Ever hitchhiked? Would you ever hitchhike? If you're saying yes, you may reconsider.

After listening to today's episode, Robert Ben Rhodes, born in 1945, started driving big rigs

across America's interstates in major highways in the mid-70s, and he seemed to most,

like an unassuming and harmless trucker for the next 15-ish years. The Iowa natives 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 his CB radio, whips and chains. He was not harmless.

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. Rhodes was and still is a deeply fucked-up individual

who sits today in a prison he will 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 50 people between roughly 1975 and

1990, most of them young women and the occasional men they were traveling with,

whom Rhodes 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 his 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 grown tired of toying with them, he dumped their young bodies in

a dumpster or out in the woods, sometimes after shaving their heads in 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 been given the closure of at least knowing that their daughter or son

is dead. A few victims thankfully were identified thanks to very disturbing photographs that Rhodes took.

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