control. He could drink all night and never get drunk. He never lost control.”

During their marriage, Bob spent a year off from truck driving, recovering from bone graft surgery on his arm, which he’d broken in an industrial accident.

And Debra remembered that after the surgery, he was groggy from anesthesia but still collected enough to yank the IV tube from his arm. She had to sit next to him in the hospital and make sure he wouldn’t do it again.

The entire time, he refused to take pain medicine, because, as Debra says, he was “afraid of losing control.”

Damn.

What happened to Dusty Bob when he was a a kid? What did his firefighting molestor father do to him?

16.October 1989: In October of 1989, Bob finally crosses the line with Debra. He demands that they have anal sex, and when she refused, he rapes and beats her.

Afterwards, she got up, looked him in the eye, and said, “Are you through?”

He said, “Yeah,” and went into the living room.

At this point, Debra had been sleeping with a baseball bat under her bed for a while. She took it, walked into the living room, and popped Bob on his arm.

I hope it was the one he’d broken.

Then she said, “Now I’M through.” She packed her bags and left. After she slammed the door, she could hear him breaking things in the house.

Sadly, Bob did not get in legal trouble for the assault and rape.

Debra believed she’d freed herself, but, in some ways, her journey with this fucking psychopath had only just begun.

17. 1989: Also in 1989, a young woman escaped from Bob’s truck and went to the police. She hadn’t got off as easily as Vanessa from before.

She described how she’d been held captive and repeatedly tortured and raped in a big rig’s sleeper.

When Bob arrived at the police station for questioning, he was calm and dismissive, telling the investigators that the woman was a prostitute. He called her a “lot lizard” and said she was clearly crazy.

A “Lot Lizard” is a slang term for a sex worker who peddles her wares at truck stops or other locations frequented by truckers.

Fearing for her safety and thinking that the police wouldn’t trust the claims of a sex worker, the woman recanted her confession.

So sad when this happens. The #MeToo movement has done a lot of good in recent years in empowering women to believe their claims of rape and other sex crimes will be taken more seriously.

In December of 2019, some research was published that affirms this.

Ro’ee Levy and Martin Mattsson, doctoral candidates at Yale University, studied the effects of the movement across 24 countries. Their research, supported by the Tobin Center for Economic Policy, found that Me Too increased overall reporting of sex crimes by 14 percent, with about a 7 percent increase in the US. https://www.vox.com/2019/12/11/21003592/me-too-movement- sexual-assault-crimes-reporting

Hail Nimrod AND Lucifina!

Whether or not this increase in reporting leads to a significant increase in convictions still remains to be seen.

18. January 1990: Bob’s first confirmed murders go down in January of 1990, right after his divorce from Debra is finalized.

Two hitchhikers, twenty-four year-old Candace Walsh and her new husband twenty-five year old Douglas Zyskowski, are traveling together through Texas.

They’re headed to a religious workshop in Georgia.

Bob picks them up and immediately recognizes that Douglas is a threat, so he shoots him and leaves his body in Sutton County, Texas.

Bob then drags Candace into his sleeper cab/torture chamber where she was tortured with a variety of BDSM-type restraints, whips, dildos, hooks, etc, and repeatedly raped over the course of a full week.

A WEEK!

Damn.

As his drive was coming to an end, Bob killed Candace and disposed of her body in Millard [mill erd] County, Utah.

That month, Douglas Scott Zyskowski’s body is found in Texas, but investigators won’t identify it until 1992.

19. February 5, 1990: On February 5th, 1990, in Houston, Texas, a young woman stands on the side of a road trying to flag down a ride. She’s terrified. She has numerous bruises all over her body.

One driver finally stops his car.

He drives her to a payphone and she contacts law enforcement.

She’s then taken to a police station and tells investigators about all of the horrific things that have happened to her.

She’s eighteen years old and from California. She wanted to hitchhike across the country and thought that truck drivers were probably her safest option.

She was wrong.

She approached a man at a truck stop who introduced himself as “Dusty” and he told her that he’d be driving through Arizona that night.

He seemed nice. Harmless. She climbed into his cabin and fell asleep.

A couple hours later, she awoke to Dusty tying her up in the back of the cabin.

Now unable to escape from heavy chain restraints, she has no choice but to endure being repeatedly cut and beaten with a whip.

She was also raped.

She endured six days of this until they arrived in Houston.

“Dusty” then took her into his apartment and tied her to the bed, continuing to assault her.

He then cut her long hair down to near the scalp with a straight razor, not caring if he sliced into her scalp here and there, and then he brought her back to his truck.

He tied her up again, but this time, he failed to chain her up correctly, and she waited for her chance to escape.

She knew that you didn’t get held captive for six days and not get killed afterwards.

When Dusty Bob stopped the vehicle to pick up a new load - she bolted out of the cabin, ran down the road, hailed a driver, and managed to live to tell her story.

Another woman escapes from the Truck Stop Killer.

At the police station, she gives the officers a good description of the truck, and they begin to pull people over. The police stop one vehicle that seems to match her description - and it IS Bob - but the woman panics and says it’s not him, so they let him go.

They had him! They had him but she froze and it’s hard to blame her. Can’t imagine what that fucker put him through.

She then tells the police that they should stop looking for her attacker because she doesn’t want to file charges any more.

She tells the police: ”I don't see any good in filing charges. It's just going to be my word against his. If there were any evidence, I would file. I would file charges and sue him."

All she wants to do is go back home to California and try to forget any of this ever happened.

