Chapter Nine

CONFESSIONS AND COURTROOMS

“A lawyer has no business with the justice or injustice of the cause which he undertakes, unless his client asks his opinion, and then he is bound to give it honestly. The justice or injustice of the cause is to be decided by the judge.”

Dr. Samuel Johnson

ROGERS STOPPED TALKING TO his interrogators after they began pressing him for details about exactly how the four women who died during the murder spree were killed. Rogers admitted knowing some of the victims, but he didn’t confess to committing any of the murders during the seven-week period police were convinced he was raging across the country on a killing spree. He said he decided he should talk with a lawyer.

By that time the experienced homicide detectives had flattered, cajoled, wheedled, and chatted with the bedraggled prisoner for four hours. The serial murder suspect spoke freely about some of the women he met during his crazy-quilt wanderings across the country while he was the subject of an intense manhunt.

Although Stephens and McIntosh garnered a huge amount of information that was vital to the investigation, they were still far short of squeezing a confession from Rogers. But once he asked to talk with a lawyer, his conversation with the two Kentucky State Police investigators was permanently ended. Both the bedraggled serial murder suspect and the detectives were aware of his constitutional protections under the Fifth Amendment in the Bill of Rights to speak with a lawyer. The basics of those rights were spelled out in the Miranda warning read to Rogers before the beginning of the interrogation. And no criminal defense attorney would be likely to allow the officers to resume their talks with his or her client.

It was shortly after 8 o’clock on a mid-autumn evening and there was barely any traffic on the bypass outside the police post when Rogers was handcuffed again, loaded into a state police cruiser, and driven to the nearby Madison County Detention Center at 107 West Irvine Street in downtown Richmond. The state police officer at the wheel of the cruiser guided it through a sally port at the rear of the modern bilevel redbrick building behind the Madison County Courthouse, and dropped off his prisoner. The sally port is an important security feature, and when a vehicle is driven inside the doors automatically close behind it. When prisoners are being delivered to the jail, it is only after they close the port that car doors are opened.

The detention center, constructed and opened on January 1, 1990, to replace a nineteenth-century structure across West Irvine, was built on a gentle slope so that from the front, which faces Main Street, it appears to be a single-level structure. But most of the activity is centered at the rear of the building, where the street dips and both stories can be clearly observed. The sally port is there, prisoners enter and leave from there, and attorneys use an entrance there as well. The modern structure is a local Richmond showpiece, and local law officers, officers of the court, and inmates have their own special nickname for it: “The Madison Radisson.”

After the exhausted shaggy-haired prisoner was handed over to the custody of jailers, he was run through the booking process. A photographer snapped mug shots of him looking directly at the camera and from the side, and a full-length shot was taken of him as he stood against a background marked to show his height; fresh palm and fingerprints were taken; and personal information, including his name and date of birth, were recorded. Finally he was directed to strip to his underwear and turn over his clothes, which were later picked up by a state police officer. Then he was issued a dark green jail jumpsuit, a pair of flip-flops, given an armload of fresh linen, and locked up in an isolation cell on the first floor. Prisoners keep their own underclothes.

The jail was constructed with cells on both floors, with the second level designated for most minimum-security prisoners. Maximum-security prisoners, and inmates who are considered suicide or escape risks, or for some other reason need special surveillance, occupy first-floor cells. A section on the first floor is also set aside for female prisoners.

As an occupant of one of six cells designated for special watch, Rogers was personally observed by a jailer every fifteen minutes. The deputies on duty in the isolation wing are stationed about fifteen feet away from the cells, and four times an hour, around the clock, a deputy walks to each of the occupied cubicles, pulls up the flap covering a small opening in the solid metal door, and peers inside.

The cells and other facilities at the detention center are state-of-the-art, or as nearly so as they can be in a period of such rapid change. Rogers’s cell was equipped with a bunk, sink, and a lidless commode which he could flush himself by pushing a button. Like other cells in the 140-inmate capacity jail, it was also equipped with its own shower, pay telephone, and television set programmed with cable and HBO, which he could control himself. There is no censorship of the available programs, and Rogers was permitted to watch film clips of his apprehension and arrest when they were repeated on television news shows.

Nevertheless, the roughly ten-foot-by-ten-foot cell was dismally restrictive and depressing. A solid metal door barred the front of the cell, and the back wall was constructed of cement blocks reinforced with steel. Solid cement and steel also separated it on the sides from other cells. It was an unpleasant place to be for anyone who might have had claustrophobia, or for someone like Rogers, who had spent his adult life as a rolling stone.

He was held without bail on preliminary charges, including two counts of wanton endangerment and a single count of receiving stolen property. The stolen property charge was tied to Mrs. Cribbs’s Ford Festiva.

Rogers didn’t go right to sleep, however. Shortly after he was booked, he talked with a pretrial release officer assigned to interview new prisoners and obtain information about their criminal records, other personal history, bail-bond eligibility, and to determine if they need a court-appointed attorney. The pretrial release officer works for the local courts and is on twenty-four-hour call. When the interview was completed, it was obvious that Rogers would need a court-appointed attorney. He was near broke, and indigent.

A pair of homicide investigators from the Clermont County Sheriff’s Department in Ohio also showed up at the jail to question the new prisoner about the knife slaying of Carrie Gaskins. While Rogers met with Lieutenant Dennis Stemen and a partner, a jail employee telephoned Erwin W. “Ernie” Lewis to tell him what was going on. Lewis was an assistant public advocate and director of the local Department of Public Advocacy, whose office on West Water Street a few blocks from the detention center and the courthouse would provide the court-appointed attorney. He immediately telephoned the Ohio lawmen and his client at the jail, forbidding them to continue with the interview.

Tuesday, the day after Rogers’s arrest, he had his first meeting with Lewis, his court-appointed attorney. The occasion was the suspect’s arraignment on the preliminary local charges. As the senior and most experienced of the five full-time lawyers with the public advocates’ office, Lewis was telephoned from the courthouse and given one hour to meet with his new client at the detention center before representing him at the arraignment.

