14 year old Regina Kay Walters. Robert ben rhodes - foreign maniacs - maniacs archive - maniacs and serial killers. John Lennon and his killer Mark David Chapman

A snapshot that went down in history as "The Most Beautiful Suicide."

Evelyn McHale committed suicide by jumping from the Empire State Building. Nearby photographer Robert Wiles captured McHale's body falling onto a UN limousine. Before committing suicide, McHale left her fiancé. Her suicide note read: “He will be better off without me. I couldn't be a good wife to anyone. "

Regina Kay Walters.

This photograph of 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters was taken by serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades, who was later caught driving a wagon with a torture chamber in its trailer. Before taking this photo, Rhodes cut his victim's hair and forced her to wear a dress and high-heeled shoes, and then killed her in a barn in Illinois.

Tyler Hadley, 17, wanted to throw a party, but his parents were at home, so he beat them both to death with a hammer. He hid the corpses, put things in order and invited guests, while the bodies of his parents remained in the house. This photo was taken the night after the murder, when Tyler confessed to his friend Max (left).

Pulitzer Prize-winning photo by Kevin Carter.

South African photographer Kevin Carter worked in Sudan during the 1993 famine. The picture shows a child dying of hunger, crawling towards the center of the food distribution, while a vulture prowls nearby, waiting for an easy prey. Carter was unable to approach the children due to the threat of infection. Three months after the Pulitzer Prize ceremony, 33-year-old Carter committed suicide, unable to bear the painful memories.

Travis Alexander.

The last photo of Travis Alexander taken by his ex-girlfriend Jodi Arias before his murder. She came to his house and, while they were fooling around, photographed him several times. Travis' body was found in the bathroom five days later with 27 stab wounds, a slit throat and a bullet in the head.

The cult of the "Heavenly Gates".

On March 26, 1997, 39 followers of the Heaven's Gate cult committed suicide, believing that their souls would be delivered to Comet Hale-Bopp in a spaceship. The founder of the cult, Marshall Applewhite, convinced them that soon the Earth would be cleansed by aliens, so they must leave this world.

Blanche Monier was held captive for 24 years in a room where she had to live among her own feces. She was discovered in 1901 when someone told police her whereabouts. The woman has not seen sunlight for 24 years.

Filipino politician Reinaldo Dagsa photographed his family during the New Years celebrations. His killer also got into the frame. It turned out to be a car thief that Dagsa once hid behind bars.

"Temple of the Nations".

American preacher Jim Jones founded the religious movement "Temple of the Nations", which went down in history as the most massive suicide. 918 adherents of the cult committed suicide by poisoning with cyanide.

Dean Corll.

Dean Corll was nicknamed Lollipop for constantly distributing candy to the neighborhood kids. He was one of the most brutal serial killers in history. Between 1970 and 1973, Corll raped and killed at least 28 boys. He had two accomplices, one of whom shot him. This picture was found among his personal belongings. The boy from this photo was never identified, which makes one think that there were much more than 28 victims of the maniac.

John Lennon and his killer Mark David Chapman.

Chapman killed Lennon just hours after this photo was taken. When Chapman was asked why he did it, he replied, "I thought I would get his fame."

This picture was taken two weeks before the Columbine High School massacre in which 12 students and one teacher were shot dead. In the upper left corner, you can see two schoolchildren who imitate shooting at the camera. Many see this gesture as a terrible prophecy.

Photo taken in the gas chamber in Auschwitz, Poland.

This picture was taken minutes before the Omeh terrorist attack in Northern Ireland. The explosive device was planted in the red car you see in this picture. The explosion, orchestrated by the Genuine Irish Republican Army, killed 29 people. The father and son captured in this photograph survived.

The last self-portrait taken by Christopher McCandless before he left for the uninhabited part of Alaska. Shortly after this picture was taken, hunters found McCandless's body in an abandoned bus. As it turned out later, the traveler was poisoned by the root of a poisonous plant.

Robert Ben Rhodes(born Robert Ben Rhoades; born November 22, 1945) is a serial killer. He killed at least three people between 1989 and 1990, but investigators were able to prove only one fact that Patricia Candice Walsh was killed. Before killing his victims, he brutally tortured and raped them in his truck, which he equipped with a special torture room. Rhodes' travel and killer streak is the subject of Alva Busch's book Roadside Prey, who personally conducted his own investigation. Alva Bush wrote a book about Rhodes almost ten years after the events had passed, by which time Rhodes was already behind bars.