The same day, Bob finds another pair of victims in Texas.

They wouldn’t be as lucky as this unnamed near-victim was.

20. February 5, 1990: Still February 5th, 1990, Regina Kay Walters, fourteen, and her eighteen-year-old boyfriend Ricky Lee Jones are hitchhiking in Pasadena, Texas.

Regina sometimes stayed with her father in Houston, and sometimes her mother in Pasadena.

She and her new boyfriend Ricky decide that they’re going to run away together, and are relieved when a friendly-looking trucker stops to give them a lift.

Later that day, Regina’s mother - who works long hours at a department store - comes home and is surprised to find her house is empty.

Her daughter’s not at any of their neighbors’ houses, there’s no note, and when she calls her ex-husband in Houston, he says he has no clue where Regina is.

Says he hasn’t heard from her in days.

Regina’s mom calls Regina’s friends, who say they haven’t seen her either, so she calls the Pasadena Police Department and reports her father missing.

She says that they argued the night before she disappeared, and that there’s a possibility she may have ran away from home. But she thinks that even if she did run away, Regina would still call her and let her know she’s okay. And because she hasn’t done that, she thinks something’s happened to her.

Pasadena Detective Susanne Jackson, a woman with a lot of experience finding juvenile runaways, is assigned to Regina’s case.

She advises Regina’s mother to continue putting up posters around town, hoping someone might have seen something or knew Regina’s whereabouts.

The posters list a phone number and a reward for anyone who can provide useful information to the police.

And the poster leads to a tip!

A caller tells police that they saw Regina talking with two local boys- her boyfriend, Ricky, and a second boy, Billy.

Then, another caller gives them the address where he’d seen Regina two nights before her disappearance.

Police track down Billy near the apartment and question him. He tells them that Ricky and Regina ran away together and intended to go to Mexico, where Ricky had family.

The detectives then decide to enter Regina’s description into the FBI’s NCIC, the National Crime Information Center database, which distributes informations about crimes or suspected crimes nationwide.

They hope that Regina might be located by law enforcement in a different state.

Meanwhile, the search continues.

In Houston, detectives speak with Regina’s father, who tells them that his phone rang on the night of March 17th.

When he picked it up, the caller asked him if he was Regina’s father. He said yes and the person told him that he knew where Regina was - that she was in a barn with her hair cut short. Then the caller hung up.

And you will soon realize how incredibly fucked up this call was.

Regina’s dad’s phone number wasn’t listed in the phone book and it wasn’t on the missing posters, either. He’s certain he’s spoken with someone who’s done something to his daughter. He’s right. He just spoke with Dusty Bob.

After hearing about the strange phone call, Detective Jackson contacts the phone company and asked them to trace the location of the caller.

When the results come in, the detectives learn that the call came from a payphone in Ennis, Texas - a little over a three hour’s drive from Pasadena, just south of Arlington.

They stake out the payphone to see if the killer returns to use it.

Nothing.

And then neither parent receives any more mysterious calls and the case goes cold.

As the weeks went by with no sign of Regina, it became increasingly clear that something terrible had happened to her.

Detective Jackson was almost positive that they wouldn’t find her alive and suspected Ricky Lee Jones, the boyfriend, of murdering her. But they can’t find him either.

Months pass before the police finally catch a break in the case.

A farmer living in Bond County, Illinois was getting ready to burn down his old farmhouse since the structure hasn’t been used in years.

He went inside to make sure he wouldn’t be burning anything of value and he stumbled upon a human skeleton.

He contacted the police, who discovered that the skeleton had wire around its neck and a couple of tufts of short hair remained on the skull. There were no items of clothing in the barn and they couldn’t find an ID.

The body was small, the investigators assumed that the victim was a child.

There were no missing persons that fit the age of the corpse in the area, so they deduced that it had probably been dumped.

The barn was right off of I-70.

The coroner determined that the corpse was female, probably a teenager, and that her hair had been cut short around the time of her death. He discovered that the killer had wound the wire sixteen times around her neck, nearly beheading her.

So much anger in that attack. Dusty Bob is a straight up monster.

The lead detective from Illinois State Police entered the information into a database of missing persons and sent the description of the unidentified victim to the agencies responsible for recent missing persons cases.

The info reached the police station in Pasadena, Texas, and police thought that it might have been Regina because of the odd detail about a barn from the phone call to Regina’s dad.

Detective Jackson sent Regina’s dental records to Illinois and they were a match.

The skeleton in the barn had indeed belonged to Regina Kay Walters.

Though Ricky had continued to be the primary suspect in Regina’s death, the discovery of her body changed the course of the investigation. Investigators knew that whoever had committed this crime knew what they were doing. Ricky simply didn’t have enough experience to execute a murder like this. In their profile of Regina’s killer, the detectives surmised that her killer might have been a truck driver or other professional traveler.

Also - Rick Lee Jones still hasn’t turned up anywhere.

Investigators, based on other evidence, determine that Regina’s killer is a sexual sadist who enjoyed torturing his victims before killing them.

21. April 1, 1990: April 1st, 1990. April Fools Day. Officer Mike Miller, who works for Arizona Highway Patrol, is doing his usual routine on I-10 when he notices a parked truck.

The truck’s hazard lights are on and its parked near a ramp, so Miller figures that the driver might be in trouble and needed to move the truck as quickly as possible. Miller gets out of the car and knocks on the cabin door.

Much to his surprise, Dusty Bob jumps out, raising his hands in the air.

Miller then hears a female voice coming from the back of the cabin.