Rogers was rapidly becoming a part of Kentucky’s folklore, the dark counterpart of earlier figures like sharpshooting frontiersman Daniel Boone; sixteenth president Abraham Lincoln, who guided the nation through the heartbreak of the Civil War; and the tragic Floyd Collins, who inspired an enduring ballad when he died in 1925, after he was trapped in a cave he was exploring with friends. The young Kentuckian lived for eighteen days, pinned under a boulder while rescue crews worked feverishly to free him, and curiosity seekers flocked to the cave by the thousands, setting up food tents, hawking popcorn, peanuts, cotton candy, and souvenirs.

No one was pitching food tents or souvenirs in front of the Madison County Courthouse, and there was no “Camp O. J.” like the lot rented and set up by television reporters in Los Angeles to park mobile units and trailers, install electronic equipment, and string telephone lines during the recently completed Simpson trial. But the media converged in force on Richmond, the Kentucky State Police Post, the detention center, and especially on the Madison County District Court for the modern-day desperado’s arraignment on the preliminary local charges. On Main Street near the center of the action on Tuesday morning, a shopper could peer out the window of about any store and see a fleet of TV mobile units and out-of-town vehicles carrying logos of news organizations or license tags issued to car-rental companies. Most of them were cruising or parked close to the entrances of the “Madison Radisson” and of the courthouse, which both front on Main Street.

Ironically, Rogers never set foot in the old nineteenth-century courthouse for the arraignment. The proceeding was conducted via closed-circuit television between the courthouse and the detention center. A special room was set aside in the detention center for the camera. When Madison County authorities began handling all first court appearances that way in 1988, they were the first jurisdiction in the state of Kentucky and one of the first in the country to do so.

Television reporters, lacquered hair glistening with spray and notepads in their hands, nevertheless competed with radio and print journalists and with members of the curious public for seats inside the cramped third-floor courtroom on the Tuesday after the notorious suspect’s capture. The courthouse, constructed with three stories and a full basement, has four huge white columns at the Main Street entrance.

About sixty people moved between the columns and filed past a huge boulder just inside the front door. The approximate five-foot-high chunk of stone, which was uprooted from northern Madison County near the Clark County line and moved to the courthouse years ago, has the name of Squire Boone carved into its surface. The eighteenth-century frontiersman marked the stone when he first moved into the area to establish Fort Boonesboro, so his younger brother, Daniel Boone, who was following behind, would know he had been there.

The crush of reporters, photographers, and a handful of curious residents from the area jammed into the courtroom to listen and to stare at the closed-circuit television screen during the arraignment. The room was so crowded that a television cameraman knocked the clock off the wall while he was leaning over to get a good angle. The spillover from the crush of reporters, cameramen, and sound operators watched from a Madison County District courthouse annex.

The hearing was brief and simple. Madison District Judge William G. Clouse advised the defendant of the local charges against him, and reviewed his constitutional rights. Rogers replied to the judge’s questions in a soft but audible monotone. One time he asked the judge to speak up.

The defendant did not enter a plea to the charges, and declined to waive his right to fight extradition. Judge Clouse ordered him held without bond, and scheduled a preliminary hearing for 3 P.M., Tuesday, November 21.

Lynn Clontz, Rogers’s thirty-four-year-old stepniece, who used her maiden name during contacts with the media, lived in nearby Berea, Kentucky, and had hoped to visit with him Tuesday. She was advised by jail authorities that she couldn’t see her notorious relative until his normal visiting day, on Thursday. So she mailed him a card, assuring him of her love and support. Ms. Clontz’s stepmother was the defendant’s sister, Clara Sue, and she had known him since she was nine years old and he was eight. In comments to a reporter for the Clarion-Ledger she was defensive of her uncle and said, “The Glen I grew up with didn’t have a violent nature. I think it’s been blown way out of proportion.”

Lewis also had a message for the press. He announced that Rogers would not talk with police, prosecutors, or the media. “At this time he’s not going to talk to anybody,” Lewis declared. “And once he’s made that assertion, nobody can talk to him in the police department unless he initiates it.”

No one at KSP Post Number 7 was surprised. Lewis was an experienced, no-nonsense litigator. He knew the ropes, and when he was appointed by the courts to handle the local charges against Rogers, he also took on defense responsibility for the critical extradition process that was just a few days down the road.

The local charges were comparatively minor when judged against the various counts of murder Rogers was facing in other states. But there were enough of them, and they were serious enough, to keep him behind bars long enough for authorities in California, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana—and Kentucky—to do the necessary sorting out. The first of four anticipated murder warrants from out of state had already been received at the courthouse by fax machine from Louisiana. In the highly unlikely event that bail was permitted on the local charges, or Rogers somehow managed to win an order for his release through some other means, the Louisiana warrant would serve as a detainer and keep him locked up.

Soon after exchanging information with Sergeant Glenn Sproles, the lead detective in the Bossier City case, KSP Detective Robert Stephens was contacted by Detective Julie Massucci of the Tampa Police Department, by Detective Mike Coblentz from the Van Nuys Division of the LAPD, and by Detective Chuck Lee in Jackson. Both Lee and Coblentz had already obtained arrest warrants for Rogers, and Massucci and her colleague, Randy Bell, were working closely with the prosecutor and the courts in efforts to move the Tampa case forward as expeditiously as possible. The prisoner’s troubles were piling up and the net was rapidly closing.

Three days after Rogers’s capture, a Madison County Grand Jury returned indictments against him on two counts of wanton endangerment and one count of first-degree criminal mischief. It was contended in the indictments that the lives of Detectives Barnes and Stephens were put at risk during the chase, accounting for the twin counts of wanton endangerment. The other charge was tied to at least $1,000 in damages inflicted on Barnes’s police cruiser at the conclusion of the chase. The preliminary charge of theft was dismissed, and would become a matter for authorities in Tampa to deal with.

It went virtually unnoticed during the commotion, but the eight-year-old drunk-driving charge in Richmond that Rogers skipped out on was still on the books and also lurked in the background. There appeared to be little chance that authorities would resurrect the charge, which was insignificant compared to the newer, more horrendous offenses he was accused of in other states.

