NINE
RICHARD ROGERS:
The Most Expensive Fingerprint
Peter Stickney Anderson walked into the Townhouse Bar at 206 Fifty-eighth Street, on Manhattan’s East Side. He looked around at the burning candles on each table, which enhanced the intimate atmosphere. It was early May 1991. Anderson had driven to the city that day from Philadelphia, where he once worked as a Center City investment broker, to attend a political fund-raising dinner for a friend, Tony Brooks. They had arrived together at a Central Park West apartment, but while Brooks returned home that evening, Anderson elected to stay.
A member of several elite clubs and a former staff sergeant in the National Guard, Anderson could trace his ancestry back to a cavalry officer in the Revolutionary War. Acquaintances viewed him, with his sport coats and bow ties, as urbane and charming, an exceptional raconteur. Even his estranged wife said he was a gentleman. Yet there were things about him that many acquaintances did not know.
Despite his affiliation with the conservative Republican Party, Anderson lived a secret gay life, and when he chose to visit the Townhouse, he may have been looking for company. He had only recently separated from his second wife, and his acquaintances had noticed his mood becoming profoundly sad; one person even called him a “lost soul.” They knew that while he was barely eating, he was nevertheless drinking a lot, and had squandered most of a recent inheritance. Some expected his body to give out, but he kept going, and in a city like New York, he could do as he pleased without anyone noticing. At five-foot-two and one hundred pounds, he was apparently no match for whomever he met that night.
Richard Rogers, who murdered and dismembered at least five men—and made the mistake of leaving fingerprints behind. Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office
Anderson was just one of several men who attracted an unusual killer, one whom it would take years to nail, in part because early investigators of the case lacked the right tools used in the right ways at the right time. Once it all came together, though, there was no room from reasonable doubt.
Body Parts
On May 5, a maintenance worker sorting through trash cans along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Lancaster County for recyclables, spotted several tightly wrapped plastic bags. They gave off a foul odor, and when he examined their shape and bulk, he decided to call the police.
Each package, unwrapped, proved to contain different parts of a middle-aged man’s dismembered nude body. From the torso, it was clear that the victim had been stabbed numerous times in the abdomen, bound with a rope around the neck, and sexually mutilated. Oddly, it appeared that blood from the wounds had been washed off. Using the recovered head, a police artist was able to draw a portrait of the victim, and police taped posters of this image at booths and rest areas along the turnpike. Eventually people driving west from Philadelphia recognized him: the dead man was the missing Peter Anderson.
Yet while a number of people knew him, no one could offer information about whom he might have seen in New York, so it was difficult for detectives to run down leads. They learned that he had been at the Five Oaks Bar and the Waldorf-Astoria, where he had declined a room and was put, highly intoxicated, into a cab. Police also developed a suspect in the Philadelphia area who was about to start a psychiatric residency at a hospital. He had lied about his past record of mental illness and seemed a viable candidate on whom to pin this murder, but there was no solid evidence linking him. Police retained the bags that had held the body parts as potential evidence.
The ability to identify someone from fingerprints has been around since the late nineteenth century. The first successful case occurred in Argentina, where a killer’s fingerprint was left in blood at the crime scene, and the ridge patterns matched her fingertips. This was a visible print. There are also “plastic” prints, left as indentations in pliable surfaces, such as wet paint. Yet fingerprints also leave impressions, via grease or perspiration, which are invisible, or latent. Since unique patterns on the fingertips distinguish an individual from all others, it’s important to be able to lift and accurately preserve the impressions, visible or latent.
The typical procedure is to lightly brush a surface with fine powder, which sticks to the residual sweat and shows the pattern. Police can then photograph or lift the prints onto a transparent piece of adhesive tape and mount them onto a card. Smooth surfaces obviously provide the best results, but techniques have been developed for rougher or more porous surfaces. Amino acids in sweat react with ninhydrin and several other dyes, also producing an image of the pattern. In some cases, prints can be developed from human skin. In addition, latent prints exposed to cyanoacrylate fumes, or Super Glue, will turn up as whitish prints against darker backgrounds. These can then be dusted and photographed. Even before the Anderson murder, other methods were being developed or refined, including laser beams.
The Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), a searchable computer database available via the FBI to every state, assists in associating fingerprints to known criminals. The program digitally encodes prints scanned into it as a mathematical algorithm, based on the characteristics of, and relationships among, their physical features. Using a standard classification system, the digital transmission of images from one AFIS system to another was perfected, and the process of making a match from a print to a suspect was consequently streamlined from weeks to hours, even minutes. A key hurdle, however, was that not all states were hooked up to this database, or all systems were not in sync with one another. Thus a print processed in Pennsylvania might not connect with a suspect in Oregon or Arkansas.
Investigators tried but failed to lift usable prints from the bags containing Anderson’s body parts. Even so, preserving the bags proved to be wise, because new technologies were developing fast and there was no telling what the future held. The 1990s, in fact, was the era of cold-case investigations, when determined detectives reexamined cases and either repeated previously used techniques more carefully or looked for a new approach. Anderson would not be forgotten.
More Body Parts
The following year, two New Jersey state workers unloading trash at a Burlington County Department of Transportation maintenance yard spotted several heavy parcels wrapped in tan and white plastic bags. Since these bags did not resemble the typical garbage from the area, they wondered what was inside. One worker picked up a bag and thought it felt like a pumpkin, but it was July not October. In fact, some of the bags appeared to be bloody, the way butchered meat looks, so he peeked inside the one he was holding. He was startled to see a decomposed human head.
The police arrived to take over, and each parcel, unwrapped, contained the body part of a middle-aged male. A hunk of skin in one bag showed a bruise resembling a bite mark, and another bag contained the intestines, stomach, a plastic cup, and a latex glove. The dismembered upper and lower torso had been separated, and all the parts were present except the legs. One more bag included a pair of latex gloves, a bedsheet, a shower curtain, and a bloodstained compass saw. Packaging from latex gloves bore a tag from a CVS store on Staten Island. Near all of this was a briefcase with identification and a pair of shoes, a box of Acme plastic garbage bags, and a sewing needle. Two hours later, the legs were located in a trash can along the Garden State Parkway at the Stafford Forge rest area.
This victim was Thomas Mulcahy, fifty-seven, a business executive from Sudbury, Massachusetts. At first, he appeared to have been at low risk to encounter a killer. A sales executive for Bull H. N. Information Systems and an active church member, he’d been married for over three decades and had four children. He’d gone to New York on July 7 to make a sales presentation at the World Trade Center and had met a friend for drinks at the Townhouse Bar, known for its gay clientele. The next day, he had drinks at a bar near the World Trade Center and withdrew two hundred dollars from an ATM on Forty-ninth Street and Sixth Avenue.
Family members who knew about Mulcahy’s secret life informed police that he was bisexual. He might have picked up someone he didn’t know at a bar. The autopsy revealed that he had suffered several stab wounds and a bite mark, and it appeared that his body parts had been washed clean of blood.
That same month, body parts that had turned up in a dump outside Schenectady, New Jersey, were traced to fifty-year-old Guillermo Mendez, a gay Cuban refugee. His arms, legs, and torso were found fifteen miles from his home, but he was not known to have been in New York or at any gay bars. His fingertips and genitals had been removed and most of the blood was drained from his body. Three weeks later, a couple of youths walking through a cemetery found his decomposing head in a bag. Despite the similarities, the New Jersey authorities believed that this crime was unrelated to the others. No more victims were found for almost year.
On May 10, 1993, Donald Giberson was driving on Crow Hill Road in Manchester, New Jersey, when he spotted a plastic bag on the side of the road. It was clear from rips in the plastic that animals had been at it, so he assumed it was a deer carcass. He rolled down his window to look. When he saw human fingers, he contacted the police.
By showing photographs of the victim to prostitutes, investigators soon identified the arms of forty-four-year-old Anthony Marrero, who was missing from New York. Five other bags scattered along the roadway contained more of his parts, wrapped first in shopping bags and then in larger plastic bags. The body had been cut into seven parts. Fingerprints confirmed the identification.
Unlike the other victims, Marrero was a crack addict and gay hustler, known around the Port Authority bus terminal at Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue. With a failed marriage behind him, he had moved to New York in 1985, but kept only sporadic contact with his family. He’d earned his money for the next decade from custodian jobs and then from pickup dates willing to pay. Last seen at a gay bar, he’d encountered it seemed, a bad trick. His body parts, too, appeared to have been cleaned up after dismemberment. Then another gay man went missing from New York.
