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The Charmer Who Killed Across America · U.S HIDDEN CRIMES

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  Speaker 1: The charmer who killed across America. In the fall of 1995,
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  Speaker 1: a charming drifter named Glenn Rogers lured women in bars,
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  Speaker 1: killed four of them across California, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana
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  Speaker 1: in just six weeks, and fled each state before police
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  Speaker 1: could close in. Investigators from five states and the FBI
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  Speaker 1: shared evidence and used the media and long-haul truckers to
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  Speaker 1: track him, until Kentucky State Police ran his stolen car
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  Speaker 1: off the road and ended the manhunt. The most dangerous
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  Speaker 1: man in America in the fall of 1995 did not
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  Speaker 1: bother to hide. He gave his real name to bartenders.
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  Speaker 1: He gave it to motel clerks. He signed it, in
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  Speaker 1: his own handwriting, on a registration card in a Tampa motel.
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  Speaker 1: And he left his fingerprints in the room where a
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  Speaker 1: woman lay dead in the bathtub. He drove cars that
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  Speaker 1: could be traced straight back to the women he had
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  Speaker 1: just killed. He paid for rounds of drinks with crisp
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  Speaker 1: hundred-dollar bills. and he smiled at strangers, and the strangers
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  Speaker 1: smiled back. For about six weeks, from the last days
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  Speaker 1: of September to the middle of November, a charming drifter
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  Speaker 1: with long hair and a quick laugh moved across the
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  Speaker 1: American map like a rumor, from Los Angeles to Mississippi,
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  Speaker 1: from Mississippi to Florida, from Florida to Louisiana, and from
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  Speaker 1: Louisiana toward the hills of Kentucky. And behind him, in
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  Speaker 1: every town, there was a woman who had said yes
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  Speaker 1: to a ride, or a drink, or a little kindness,
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  Speaker 1: and who was later found dead. It is easy to
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  Speaker 1: look back on a story like this and say that
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  Speaker 1: the warning signs were everywhere. They were not. Not at
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  Speaker 1: the time. At the time there was only a friendly
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  Speaker 1: man at the end of a bar. A stranger who
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  Speaker 1: seemed to have plenty of money and plenty of time.
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  Speaker 1: Who laughed at the right moments and listened as though
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  Speaker 1: everything you said mattered. That is the unsettling heart of
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  Speaker 1: this case. The people who met him did not see
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  Speaker 1: a monster. They saw someone they wanted to spend an
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  Speaker 1: evening with. And by the time investigators across five states
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  Speaker 1: understood what they were looking at, the man the newspapers
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  Speaker 1: would soon call the cross-country killer and the Casanova killer
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  Speaker 1: was already hundreds of miles down the road. This is
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  Speaker 1: the story of Glenn Edward Rogers. Over the next couple
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  Speaker 1: of hours, we will follow it from the paper mill
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  Speaker 1: town in Ohio where he was born, to a burned-out
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  Speaker 1: pickup truck in a hospital parking lot in the San
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  Speaker 1: Fernando Valley, to a motel bathtub in Tampa, to a
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  Speaker 1: roadblock on a Kentucky highway, to a courtroom in Florida,
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  Speaker 1: a courtroom in Los Angeles, and finally to a gurney
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  Speaker 1: in a small room at Florida State Prison, nearly 30
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  Speaker 1: years after the killing spree that made his name. Along
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  Speaker 1: the way, we will meet the people who did the hard, patient,
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  Speaker 1: unglamorous work of stopping him. A Los Angeles detective who
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  Speaker 1: began with nothing but a husband's testimony and a roll
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  Speaker 1: of film that survived a fire. A Mississippi family who
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  Speaker 1: understood too late what their daughter had been afraid of.
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  Speaker 1: A Tampa detective who refused to let a Jane Doe
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  Speaker 1: stay nameless. and a Kentucky investigator who had been hunting
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  Speaker 1: this man for almost two years before the rest of
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  Speaker 1: the country had ever heard of him. And we will
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  Speaker 1: keep returning, again and again, to the women whose lives
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  Speaker 1: were taken. Sandra Gallagher, Linda Price, Tina Marie Cripps, Andy Sutton.