Russell pointed out to the press, however, that the Rogers affair was a tremendous burden on the local law enforcement and court system, and Kentucky officials were anxious for him to be moved and put on trial in another state where the charges were more serious. All three of the counts tied to the car chase carried a maximum penalty of one to five years in prison on conviction. They were similar to charges Rogers’s court-appointed attorney had dealt with many times before. Like everyone else who was involved, Lewis knew, of course, that the local charges didn’t pose the most critical danger to his client. The issues of life and death would most certainly be decided by other lawyers and judges, in other courts, in other jurisdictions.

Lewis’s dress and style were severe and unemotional, giving him the sober look of a dedicated accountant. He was a small-town defense lawyer, not a multimillionaire legal superstar who preened and showed off on courtroom cameras in $2,000 suits and perfectly fitted rugs. He wore a neatly trimmed, jet black Van Dyke beard and mustache, and a shiny patch of skin at the top of his head stretched straight up the middle Samurai-style and tended to shine and reflect light from courtroom cameras. Ernie Lewis was one of the busiest criminal defense lawyers in East Central Kentucky.

The public defender’s office headquartered in Richmond represents indigent clients in a broad area, encompassing Madison, Clark, Rockcastle, and Jackson Counties. It is a vast area of flatland, mountains, and a rugged strip of dense woods that is part of the Daniel Boone National Forest extending from Winchester on the north through Richmond, then almost straight south along U.S. 75. The national forest sprawls along the southern end of the jurisdiction, where U.S. 75 is bordered on the west by Rockcastle County and to the east by Jackson County.

It is a huge territory to cover with a total population of roughly 110,000. About half the people in the quad county area live in Madison County or Clark County, which is the second most heavily populated, and has a larger population than Rockwell and Jackson combined. During the fiscal year ending July 1, 1996, the period when Rogers wound up with Lewis as his attorney, more than 2,200 clients were represented through the Department of Public Advocacy in Richmond.

The five staff attorneys were supported by two office workers, an investigator, and by volunteers, including a law clerk and a paralegal. Nevertheless, they had a big cud to chew. The public defenders operate a bit like the old-time circuit judges who “rode the circuit” on horseback or in carriages from one courthouse, town hall, or saloon to another to mete out justice across a broad territory that might include several counties. Lewis and his legal sidekicks make their rounds of the courthouses and jails in the quad county area dressed in darkly conservative suits and ties and driving their own cars.

Local motels and bed-and-breakfasts in Richmond quickly filled with newspaper reporters and television news crews, along with members of the print and electronic tabloid press. Tabloid TV producers were aggressively recruiting anyone who had almost anything at all to do with Rogers or with the people who became his presumed victims.

While her brother was still on the run, Clara Sue Rogers taped a show for A Current Affair that was broadcast on the day of his capture, and said he told her police would never catch him unless he wanted them to. He vowed to kill himself before surrendering, and told her he had a gun and was saving the last bullet for himself. “He wasn’t going to spend the rest of his life [on] death row,” she said. Tacking on an especially ominous note to her remarks, she added that he told her it was “too late to stop and that … we’ve only scraped the surface. And that you’d find a whole lot more dead people.” She said her brother told her he killed fifty-five people, and shot a highway patrolman.

Andy Sutton’s roommate, Teresa Whitehead, appeared with Willie Jiles’s fiancée, Beverly Chavez, on Leeza, and told a national audience: “I believe he [Rogers] killed my friend and had a chance to kill me. It feels like a nightmare you just can’t quite wake up from.” Mrs. Wingate and Linda’s sister, Mrs. Marilyn Reel, also appeared on the same show. Willie Jiles and Bossier City Public Information Officer Mike Halphen were invited to appear as guests on Rolanda.

Guests on Rivera Live outraged some of Rogers’s kinfolk when they referred to the accused spree killer as a psychopath. Although Clara Sue was still talking to reporters from her home in Monroe, a lickspittle settlement of a few hundred people about midway between Hamilton and Middletown, several of his relatives were beginning to signal to the press that they were fed up with all the negative attention.

After speaking freely to the media for days, Rogers’s widowed mother decided she had had enough. She went into seclusion at her home in Hamilton. Reporters were no longer invited inside, where the walls, stands, and tables in the living room were dominated by pictures of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and other family members; ceramic figurines; and dolls, including an image of Ringo Starr playing drums, and a beautifully kimonoed Japanese woman behind glass. When journalists drove to the house and walked onto the front porch, framed by two redbrick columns with an image of the American eagle overhead, they were confronted with a hand-scribbled sign on the front door that read: “NO TV NEWS REPORTERS, NO NEWS MEDIA. THANK YOU.” The rebuff was reinforced by a two-word message on the “welcome” mat: “GO AWAY.”

A shower of business cards had already been left off at the house from journalists and producers for her to sift through in case she changed her mind about talking. There was also a blaze of telephone calls to contend with, and talk-show host Geraldo Rivera sent her a telegram asking for an interview.

In Beattyville, Rogers’s cousin, Edith Smallwood, told the local newspaper, the Three Forks Tradition, that she and her sister were merely doing their duty when they tipped off police to Rogers’s visit. “You have to wonder if you would do it again knowing that these people won’t leave you alone,” she said. Then she and her sister left home for a while and headed for the hills to get away from the rush of reporters. A man who stayed behind at the modest trailer home told one reporter he was the seventy-fifth to stop by.

Some of the Smallwoods’ neighbors were also becoming fed up with all the media attention being focused on their normally quiet little community. Opal Newman, owner of the Bear Claw Grocery, told a reporter for Jackson’s Clarion-Ledger that two county sheriffs were in prison. Then the Rogers story became big national news. “It’s been just one blow after another,” she said.

On Thursday Rogers was permitted his first visit with family members, including his mother and stepniece. According to jail regulations, inmates whose last names begin with the letters “A” through “K” are allowed a single twenty-minute visit on Tuesdays or Saturdays. Inmates whose names begin with the letters “L” through “Z” are permitted visits on Thursdays or Sundays. There was some speculation in the press that Rogers’s visiting day might be switched from the “L” through “Z” schedule to throw off reporters who hung around the jail when his relatives were expected to show up in hopes of obtaining interviews. The press was wrong about changing days. Jailers juggled the hours instead.

