hitchhiking and he was driving, we would both have struggled with some of the same challenges—sleep deprivation and the hypnotic dullness of going through identical locations over and over, a world constructed of boredom and violence. And while I was getting more adept at survival, he was very likely getting more adept at killing. We both had our own systems, our own rituals, and our own beliefs about what people were really like and how they acted under pressure.
I’d put off writing to Rhoades, mostly because I didn’t want him to write me back. The time had come to do it anyway. Mark Young said Rhoades likes to feel like an expert and that I should ask him to “educate” me, so while writing my letter I used permissive language, saying I wanted him “to teach me what I did right and what I did wrong” when I was traveling. Knowing the capacity of his sadism made this unbearable. Rhoades didn’t live a double life as much as a shadowed one. There’s a picture of him in leather and chains that floats around the Internet. It’s actually from a Halloween party in Houston where he went as a “slave,” led on a chain by his wife, who was dressed as a dominatrix.
Debra Davis and Rhoades met in the early ’80s at a Houston bar called Chipkikkers. Rhoades was dressed that night as an airline pilot, and it was months before Davis found out he wasn’t one. The remarkable thing is that when she did, she didn’t dump him. But Rhoades was cunning and highly charismatic. When the FBI extradited him to Illinois, he was able to get a phone number off a waitress while shackled hand and foot and wearing an orange prison suit. This obviously doesn’t recommend the waitress’s judgment, but at least some of the credit has to go to Rhoades.
I finally got to Davis through Agent Young. He sent me a text just as I was leaving Texas saying that “Debbie” was ready to talk. I called as soon as I landed. Today Davis lives in College Station, Texas, and her kids, the product of a previous marriage, are grown. She occasionally speaks on domestic violence at conferences and in classrooms at A&M. She’s tried to put the years with Rhoades behind her but still gets letters from him sporadically. Sometimes they’re threatening, sometimes cajoling, but always manipulative.
According to her, in the summer of 1985 Rhoades was driving for a trucking company based in Georgia that had an office right on I-95. I ran my story past her. When I got to the part about the sudden switch in his behavior, she got excited. “That’s him! That’s exactly like him!” she said. She also said Rhoades often left his gun at home in the beginning and could have used a knife. There were other points where she saw similarities and would say, “That sounds like Bob,” but these were less emphatic, and it was hard to tell what she really thought. Like Young and Lee, she had never heard of the Laughing Death Society, and since it had featured so strongly in my experience, I thought it salient.
“Don’t you think that fact starts to rule him out?”
“Oh no, not at all!” she said. “Bob was fascinated by secret societies.”
Davis mentioned the case of Colleen Stan, a twenty-year-old hitchhiker who had been kidnapped in 1977 by a couple who tortured her and kept her as a sex slave for seven years while she slept in a box under their bed. Eventually she was left unbound. They kept her from running away by convincing her that a secret society called the Company would find her and bring her back. “Bob was obsessed with how they used an imaginary secret society to keep her from running away,” Davis said.
It made sense. As a true sexual sadist, Rhoades would have been interested in a level of submission requiring no chains. He’d told Shana Holts to “sit there and be a good girl.” Regina Walters had been seen in Chicago standing freely outside his truck in a public place.
“Do you remember what he was wearing?” Davis asked
I’d put off writing to Rhoades, mostly because I didn’t want him to write me back. The time had come to do it anyway. Mark Young said Rhoades likes to feel like an expert and that I should ask him to “educate” me, so while writing my letter I used permissive language, saying I wanted him “to teach me what I did right and what I did wrong” when I was traveling. Knowing the capacity of his sadism made this unbearable. Rhoades didn’t live a double life as much as a shadowed one. There’s a picture of him in leather and chains that floats around the Internet. It’s actually from a Halloween party in Houston where he went as a “slave,” led on a chain by his wife, who was dressed as a dominatrix.
Debra Davis and Rhoades met in the early ’80s at a Houston bar called Chipkikkers. Rhoades was dressed that night as an airline pilot, and it was months before Davis found out he wasn’t one. The remarkable thing is that when she did, she didn’t dump him. But Rhoades was cunning and highly charismatic. When the FBI extradited him to Illinois, he was able to get a phone number off a waitress while shackled hand and foot and wearing an orange prison suit. This obviously doesn’t recommend the waitress’s judgment, but at least some of the credit has to go to Rhoades.
I finally got to Davis through Agent Young. He sent me a text just as I was leaving Texas saying that “Debbie” was ready to talk. I called as soon as I landed. Today Davis lives in College Station, Texas, and her kids, the product of a previous marriage, are grown. She occasionally speaks on domestic violence at conferences and in classrooms at A&M. She’s tried to put the years with Rhoades behind her but still gets letters from him sporadically. Sometimes they’re threatening, sometimes cajoling, but always manipulative.
According to her, in the summer of 1985 Rhoades was driving for a trucking company based in Georgia that had an office right on I-95. I ran my story past her. When I got to the part about the sudden switch in his behavior, she got excited. “That’s him! That’s exactly like him!” she said. She also said Rhoades often left his gun at home in the beginning and could have used a knife. There were other points where she saw similarities and would say, “That sounds like Bob,” but these were less emphatic, and it was hard to tell what she really thought. Like Young and Lee, she had never heard of the Laughing Death Society, and since it had featured so strongly in my experience, I thought it salient.
“Don’t you think that fact starts to rule him out?”
“Oh no, not at all!” she said. “Bob was fascinated by secret societies.”
Davis mentioned the case of Colleen Stan, a twenty-year-old hitchhiker who had been kidnapped in 1977 by a couple who tortured her and kept her as a sex slave for seven years while she slept in a box under their bed. Eventually she was left unbound. They kept her from running away by convincing her that a secret society called the Company would find her and bring her back. “Bob was obsessed with how they used an imaginary secret society to keep her from running away,” Davis said.
It made sense. As a true sexual sadist, Rhoades would have been interested in a level of submission requiring no chains. He’d told Shana Holts to “sit there and be a good girl.” Regina Walters had been seen in Chicago standing freely outside his truck in a public place.
“Do you remember what he was wearing?” Davis asked
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