Robert Ben Rhodes in custody

Date of Birth:

Profession:

Truck driver (trucker)

Motive:

Rape / Torture

Number of victims:

Killing period:

1989 - 1990

Date of arrest:

Method of killing:

Choke / Pistol Shooting

Crime scene:

Texas, Illinois, USA

Status:

Life imprisonment

Rhodes is a former truck driver. Investigators believe that a torture room was set up in the cab of his truck, in which he brutally and systematically tortured the women he had in captivity before killing them.

Robert Ben Rhodes

To be honest, an article in Tucson Weekly in 1996 contained lines from which the blood runs cold. A police investigator said that in early 1990, Rhodes kidnapped and killed an average of three women a month. He always had a briefcase with objects for torture with him on the road, according to the information in the article. The exact number of casualties is still unknown.

Alva Bush believes that Rhodes roamed the roads for years, using his truck to satisfy his lust by torturing and killing people. His bloody journey ended one day in 1990 when an Arizona police officer stopped to investigate a truck parked on the highway with its headlights on.

Alva Bush: “When the officer climbed onto the step to look inside the truck, he saw a woman in handcuffs in the cockpit with a horse bit in her mouth. A police officer arrested Rhodes and rescued a woman who had been held captive on the highway for days.

Scott Zyskowski

In 1990, 25-year-old Patricia Candice Walsh and her husband, Douglas Scott Zyskowski, both from Seattle, were hitchhiking in Texas when Rhodes picked them up on the road. Prosecutors believe he killed Ziskovsky and dumped his body in January 1990 in Texas. Utah officials believe that for the next seven days, Walsh was held captive by Rhodes before he shot her with multiple shots and buried her body.

A month after Walsh's death, Rhodes took on 14-year-old Regina Walters and Ricky Lee Jones, a Texas couple in love. He killed Walters in Illinois and was later convicted of the crime. On September 11, 1992, Rhodes pleaded guilty to first degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison. Jones' body was never found.

Walsh's body was found almost a year later by a farmer and deer hunter who discovered a decomposed corpse 22 miles south of Fillmore in October 1990, having been dead for several months when he was found. Examination revealed through dental records that it was 14-year-old Regina Walters of Pasadena, Texas, who was last seen in February 1990 near Houston with her boyfriend, Ricky Lee Johnson.

Even after the body was found, Walsh was considered unknown for 13 years, and her remains were kept in the Millard County Sheriff's basement. But through a set of random circumstances, Millard's detectives were finally able to identify and establish her identity in 2003. Then 59-year-old Robert Ben Rhodes was linked to DNA.

After Walsh was identified, the next step in the investigation went much faster. The police have found enough evidence to link Rhodes the git with crime. By then, Rhodes was already serving a life sentence in Illinois for murder.

The last photo of 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters before she was killed by Robert Ben Rhodes.

This painting was the key piece of evidence and evidence. In the photo above, the man behind the camera is serial killer Robert Ben Rhodes, filming one of his victims moments before she takes her last breath.

The very bloody story of Rhodes was completed on April 1, 1990, in Arizona, when police stumbled upon a semi-trailer of Rhodes' truck while he was torturing another woman. He was convicted and sent to prison. But before he was to be released in Arizona, officials in Illinois "filed" their business. Rhodes was sent to Illinois, where he stood trial and was again found guilty and convicted.

It's no secret that it is naive and unsafe to expect anything good from killer maniacs. Inner demons whisper wild and terrible things in their heads. Although nothing human is alien to them - to treat a little boy with candy and stroke his fair-haired head, before torturing him to death and cutting him into pieces. Or take a photo of the victim as a souvenir, not yet suspecting that this picture will be her farewell.

In general, the killers take photos of their victims quite often. Like a hunter, for whom aerobatics capture the still living “game” for history on their own camera, the maniacs fervently click the shutter, so that later, looking through the printed silent testimonies of their inhuman actions, again, with a tremor of delight, revel in their own power over the fate of the unfortunate victim ... However, there is undoubtedly the benefit of such posturing - and the evidence base after the capture of the scoundrels is wider, and the relatives of the victims get the opportunity to absolutely know the truth about the last hours of the life of their missing loved ones.

What kind of photos from the masters of pain and horror are present in the piggy bank of forensic science today? Let's take a look at some of them.