Along with visitors to other inmates, Rogers’s family members walked through the front door of the jail, and crossed the lobby to the visiting room on the other side. When it was Rogers’s turn, he seated himself in one of five seats on the jail side of a heavy, thick glass that separated prisoners from their visitors. No contact visits, which would permit an exchange of hugs, kisses, or handshakes—and frequently results in passing of contraband where touching is allowed—were permitted at the jail. Rogers and his guests were restricted to looking at each other and talking through telephones installed on each side of the heavy glass.

He and his fellow inmates were permitted to talk with as many visitors as they could jam into the twenty-minute period, but only two were allowed at the mirror with access to the phone at any one time. Rogers assured his relatives that he was being well treated.

According to jail regulations, Rogers and other prisoners were permitted twenty-minute visits once each week with family members or other approved visitors. Attorneys, of course, were allowed more generous access to the inmates. Lawyers and visiting clergy had their own entrance on the West Irvine end of the jail.

Rogers knew his way around a jail, and he was a docile, courteous, and well-behaved prisoner. He got along with corrections officers he came in contact with, but inmates in isolation were firmly cut off from association with other prisoners. Even after he was moved into general population from isolation about a week after he was locked up, his contact with other inmates was minimal. He was assigned to another cell on the same floor, and given outdoor exercise privileges in a narrow yard facing the brick wall of the jail on one side and ringed with a barbed wire on the others. The yard is outfitted with a pair of backboards for playing basketball. Only once during his stay at the detention center was another inmate assigned to share a cell with him, and that was only for a day or two.

Rogers spent most of his time alone in his cell watching television, sleeping, mulling over his problems, or eating his meals. Meals were nutritious, but strictly institutional, and were delivered by a trustee who pushed a food cart along the corridors. The trustees shove the meals through a special slot in the cell door that is opened only when food is delivered and the trays are retrieved. The trustees are always accompanied by a sheriff’s deputy.

Every once in a while, Rogers was led out of his cell and walked along the sterile corridors and hallways to a lawyer-client conference room at the back of the jail to talk with his attorney.

Despite Lewis’s intimidating statements and presence on the scene, homicide investigators flocked to Richmond from police departments across the country, carrying bulging unsolved case files in briefcases and under their arms. When Lewis turned thumbs-down on interviews with his client, it hardly slowed the rush of detectives flying or driving to the Madison County—seat town with hopes of interviewing the prisoner and closing some long-standing homicide cases. By Wednesday, two days after the dramatic chase brought the manhunt to an abrupt close, homicide investigators from six states and from Alberta, Canada, were in town competing for scarce accommodations and clamoring to talk with the suspected serial killer. Two of the sleuths were from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and others flew in from Jackson, Bossier City, and Tampa. Most of the officers had to settle for comparing notes about investigations of unsolved crimes resurrected by the manhunt for Rogers and by his arrest.

Detectives from Hamilton were also preparing to make the trip, and although they were pessimistic about their chances of questioning the hometown boy, they planned to confer with investigators from other jurisdictions who were involved with the case.

It was easier for Lewis to enforce the proscription about talking with his client when he was dealing with law enforcement agencies than with the press. After the conclusion of the marathon Simpson investigation and trial in California that entranced a nation, Rogers and Rathbun were thrust into reluctant competition for the crime-story flavor of the month. The media was scrambling for information and there was very little that Lewis could do to keep a lid on a story that was boiling over with dramatic and lurid revelations.

One of the most explosive public disclosures occurred when WTVQ-TV in nearby Lexington obtained a copy of the affidavit signed by Detective Stephens quoting Rogers as boasting when he was told he was a suspect in five deaths that “it’s more like seventy bodies.” The affidavit was prepared and filed with the goal of obtaining a search warrant for Mrs. Cribbs’s hatchback and the contents of the suitcase; and another warrant for search of Rogers’s person to permit taking of blood, hair, and saliva samples from the suspect.

Stephens stated on the application that there was “probable and reasonable cause to believe that property or other things existed that showed evidence that Rogers had committed murder in at least four other states: California, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi.” He included a capsule review of the homicides Rogers was suspected of committing in those states, and said his fellow officers in those jurisdictions were anxious to obtain samples to compare with blood or body fluids, hair and fiber, and also requested fresh fingerprints from the prisoner.

Similar requests for evidence to be gathered from Rogers were communicated to officials at KSP Post 7 from officers investigating unsolved homicides in many other areas as well, he wrote.

The veteran homicide detective also stressed that it was “extremely important, now rather than later,” to collect a large number of hair samples. He said he was advised by Ed Dance, manager of the KSP Central Crime Laboratory in the state capital city of Frankfort, that the longer after the commission of a crime the more likely that hair may change color, length, and comparability with other hairs.

After details of Rogers’s boast were aired by WTVQ, the story went nationwide, sparking an entire new round of finger-pointing at the drifter by police and the families of murder victims wondering if he might have been involved in their cold-case investigations and personal tragedies.

The interview with the lawmen at KSP Post 7 didn’t account for all the talking Rogers did outside the courtroom. Listening to good advice was never one of the rambunctious prisoner’s strong suits, not even when the counsel originated with his lawyer. While he was locked up, Rogers busied himself on the telephone calling family members and selected elements of the media.

He was apparently shocked by the fuss he kicked up with the wisecrack to Stephens and McIntosh about murdering seventy people. His Hamiltuckian tall-tale–telling finally backfired on him with a vengeance, and he was suddenly being pictured in the press and in the public mind as a ruthless modern-day Bluebeard, or a slavering vampire prince who seduced and lured innocent women to their doom. During his first weekend locked up at the detention center, Rogers made three calls to the media from the pay phone in his cell, in an effort to set the record straight.

One call was to his hometown newspaper, the Journal-News. After complying with a reporter’s request to confirm his identity by providing personal details about himself, including a description of the tattoos on the fingers of his left hand, he said he was just joking when he bragged about killing all those people.

