The Best American Essays 2013 Page 8

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

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

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

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

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

  “But a real serial killer wouldn’t have let me go, right?” I asked.

  “Maybe he didn’t think you’d run.”

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

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

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

  No one knows who she is.

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

  “Granddaughter,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Well,” said Lee, sitting back after I finished, “you’re probably right. Look at Lisa Pennal.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Don’t you think that fact starts to rule him out?”

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

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

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

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

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

  The airline pilot’s outfit came to mind.

  “Do you remember what his cab looked like?”

  “Meticulously clean.”

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

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

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

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

  “We don’t have any records,” she told me.

  I thought she meant digitized.

  “I can come down,” I said.

  “We don’t have any records.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “No,” she said.

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

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

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

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