She sounds as if she’s crying uncontrollably.

Bob claims that everything’s alright, but the woman continues to scream, pleading for help. Miller takes Bob to his patrol car and handcuffs. He immediately calls for backup, too - if what’s going on is what he thinks is going on, the truck is an active crime scene.

Bob wiggles out of his restrains but Miller subdues him and restrains him again before returning to the truck to find the woman. He’s shocked by what he sees - a young woman bound with a horse bridle strapped to her neck. A long chain is attached to the bit and she’s also handcuffed.

Miller sees red whip marks all over her back.

At the police station, the woman tells detectives that Bob put down a white towel before torturing and raping her. He bragged to her that he’d been doing it for years and that he’d always gotten away with it.

Law enforcement from Casa Grande, the nearest town, arrive to check out the truck.

When they climb into the cab, they find a full torture chamber— chains, hooks, and a briefcase filled with different instruments, as well as a camera. The briefcase was meticulously organized, with leashes, whips neatly wrapped, handcuffs, alligator clips, pins, fish hooks and various other sex toys.

Holy shit. For long time Suckers - it's the Toy Box Killer and Bob Berdella, the Kansas City Butcher, all over again.

According to FBI Special Agent Bob Lee in his interview in 1996 with the Tuscon Weekly, it was the most elaborate kit of its kind they’d ever seen.

Investigators feel confident that Robert Ben “Dusty” Roads has been at this for years.

Dusty - ol’ Whips and Chains - is arrested for aggravated assault, sexual assault, and unlawful imprisonment. At the police station, he’s calm and collected. He tells the police that the handcuffs and ties were all the woman’s idea. That she was a “lot lizard.” That she’s crazy.

This tactic had worked for him before, but this time, his victim doesn’t back down.

In her interview, she tells detectives that Robert picked her up at a truck stop near Phoenix, Arizona, just a few hours before the highway patrol officer found her.

She says she fell asleep while they were driving and the next thing she could remember was that she was tied up and Robert was sexually assaulting her.

She tried to defend herself by biting him, and when the investigators take another look at Robert, they see a bite mark on his neck.

Even with all this overwhelming evidence, sadly, the woman had a history of mental illness, and the detectives worry that her story won’t hold up in court.

State prosectors can’t make a solid case that will put Robert away for good.

So they offer him a deal: - if he pleads guilty to assault, he’ll be sentenced to six years and eligible for parole after just one.

Forty-four year-old Rhoades accepts the deal, thinking he’ll be back out on the road, torturing and raping and killing the following year.

He doesn’t know at this point that the Illinois State Police had asked the FBI for help in solving the Regina Kay Walters murder.

That agents had begun combing the databases for similar cases, and that one FBI agent was present in Houston when the bruised woman with chopped hair was interviewed after escaping from a truck driver.

Police officers in Houston now hear about the Arizona case and remember that they had pulled over a truck driver by the name of Robert Rhoades, but that the girl had dropped the charges.

Robert’s description and the description of his truck match, of course, the girl’s story exactly. The crimes the two women were describing were also incredibly similar - revolving around bondage, torture, and rape.

At this point, Bob reaches out to Debra, his ex-wife. He asks her to do him a favor and go to his apartment in Houston, where she should throw everything out.

Luckily, law enforcement is one step ahead of him, and they obtain a warrant to search his apartment.

And in it, they discover numerous “torture devices” and bondage equipment, including a bondage rack.

They find various women’s underwear, other articles of clothing, shoes, and jewelry, incredibly violent pornography, and, notably, “a giant dildo.”

The police discover a single handcuff and multiple towels drenched in blood.

The apartment also reveals dozens of photographs of two short- haired women and one set of photos of a young girl - Regina Kay Walters.

The photos showed young Regina, nude, chained inside his truck cab.

Her hair had been cut and she was handcuffed.

There was a choke chain around her neck. He’d shaved Regina’s pubic hair and pierced her clitoris with a ring, which was also attached to a chain.

Another collection of photos, taken outdoors, depicted Regina both dressed and undressed in a variety of poses.

Her fingernails and toenails were painted bright red, and she was wearing bright red lipstick, too.

Her eyes were filled with obvious terror, and for good reason - the photos showed the barn where her skeleton would later be found in the background.

In these pictures, she was just moments away from being brutally killed.

These photos are online and so tragic. I stumbled upon them googling his name before I knew what they were. They’re fucking haunting once you know this story.

Authorities aren’t able to identify other women from the rest of the photos.

While the women in the photos certainly look distressed, it’s unclear who they are, or if they had been consensual sexual partners.

The FBI agent in Houston contacts Arizona law enforcement and confirm the pictures are of Regina. It’s clear now that Dusty Bob killed the fourteen year old runaway.

They also find a notebook in Dusty’s apartment containing Regina’s father’s unlisted telephone number.

That motherfucker called her dad right after killing her.

Investigators also another set of photos before they’re done tearing apart Bob’s apartment that they will later confirm are of twenty-four year-old Candace Walsh, whose body was dumped in Utah over three months earlier in January.

How all those photos must haunt those investigators.

After finding all of this, the FBI continues to build airtight case for three murders against Robert Rhoades.

Robert’s employe provides FBI with Robert’s truck log, which show that he was in Ennis, Texas the day the phone call to Regina’s father was made.

The FBI agents enter his information in VICAP - their Violent Criminal Apprehension Program - and find over fifty missing people match his movements during his active period.

They search his truck and find Regina’s hair and fingerprints, along with other physical evidence.