Like always, Rogers appeared to relish talking about himself. He said that when the detectives asked him about the four women he was suspected of strangling or stabbing, he wasn’t familiar with any of the names. Rogers explained he wasn’t good with names and had “no idea who’s who.” Then he explained that he wasn’t allowed to say anything about the women.

Continuing in his typically exaggerated style, he told the reporter he traveled in bars all around the world and probably met “millions” of females and didn’t kill any of them. His claims that he never killed anyone included Peters. The Journal-News ran the story in its Saturday editions, the day after the television broadcast in Lexington.

Another call was placed to the newsroom at WCPO-TV in Cincinnati on Saturday night. Earlier in the week members of the WCPO-TV news staff had requested an interview. All media requests for interviews were passed onto the inmate by jailer Ronald C. Dever, the elected civilian in charge of the operation and the thirty-three-member staff at the detention center.

“Yeah, I remember that I laughed because I thought it was funny,” Rogers told a WCPO-TV reporter about his interview with the KSP detectives. “If he’s going to ask me about a bunch of murders, I said, ‘Well, what are you talking about?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ I said … ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.”

The suspected serial killer said he didn’t realize his response to the detectives was going to blow up that big. Then he laughed. Rogers also continued exhibiting his trademark braggadocio by boasting that he walked past FBI agents while they were looking for him in a Jackson motel. Before the comments were aired, reporters at the Cincinnati station checked the interview out with Rogers’s brother, Gary, in Hamilton. Gary Rogers listened to a tape recording of the interview and confirmed it was his brother talking.

Rogers spread his interviews around, and surprised a local reporter for the Richmond Register by telephoning him at home from the downtown jail. Todd Blevins had a nasty head cold and so much trouble breathing he told his editor he had to stay home a couple of days and load his system up with medicine. He was stretched out half-conscious on the couch when the phone rang, and an operator asked if he would accept a collect call from Glen Rogers. The prisoner was using the pay phone in his cell, and Blevins, who was still groggy from the cold and the medication, mumbled that he would accept the call.

Rogers began the surprise interview by saying he wanted to tell his side of the story. He also stressed that he planned to fight extradition. Asked about his arrest, he said, “I guess it’s a little bit of a relief.”

Blevins wasn’t at his best, and didn’t ask all the questions he later realized he might have posed to his surprise caller, even though they talked for about twenty minutes. Rogers promised to write a letter to him at the Register, giving his side of the story. He said his niece would deliver it on Friday night, after her Thursday visit with him at the jail. Ms. Clontz would also be his spokesman, he said. “Lynn is solid. She’s a firm believer.”

Rogers said his lawyer told him not to talk to the media, so he couldn’t discuss the the case. But he rattled on about other subjects, such as his treatment at the jail: they were very good to him; the mail he was receiving—most people who wrote to him were supportive. He lavished praise on his hardworking attorney, and said he didn’t think he could have gotten a better lawyer. He said he wished Lewis could go with him to represent him in proceedings in other states. The conversation went on so long that it cost forty cents. When he got his telephone bill, the reporter put the forty cents on his expense account.

After Lewis read the brief story about the phone call, he headed for the detention center to have another serious talk with his exasperating client. Then he notified Blevins that he could forget about the letter. He said he believed he had convinced Rogers not to write it.

The local newshound nevertheless got a second chance at the determined chatterbox when Rogers called back a few weeks later. By that time Blevins was feeling better, and got to the core of the matter in a hurry. “Did you kill anybody?” he asked. “No, I haven’t,” Rogers replied.

He made the second call because he was upset over a story printed in the Bethel Journal, which he complained quoted Lieutenant Stemen as accusing him of the Gaskins murder. Rogers told Blevins he heard of the little Ohio town but had never been there. He also denied reports that he knew the victim.

On the day the woman was stabbed to death, Rogers appeared in Hamilton Municipal Court, signing in at about 12:30 P.M. Ms. Gaskin was stabbed to death in her home in Bethel three or four hours before that, creating a time window that authorities in Clermont County claimed was sufficient for him to have committed the crime before driving back to Hamilton. Clermont County authorities still considered the accused serial killer to be a solid suspect in the local murder, however, despite his denial during the telephone call to the Richmond news reporter.

The prisoner even talked by telephone with a reporter for the tabloid television show Hard Copy. She faxed a note to him at the detention center asking Rogers to call collect, and it was delivered to him by a jailer along with other letters and faxes from reporters seeking interviews. Jailers saw to it that he received all his mail and faxes.

Rogers’s response to the media frenzy may not have been all shock or disappointment at being depicted as a bloodthirsty ogre, if it was true he was a serial killer. Specially trained law enforcement experts, psychologists, and others with educational credentials in the field recognize that courting the press is typical behavior of many serial killers. They glory in the public attention which makes them feel important and allows them to relive their crimes.

After spending his adult life as a relatively obscure drifter, handyman, cabbie, and carnival roustabout, Rogers was suddenly someone that everybody in the country was interested in. His image was broadcast into millions of homes on television. Other photographs were on the front pages of newspapers and in magazines, along with stories exploring details of his life from his childhood to the present. He was solidly in the limelight and his picture and story were right there up front, beside those of people like the president, other world leaders, and Hollywood’s most glittering stars.

When jailers delivered his mail, there were sometimes as many as twenty letters and faxes a day from reporters and producers pleading to talk to him. Talking was something he loved to do, and now when he talked everybody listened to what he had to say. Even his lawyer’s warnings couldn’t shut him up.

Lewis complained bitterly that people were camping in the little town and moving messages to his client in jail. The journalists were misleading him by telling him that his story wasn’t being told, and they would be fair to him. It was a line that his client swallowed because he didn’t know any better, the lawyer carped. The laid-back attorney was also experiencing his own problems with the media. For a while after the story broke, as many as thirty calls a day were being made to his office from journalists seeking to talk with him. The media attention exerted a massive drain on his time and the resources of the public defender’s office staff.

Lewis talked to the media when it appeared to be appropriate, and when time permitted. He appeared with Madison County Attorney Robert Russell on a local television show called Your Government, that was broadcast on Sunday mornings by WLEX-TV, and offered a few insiders’ comments on the case that was captivating viewers in Central Kentucky and in many other areas of the state and nation. Russell said he doubted that Rogers was responsible for murdering anywhere near the appalling number of seventy victims he once boasted of killing. At that time he didn’t see any evidence or indication to back that up, the county attorney added.