Michael Sakara, fifty-six, was openly gay. At six-foot-four and 250 pounds, he made an impression. He worked the afternoon shift as a typesetter at the New York Law Journal and was considered to be both bright and intense. His longtime lover had recently moved out of the studio apartment they had shared on Manhattan’s West End Avenue, so he was often out in the evenings looking for company. He was easy to like.
For two decades, Sakara frequented the piano bar at the Five Oaks so often that the owners knew his favorite seat. He liked to talk and sing, and he greeted everyone freely with a firm handshake. He often remained at the bar until the early hours of the morning. Whoever he went off with on July 30, 1993, was also there, but no one could remember who it might have been. Someone did see Sakara enter a car.
At midmorning on July 31, a hotdog vendor in Haverstraw, New York, discovered Sakara’s head and arms wrapped in two garbage bags and tossed into a fifty-five-gallon can. On top of these bags, before the refreshment stand had opened, a bottle collector had come across clothing, traced to Sakara. Nine days later, on August 8, the legs and torso turned up in bags at a second location along the same road, ten miles north, in Stony Point, New York.
An autopsy showed that Sakara had been killed by blows to the head but was also stabbed five times. In addition, like the other men, it appeared that his body parts had been cleaned up before being wrapped. Also like the two men in New Jersey, he had been cut into exactly seven pieces.
Bartender Lisa Hall said she recalled seeing Sakara with a man whom he introduced, but she did not know a name. She remembered only that he was a nurse at St. Vincent’s Hospital. If authorities ever apprehended a suspect, they at least had a witness who could place him with the victim.
Several reporters wrote about a potential serial killer on the loose, a predator of middle-aged gay men. Investigators stated that they had no hard evidence for the assumption. Nevertheless, customers of gay bars in New York began taking extra precautions. In the West Village, the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project handed out flyers that offered a $10,000 reward for information. They wanted the killer caught.
Rockland County investigators on the Sakara case sent a teletype to other police agencies to inquire about similar murders. New Jersey state troopers responded, forming a task force with seven other New York and Pennsylvania law enforcement agencies, determined to stop this grisly killer. They based their headquarters in Rockland County, where the most recent victim had been dumped.
Found variously in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, the four key victims had been murdered, dismembered, and wrapped tightly in several layers of plastic bags. (Guillermo Mendez was left off the list.) From the method of cutting with both a saw and a knife, and the technique of wrapping and disposal, it seemed to be the work of a single perpetrator, soon dubbed the “Last Call Killer.” There were also similarities in the way the victims were bound and in ligature marks on the wrists. That August, Lieutenant Matthew Kuehn, a New Jersey state trooper in charge of the Mulcahy investigation, collected photos of male nurses working in hospitals in the area and showed them to bartender Lisa Hall. She picked out Richard Rogers as having the same hairstyle as the man she had met, but she thought the name used was something more common, like John. She could not make a positive ID from the photo. Since this potential lead failed to go anywhere, this case, too, went cold.
Lieutenant Kuehn had promised Mulcahy’s widow that he would stay on the case until he found the killer, and during the late 1990s, she inquired into their progress. Although Kuehn had nothing to offer, he decided to reexamine the bags. The cold-case squad used cyanoacrylate fuming once more, and while they were able to obtain prints that were scannable for AFIS, they had no hits on a suspect.
Then, in November 2000, Kuehn learned about a fingerprint-lifting technique called vacuum metal deposition (VMD), which involved an expensive high-tech machine and was supposedly superior to Super Glue fuming for obtaining prints from plastic bags. He contacted scientists in Toronto, where this process was available, and they agreed to subject the bags from the body parts to the VMD analysis. However, they had to work on their own time, so it would not be a quick turnaround.
With VMD, an exhibit is placed inside the chamber of a machine, and four to five milligrams of gold and several grams of zinc are loaded into evaporation containers beneath it. Pumps are activated that reduce pressure and a low-voltage current evaporates the gold, leaving a minute deposit over the exhibit. The gold apparently absorbs into the fingerprint residue. In a separate dish, the zinc is then subjected to a similar method, heated and vaporized, and then deposited onto the exhibit. It adheres to the gold (but does not penetrate) to produce an image of the fingerprint valleys that lie between the ridges. This makes the print visible in sharp relief for photography.