Detectives in Bond County, Illinois arrest Robert officially on kidnapping and murder charges.

Robert maintains his innocence.

As one might guess, when Debra learned of Robert’s crimes, she was horrified.

After hearing about Dusty Bob’s crimes, Debra quickly fell into a disastrous third marriage, and attempted suicide for a second time.

She couldn’t stop thinking that if she’d just stayed with Bob, loved him better, Regina wouldn’t be dead.

She also felt that since she’d loved him, an evil man, she must be evil too.

Eventually, Debra dealt with her shame and began regularly speaking on spousal abuse to audiences in the Houston area, which she’d do for years.

She also counseled physically and sexually abused women.

Hail Debra!

22. March 3rd, 1991: On March 31st, 1991, Ricky Lee Jones’s body is discovered in Lamar County, Mississippi. Regina’s boyfriend.

He’d been dumped near a river and his body was almost completely decomposed. A gunshot wound on his head gives authorities his cause of death.

No physical evidence is found near the corpse.

While it’s clear that Ricky was killed around the time of Regina’s abduction, his remains, wouldn’t be identified until seventeen years later, in 2008.

23. September 1993:

September 1993.

Dusty Bob’s trial begins after he’s extradited from Arizona to Illinois and charged with the first-degree murder of Regina Kay Walters, the murder where there is the most evidence against him.

The trial lasted for several months.

24.1994: In 1994, 48 year-old Robert Rhoades is found guilty of first- degree murder and he’s sentenced to life without parole.

He’s set to serve his sentence in the Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois.

And then in 2005, he’s back in court after being extradited to Utah.

He was all set to go on trial for the murders of Candace Walsh and Douglas Zyskowski.

However, their families decided not to go through with the case and dropped the charges.

Since their murders was determined to have actually been committed in Texas, Rhoades is now transported there, where he pleads guilty to avoid the death penalty. He receives another life sentence for the additional two murders of Walsh and Zyskowski.

Rhoades is now serving his initial life sentence in Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois, where he just had his 75th birthday on November 22nd.

Wonder if he’s still into BDSM?

I hope he shares a cell with a real, REAL aggressive dom. Someone who’s super horny and doesn’t care one bit about his safe word.

Let’s get out of this timeline.

PAUSE TIMESUCK TIMELINE OUTRO

V. Woman Sees Herself in Bob’s Pictures:

Before we wrap up with Bob, let’s revisit Bob’s obsession with BDSM.

Can the world of BDSM be blamed in any way for what he did?

No. No I don’t think it can.

BUT - does the world of BDSM maybe draw more than its fair share of sadists who would love, if they could get away with it, to make the jump from fantasy sadistic sex to actual, true sexual sadism where there are no safe words and no regard for the life and well-being of the submissive helplessly tied up?

I have to wonder if it does.

VI. BDSM - How Far is Too Far?

Clearly, Robert Ben Rhoades was not your typical member of the BDSM community.

He ignored some of the most basic tenants of true BDSM, like receiving enthusiastic consent from his partners.

In a healthy, normal BDSM relationship, your submissive is NOT your victim.

They are your partner - a consenting one at that - with whom you communicate with and have made a coherent agreement with.

Obviously, Dusty Bob took shit WAY too far with his abductions, rapes, torture, and murder.

What I wonder is, do others who don’t take nearly as far as Dusty Bob also cross any ethical lines?

At what point does it BDSM stop becoming the enjoyment of a little pain with your pleasure and start becoming true abuse, even if you DO ask for it?

Does asking to be victimized - or to victimize someone else - make it ok?

My question is not a new one.

Many people over the years have voiced concern over certain BDSM practices. And many others are quick to file these concerns under the category of “kinkshaming.”

We’ve talked about kink shaming here on the Suck before.

It’s when you cite someone’s sexual predilections as a reason that they’re a bad person, or attempt to embarrass someone for some consensual act they like to do in bed. https://metro.co.uk/2018/04/06/kink-shaming-care-7445761/ #:~:text=Kink%20shaming%20is%20when%20you,like%20to%20do%2 0in%20bed.

Kinkshaming, in a negative sense, can be an attempt to rigidly and illogically try and hold some one else to your own, subjective, comparatively Puritanical sexual morals.

It can promote a belief that people who like something a little different than you do - maybe a little more “risque,” or “out there” - are dirty, DIRTY perverts! Real sexual deviants!

And this type of judgement can lead to feelings of guilt, shame, anxiety, depression, and more in the person being judged.

Not good.

“Slut shaming” - which can definitely be considered a form of kink shaming - has been linked to eating disorders, other body image issues, and an increased risk of suicide in women and teen girls. https://www.bustle.com/p/growing-up-sexually-repressed-can-have- long-lasting-effects-well-into-adulthood-18713688 https://www.verywellfamily.com/the-effects-of-slut-shaming-on-teen- girls-460586

Obviously, in this sense, kink shaming is negative and terrible.

But, in certain situations, can it be also good to be kink shame?

The opposite stance of kink shaming is a sex positive stance, where you believe that having various sexual predilections is not inherently wrong, and that what you like to do privately in the bedroom as a consenting adult is entirely your own business.

However - we meat sacks, left to our own devices, don’t always privately make the best of choices for ourselves, do we?

Would you try and intervene - or at least express concern - if a friend began to self-harm through, say, opioid abuse? I bet you would. Even if you wouldn’t, I doubt you’d object to someone else intervening.

So what about this.