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  Speaker 1: Between them, they left behind at least 11 children. They
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  Speaker 1: were mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends, and they were far
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  Speaker 1: more than the last chapter of someone else's story. It
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  Speaker 1: is a mistake that true crime sometimes makes, to let
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  Speaker 1: the killer swallow the whole narrative, to give him the
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  Speaker 1: best lines and the most vivid details while the people
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  Speaker 1: he destroyed become little more than names on a list.
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  Speaker 1: We are going to try to do better than that.
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  Speaker 1: A word before we begin about how this account was
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  Speaker 1: put together. It draws on the investigators' own recollections as
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  Speaker 1: they were presented in an FBI documentary, on contemporary newspaper
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  Speaker 1: reporting from 1995 through 1999, on court records as they
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  Speaker 1: have been summarized in public sources, and on coverage of
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  Speaker 1: Rogers' execution in May of 2025. Where the public record
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  Speaker 1: is clear, we will tell you plainly. Where it is
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  Speaker 1: silent or where accounts disagree, we will tell you that too,
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  Speaker 1: rather than invent details to fill the gap. A story
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  Speaker 1: about real victims deserves that much honesty. Let us begin, then,
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  Speaker 1: where Glenn Rogers began in Hamilton, Ohio. Hamilton sits on
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  Speaker 1: the Great Miami River in Butler County. a short drive
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  Speaker 1: north of Cincinnati. In the middle of the 20th century,
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  Speaker 1: it was a hard-working industrial town, a place of paper
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  Speaker 1: mills and machine shops and brick neighborhoods, where a man
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  Speaker 1: could finish high school, take a job at a plant,
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  Speaker 1: and expect to be there until his pension. It was
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  Speaker 1: the kind of American town that produced a great deal
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  Speaker 1: of the country's goods and very little of its headlines.
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  Speaker 1: Glenn Edward Rogers was born there on July 15, 1962,
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  Speaker 1: and he would later be described as in the grim
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  Speaker 1: shorthand of newspaper profiles, as a hometown boy who went wrong.
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  Speaker 1: He was one of seven children born to Edna, whose
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  Speaker 1: maiden name was Sears and Claude Rogers. Their father worked
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  Speaker 1: at the Champion Paper Company, as what the records call
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  Speaker 1: a hydropulp operator, one of the men who tended the
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  Speaker 1: machinery that turned wood into the raw material of paper.
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  Speaker 1: It was steady, loud, physical work, the kind that gets
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  Speaker 1: a family through the month but does not leave much
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  Speaker 1: room for anything else. Among the seven children was a
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  Speaker 1: brother named Clay, who will matter a great deal to
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  Speaker 1: this story, both in 1994, when he helped lead police
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  Speaker 1: to a terrible discovery, and decades later, when he would
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  Speaker 1: sit in front of a documentary camera to talk about
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  Speaker 1: the brother he had known. Here we meet the first
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  Speaker 1: of the places where the public record runs thin, and
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  Speaker 1: it is worth being honest about that. What we do
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  Speaker 1: not have, in any documented form, is a detailed picture
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  Speaker 1: of what the Rogers household was actually like. We do
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  Speaker 1: not have reliable, independently verified accounts of how Claude and
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  Speaker 1: Edna raised their children, how Glenn got along with each
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  Speaker 1: brother and sister, or what his earliest years looked like
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  Speaker 1: day to day. The things that are on the record
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  Speaker 1: are the bare facts of the family's size, the father's employment,
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  Speaker 1: and the names of a few relatives. In the final
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  Speaker 1: weeks before Glenn Rogers' execution in 2025, his attorneys told
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  Speaker 1: the courts that he had been sexually abused as a
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  Speaker 1: child and that this should have been weighed at his sentencing.
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  Speaker 1: Those claims were made in legal filings, and the courts
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  Speaker 1: ultimately declined to stop the execution on that basis. They
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  Speaker 1: are part of the record of the case, but they
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  Speaker 1: are allegations advanced by his lawyers, not findings that were
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  Speaker 1: tested in the way a trial tests evidence, and we
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  Speaker 1: will treat them exactly that way. What the record does
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  Speaker 1: show is that by his mid-teens, Glenn Rogers was already
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  Speaker 1: in trouble. He was expelled from junior high school before
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  Speaker 1: he turned 16. Not long after, he got a girlfriend pregnant.