Although this method had only recently been applied to latent-fingerprint analysis, it had been in use since 1976 for other purposes. It was most effectively used for prints on plastic and glass but had also worked on cloth and currency. Reportedly, VMD develops more fingerprints than any method of Super Glue fuming or other reagents. It can develop prints on more types of articles than other methods, including on leather surfaces, synthetic clothing, and polyethylene garbage bags. However, one issue that a defense attorney could raise is that, to get the best results, significant experience is required on the part of the examiner.
The New Jersey investigators sent the plastic gloves found with Mulcahy’s body and more than three dozen bags from the body parts of all four victims for analysis. It took six months, but finally the scientists were able to lift thirty-five fingerprints and a few palm prints from four bags that were of sufficient quality for identification. This supported what the New Jersey investigators had found with their most recent go at Super Glue fuming.
Lieutenant Kuehn sent packets with the prints and case details to all fifty states and Puerto Rico, to be run through all state-based AFIS systems. This time, he received the call he was waiting for. The prints were a match to a man in the system in Maine, Richard Rogers. His name had not popped up before, although his prints had been on file for three decades, because Maine had not been online with AFIS until 2001.
But Kuehn had encountered this name before: Rogers was a fifty-year-old registered nurse from Staten Island who had worked for the past twenty years at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. Kuehn had shown his photo, along with those of other male nurses, to Lisa Hall. He had certainly been in the area during the times of these crimes and it remained to be seen whether he had alibis. In addition, in 1988, he had been arrested for unlawfully imprisoning a man who had visited him, but was acquitted.
More interesting, Rogers had a checkered history. In 1973, he had used a hammer to bludgeon a housemate, Frederick Spencer, killing him. He then wrapped the body in a plastic tent and dumped it on the side of a road. When charged with manslaughter, he claimed he had attacked Spencer in self-defense and he was acquitted. While he had not dismembered this man, he’d wrapped him in plastic and dumped him along the road. It’s often the case that serial killers who have been linked to a victim but not convicted take pains to avoid future arrests. Cutting up a body to dump in the trash was less risky than dumping it whole.
It turned out, after checking records and talking with his colleagues, that Nurse Richard Rogers had no alibis for the times of the murders. In fact, he’d been seen with Michael Sakara just before he vanished. The D.A.’s office in New Jersey believed they had enough to bring him in, so on May 27, 2001, Rogers was arrested and charged with the 1992 murders of Thomas Mulcahy and Anthony Marrero. When confronted, he neither admitted nor denied his guilt, but instead nodded and passed gas.
Rogers resisted extradition to New Jersey. To get him there, the authorities had to prove that the incident considered a crime in that state was likewise considered a crime in New York, that the man in the warrant was the man detained in New York, and that the suspect had been in New Jersey. The crime was murder and they had his fingerprints, so the legal issues were easily resolved. He was brought to Ocean County.
A dozen detectives from New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania searched Rogers’s condominium for evidence that the murders had been committed there, but found no blood or cutting instruments. They did turn up a bottle of Versed, often used as a date-rape drug; rug fibers consistent with those found on Mulcahy’s body; a Bible with earmarked pages in the Book of Kings, in which passages that mentioned decapitation and dismemberment had been highlighted; videotapes of horror films, including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; and photos of shirtless men on which wounds had been drawn with red ink. They also found plastic bags similar to those in which body parts had been wrapped, as well as a New Jersey road map. The bags were an Acme brand, and there was an Acme store in the same mall on Staten Island where the gloves had been purchased. Despite failing to turn up the proverbial smoking gun, this was a lot of good circumstantial evidence.
The D.A.’s office announced what they had against Rogers: eighteen of his fingerprints on bags that wrapped the remains of Peter S. Anderson; sixteen on the bags wrapping Thomas Mulcahy; and two fingerprints and a palm print on a bag wrapping parts of Anthony Marrero. Rogers had been seen in the company of Michael Sakara, the New York Law Journal typesetter, and they had a witness for that. In addition, there was potentially a fifth victim linked to Rogers—or sixth, if one counted Spencer. Matthew Pierro, twenty-one, who was last seen in 1982 leaving a gay bar in Orlando, Florida, had been found murdered off Interstate 4 in Lake Mary. While he was not dismembered, he’d been stabbed multiple times, a nipple bitten off, and an odontologist indicated that another bite mark on his body could be a match to Rogers’s teeth. Rogers had been in Florida at the time for a class reunion.