Would you express concern if a friend suddenly started showing up with black eyes, a busted lip, bruises and cuts on their arms and legs? What if they told they just went to the hospital - again - with anal lacerations, vaginal tearing, or a ruptured testicle?

And then what if you found out they received these injuries through practicing consensual - but exceptionally violent - BDSM.

Would you say something? And if you did - are you being a good friend? Or are you kink shaming?

Tricky isn’t it?

I think is.

I’ve always thought that part of being a good human being is to intervene in situations I find unhealthy.

See something, say something.

How harmless are kinks that involve a strong power dynamic, such as sadomasochism where the person playing the role of dom is bigger, stronger, and perhaps - more persuasive and manipulative than the person playing the role of sub? If they’re engaged in violent, injurious, and seemingly dangerous and degrading sex - extreme and rough BDSM - is it really value-neutral?

A recent Guardian article discussed the way in which sex surveys, advice forums, social-media feeds and women’s magazines have together created the impression that rough BDSM is simply the way young people have sex now, which has led to several men successfully employing a “sex game gone wrong” defense when they’ve choked their female partners to death.

This horrifying defense has been used numerous times when the alleged assaulter admits that he DID cause injuries that led to a woman’s death - BUT - her death was not his fault because it was just part of a “sex game gone wrong.”

The murdered woman, of course, is not there to say otherwise.

And when the man gets into the witness box and gives lurid, unchallengeable accounts of her addiction to violent sex and explains that the bruises that cover her body were what she wanted, should he go free?

Britain just recently introduced a bill to ban the “sex game gone wrong” defense in June of 2020.

The change is the result of tireless campaigning by the group “We Can’t Consent To This”, who collected sixty examples of women “who were killed during so-called ‘sex games gone wrong'” since 1972 in the UK.

In 45 percent of those killings the claims that the women received their injuries from a “sex game gone wrong” resulted in lighter sentences, an acquittal, or the death not being investigated at all. https://thetab.com/uk/2020/07/01/the-rough-sex-defence-is-finally- being-banned-164263 https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a32889431/rough-sex- defence-banned/

When a man chokes his girlfriend to death and chalks it up as a “sex game gone wrong”, are we supposed to sigh, ask “Who am I to kink- shame?” and then dust our hands?

What about castration fetish injuries?

It’s really a thing.

In August of 2019, a fetish-site meetup led to a man’s castration in Florida.

Police arrested Gary Van Ryswyk, 74, at his home in Sebring.

He told officers he just performed a castration on a man. Because that’s what the guy wanted.

Inside the home, they found a man bleeding profusely on a bed with a blood-soaked towel covering his groin. Van Ryswyk told cops he met the man through a castration fetish site on the dark web.

The emasculator told the victim he’d performed the procedure before on animals. Super fucked up.

They certainly didn’t consent to that.

He said he’d even removed one of his own testicles.

And he was charged with practicing medicine without a license.

Should he have been charged with more?

And the man who consented to having one of his testicles cut off - was he having healthy sex? https://torontosun.com/news/world/fetish-site-meet-up-leads-to-mans- castration-in-florida https://www.metromag.co.nz/society/society-society/kinkshaming- fantasy-metro-madeleine-holden

Does it really make me some kind of puritanical kink-shamer to question if it’s healthy for someone to feel that they need to be really violent towards their partner - or lose their dignity in an ultra submissive role - in order to cum?

I don’t consider myself a kink shamer, I really don’t.

And - as I said in the Sex Suck months ago - I like BDSM! Light BDSM. I think it’s hot!

And if you like a more extreme version, I definitely don’t jump to thinking you’re some kind of monster. Or broken somehow.

But if the act of truly hurting someone is what gets you off - or truly being hurt - yeah, I am going to worry about you.

I saw some video getting tossed around as a joke of a sub tied up and getting aggressively kicked in the balls by a female dom.

No fucking part of me saw this video and thought - “This looks healthy! What a healthy, fun, relationship!”

Instead, I just thought - “I wonder how many times that guy’s been to the ER? And - wow - that woman clearly really hates that guy!”

Maybe I am Puritanical in some ways. Maybe I am a kink-shamer.

A lot of that stuff reads dark as fuck to me at its core. It concerns me.

Debra - Dusty Bob Rhoades third wife - she was concerned about him. She kink shamed him.

And I think she was probably right too. Too bad it didn’t lead to her discovering evidence of actual rape, torture, and murder so he wasn’t stopped earlier.

He had crossed the line from kink to assault and worse.

Enough BDSM. Hope you’re doing it right and having so much fun, exciting sex. Hail Lucifina!

VII.Recap:

Let’s wrap up on this dirtbag.

Robert Ben Rhoades was a monster.

From 1975 to 1990, this waste of kinky space terrorized American truck stops, highways, and interstates by definitely raping and killing two women - and probably dozens of others.

He also killed at least one man that got in the way of his nefarious plans.

And probably many, many more.

He recognized that being a long haul truck driver allowed him the perfect cover - he could stop someplace, abduct a woman, and be hours away before anyone knew she was gone.

By then - it was just him, his poor victim, the open road, and his mobile torture chamber.

His truck logs placed him near fifty unsolved murders.

Maybe he killed far more than that.

One law enforcement official interviewed by Arizona’s Tucson Weekly estimated that Rhoades had kidnapped, tortured, and killed as many as three women a month for years.

Robert Ben Rhoades - the Truck Stop Killer - is one of the main people responsible for hitchhiking and truck stops now having reputations for being dangerous places where violence is never very far away.

