We bring to your attention 15 photographs behind which there are real stories that at one time horrified even the most experienced criminologists.

A photograph 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 the 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 photo of 14-year-old Regina Kay Walters was taken by serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades, who was later captured driving a truck with a torture chamber in its trailer. Before taking this photo, Rhodes cut off his victim's hair and forced her to wear a dress and heels before killing her in a barn in Illinois.

Tyler Hadley.
17-year-old Tyler Hadley wanted to throw a party, but his parents were home, so he beat them both to death with a hammer. He hid the corpses, restored 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 photograph by Kevin Carter.
South African photographer Kevin Carter worked in Sudan during the 1993 famine. The photo shows a starving child crawling towards a food distribution center while a vulture prowls nearby, waiting for an easy prey. Carter could not approach children due to the risk 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, she took several photographs of him. Travis' body was found in a bathroom five days later with 27 stab wounds, a slit throat and a bullet in the head.

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

Blanche Monnier.
Blanche Monnier was held captive for 24 years in a room where she had to live among her own excrement. She was discovered in 1901 when someone pointed out her location to the police. A woman has not seen sunlight for 24 years.

Reynaldo Dagsa.
Philippine politician Reynaldo Dagza photographed his family during New Year's celebrations. His killer was also caught in the picture. He turned out to be a car thief, whom Dagsa had once put behind bars.

"Peoples Temple"
American preacher Jim Jones founded the Peoples Temple religious movement, which went down in history with the largest mass suicide. 918 cult followers committed suicide by poisoning themselves with cyanide.

Dean Corll.
Dean Corll earned the nickname Lollipop for constantly handing out candy to neighborhood children. He was one of the most brutal serial killers in history. Between 1970 and 1973, Corll raped and murdered at least 28 boys. He had two accomplices, one of whom shot him. This photograph was found among his personal belongings. The boy from this photo was never identified, which leads to creepy thoughts 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 this, he replied: "I thought I would get his glory."

Massacre at Columbine High School.
This photo was taken two weeks before the Columbine High School massacre, when 12 students and one teacher were shot and killed. In the upper left corner you can see two schoolchildren simulating shooting at the camera. Many see this gesture as a terrible prophecy.

Photo taken in a gas chamber in Auschwitz, Poland.

Terrorist attack in Omagh.
This photo was taken minutes before the Omagh attack in Northern Ireland. The explosive device was planted in the red car you see in this photo. The bombing, carried out by the Authentic Irish Republican Army, killed 29 people. The father and son captured in this photo survived.

Traveler Christopher McCandless.
The last self-portrait taken by Christopher McCandless before he ventured into the wilderness of Alaska. Shortly after this photo was taken, hunters discovered McCandless's body in an abandoned bus. As it later turned out, the traveler was poisoned by the root of a poisonous plant.

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

Robert Ben Rhodes in custody

Date of Birth:

Profession:

Truck driver (truck driver)

Motive:

Rape/Torture

Number of victims:

Murder period:

1989 - 1990

Date of arrest:

Method of murder:

Strangulation/Pistol shooting

Crime scene:

Texas, Illinois, USA

Status:

Life imprisonment

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

Robert Ben Rhodes

To be fair, a piece in the Tucson Weekly in 1996 contained blood-curdling lines. A police investigator said that in the early 1990s, Rhodes abducted and killed an average of three women a month. He always had a briefcase with torture devices with him on the road, according to the data in the article. The exact number of victims still remains unknown.

Alva Bush believes that the Rhodes have been roaming the roads for years, using their truck to satisfy their 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 stepped onto the step to look inside the truck, he saw a woman handcuffed in the cab 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 both up on the road. Prosecutors believe he killed Zyskowski and dumped his body in January 1990 in Texas. UT officials believe that over the next seven days, Walsh was held captive by Rhodes before he shot her multiple times and buried her body.