Lewis reiterated that he was trying to convince his client to shut up and quit talking with the media. The lawyer was clearly getting fed up with Rogers’s blabbermouth ways, and other news reports quoted him as saying he didn’t know how to stop his client from talking with the press. If he could stop him, he would, Lewis insisted.

A new element was injected into the furor when a Hamilton lawyer journeyed to Richmond and spent more than three hours with Rogers at the jail. Then James Cooney, of the firm of Brever, Cooney, Beane & Lane, on Dayton Street, disclosed that he had been retained by Rogers to represent him on personal matters. If Rogers was named on criminal charges in Ohio, Cooney would defend him there. Cooney also had Kentucky connections, and was a graduate of the Chase Law School at Northern Kentucky State University in Highland Heights, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.

One of the first matters that the Hamilton lawyer addressed were the stories pointing at Rogers as the possible killer of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Cooney said his client told him he met Nicole in a bar and they were acquainted but he didn’t kill her. It was a story that was hard for some people to believe, regardless of whether he supposedly met Nicole in a drugstore, as he once said, or in a bar, as he told his attorney. Rogers and Nicole came from two widely disparate worlds.

While Rogers was reveling in the avalanche of attention and publicity, the investigation was rapidly progressing. Both the search warrant and the court order requiring him to provide the blood, hair, and saliva samples to compare with evidence at the murder scenes in other states were approved. KSP Detective Nolan R. “Skip” Benton served the warrant on Rogers at the detention center

Among items police were looking for, according to the affidavit, were knives or other sharp instruments, bloodstains, fibers, fingerprints, and palm prints from Rogers, and fingerprints of the last two murder victims killed during the reputed killing spree, along with any documents containing their names. The document also listed personal items believed to have been stolen from the women, including rings, bracelets, and watches, as well as food items including bottles of spices.

After the chase ended and Rogers was driven away, Mrs. Cribbs’s battered and dusty Festiva with the broken headlight and broad new scrapes along the driver-side fender and door was loaded onto a flatbed truck and transported to the evidence room at KSP Post 7. Detective Benton headed the inventory search of the car and its contents, and observed a two-zipper gray and white cloth-covered suitcase between the rear seat and the hatch. He also removed a pair of tennis shoes that were lying in plain sight and were smeared with a rust-colored substance that appeared to be blood. The shoes were tagged with information noting the exact location they were found, the time, and Benton’s name. Then they were locked up with other evidence.

Early Tuesday morning, the hatchback was again loaded onto a flatbed and Benton followed in a cruiser as the car, the suitcase, and the shoes were transported northeast to a gleaming new white building on Sower Road in Frankfort that is the KSP Central Crime Laboratory. In Building 100, at the conclusion of the forty-mile trip, Benton and evidence technicians from the police laboratory completed a meticulous search of the car. They carefully bagged or tagged and logged every piece of potential evidence found on the inside or outside of the vehicle, ranging from objects as large as the suitcase to strands of hair or fiber.

A police photographer snapped pictures of the exterior and interior of the car, of the suitcase before and after it was opened, and of individual pieces of evidence before they were picked up and tagged. Search of the car and of the suitcase in the back was disappointing, as far as any hopes may have gone of finding a knife, machete, gun, or some other obvious weapon. Although a report or two appeared in the press during the manhunt about fears that Rogers was armed with a gun, they were apparently unfounded. Except for a single pornographic magazine and a blue housecoat, most of the items listed in the inventory were unsuspicious personal effects that any man might be expected to carry with him on a trip. Three extra pairs of pants, seven shirts, ten T-shirts, fourteen clothes hangers, a safety manual from a contracting company, and a list of phone numbers and notes were taken from the car and suitcase.

On a more promising note, blood samples were discovered and collected from the interior of the car. An evidence technician also vacuumed the interior and collected hair and fibers. When the vacuum bag was emptied on a plain white surface, the hair and fiber samples were collected with tweezers and placed inside clear plastic envelopes, labeled, and set aside for later analysis.

Along with the suspiciously stained tennis shoes, they were turned over to crime laboratory technicians to be inspected and analyzed. An analyst specializing in forensic serology, the procedure of identifying and typing blood, semen, and other body fluids, was given the job of studying the blood samples and stains on the shoes.

The hair and fiber samples were turned over to other specialists to work on and make forensic comparisons. Hair is among the most common physical evidence found at crime scenes, and often offers the most valuable clues to the identity of a killer. At any given time there are about 300,000 strands of hair on the scalp of individuals who have not already suffered significant hair loss. It is constantly being shed, while new hair grows.

Importantly, sexual assault requires close contact between the attacker and the victim, and even the most careful rape-murderer is unlikely to notice the loss of a few strands of hair from his own person. In addition to normal hair loss from the scalp, pubic and other body hairs are often torn loose during sex and left on the victim or on sheets and other bedclothing. If Rogers murdered and had sexual relations with the dead women left behind during the cross-country rampage, the chances were excellent that he left some of his hair on their bodies or on the bedclothes. That was so, even though two of the bodies were dumped in bathtubs and washed, one was left sprawled on a punctured waterbed, and the other was burned.

A single strand of hair subjected to forensic analysis in a police laboratory can provide vital information about the identity of the owner. The color of the hair is an obvious clue, but it can also reveal the race, information about health, and detect traces of drug use. Drug molecules circulate in the bloodstream, seep into the hair roots, and stay there. Even a six-inch sample can become a road map to the drug history of the owner of the hair that is handily readable by chemists when it is inserted into a device called a mass spectrometer.

In the past few years, with the expanded role in forensic science of DNA, the complex chemical that forms tiny threadlike sequences of genes in the body’s cells, foreign hairs collected at crime scenes have taken on more importance. Even if investigators fail to collect samples of blood, semen, or saliva from an attacker, his unique genetic code can be determined and pinned down by analyzing hair samples.