On January 21, 2003, a New Jersey grand jury indicted Rogers on two counts of murder and two counts of hindering apprehension. He denied involvement and said he was innocent. Prosecutors hoped to bring all five cases into evidence against him, believing that the patterns from one case to the next would be convincing. Failing that, they still had his fingerprints associated with both victims found in New Jersey.
The Same Case, but Different
At a hearing in September 2005, Detective Steven Colantonio, from Rockland County, testified before Judge James N. Citta in Toms River, New Jersey, about the similarities between the Sakara murder and the other three. “It was the opinion of the investigators [and] the opinion of the medical examiners,” he said, “that there were such similarities that if you found the person who did one of them, you would find the person who did all three of them...It was as if you were looking at the same case, but they were different.”
Dr. Fred Zugibe, the chief medical examiner of Rockland County at the time, described how the victim had been expertly decapitated by someone familiar with the easiest places to saw through a body. Similar testimony was offered about the Anderson case. In addition, fingerprints from the bag holding Anderson’s parts were a match to the defendant, as were prints on bags from Mulcahy and Marrero.
Deputy Chief Mark Whitfield, a member of the task force from Ocean County, New Jersey, discussed how the body parts had been cleaned up in each of the cases, “as if they were drained so they were not as messy to move.” He also discussed the similarity of victim type, adding that Rogers had frequented both the Five Oaks Bar and the Townhouse, connected to three of the victims. All of the men had been drinking or high when they went missing, and all appeared to have been incapacitated before they disappeared.
Judge Citta found the testimony compelling. He ruled that, based on significant similarity, he would allow accounts about the Anderson and Sakara murders into the double murder trial, which considerably strengthened the collection of evidence against Rogers. However, he thought the fifth case, the murder of John Pierro in Florida, was too far removed in time and place, and too dissimilar. That one would not be allowed.
The trial of Richard W. Rogers got under way on October 26, 2005. During jury selection, Rogers was offered a deal: plead guilty to manslaughter in both cases and receive two thirty-year sentences with the possibility of parole in fifteen years. Also, if he pleaded to third-degree murder in the Anderson case from Pennsylvania, he would receive just ten to twenty years in prison. Rogers indicated that he’d take it under consideration. Trial watchers anxiously waited out the weekend, wondering if he might short-circuit the process and admit to guilt. It wasn’t a bad deal, unless he believed the case against him was weak. No one knew what his attorney, David Ruhnke, told him.
On Monday, it was clear that jury selection would resume; Rogers was not accepting the deal. William Heisler, the assistant prosecutor and chief trial attorney for Ocean County, had teamed up with Hillary Bryce. They told the jury the state could prove its case against Rogers beyond a reasonable doubt. In an interview later, Heisler recalled the experience. “It’s difficult when you have a defendant with no statement. You don’t know what he’s going to come up with. He’s a meek, mild-looking guy, which struck me as kind of strange. But nothing about this case wasn’t strange. He’s a smart guy. I don’t know what he would have said. Half the time, these guys make stuff up on the fly and then you have to check it out and disprove it. But what could he say about his fingerprints?”
In his opening address, defense attorney David Ruhnke indicated that Rogers was innocent, and that his fingerprints on these bags indicated only that he had carried something in them at some point in time. In addition, a few prints on the bags were not linked to him, indicating that others had handled them. “Maybe,” he said, “they don’t have the right guy.”
The prosecution opened with accounts from the various witnesses who had discovered the bodies. Then Deputy Chief Mark Whitfield, the lead investigator on the Marrero case, described how he had looked at several suspects just after the dismembered bodies were found, and took their fingerprints, but was unable to make reliable comparisons until 2001. (Describing the situation in Maine was disallowed because it would bring in suggestive details from a case in which Rogers had been acquitted.)
Two fingerprint analysts, Detective Sergeant Jeffrey Scozzafava of the New Jersey State Police and Detective Eugene Thatcher of Ocean County’s Criminalistics Investigation Unit, testified that the sixteen fingerprints on the bags used to wrap victim Thomas Mulcahy and two fingerprints and a palm print from the bags containing the arms and head of Anthony Marrero matched former surgical nurse Richard Rogers. One fingerprint from the Mulcahy bags and a palm print from the Marrero bags remained unidentified. Ruhnke attempted to attack the examiners by noting mistakes made in fingerprint analysis, including those committed by the FBI. He talked about how the FBI had mistakenly identified a U.S. citizen as the person who had planted a bomb on a train in Madrid. Ruhnke also tried to discredit the unusual method of VMD. While it was not the only method used, it had contributed sufficiently to the case to warrant an expert in the courtroom. (Allen Pollard from the Toronto Police Service testified about the process and results.) While the method was not widely used, because of its expense, this was no indication that it was not a viable scientific technique. When Judge Citta limited Ruhnke’s questioning about fingerprint analysis, the lawyer retorted that the jury was “entitled to learn that it is not a perfect system.”