A few bad apples can spoil the whole bunch. And Dusty Bob is a bad, bad apple.

The majority of truckers are decent meatsacks trying to make a living for themselves and/or their families - keeping food not just on their tables - but on store shelves around the world.

They’re not all Robert Rhoades. Not even close.

That said - after reading about all these murders this past week - I’m not going hitchhiking anytime fucking soon!

Time for today’s top five takeaways.

PAUSE TOP FIVE TAKEAWAYS INTRO

VIII.Top Five Takeaways

1.Number One: Number one! Robert Rhoades, the Truck Stop Killer, definitely murdered three but is suspected to have tortured, raped and killed more than fifty women between 1975 and 1990, based on data about his truck routes and information on women who went missing during those years. He preyed on hitchhikers and sex workers - people who, even if they made it away from him, as a few lucky woman did, knew they weren’t going to be believed by law enforcement

2.Number Two: Number two!

BDSM can be a lot of fun! Just make sure everyone is truly consenting, or it’s just sadism and/or assault. And maybe don’t let anyone kick you in the nuts as hard as they can. And maybe don’t do that to someone else.

3.Number Three: Number three! Debra Rhoades thought Robert was her knight in shining armor, until he continually pressured her to engage in sex acts that she was uncomfortable with. When he assaulted and raped her in October of 1989 for refusing to try anal sex, she hit him with a baseball bat and told him she was out.

After he was caught, she was distraught over once being married to a monster, she attempted suicide.

Being in love with a monster doesn’t make you a monster and no one deserves to be treated like that. If you think that you or a loved one might be in an abusive relationship, I urge you to call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or seek out resources in your community.

You are not alone.

4.Number Four: Number four! Dusty Bob’s CB Handle was “Whips and Chains.” Is it kink shaming to think that maybe we should all keep our sexual preferences a bit more private than that?

Or is it okay to go to Applebee’s and hear something like, “Cums When He Takes A Hard High Heel to the Taint! Party of one! Your table is ready.”

5.Number Five: Number five! Something new.

Rhoades’s first confirmed victim, Patricia Candace Walsh, was the former girlfriend of metal vocalist Warrel Dane of the bands Sanctuary and Nevermore.

The third Nevermore album, Dreaming Neon Black, has a deep connection to the Truck Stop Killer and explores Dane’s feelings about Patricia Walsh. It was released in 1999, ten years after Patricia’s death.

According to Dane, the album is “a very simple story about a man who slowly goes insane after losing a woman that he was very close to. Progressive levels of insanity are expressed in the songs, he goes through phases of denial and self-blame, blaming God, then denouncing God.”

The story is based on his relationship with Patricia, who according to him, ceased contact with him when she joined a religious group not too long before being murdered.

The band Sanctuary, if you’ve never heard of them, was a Seattle Thrash band that paved the way for later, more popular Seattle metal bands like Alice in Chains and Soundgarten.

https://www.angelfire.com/mi/demonzine/nevermore.html https://www.allmusic.com/album/dreaming-neon-black- mw0000602028

PAUSE TOP FIVE TAKEAWAYS OUTRO

IX. Final Announcements

A.Episode has been sucked!:

The Truck Stop Killer - Dusty Bob - has been SUCKED. What an epic pile of shit. Wish we knew more about him but he doesn’t seem to have given any interviews with the press, and his family hasn’t seem to have talked either. Most of the details came from his third wife, Debra, and a few almost-victims.

Still - we found enough to tell a tale that led to some interesting info about hitchhiking and BDSM. Hope you enjoyed the episode.

B.Thank you to Timesuck Team:

Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions Team for all the help in making Timesuck! Queen of Bad Magic Lynze Cummins, Reverend Doctor Joe Paisley, the Script Keeper Zaq Flannary, Sophie “Fact Sorceress” Evans, Bit Elixir, Logan and Kate Keith - the Art Warlock and Bad Magic Baroness running BadMagicMerch.com and the socials!

Thanks to all of those who’ve joined the Cult of the Curious private Facebook group - closing in on 24,000 members who continue to make Timesuck more than a podcast, they make it a community. Hail Nimrod to all of you! You make Bojangles wag his tail.

Thanks Liz Hernandez and her All Seeing Eyes running the Cult of the Curious Facebook page.

Thanks to Beefsteak and the Mod Squad running buck wild on our Discord Channel as well. Over 8,000 maniacs fucking around in there.

And thanks to all of your Space Lizards playing Timesuck Trivia on the app: Bodhi210 in the lead right now with 6111 points - ahead of the Raven Queen with 5772 points. I need to play again. It was just such a busy month here. Thank you to everyone who is playing!

Now let’s take a peek at next week’s Suck.

C.Next Episode Preview: What comes to mind when you think of the Dark Ages? Knights, kings and queens? Jesters entertaining at feasts, roast pigs with apples stuffed in their mouths? A scene straight out of Game of Thrones?

Maybe you’re a little twisted. Maybe you think of the insane torture devices that sadistic meatsacks developed to torture other meatsacks? Do you think of witch burning, inquisitions, and being hunted down by an angry mob of dirty peasants?

Next week, the Space Lizards have decreed that we’re going back to the Dark Ages. Just what made these times so dark? The fall of Rome, the biggest empire in Europe and one of the most advanced civilization in the world, led to the absence of classical knowledge and intellectual values from almost all of Europe. Within a few hundred years, people who had been building aqueducts and inventing new forms of government and civic participation were farming their own shit to fertilize their crops. Crops that, once sold, would generate money that they wouldn’t even see. Under the feudal system, most of that money would go to their nobles, who would kick it up to their king, who would kick some of that over to the holy man with the fanciest hat, the Pope himself.