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  Speaker 1: Her name was Deborah and Nix, and she was 14
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  Speaker 1: years old. The two of them married, and they went
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  Speaker 1: on to have another child together in 1981. By 1983,
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  Speaker 1: the marriage was over. In the divorce filing, Deborah Nix
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  Speaker 1: alleged that Glenn Rogers had been physically abusive. That detail
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  Speaker 1: matters because it is the earliest documented sign of a
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  Speaker 1: pattern that investigators would hear about again and again from
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  Speaker 1: people who knew him. a man who could be warm
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  Speaker 1: and entertaining one moment and frighteningly violent the next. What
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  Speaker 1: became of the children, and whether Rogers had any meaningful
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  Speaker 1: relationship with them in later years, is not something the
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  Speaker 1: sources available to us document, so we will leave it there.
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  Speaker 1: When reporters arrived in Hamilton in November of 1995, after
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  Speaker 1: the nation first learned his name, they found a town
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  Speaker 1: divided in its memories. Some people who had known Glenn
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  Speaker 1: Rogers remembered him as a charmer, easy to talk to,
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  Speaker 1: quick with a joke, the kind of guy who would
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  Speaker 1: give you a hand if you asked. Others remembered something
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  Speaker 1: else entirely. They remembered a short fuse, a hair-trigger temper,
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  Speaker 1: and trouble that seemed to follow him. A major newspaper
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  Speaker 1: summed up the contradiction in its headline that month, noting
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  Speaker 1: that some in his hometown saw him as charming while
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  Speaker 1: others recalled troubles and a temper. Both descriptions were true,
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  Speaker 1: and that is exactly what made him so dangerous. The
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  Speaker 1: charm was not a mask that hid the anger. The
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  Speaker 1: charm and the anger lived in the same man, and
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  Speaker 1: the people around him never quite knew which one they
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  Speaker 1: would meet. Investigators who later looked into his background said
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  Speaker 1: much the same thing. Friends and co-workers told detectives that
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  Speaker 1: Rogers worked odd jobs, mostly in construction, and that he
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  Speaker 1: spent his free time in local bars. They said that
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  Speaker 1: when he drank, he could become enraged. Former girlfriends described
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  Speaker 1: domestic violence. Taken together, These accounts sketch a portrait that
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  Speaker 1: will be familiar to anyone who has studied violent crime.
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  Speaker 1: A man with a long history of controlling, aggressive behavior
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  Speaker 1: toward women, who drank heavily, who moved from place to place,
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  Speaker 1: and who had never been held to account in any
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  Speaker 1: lasting way. None of that makes a serial killer. Plenty
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  Speaker 1: of people who fit parts of that description never kill anyone.
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  Speaker 1: But it is the context in which what came next
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  Speaker 1: has to be understood. And what came next, in the
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  Speaker 1: autumn of 1993, was the first death that investigators would
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  Speaker 1: later connect to Glenn Rogers, though it would take months
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  Speaker 1: for anyone to realize it had happened. His name was
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  Speaker 1: Mark Peters. He was 71 years old, a retired electrician
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  Speaker 1: and a military veteran, a quiet older man living in Hamilton.
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  Speaker 1: At some point before October of 1993, Peters had taken
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  Speaker 1: Glenn Rogers in. He let the younger man share his home,
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  Speaker 1: which is the sort of generosity that rarely makes the
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  Speaker 1: news until it is repaid with betrayal. In October of 1993,
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  Speaker 1: Mark Peters was reported missing. His car was gone too.
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  Speaker 1: So were several valuable personal possessions, including antiques, guns, and
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  Speaker 1: a collection of coins. And Glenn Rogers had disappeared along
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  Speaker 1: with them. On January 10, 1994, Kentucky State Police recovered
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  Speaker 1: a body from a cabin in Beattyville, Kentucky. The cabin
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  Speaker 1: belonged to the Rogers family, a rural retreat in the
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  Speaker 1: hills about a few hours south of Hamilton. It was
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  Speaker 1: Glenn's brother Clay who had reached out to police and
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  Speaker 1: who helped lead them to the place, and what investigators
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  Speaker 1: found was grim. The remains, which police believed to be
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  Speaker 1: those of Mark Peters, had been tied to a chair
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  Speaker 1: and hidden beneath a pile of furniture. The cord that
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  Speaker 1: bound the body-matched cord found in the home the two
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  Speaker 1: men had shared in Hamilton. Because of the condition of
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  Speaker 1: the remains, the authorities could not determine how Mark Peters
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  Speaker 1: had died. That last fact is important, and it explains
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  Speaker 1: why Glenn Rogers was never prosecuted for the death of
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  Speaker 1: Mark Peters. Without a cause of death, and without Rogers
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  Speaker 1: himself to question, the case could not be brought to
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  Speaker 1: a conclusion. Peters' death was treated as a homicide, and
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  Speaker 1: Rogers was the only suspect, but the case stayed open
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  Speaker 1: and pending. It was assigned to Kentucky State Police Detective
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  Speaker 1: Bob Stevens, who set out to find the missing man.
