Part 26 (1/2)

Eventually, Debra did acquiesce to Rhoades's insistence that they try group s.e.x. ”He was my Prince Charming,” she explains. ”He rescued me. He was going to fix everything, and make it okay. My whole life had been a disaster. I was willing to do this for him.”

There were limits, however.

She agreed one Halloween to attend a costume party as a dominatrix, leading Bob, her collared s.e.x slave, on a chain.

”We won first place,” she says.

But she vehemently refused any more radical s.e.xual experimentation. Bob wanted to introduce bondage into their s.e.x life, and sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic devices, such as nipple clamps.

”He'd bring those things home and I'd tell him to get them out of my d.a.m.n house.”

One day, an odd-looking stranger appeared at the front door and announced that he was the love slave Bob had ordered for her. Debra hardly knew how to respond, except to shove her visitor back out the door, telling him there'd been some sort of mistake.

Bob read a lot of books and magazines, much of it violent p.o.r.nography, which Debra found hidden around the house, along with the enormous phone-s.e.x bills that Rhoades ran up.

She also began to sense that Rhoades connected s.e.x to violence and pain in ways she could not previously have guessed. When she developed sick headaches, he sometimes would lie down with her, just to watch Debra suffer. When she was diagnosed with lupus and hospitalized, her evident pain and discomfort s.e.xually aroused him. Once, Rhoades climbed into Debra's hospital bed to have s.e.x with her.

Her first halfhearted attempt to break free came in late 1986, when Bob was on the road in his rig for three straight months. ”I found out that I could make it on my own,” she says. ”I didn't need any help.”

She began to signal her independence during phone calls with Bob, sounding less meek and more self-a.s.sured. Not coincidentally, Debra believes, an avalanche of love letters started arriving from Rhoades.

Bob was highly sensitive to her moods when he chose to be.

”It's true there are other things in my life,” read one letter he sent from the road, ”but for the life of me I can no longer find any value in them without your warmth; the nights are dark without your fire.”

”I guess he felt like he was losing me,” says Debra. ”He came home and we got married in two days, on Valentine's.”

She stayed with him for two and a half more years.

”His thing was control. It drove me nuts. Even when we had s.e.x he never lost control. He could drink all night and never get drunk. He never lost control.”

Rhoades spent a year off the road, recovering from bone graft surgery to repair an arm he'd broken in an industrial accident.

Debra remembers him coming out of surgery, groggy from anesthesia, but collected enough to yank the IV tube from his arm.

”I had to sit with him in the hospital to make sure he didn't do it again,” she recalls.

”He refused even to take pain medicine, because he was afraid of losing control.”

It was a night in October 1989 when Rhoades finally stepped over the line. Bob demanded a.n.a.l s.e.x. Debra refused him. So he raped her.

”He really lost it,” Debra says. ”He beat the h.e.l.l out of me.

”I got up and looked him in the eye and said, 'Are you through?'

”He said, 'Yeah,' and went in the living room.

”I'd been sleeping with a baseball bat underneath my bed for a while. I went and got it and walked out and hit him in the arm.

”Then I said, 'Now I'm through,' and I packed my bags and left. After I slammed the door, I could hear him breaking things in the house.”

Debra believed she'd cut the cord, hardly realizing that in some ways her trials hadn't yet begun.

About a year later there came a telephone call from Arizona. It was Bob. As Debra would learn, her ex-husband had been parked in his rig on the shoulder of Interstate 10 in Casa Grande, south of Phoenix, when a patrol officer happened along. Concerned that the big truck was stopped too close to traffic, the policeman pulled out his flashlight and climbed up to the cab, expecting to find the trucker asleep.

Instead, he discovered Bob Rhoades in the rig's sleeping compartment with a young girl, who was nude and crying uncontrollably. There was a horse bridle strapped to her neck, with a long chain attached to the bit. The hysterical teenager was handcuffed, too, and there were red whip marks on her back. When she saw the policemen, she burst into screams.

This incident was going to cost Rhoades six years or more in an Arizona prison. But much more serious jeopardy prompted his call to Debra. He asked her to rush to his Houston apartment and clean the place up, throw everything out.

The authorities, however, beat her to it. They already had tossed Bob's place, where they discovered evidence suggesting that the incident in Arizona was not isolated.

Far from it.

They found women's underwear, articles of clothing and shoes and jewelry, violent p.o.r.nography, and a giant d.i.l.d.o. The police recovered a single handcuff, too, an ominous mystery. How had it been snapped from its mate?

Rhoades obviously had been busy. There was a bondage rack in the apartment, too, and nearby a white towel drenched in blood.

Also recovered in Rhoades's apartment were several sets of photographs of a young girl, who turned out to be Regina Kay Walters of Houston. Walters had vanished in February 1990, several months after Debra walked out on Rhoades.

The teenager's desiccated remains were found in late September 1990, hundreds of miles away in an old barn near Greenfield, Illinois. She'd been strangled with a piece of wire twisted around her neck fourteen times, one twist for every year of her life.

Rhoades's photos sorted into several groups. The first pictures were nudes of Regina. She was chained inside his truck cab. Her hair had been cut, and she was handcuffed. There was a choke chain around her neck. He had shaved Regina's pubic hair, too, and pierced her c.l.i.toris with a ring, also attached to a chain.

The second group of photos, taken out of doors, depicted the girl, both dressed and undressed, in a variety of poses. Her fingernails and toenails were painted bright red, and she was wearing bright red lipstick, too.

In the final set of pictures, evidently taken in the old barn just before he murdered her, Regina's eyes express exactly the same silent, frozen terror that Harvey Glatman's victims had in his photos more than thirty years before.

Like Glatman, Bob Rhoades scared his victim half to death, then killed her.

He was extradited from Arizona to Illinois, where he pleaded guilty to the Walters murder. He was given a life sentence in Illinois, and is a suspect in a number of other abduction-murders in other states as well.

In the aftermath of her experience with Rhoades and the disclosure of his crimes, Debra fell into a disastrous third marriage, and attempted suicide for a second time.

”I was having a real rough time with it,” she says. ”I was feeling lots and lots of guilt. My way of thinking at the time was that if I'd just stayed with Bob, that young girl would not be dead. It would have been better if I had died. I felt that if I loved this evil man, then / must be an evil person, too.”

As she recovered, she heard from local FBI agent Mark Young that Roy Hazelwood would like to speak with her for a survey he was conducting. Debra agreed to cooperate, and told Hazelwood her story.

”Roy had this big book of questions,” she recollects, ”and he started asking me questions about childhood and about my family. It seemed that once I started talking to him, I finally could talk about it. No one ever wanted to listen before.

”And the whole time he kept rea.s.suring me that I was a victim, that it wasn't my fault, that I didn't do anything wrong. The more he made me understand, the better I felt.

”It was so important for me to hear that from him. Roy made me realize what really had gone on, that I wasn't a bad person just because I loved a bad man. Roy gave me the courage to take control of my life.”

Debra regularly speaks on spousal abuse to audiences in the Houston area. She also counsels physically and s.e.xually abused women. The last thing she heard about Bob Rhoades was that he'd developed colon cancer.

”And when I heard that I just busted up laughing,” she remembers. ”Mark Young asked me, 'Debbie, are you all right?'

”I said,' Yeah, I'm fine!'

” 'Why are you laughing?'