Literally living in an inescapable pyramid scheme.

But were the Dark Ages really that dark? While Europe was sitting in its own shit, what was the rest of the world doing?

This is the era of the crusades, the black plague, the Great Famine, the Hundred Years war and the rise of a very “up-in-your-business” authoritarian style of European Christianity.

But the Dark Ages were also the era of the Magna Carta, Charlemagne, and great leaps forward in architecture, art, technology, philosophy and, at least in the Middle East, math and science.

Turns out the Dark Ages weren’t ALL dark.

All this and more next week on another historical edition of the Suck. Long Live the Suck!

D.Segue to Timesucker Updates: And now let’s head on over to this week’s Timesucker Updates!

PAUSE TIMESUCKER UPDATES INTRO

X.Timesucker Updates

1.First Up! An Annie Oakley correction coming in from awesome Aussie Sucker Justin Walker. Justin writes:

Hail Bojangles, Glory To Lucifina!

Sorry to be a sad stickler for facts, but ...... there are no Tigers in Senegal. Or Africa. Sorry for the silly correction, but it gives me the the chance to say greetings from Down Under. Love your work. Yip Yip How's It Going Mates n Mistresses from Australia.

Justin

Thank you Justin! Don’t ever be sorry for a factual correction. In the age of misinformation, I need help just like everyone else. You are absolutely right, there are no Tigers living in the wild in Senegal, or any other part of Africa. And I did not think of that.

And, if you forgot or missed last week’s episode, Justin is referring to me saying that the King of Senegal wanted to buy Annie from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show when it toured Europe, to come and kill tigers plaguing his country.

I looked back into this, and this incorrect detail is listed in SO MANY Oakley sources. It’s listed on pbs.org, Mental Floss dot com, true west magazine dot com - often a great site for wild west figures, encyclopeida dot com, an Annie Oakley feature in Ohio Memory dot ohio history dot org, and in so many books.

Doing further digging, I found an excerpt Annie’s husband Frank Butler wrote in a journal in Paris in 1890, on the Annie Oakley Center Foundation, and he wrote that the King of Senegal proposed purchasing her for 100,000 francs and taking her home to “exterminate the wild beasts within his domain.” https://www.facebook.com/annieoakleycenterfoundation/photos/ annie-and-the-king-of-senegal-a-snippet-from-the-new-book-one- or-two-eyes-open-a/1502697259840421/

Somehow, “wild beasts” became “tigers”, and then that detail was repeated over and over in various sources.

Good catch Justin. Hail Nimrod!

2. Now an update for super sack Zander Nowicki that also could pertain to last week’s Suck. Zander writes:

Hey I absolutely love your podcast. It has helped me and is helping me through depression right now.

I’m not writing this to tell you how you’re helping me though, I’m here to help you real quick.

I am 1/4 Native American and 1/4 your favorite people the Polish but the native part is what matters.

In a past suck you said Indians and since it was old I left it alone, but a recent suck you said native Indians if I’m remembering correctly.

While this does not offend me for I haven’t had to deal with the racism natives encounter for I look all white. But my ancestors and my father have though, and they hate being called Indian.

I am not upset you have said Indians for it is what was taught in school back then, and America is known for a racist past.

For the natives that do go thought the racism and poverty on reservations, please refer to them as native Americans. If you don’t, the next time you refer to them I’ll just assume you haven’t seen this and I won’t hold it against you, for you do bring a smile on my face everyday.

Long live Bojangles and long live you and your family mr. sucker.

Also my last name is pronounced exactly how it looks no-wiki

Zander! Thanks for writing in, man. Gives me a chance to explain my lingo choice.

A long while back, in the Chief Crazy Horse Suck, I looked into the proper nomenclature for referring to the collective body of various indigenous North American tribes.

And unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of agreement when it comes to Native American versus what I ended up going with, American Indian.

Some tribal members and those descended from tribal remembers prefer Native American and hate American Indian. Others prefer American Indian and hate Native American.

I went with American Indian thanks to the feed back of earlier listeners and due to what I read on a few articles on the web.

What I really try to do, is refer to the tribe when possible. I know it’s better to say that so-and-so is Lakota or Comanche or Navajo or Inuit instead of either Native American OR American Indian. Sometimes, descriptive-wise, it’s just a bit clunky to do that.

I say all this to let you know - I mean no offense. And that I have looked into it. And that, I’m trying to do my best.

Thank you again, Zander!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/09/american-indian-vs- native-american.html https://www.oprahmag.com/life/a34485478/native-american-vs- american-indian-meaning/

3. Now let’s here from top shelf sack, Xavier Haskins. Xavier writes:

Hey master sucker,

Just wanted to reach out and send a quick and well deserved Fuuuuuuuck you for that George the Poodle storyline rant this week on the suck. I was praying for the end to that poor dog’s misery and you put and end to it just as you revealed you created it.

My relief did not suppress my rage for justice and this email is my attempt to quench that thirst. So yeah fuck you and thanks for suckin.

Xavier

Haha! I literally forgot I did said all that when I first read your email, Xavier. I hope you not feel healed from the mental trauma making you think that Frank Butler shot the fuck out of his beloved poodle over and over. Haha!

Still can’t believe that he and Annie shot apples of their dog’s head over and over. Still think that’s insane.