A month after Walsh's death, Rhodes took in 14-year-old Regina Walters and Ricky Lee Jones, a loving couple from Texas. 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 nearly a year later by a farmer and deer hunter who discovered the decomposed body 22 miles south of Fillmore in October 1990; she had already been dead for several months when she was found. An examination confirmed through dental records that she 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 her body was found, Walsh was considered unknown for 13 years, with her remains kept in the basement of the Millard County Sheriff's Office. But through a series of fortuitous circumstances, Millard detectives were finally able to identify her in 2003. Then 59-year-old Robert Ben Rhodes was linked to DNA.

After identifying Walsh, the next step in the investigation moved much faster. The police found enough evidence to link the scoundrel Rhodes to the crime. By that time, 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 picture was key evidence and proof. 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.

Rhodes' bloody story itself ended on April 1, 1990, in Arizona, when police came across Rhodes's semi-trailer truck while he was in the process of torturing another woman. He was convicted and sent to prison. But before he was to be released in Arizona, officials in Illinois filed their case. Rhodes was sent to Illinois, where he was tried and again found guilty and convicted.

As if the murders of young men and women were not enough, maniac Robert Ben Rhodes photographed his victims before his death, capturing for history a truly nightmarish image that is impossible to watch without shuddering.

Driving along the endless American roads from the West Coast to the East, the trucker collected his bloody harvest for fifteen years, killing an average of one to three women a month and invariably escaping justice. As was the case in Martin McDonagh’s recent wonderful film “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” when the killer picks up a future victim on the side of the road, promising a ride to the desired destination, then carries out his cruel deed and calmly leaves the crime scene without fear of persecution , 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 the killer truck

Photo of the killer truck interior

Interesting articles

In the cabin 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 completely by accident. God only knows how many innocent people would have suffered at the hands of a killer photographer if, on an April evening in 1990, police officer Mike Miller of the Arizona Highway Patrol had not become suspicious while driving past a truck parked on the side of the road. The officer approached the car, looked inside and saw a terrible picture that he would probably not forget for the rest of his days. Miller pointed a gun at the suspect and called for backup.

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


Regina Walters - victim of a maniac

Rhoads received his life sentence for the murder of Regina Walters, but over time he confessed to several more murders, and then the investigation realized to compare the truck driver's trucking diary with the approximate location of the disappearance of persons listed as missing. Thus, the list of victims of Robert Ben Rhodes grew to the terrible number of 50, although some experts are inclined to think that the real number is 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.

Having become interested in @nva’s post, I decided to continue the topic...

The last shots of Regina Walters
Regina Kay Walters was a 14-year-old girl from Pasadena, Texas, who was murdered by notorious serial killer Robert Ben Rhodes. She turned out to be one of three victims of a maniac who treated Regina in a special way. Rhodes cut her hair, dressed her in a black dress and took photographs. The one that stands out the most is the photo you see below. Robert Ben Rhodes was captured in September 1992, taking two more lives in the process. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and remains incarcerated in a Texas prison to this day. The photograph of this young girl in her last moments is literally saturated with fear and despair. The girl looks at her torturer in horror, with despair on her face, making this photo a disgusting demonstration of human torture, like a cat playing with a mouse. The image forever captured the breaking of one man's soul.

Photo by Reynaldo Dagsa
Reynaldo Dagza actually filmed his own killer, as well as his own death. He was a Filipino politician who was assassinated on New Year's Eve 2011. His murder gained international notoriety due to a photograph of his family moments before the shooting. The killer himself is clearly captured in the photo, with a pistol in his hands. Dagsa was taking a photo of his wife, daughter and grandmother when the shooter decided to carry out the assassination attempt. The photograph was used as key evidence to jail two of the perpetrators, although it was believed there were more. This photo is proof of the absolute absurdity of life: a man who was only 35 years old, at the very beginning of the new year, takes a photo of his loving family and at the same time sees his own death in the lens...