Medical Examiner Lyla Perez then described the wounds she had noted during Mulcahy’s autopsy. After he was stabbed to death, she said, his body had been eviscerated and cut into seven separate parts. She had photographs of the gory remains, but because of their disturbing nature, Ruhnke attempted to limit what the jury would actually view. They reviewed five photos. Mulcahy’s blood alcohol level was high, Perez told them, and there were ligature marks on his wrists that indicated he’d been bound.
The next day, Lieutenant Kuehn described the murder of Michael Sakara. Its relevance lay not just in the way it resembled the two in New Jersey, but that it was the only case in which Rogers had been identified by a witness. This brought in Lisa Hall, the former bartender at the Five Oaks, who stated that on the night Sakara disappeared, July 30, 1993, he had introduced her to Rogers. While he had used a generic name, Hall had identified Rogers from a photo and was able to point him out in the courtroom. She said she had no doubt he was the man she had met.
But there was another issue. Lieutenant Kuehn stated that a rigorous search had produced no evidence that Rogers had killed either man on Staten Island, which would have transferred the case to New York’s jurisdiction. Defense attorney David Ruhnke challenged this, saying that no crime scene had been established in New Jersey, only dump sites, and indicating that Rogers (if he did it) would more likely have committed murder on familiar turf. Lieutenant Kuehn responded that it would have been quite difficult for Rogers to have killed and dismembered the victims in his fifth-floor condo and then carried the bloody bags through the halls without anyone noticing.
Also testifying that day was Sergeant George Kegerreis, who indicated that eighteen fingerprints and a palm print lifted from the bags containing parts of victim Peter Anderson had been matched to eight of Rogers’s fingers and his palm. With this testimony, the state rested its case.
John O’Brien, a reporter for the Staten Island Advance, described Rogers’s demeanor during this final stretch. In contrast to his earlier calmness, he now “wrung his hands, bounced his legs and grimaced at his attorney.”
On November 10, Rogers indicated he would not take the stand to testify on his own behalf. Ruhnke also stated he would call no witnesses on Rogers’s behalf. This surprised many people. It seemed that Ruhnke’s challenge of the fingerprint testimony had been his sole strategy. While he also asked for an acquittal based on the fact that no one knew where the men had been killed, the judge dismissed this concern.
Closing arguments from both sides were brief. Prosecutor William Heisler reiterated the circumstantial and physical evidence that linked Rogers to the crimes from all four cases.
• Mulcahy had disappeared after attending a business meeting in Manhattan, and he was seen in a gay bar that Rogers frequented. There were sixteen fingerprints on bags that wrapped his remains.
• Marrero, a known gay hustler from Manhattan, was cut up and wrapped in plastic before being dumped in New Jersey. A palm print and two fingerprints linked him to Rogers.
• Peter Anderson, found in Pennsylvania, was a gay man who went to a bar Rogers frequented in Manhattan. A palm print and eighteen fingerprints on the bags that wrapped his parts were matched to Rogers.
• Michael Sakara was seen with Rogers at a gay bar the evening before his body parts were found wrapped in several bags.
• Rogers’s employment records indicated he’d taken a few days off during the time of each of the four murders.
• The murder MO and disposal of all four were strikingly similar, including the way the parts were cut, cleaned, and wrapped, as well as how they were dumped near roadways.
Defense attorney Ruhnke reiterated that with no crime scene, New Jersey had no jurisdiction; he also disputed the argument that his client’s fingerprints on bags were proof that he’d committed murder. They had the wrong man.
In the middle of the afternoon of November 11, the jury retired. During their deliberations, they asked Judge Citta about jurisdiction issues. He indicated that New Jersey did have jurisdiction over the two cases, because the law allowed them to infer that if the bodies were found in the state, the men had been killed there. There was no proof that they had been murdered anywhere else.
