The Murder of Regina Kay Walters

Fourteen-year-old Regina Kay Walters left home with her boyfriend. She was last seen at her mother’s apartment in Pasadena, Texas, on 3 February 1990. In March, an unidentified man began calling her father.

1. Regina in the barn

According to a 1996 Tucson Weekly report, the caller said he had cut Regina’s hair. The calls were traced to Oklahoma City and Ennis, Texas; Rhoades’s trucking logs later placed him in those cities on the same days.

In April 1990, near Casa Grande, Arizona, a highway patrol officer stopped beside a truck parked on the shoulder of the road. Inside its sleeping compartment, he found a naked woman chained up and alive. The driver, Robert Ben Rhoades, was arrested. Regina’s notebook was found in his truck.

A search of Rhoades’s Houston apartment produced women’s clothing, restraints and photographs of several women. Among them were pictures of Regina in the truck and beside a wooden building. Some of the clothing found in the apartment resembled what she wore in the photographs. The connection between these pictures and the missing girl was established later.

2. Regina before her disappearance

Regina’s body was found on 29 September 1990 in an abandoned barn near Interstate 70 in Bond County, Illinois. She had been strangled with a wire ligature. Her killer’s employment records placed him on that stretch of highway in February or March.

In 1991, FBI agents Mark Young and Bob Lee connected photographs from Rhoades’s apartment to Regina’s case. As they told Tucson Weekly, her father recognized his daughter in the pictures. Experts confirmed that the barn in the photographs was the one where her body had been found.

The Thought Catalog article describes the barn photographs as having been taken minutes before Regina’s death. The court opinion does not establish that interval. The charge placed the murder between 3 February and 17 March 1990; 29 September was the date her body was found.

Prosecutors announced that they intended to seek the death penalty for Regina’s murder. On 11 September 1992, Rhoades pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and received a life sentence without parole. He later challenged his sentence and tried to withdraw his plea. On 13 July 2001, the Illinois Appellate Court affirmed the trial court’s judgment.

On 26 March 2012, Rhoades pleaded guilty to two more murders: those of Patricia Walsh and her husband, Douglas Scott Zyskowski. The Ozona Stockman, citing a statement from the district attorney’s office, reported that a Texas court imposed two additional life sentences. ABC News quoted the prosecutor on the terms of the agreement. The sentences were to be served consecutively after his Illinois sentence; the agreement included a waiver of parole.

3. Robert Ben Rhoades