Tragedy on the Beas River
On June 8, 2014, 24 engineering students from Hyderabad, India, were killed during their trip when there was a sudden release of water at the Larji hydroelectric power station on the Beas River. The bus carrying students stopped so they could take photographs on the banks of the Beas River. Without warning, the open floodgates and flood of water caught the group by surprise and all the students died instantly. This incident was caused by gross negligence on the part of Larji Hydroelectric Power Station workers. This photo was supposed to be a simple reminder, a memory of a trip with friends from college. Instead, it became a harrowing look at the final moments of a group of friends.

Doomed
The following photo and headline were used very eloquently by the New York Post. These are the final moments of Ki-Sook Yeon, a 58-year-old father and husband pushed in front of an arriving train by homeless man Naiem Davis. Previously, a quarrel broke out between them, the reasons for which are not fully known. Naiem Davis blames his violent actions on multiple factors - voices in his head, drugs, and even a lost pair of shoes. He claims that Ki-Sook Young would not have left him alone and that he acted according to circumstances. After all these acquittals, the “not guilty” Davis was charged with second-degree murder and sent to prison. Regardless of the cause of death, this photograph will forever remain a sad reminder of the unexpected nature of death.

Suicide of Budd Dwyer
Robert Budd Dwyer was a politician and Republican member of the Pennsylvania State Senate for more than 10 years. He also served as Pennsylvania Treasurer until the day of his death on January 22, 1987. After being convicted of bribery, Dwyer called a press conference to announce his resignation. After all the charges, Dwyer bravely accepted a 55-year sentence and a hefty $300,000 fine. In his eyes, this was an unfair punishment, as his ex-attorney William T. Smith admitted many years later. He said he lied under oath when accusing Dwyer of bribery. The press conference was broadcast live to television viewers throughout Pennsylvania. After reading part of the speech, Dwyer stopped reading and began handing out envelopes to his staff members. After the final envelope, he pulled out a weapon and shot himself in the head before anyone could intervene. If for any reason you would like to watch the video of Budd Dwyer's death, it is on Youtube.

Death of Travis Alexander
This is a photo of 30-year-old Travis Alexander taking a shower seconds before he was brutally murdered by his ex-girlfriend, Jodi Arias. In 2008, friends found Travis Alexander dead in his home. He was found in the shower with 27 stab wounds, a slit throat and a gunshot wound to the head.

Police found a digital camera inside the washing machine along with bloody sheets. The camera was damaged by water, but the memory card was preserved - with 8 photographs: there were images of Alexander's naked girlfriend Jodi Arias, himself, also naked, and several more photographs of Alexander - already dead. In some of the photographs, he sits in the shower, wounded, bleeding, and looks directly into the camera; the reflection of the killer photographing him was imprinted in his pupil. The photographs were taken in a series, second by second: here Alexander was still alive, and now he was already dead. This means he was photographed in the act of killing. The picture of the crime shocked even experienced police officers.

The investigation lasted 5 years. Jodi Arias was charged with murder, and 2 years later she confessed to the crime under the pressure of irrefutable evidence, in particular, bloody handprints of her palms at the crime scene.

Arias is 32 years old. On May 3, the jury returned a verdict of first-degree murder. The maximum penalty under Arizona law is lethal injection. Since the founding of this state, Arias became the fourth woman sentenced to death in it.

Photo by James Bulger
In February 1993, ten-year-olds Jon Venables and Robert Thompson killed two-year-old James Bulger after kidnapping him from a shopping center in Liverpool. Details of this case sent a shock wave of panic across England, forcing parents to think about the upbringing of their children. This photograph of little James Bulger being led away by his killers graced the news channels for months, and will forever remain the last photograph of the little one. Venables and Thompson stole James Bulger from his mother and walked with him, hand in hand, 4 kilometers to the railway embankment. Along the way, the boys were stopped many times by concerned people. People thought they were lost or in need of help as James kept crying loudly. They were even offered to help take their “little brother” home. James was found two days after his death, on the railway line in Walton. His horrific injuries were covered by the media, which loudly declared the court's lenient ruling on the incident. Venables and Thompson remained in young offenders' institutions for eight years, receiving mental health care until the age of 18. They were subsequently released, cared for by the government and guaranteed safety.