Rodney Alcala - hippie killer with a camera

The widest collection of photographs of victims belongs to the amateur photographer and part-time American strangler Rodney Alcala, who committed excesses from 1971 to 1979 and took the lives of seven people according to proven articles. Given the abundance of pictures, the estimated number of victims of the Dating Game Assassin can reach 130 people! An elderly photographer with the appearance of a good-natured hippie offered the future victim a photo session, then playfully handcuffed or stunned him with a piece of steel rail, and then strangled him. I revived and choked again. And so for several hours, each time gazing intently into the eyes of his victim, from which the spark of life slowly escaped.

Like many American serials, Alcala was arrested several times, but it was only at the very end of the seventies of the last century that he could stop his successful “harvest” for decades. A non-human sentenced to death several times, one of whose victims was cynically raped with a nail hammer, was released due to the casual features of the US legal system and received a final sentence only in 2010 (!)

Due to the current moratorium on the death penalty, he is still alive and does not deny himself the attention of journalists and assorted fabulous biographers in the Washington prison.

John Wayne Gacy - a clown who loved to be photographed with victims

You should not severely condemn people suffering from Coulrophobia - the fear of clowns. Perhaps they have good reasons for this, given by gay, rapist and killer clown in one bottle, John Wayne Gacy. This sick bastard came up with a stage image for himself, perfect to disguise his inclinations as charity events, discreetly approaching his future victims. On account of the bloody "circus performer" more than thirty young men, whom he raped and strangled.

A cheerful children's clown named Pogo has repeatedly advertised young people for unskilled construction contract work. The careless victim was stunned, tied up and became the object of sexual games with a fatal ending. Once, convinced of the complete failure of law enforcement agencies and his own impunity, Gacy lured two young men to his home. The clown buried them with enthusiasm and imagination, in a pose 69, putting a member of his brother in misfortune in each of his mouths.

The seventies of the last century in the United States turned out to be very productive for serials. Gacy, who took his life from 1972 to 1978, was nevertheless executed in May 1994 by injecting "death serum" into a vein.

Arnold Corll - Last Photo for Candy

And again the seventies. From 1970 to 1973, the owner of a confectionery factory in Houston Haight fed free chocolates to about thirty male children and adolescents under 20. None of them endured such generosity - once they got to Arnold Corll's home, the victims were tortured, abused, and then raped. For the finale of the boring evening, Col's accomplices - David Owen Brusk and Elmer Wayne Henley Jr., who also participated in the orgy, helped strangle the unfortunate, or shot them in the head with a .22 caliber pistol.

A photograph of a child handcuffed next to a torture toolbox demonstrates the horror and despair of the victim, who realized the disastrous situation in which she was not lucky enough to find herself.

Robert Ben Rhodes - Truck photographer

A photo of 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters floated around the world as the final death-image of a young slender brunette in love who fell victim to Robert Ben Rhodes, a serial Texas killer who worked as a truck driver.

Rhodes even equipped a special torture chamber in his truck, which he used several times from 89 to 90 of the last century. The exact number of victims of the driver of "Hell on Wheels" is not known - experts who studied Rhodes' routes believe that he killed about three times a month.

Rhodes was detained by accident by a policeman who decided to check a suspicious truck on the side of the road. This saved the last victim of the maniac, hobbled, with a horse bit in his mouth, which Rhodes had raped over the past few days. Regina was so unlucky.

Harvey Murray Glutman - camera nerd

Another “professional” photographer who created deadly collages with photo models who dream of getting on the cover of a detective novel. Strangled after repeated rape of four girls with an ordinary household rope, the bespectacled photographer still kept his word - the photographs of the victims fell into the hands of detectives, however, the girls themselves would hardly have arranged such an ending.

Taking advantage of the powerlessness of the victims, Harvey raped the victim at gunpoint, took another photograph, then raped again, receiving ecstasy from the horror and pain of a helpless beauty. The murderer with a camera managed to commit three murders in a row, but the next chosen victim kicks the puny photo esthete, takes the pistol and hands the villain into the hands of the cops who have arrived on call. In November 1958, the district court gives the talented paparazzi plenty of breath of stale air in the gas chamber, and the photos of his several victims will forever add to the archives of the world's forensic scientists.

As if killing young men and women were not enough, maniac Robert Ben Rhodes photographed his victims before dying, capturing a truly nightmarish shot for history, which is impossible to watch without shuddering.