Crime laboratory analysis and comparisons of fibers found in Mrs. Cribbs’s battered Ford, lifted from Rogers’s clothing, or recovered at the murder scenes were also important to the combined investigations. Crosstransfers of fibers between victims and assailants are especially common in incidents of rape, other physical assault, and in homicides committed by strangulation, knifing, and other means where there is close physical contact.

Fibers and threads from clothing, blankets, rugs, and other common woven objects also have their own unique colorations and patterns that can be identifiable in meticulous detail during the laboratory process. Fiber analysis was expected to be especially important to the investigation and possible trials stemming from the slayings in Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The fire inside Sandra Gallagher’s truck cab in Van Nuys destroyed much of the trace evidence that might otherwise have been collected by investigators.

No information was immediately released to the public about possible match-ups of the stains on the shoes or the trace evidence with any of the murdered women in Mississippi, Louisiana, or Florida.

Detective Stephens served the warrant for samples of blood tissue and hair from Rogers on the suspect at the detention center. An important element of the personal search warrant provided for use of a “Kentucky State Police Male Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit,” and Stephens subsequently collected: five full, ten-milliliter blood samples, which were drawn by a medical technician; approximately 100 samples of hair plucked from various areas of the suspect’s head; samples of pubic hair obtained by combing; another 100 pubic hair samples from various areas of the groin obtained by plucking; 100 hairs pulled from various areas of his beard and mustache; twenty oral swabs; and twenty-five sets of inked fingerprints and palm prints.

Except for the samples obtained by combing the pubic area, technicians always pull hairs collected as evidence. The seemingly preferable method of cutting hair samples is avoided because the root structure is important in the analysis and comparison process. Samples were taken from various areas of Rogers’s head because hair color often varies in the same individual. In obtaining the combed samples, technicians were required to use a paper towel and comb provided in an envelope enclosed in the kit. The recommended process calls for placing the towel under the buttocks, and then either the suspect himself or the technician moves the comb in downward strokes through the pubic hair. Any loose hair or other debris is caught in the teeth of the comb or falls onto the towel. At the conclusion of the procedure the comb was placed on the towel and the paper was carefully folded in order to retain any hair or other material, then placed in a labeled envelope provided with the kit. Finally, the envelope was sealed and the label filled out with the pertinent information. All the other hair samples were placed inside Ziploc bags, then sealed and identified by filling out an attached label. Separate bags were used for the head hair, mustache and beard, and for the hair taken from the pubic area.

The oral swabs were collected four at a time. A technician carefully rubbed the swabs over the mouth cavity and the gum lines, then allowed them to air-dry before placing them in envelopes, checking them off, and adding labels. After individual packaging was completed, the swabs, hair, and blood samples were placed inside the kit and kept under refrigeration until the evidence was distributed to analysts.

The techniques for obtaining various samples from the persons of suspects are meticulously proscribed in regulations, and any deviation in the system could lead to serious problems when the case moves into the courtroom. There is no room in the process for invention or creativity. Detectives and technicians have to be excruciatingly exact.

Stephens also collected the clothing and shoes Rogers was wearing at the time of his arrest, so tests could be made for bloodstains and blood spatters. Conventional biochemical tests were conducted on the blood by serologists at the state crime laboratory, to define the enzymes and type. DNA typing was carried out by biochemists in the FBI Crime Laboratory at Quantico, Virginia, to more specifically pin down the unique genetic code of the owner.

The results of the analyses and other tests, along with samples of the blood, were shared with other police investigating the slayings committed during the reputed murder spree, as well as with other agencies checking out possible links by the accused killer to unsolved homicides in their jurisdictions. Hair samples and fresh sets of fingerprints taken from the suspect were also shared with fellow police agencies.

A short time later homicide investigators from Kentucky and Ohio to Louisiana, California, and Canada began turning their attention away from the big-talking braggart and looking elsewhere for the answers to their old unsolved murders. Blood typing, DNA comparisons, and other tests on the samples firmly ruled Rogers out as a suspect in unsolved slayings from Canada and California to Ohio and Kentucky.

In Port Hueneme, the DNA test results definitely eliminated him as a possible suspect in the Burger case, the single slaying in the three local murders that seemed to offer the most promise of a connection. Detective Jerry Beck said he was disappointed in the blood test results, but some new leads were developed in the Ventura County slayings as a result of the media blitz generated by coverage of the Rogers story. Similar cases to the local bathtub murder were turned up in Malibu and in Los Angeles County. Beck said there was also nothing to connect Rogers to either of the other two unsolved slayings in Port Hueneme that occurred during the local murder spree.

The Kentucky State Crime Laboratory forensics reports brought similar reactions from investigators in other cities and states. Rogers was not the killer of Nancy Jean Ludwig or Stephanie Hummer. With the exception of the Gaskins slaying. Rogers was no longer a suspect in the slayings of any other women whose unsolved deaths it was once considered he may have been involved in.

On the West Coast at about the same time, Rathbun, the other celebrity murder suspect of the moment, was also cleared of any possible involvement in the Ludwig and Hummer slayings. Both men were featured in major writeups within a few weeks of each other in People magazine and the national weekly tabloids.

Information that Rogers was serving jail time when other crimes occurred, or had other solid alibis, cleared him in yet additional cases. He was eliminated of involvement in the Heather Teague abduction after local and state police compared notes with other investigators probing Rogers’s activities. The young woman was still missing, and Dill was still the prime suspect.

There appeared to be little doubt that Rogers’s injudicious remark to Stephens and McIntosh that “it’s more like seventy bodies” was the incredibly stupid boasting of a lifetime gasbag. Depending on the outcome of murder cases he was already charged with, he might indeed go down in criminal history as a serial killer whose crimes stand out for their ruthlessness and brutality, but he would never be top gun. That dubious honor already belonged to another “Hamiltuckian.”

Ironically, the modern American record for known slayings by a single killer, for the time being at least, still belongs to a seemingly mild-mannered little male nurse born in Rogers’s hometown. Like Rogers, Donald Harvey’s father moved from the Kentucky hill country when he found work in the Ohio factory town. Unlike Rogers, however, he was born in Mercy Hospital in Hamilton, and then moved with his family back to their roots in Kentucky. Like Rogers, he shuttled between states, and lived briefly in California.