4. Quite shoutout request not from Cummins Law victim Jason Molenaar. Jason writes:

Dan, you mustachioed mush mouthed, MOTHERRR fucking minister of Triple M!

I got Cummins Law'd at work today with your Annie Oakley suck.

I was preparing food when all of a sudden you yelled "STUPID IMMIGRANTS!"

Needless to say, my face went beet red and every single eye was on me as I scrambled to pause the episode. Everyone that I work with immigrated to Canada.

I would really appreciate if you could give a shout out to my brothers Andrew and Luke - I lost the game, and my buddy Dylan - who got me into the suck. Sorry for the long email - not really, happy to hear that your family is on the mend from covid - yes, even your Polish wife, Lynze.

Sincerely, your loyal Space Lizard in the frozen North, Jason Molenaar

Thank you, Jason!

I hope you were able to explain to your coworkers how I was being completely absurd when I said what I said and how I am very pro-immigrant.

And yes - shout out to Andrew and Luke - and thanks Dylan for bringing Jason into the fold.

And thank you Jason for the recovery wishes. We’re all doing great right now.

And good news about Covid - the first 6.4 million doses of Pfizer’s new fast-tracked vaccine, apparently 95% effective against Covid 19, may start being disbursed around the US in mid-December. If that happens, I’m sure it will be quickly followed up in Canada and around the world.

Hail Nimrod!

5. Now let’s leave with an introduction to yet another new conspiracy theory growing out there on the web. I’ll let Funny Sucker James Needham induce your groans and eye rolls. James writes:

Forget holocaust deniers. Forget those who don't believe we landed on the moon. Wyoming Deniers are the new kids in town.

Hail Nimrod and hello master sucker,

I just wanted to write in and suggest this mind-bogglingly brainless conspiracy theory as one of your future topics. Apparently there's a whole gaggle of geniuses that don't believe the entire state of Wyoming exists. Have you been there? No. Have you met anyone from there? No. Well, it must not be a thing then. Is that really all there is to their logic?

Below is a link to an AP story to get you started. There's also an entire subreddit dedicated to this nonsense (/ rWyomingdoesntexist). Anyway, I'd love to hear your take on these folks. Seemed like it might be up your alley.

Thanks for all you do. Love the show. It makes my hour commute each morning a little more bearable.

-- James Needham

James! Thank you and uh, WOW. First Australia’s not real and now this!

Pretty funny. I have family in and around Sheridan, Wyoming. I have been there. Many times. And my uncle who lives there is a huge conspiracy theorist. I wonder if he now questions his own existence.

I looked into this and yeah, around 25,000 people on reddit seem to believe that Wyoming is not real.

NOW I understand why I don’t have a lot of listeners there!

Some are clearly joking, but of course, others are clearly not.

I found a post on reddit with the most popular reasons for Wyoming not being real. Some of these are jokes, some - maybe not.

(1)It has a population supposedly smaller than Baltimore. No way it's real.

(2)The National parks are just obstructions built by Teddy Roosevelt in 1908 to convince people it's real. (3)Wyoming is really a government lie just like the moon landings

(4)When Regan killed all the birds in 1986 they were rebuilt in Wyoming.

(5)The government is building the oil pipeline in North Dakota becuase Wyoming isn't real, if it was the pipeline would be built.

(6)Wyoming is also allegedly mostly roads, what else has mostly roads around it, Area 51.

(7) The government has the resources to produce images with Wyoming included because they have connections to every major company.

(8)It's just a tool to build a sense of national unity and promote capitalism.

My favorite is number four about the birds. I love that someone is stating that Wyoming isn’t real because fake birds were built there. If they were built there, doesn’t that mean it’s real?

We live in a weird world. Strange days right now. And I think they’ll get stranger before the pendulum swings back the other way like it always seems to do.

Thanks for the messages everyone.

PAUSE TIMESUCKER UPDATES OUTRO

XI.Goodbye! A.Goodbye!:

1.Eleven out of twelve months of 2020 Sucks are in the books. December here we come!

More Bad Productions content coming the rest of the week.

New spooks with Scared to Death late Tuesday night.

Pure silliness with Is We Dumb Wednesday at Noon Pacific Time.

Please don’t pick up hitchhikers this week and torture and kill them. It’s extremely not nice. Maybe just introduce them to a new podcast instead, so you can both keep on sucking.

PRIMARY SOURCES: https://www.gq.com/story/truck-stop-killer-gq-november-2012 https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780312970604/page/278/mode/2up? q=rhoades https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tw/02-29-96/cover.htm https://nonpareilonline.com/news/crime/robert-rhoades-council-bluffs- homegrown-serial-killer/article_fde3e29b- bd8b-5c29-9f03-7b04a039eec8.html https://horrorhistory.net/2020/04/01/the-truck-stop-killer-robert-ben- rhoades-is-arrested/ https://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-trucker-traveling-torture-chamber- admits-murders/story?id=16037743 https://www.deseret.com/2008/6/25/20260246/texas-town-to-try-case- involving-utah-body https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9175140/ Torture-chamber-trucker-sentence-to-life-in-prison.html https://factionary.co/inside-brutal-murders-and-haunting-photos-of- robert-ben-rhoades-the-truck-stop-killer/2/

Books:

The Evil That Men Do by Stephan G Michaud and Roy Hazelwood and

The Truck Stop Killer by Ana Benson and

Roadside Prey by Alva Busch

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XII.Idiots of the Internet

A.Today’s Video:

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