Driving along the endless American roads from the west coast to the east, the trucker has been harvesting his bloody crop for fifteen years, killing an average of one to three women a month and invariably hiding from justice. As was the case in Martin McDonn's recent wonderful film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, when the killer picks up a future victim on the side of the road, promising to give a ride to the desired destination, then does his cruel business and calmly leaves the crime scene without fear of prosecution , because his truck appeared in these places for the first and last time in his life.

Serial Killer Robert Ben Rhodes

Regina Walters and Robert Ben Rhodes

Photo of a killer truck

Photo of the interior of the assassin's truck

Interesting articles

In the cab of his death truck, the maniac set up a torture chamber, where he gave free rein to his monstrous nature. It was here that justice overtook the criminal, and it happened quite by accident. God only knows how many innocent people would have suffered at the hands of a killer photographer, if policeman Mike Miller of the Arizona Highway Patrol Service did not suspect that something was wrong on an April evening in 1990, as he drove past a truck parked on the side of the road. The officer approached the car, looked inside and saw a terrible picture, which he probably will not forget until the end of his days. Miller pointed a pistol at the suspect and called for reinforcements.

Thus ended the story of the murders of Robert Ben Rhodes and began a long investigation that continues to this day, acquiring new ominous details.

Regina Walters - victim of a maniac

Rhoads received his life sentence for the murder of Regina Walters, but over time confessed to several more murders, and then the investigation guessed to compare the cargo transportation diary of a maniac trucker with the approximate location of the disappearance of persons listed as missing. Thus, the list of victims of Robert Ben Rhodes has grown to a nightmare number of 50, although some experts tend to think that real figure even worse - more than 100, and the atrocities began back in 1975, when the murderer changed jobs and got behind the wheel of a truck.

Some gruesome deaths have at their disposal unique photographs taken immediately after the incident or shortly before.

"The most beautiful suicide"

Photographer Robert Wiles was accidentally near the Empire State Building in New York, where he captured an ambiguous picture, which was later nicknamed "The Most Beautiful Suicide." Young girl Evelyn McHale took her own life by jumping from the top floors of the building and landing on a UN limousine. In a note left before her death, the deceased said that she had abandoned the groom and that he would be better off without her, since she would not become a good wife for anyone.

Regina Kay Walters

The dying photo of 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters was captured by serial killer Robert Ben Rhodes, who, some time before the murder, put on a dress, shoes and cut off her hair. Shortly after the incident, the police detained the suspect at the wheel of a truck, where a real torture chamber and the very same camera were found in the trailer.

Christopher McCandless

This is the last image that the traveler Christopher McCandless captured himself before heading out to the uninhabited part of Alaska. Very soon, the body of a man was found in an abandoned bus, and an autopsy revealed that McCandless had been poisoned by the root of a poisonous plant he discovered.

Photo by Kevin Carter

A photojournalist from South Africa worked with a camera during the famine in the country in 1993 and captured a truly terrifying picture. In the photo, a small child, emaciated by hunger, crawls to a food distribution point under the scorching sun and is chased by a vulture, which hunts down the available prey. This photo won a Pulitzer Prize, and its creator committed suicide at the age of 33 due to the fact that he could not bear the guilt of not acting in this situation. The fact is that Kevin Carter could not approach the children due to the threat of infection.

Blanche Monier

French woman Blanche Monier was locked in a small windowless room by her own mother for 25 years. Until she was discovered in 1901, she lived in the waste of her own life and did not see the sun.

Reinaldo Dagsa

A politician from the Philippines, during a vacation with his family, photographed them and captured in the photo his own killer, who was already aiming. They, as it turned out later, turned out to be a car thief whom Reinaldo Dagsa had once sent to jail.

John Lennon

The killer of the famous British musician and member of The Beatles, John Lennon, is considered Mark David Chapman, who appeared with the artist in the photo a few hours before the incident. The only thing Chapman said was, "I thought I was going to get his fame."

Columbine High School Massacre

A couple of weeks immediately prior to the Columbine murder in April 1999, a general photograph was obtained of the students, 12 of whom died. Some see the brutal prophecy of this tragedy in the picture in the upper left corner, where several teenagers imitate firing pistols at the camera.

Terrorist attack in Oma

A few minutes before the terrorist attack in Ome, which took place on August 15, 1998 in Northern Ireland, father and son were photographed near the red car, where the explosives were planted. As a result, 29 people died, but the family in the frame survived.