By six o’clock that evening, they had a verdict. People filed back into the courtroom, despite the fact that it was a Friday, until the place was packed. The forewoman wept and held the hand of another woman as she rose to announce their findings. Clearly she was shaken—always a bad sign for the defense. And it was. Richard Rogers, fifty-five, was found guilty of the first-degree murder of Thomas Mulcahy and Anthony Marrero. He was also found guilty on two counts of hindering his apprehension by dismembering the victims and disposing of them the way he had. As the forewoman spoke, Rogers showed no reaction. He simply stared at the front of the courtroom.
Since the D.A. had not requested the death penalty, Rogers was remanded to Ocean County’s jail to await his January 26, 2006, sentencing, which everyone knew would be life imprisonment. Ruhnke announced his plan to file an appeal over the jurisdiction issues. Heisler told reporters that he felt better knowing that the killer was no longer out on the streets. It was a victory for him and his team, as well as for the tristate task force that had worked so hard on making sure that a killer had been brought to justice.
“When you put everything in the mix,” Heisler said in retrospect, “it’s pretty tough to explain all these fingerprints and all these bodies dismembered in the same way, and try to lay it off on anyone else. I’d like to have had more information about what motivated the guy.”
Judge Citta had no qualms about putting a label on these acts. At the sentencing, he said to Rogers, “You are an evil human being.” He added that he would do everything in his power “to assure society that you never walk free again and that you die in some hole in some prison.” He gave Rogers two consecutive life terms, plus ten years, ensuring that he must serve sixty-five years behind bars before he could be considered for parole. “If we had to measure a depraved murderer on a scale of one to ten,” Judge Citta said, “I would have to conclude that Mr. Rogers’ participation and actions in these murders would make him a ten.”
Whether Rogers will be tried for the other murders remains to be seen. However, relevant technology will continue to be at the forefront of such investigations. The use of science is compelling to juries, who are swayed by its seemingly objective irrefutability. The next case in this chronicle, also a long-term investigation, involved computer technology.
Sources
Bean, Matt. “Gold-Dust Fingerprint Method Catching On.”
CourtTV.com, November 14, 2004.
“ ‘Body Chop’ Nurse Charged in Grisly Dismemberment Slayings.” New York Post, January 22, 2003.
Cave, Damien. “As Killer Faces Sentencing, His Motive Remains Elusive.” New York Times, January 27, 2006.
Cummings, Amanda. “Vacuum Metal Deposition: The Future of the Last Call Killer Saga.”
Associatedcontent.com, retrieved December 9, 2007.
Dimeo, Lisa. “Vacuum Metal Deposition: Its Value in Developing Archival Prints,”
SCAFO.org, October 3, 2002.
Fisher, Ian. “Do Threads of Five Lives Lead to One Serial Killer?” New York Times, August 8, 1993.
Holl, John. “Man Who Killed 2 He Met at Gay Bar Gets 2 Consecutive Life Sentences.” New York Times, January 28, 2006.
Hopkins, Kathleen. “Chilling Warning Made by Suspect.” Asbury Park Press, September 29, 2005.
_. “Ex-Bartender Says Rogers Was Last to See Her Friend.” Asbury Park Press, November 3, 2005.
_. “Murder Trial to Start Sept. 20.” Asbury Park Press, August 20, 2005.
_. “Prints Match, Detectives Testify.” Asbury Park Press, September 23, 2005.
_. “Killer Gets Two Life Terms.” Asbury Park Press, January 28, 2006.
_. “Ex-Nurse Guilty of Murder May Face More Charges.” Asbury Park Press, November 24, 2005.
_. “New York Killing Identical to 2 in New Jersey, Detective Tells Judge.” Asbury Park Press, September 22, 2005.
_. “Experts Connect Fingerprints to Killing Suspect.” Asbury Park Press, November 2, 2005.
“Judge Rules Gay Prey Serial Killer Richard Rogers Jury Will Hear Similar Slayings.”
Queerday.com, retrieved September 29, 2005.
Osborn, Duncan, “An Accused Serial Killer on Trial.” Gay City News 3, January 29-February 4, 2004.
Parry, Wayne. “Trial of Richard Rogers to Hear About Slayings, Dismemberment of Four Gay, Bisexual Men.” Associated Press, October 15, 2005.
Rizzo, Nina, and Joseph Sapia. “Suspect Resisting Extradition, Home Searched for Evidence.” Asbury Park Press, May 31, 2001.