The war killed her

This photo was taken in 1942. The girl jumped out of the hotel window just as a photographer was passing nearby. There are suggestions that she received a message about the death of a loved one during the Second World War.

Last working day

This photo captures the last moments of the lives of two Norwegian workers who were carrying out repairs on a wind turbine. Suddenly a fire broke out, cutting off the men's escape route. In this photo you can see that they hugged each other, probably saying goodbye. The young people were 19 and 21 years old.

Before killing his victims, he brutally tortured and raped them in his truck, which he equipped with a special torture room. Rhodes' travels and murderous streak are the subject of a book called Roadside Prey by Alva Busch, who personally conducted his own investigation. Alvah Bush wrote a book about Rhodes almost ten years after the events, by which time Rhodes was already behind bars.

Robert Ben Rhodes in custody

Date of Birth:
November 22, 1945
Profession:
Truck driver (truck driver)
Motive:
Rape/Torture
Number of victims:
3+
Killing period:
1989 - 1990
Date of arrest:
April 1, 1990
Killing method:
Strangulation/Pistol shooting
Crime scene:
Texas, Illinois, USA
Status:
Life imprisonment

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

Robert Ben Rhodes

To be fair, a piece in the Tucson Weekly in 1996 contained blood-curdling lines. A police investigator said that in the early 1990s, Rhodes abducted and killed an average of three women a month. He always had a briefcase with torture devices with him on the road, according to the data in the article. The exact number of victims still remains unknown.

Alva Bush believes that the Rhodes have been roaming the roads for years, using their truck to satisfy their 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.

Alvah Busch: "When the officer stepped onto the step to look inside the truck, he saw a woman handcuffed in the cab with a horse bit in her mouth." The 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 both up on the road. Prosecutors believe he killed Zyskowski and dumped his body in January 1990 in Texas. UT officials believe that over the next seven days, Walsh was held captive by Rhodes before he shot her multiple times and buried her body.

A month after Walsh's death, Rhodes took in 14-year-old Regina Walters and Ricky Lee Jones, a loving couple from Texas. 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 nearly a year later by a farmer and deer hunter who discovered the decomposed body 22 miles south of Fillmore in October 1990; she had already been dead for several months when she was found. An examination confirmed through dental records that she 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 her body was found, Walsh was considered unknown for 13 years, with her remains kept in the basement of the Millard County Sheriff's Office. But through a series of fortuitous circumstances, Millard detectives were finally able to identify her in 2003. Then 59-year-old Robert Ben Rhodes was linked to DNA.

After identifying Walsh, the next step in the investigation moved much faster. The police found enough evidence to link the scoundrel Rhodes to the crime. By that time, 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 picture was key evidence and proof. 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.

Rhodes' bloody story itself ended on April 1, 1990, in Arizona, when police came across Rhodes's semi-trailer truck while he was in the process of torturing another woman. He was convicted and sent to prison. But before he was to be released in Arizona, officials in Illinois filed their case. Rhodes was sent to Illinois, where he was tried and again found guilty and convicted.

Regina Kay Walters died at the hands of Robert Ben Rhodes

In 2005, Rhodes was extradited from the Pontiac Correctional Center in Illinois to the Utah Correctional Center to stand trial for Walsh's murder. If convicted, then prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty for Rhodes.

Based on the wishes of the Walsh and Zyskowski families, Utah dropped its case in 2006 and sent Rhoades back to Illinois to await Texas authorities, who filed two counts of murder and also sought the death penalty for the maniac. Under Texas law, prosecutors will be able to set Rhodes' sentence for both deaths at trial. In Utah, only Walsh's murder can be tried.

Although Alva Bush and other researchers believe there were many victims, Rhodes was convicted of only one murder - Patricia Candice Walsh. He is serving a life sentence without parole in Illinois. If convicted in Utah, he could face the death penalty.