Serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades reportedly killed as many as 50 women between 1975 and 19990. It could’ve been one more if not Vasessa Veselka, then a teenager, had been able to escape. In a piece for GQ, Vanessa now writes about the escape from Rhoades and reveals the chilling thing he did when they stood face-to-face.
In the summer of 1985, Vanessa Veselka, then 15, found herself in Ohio while hitchhiking. She had been riding with one individual, but when she was at a truck stop, a teenage hitchhiker was pulled from a dumpster there.
Days later, Veselka was picked up by another trucker, Robert Ben Rhoades. At that time, she didn’t know he was a serial killer who reportedly had killed 50 women between 1975 and 1990.
He got the name “Truck Stop Killer,” as his victims often were hitchhikers or young women alone at the stops. In a 2012 piece for GQ, Vanessa recalled the chilling encounter with Rhoades.
“I don’t remember much about him except that he was taller and leaner than most truckers and didn’t wear jeans or T-shirts,” she wrote. He wore a cotton button-down with the sleeves rolled neatly up over his biceps and had the cleanest cab I ever saw. He must have seemed okay, or I wouldn’t have gotten in the truck with him.”
At first, things were fine. But “once out on the road,” Vanessa wrote,” he changed. Rhoades stopped responding to her questions and “grew taller in his seat.”
Vanessa Veselka escaped the “Truck Stop Killer”
“Then he started talking about the dead girl in the Dumpster and asked me if I’d ever heard of the Laughing Death Society. ‘We laugh at death,’ he told me,” Vanesa Veselka wrote.
Just minutes later, the Truck Stop Killer stopped by the road, where he took out a hunting knife. Veselka recalled how he took out a hunting knife and told her to get into the back of the cab.
“I knew in my body that it was over. Then he said one word: Run. Without looking back, I ran into the woods and hid. I stayed there until I saw the truck pull onto the interstate. It was getting dark. I was still in shock, so I walked back out to the same road and started hitching south. I never went to the police and didn’t tell anyone for years,” Veselka wrote in GQ.
In April 1990, Rhoades was caught by police in Arizona. He was charged with aggravated assault, sexual assault, and unlawful imprisonment. Later, he was found guilty of killing 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters. He was sentenced to life behind bars and has no possibility of parole.
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