During a sixteen-year murder orgy that didn’t end until 1987, he killed more than fifty victims in eastern Kentucky and in the Cincinnati area, according to his own admission. A plea-bargain agreement kept him off Ohio’s death row. Harvey’s victims were patients and neighbors whom he killed while working at hospitals on both sides of the Ohio River, many with poison or by smothering them.

Early Tuesday morning, November 21, Rogers was routed out of bed, given a shower, and fed breakfast. Then he was cuffed and manacled, and placed in the back of a Sheriff’s Department cruiser. The deputy at the wheel drove him across West Irvine Street to the Madison County Courthouse for his arraignment on the local charges.

Normally it would be a few minutes’ walk from jail to the back entrance of the courthouse. But with his hands in cuffs and manacles, a belly chain, and his legs securely shackled, it was difficult for the prisoner to walk more than a few steps under his own power.

For once, the man the press was calling the “Cross Country Killer” wasn’t in a talkative mood. After being helped out of the cruiser by a pair of stern-faced sheriff’s deputies, he ignored reporters who shouted questions and shoved microphones toward his face. The shackled man stared straight ahead and kept his mouth closed while he awkwardly shuffled past the crunch of media into the back door and was taken up to the third floor by private elevator.

Armed sheriff’s deputies were stationed outside and inside the courtroom. Rogers’s niece Lynn was already seated inside the wood-paneled room in the first row of the spectator section when he was led to the defense table. With the pressure of the manhunt over and a few days’ rest, Rogers was once more paying attention to his appearance. His hair, which had grown longer and tumbled over his shoulders in front and back, was neatly parted in the middle; and the baggy dark green jumpsuit was a surprisingly good fit and looked as if he may have pressed it military or jailhouse style by spreading it out under the mattress of his bed and sleeping on it. The sleeves of the jumpsuit were cut off at about elbow length, and showed off the long sleeves of the white T-shirt. Considering the circumstances, the defendant was about as neatly dressed as could be expected.

Before settling awkwardly on his chair, the securely manacled prisoner aimed a wan smile at his niece and blew her a shaky kiss. Madison County Commonwealth Attorney Thomas J. Smith, III, stood at the prosecution table on the other side of the courtroom conducting a last-minute shuffle through his files and notes on the case. Madison Circuit Court Judge William T. Jennings presided. Judge Jennings read the charges from the indictment to the defendant, and carefully explained the meaning of each count.

Lewis also briefly complained at the hearing about the questioning of his client at the jail by Clermont County Sheriff’s Lieutenant Dennis Stemen. The court-appointed attorney said he wanted it pointed out in court that the meeting occurred without his knowledge or presence, even though Rogers had invoked his right to counsel and to silence. Lewis asserted that the Clermont County detectives violated his client’s constitutional rights when they questioned Rogers on the night after his capture. He said he told Rogers and the deputies to halt the interview, but they continued asking questions anyway. “I think it’s shabby and unprofessional,” he carped.

Any information obtained during the interview would probably be thrown out of court before a trial, Lewis said.

Lieutenant Stemen told the press no rules were broken.

The lawyer also observed that he advised his client “about thirty times” not to talk, and said he would personally screen all future requests for interviews. He stated that he would deliver the requests to his client, but stressed that the prisoner would not be granting any additional interviews.

Speaking calmly, but in tones that were clearly audible in the spectator section of the courtroom, the suspect entered pleas of not guilty to the trio of charges tied to the police chase. During the brief proceeding, he didn’t show any traces of the old cockiness he exhibited when he was trolling bars, talking to police and reporters, or tossing the beer can at the state trooper. He sat quietly beside his attorney, without any show of emotion, while he allowed Lewis to do the talking. At the conclusion of the ten-minute hearing Jennings denied bail and designated February 5, 1996, as the trial date. In the second row of seats an out-of-town reporter leaned over toward a colleague with the whispered offer of a ten-dollar bet that Rogers would never appear for a trial in the Richmond courtroom during 1996. The bet was rejected.

When the prisoner was escorted out of the courtroom to be returned to the detention center, he showed some of his old cockiness, turning to smile at his niece and raising a clenched-fist salute. Ms. Clontz appeared to be near tears. As the courtroom cleared she brushed off reporters’ questions, slipped on a pair of sunglasses, and hurried from the courthouse.

Rogers’s transparent show of bravado may have temporarily lifted his own spirits, but once he was back in his one-man cell at the detention center there would be plenty of time for the effect to fade. The brief proceeding barely hinted at the long hours that lay ahead of the prisoner and his attorneys in the Kentucky courtroom, and very likely in courtrooms in one or more other states.

Homicide investigators from other cities and from other states were still streaming into Richmond to compare notes in the case, and to take their virtually nonexistent chances to talk with the suspect. For a while, it may have seemed to Rogers and his lawyer that half the law enforcement agencies in the country were lining up to get a crack at the suspected serial slayer.

But in Kentucky, where he was brought to bay and captured, state police and authorities in Lee County were behaving like the death of the old man found in the cabin outside Beattyville was too complicated to deal with. They didn’t even know how he died, and the man most people believed was responsible for his death was already in enough trouble in other states where prosecutors were anxious to win a death-penalty conviction or honest-to-goodness life-sentence prison terms that would put him behind bars for the rest of his days. But if everyone else failed to take Rogers permanently off the streets and out of the saloons, Kentucky could always reassess the evidence and their possible murder case against him. There is no statute of limitations for homicide.

Less than two weeks after his capture, Rogers spent a quiet, almost pleasant Thanksgiving Day at the detention center. It was visiting day, and his mother and step-niece walked into the detention center at 3 P.M., and talked with him for about twenty minutes. Along with approximately a hundred other inmates earlier in the day, he dined on a traditional holiday dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing, green beans, a roll, and pumpkin pie. His meal was delivered to him hot, in special trays that hold heat, and slipped through the food flap in his cell door.

Rogers had been locked up on holidays before, but this time it appeared he had little to celebrate or to look forward to except the dreary prospect of spending more time in courtrooms and behind bars.