In the summer of 1985, somewhere near Martinsburg, Pennsylvania, the body of a young woman was pulled from a truck-stop Dumpster. I had just hitched a ride and was sitting in a nearby truck waiting for the driver to pay for gas so we could leave. When they found her, there was shouting. A man from the restaurant ran out and started yelling for everyone to stay away as a small crowd gathered around the Dumpster in the rain. Word filtered back that the dead girl was a teenage hitchhiker. I remember thinking it could be me, since I was also a teenage hitchhiker. Watching the driver of my truck walk back across the wet asphalt, a second thought arose: It could be him. He could be the killer. The driver reached the cab, swung up behind the wheel, and said we should get going. He said he didn't want to get caught up in anything time-consuming. Stowing his paperwork, he released the brake. Neither of us said anything about the dead girl. As we pulled away, I looked once more in the side mirror. They were stringing crime tape around the Dumpster just as another state trooper rolled into the lot.

That ride turned out to be fine. We drove up to Ohio drinking Diet Coke and listening to Bruce Springsteen. The trucker bought me lunch and didn't even try to have sex with me, which made him a prince in my world. Several days later, though, heading south on I-95 through the Carolinas, I got picked up by another trucker who was not fine. 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. 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. Once out on the road, though, he changed. He stopped responding to my questions. His bearing shifted. He grew taller in his seat, and his face muscles relaxed into something both arrogant and blank. 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.

A few minutes later, he pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the road by some woods, took out a hunting knife, and told me to get into the back of the cab. I began talking, saying the same things over and over. I said I knew he didn't want to do it. I said it was his choice. I said he could do it in a few minutes. I said it was his choice. I said I wouldn't go to the cops if nothing happened to me, but it was his choice—until he looked at me and I went still. There was going to be no more talking. 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.

This spring a friend sent a news story link about a serial killer with the subject line "Is this your guy?" The serial killer's name was Robert Ben Rhoades. Rhoades was a long-haul trucker, in jail since 1990, who had recently been convicted of a couple of new "cold cases." I didn't recognize him from the initial photos, but as I found pictures of him as a younger man, his face came to seem more familiar. The glasses were the same, the curve of the cheekbone, and something about the expression, particularly the set of the mouth. It had the same neutral arrogance. Rhoades looked like the guy who picked me up. But then, Rhoades looks like a lot of guys. He would only have been 39 at the time, and I remember the trucker as an older man with light brown or graying hair. To a teenager, though, someone pushing 40 is pretty old, and hair often looks darker in photos. The light in my memory is strange, too. It was a cloudy day just before a summer storm, and everything in the truck is cast in gray.

After receiving my friend's e-mail, I left messages with the FBI but was relieved when they were not returned. The memory was twenty-seven years old, and nothing in it was actionable. The photos stayed in my head, though, and with them came questions: What if the man who pulled the knife on me really did murder the hitchhiker? Why did he let me go? Who was the girl in the Dumpster? Why didn't I go to anyone? I needed to understand what my responsibility was and to find my own answers, if nobody else's, so I began to look.

I have no fascination with serial killers, so I didn't realize that Rhoades was famous. There are articles, TV episodes, and books on him—Driven to Kill, Roadside Prey, Killer on the Road—and from these sources I learned that every grim and secret fear I have about the human race is manifest in Robert Ben Rhoades. Rhoades was a sexual sadist. He kidnapped women, tortured and raped them for weeks before killing them. What is known about him in the 1980s is murky. He was involved in the BDSM and swinger scene in his hometown of Houston. He was married. When he was caught, he said that he had been "doing this" for fifteen years, which would put the onset of his murders back into the 1970s. His trucking logs place him in the area of fifty unsolved murders in the three years prior to his arrest alone. While not all fifty cases have been tied to Rhoades yet and Rhoades himself has admitted to only three murders, the FBI has strong reason to believe that at his peak he was killing one to three women a month.

Rhoades was first arrested when an Arizona state trooper found a screaming woman named Lisa Pennal* chained in the back of his cab. He was charged with kidnapping and assault. What put him away for life, though, was the rape and murder of Regina Walters, a 14-year-old girl from Pasadena, Texas. Rhoades picked her up along with her boyfriend, Ricky Jones, in February of 1990. Jones was promptly killed, and his remains were discovered later in Mississippi. Rhoades kept Regina for at least two weeks. He shaved her head and pubic hair, pierced her with fishing hooks, dressed her up in a black dress and heels, and photographed her in moments of terror, then killed her with a garrote made of baling wire, leaving her one-hundred-pound body to decompose in a barn in Illinois off Interstate 70.

Behind the tragic elements of Regina's story, like some kind of pentimento, I saw my own. Like me, she left home with her older boyfriend. Also like me, Regina became dependent upon the grace of truck drivers. In her weeks with Rhoades, many drivers saw her, but somehow no alarm was raised. She passed through that world as if she were invisible.