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  Speaker 1: He would be looking for almost two years. It was
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  Speaker 1: extraordinarily hard to track Rogers, Stevens later explained, because Rogers
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  Speaker 1: did not live the way most fugitives live. He did
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  Speaker 1: not hole up in a single hideout. He moved by
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  Speaker 1: Greyhound bus, by tractor trailer, by borrowed car, by whatever
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  Speaker 1: came along, and each time the trail went cold, he
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  Speaker 1: was somewhere else. We do not know because it is
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  Speaker 1: not documented in the sources we have, precisely where Glenn
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  Speaker 1: Rogers went in the months after Mark Peters vanished. We
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  Speaker 1: do not know every town he lived in, every job
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  Speaker 1: he held, or every person he met between the winter
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  Speaker 1: of 1994 and the late summer of 1995. Investigators would
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  Speaker 1: later suspect that he had been involved in other violent
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  Speaker 1: crimes during that stretch, and he would eventually make statements
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  Speaker 1: about killings that he did not follow through on or
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  Speaker 1: that were never proven. We will come to that, For now,
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  Speaker 1: the only solid fact is that at some point he
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  Speaker 1: surfaced on the other side of the country, in the
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  Speaker 1: Los Angeles area, where he rented an apartment in the
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  Speaker 1: Van Nuys neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley. Imagine the
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  Speaker 1: Los Angeles of that September. It was a city transfixed.
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  Speaker 1: For months, the whole country had been watching a courtroom
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  Speaker 1: in downtown Los Angeles, where the trial of O.J. Simpson
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  Speaker 1: was winding toward its end. Within a week of the
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  Speaker 1: events we are about to describe, a jury would deliver
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  Speaker 1: its verdict. and the nation would stop what it was
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  Speaker 1: doing to listen. Los Angeles in the fall of 1995
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  Speaker 1: was a city of television cameras and speculation, a city
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  Speaker 1: that believed it had seen everything. And in the middle
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  Speaker 1: of all that noise, in an apartment a few minutes
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  Speaker 1: from a hospital in Van Nuys, a drifter from Ohio
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  Speaker 1: with a violent past and a pleasant smile was settling in,
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  Speaker 1: working odd jobs and spending his evenings in neighborhood bars.
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  Speaker 1: It is worth pausing on what those bars were. A
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  Speaker 1: neighborhood bar in the mid-1990s was not just a place
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  Speaker 1: to drink. It was a social center, a living room
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  Speaker 1: for people who did not always have a living room
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  Speaker 1: to go to. People went there after work, after a
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  Speaker 1: fight with a spouse, after a good day or a
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  Speaker 1: bad one. They went to be around other people. Regulars
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  Speaker 1: knew each other by first names and nicknames. A new
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  Speaker 1: face at the end of the bar was a small event,
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  Speaker 1: and a friendly new face, especially one who was generous
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  Speaker 1: with his money, was welcomed. That is the environment Glenn
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  Speaker 1: Rogers moved through, and it was the perfect hunting ground
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  Speaker 1: for a man like him. Strangers were easy to approach.
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  Speaker 1: A request for a ride home sounded harmless. And because
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: everyone was a little drunk and a little lonely, nobody
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  Speaker 1: asked the questions they might have asked in daylight. People
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  Speaker 1: who met him described the same things over and over.
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  Speaker 1: He was tall, about six feet, with long hair, which
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: in Los Angeles that fall was blonde, and a beard.
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  Speaker 1: Later press coverage would dwell on his striking blue eyes.
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  Speaker 1: He was friendly. He was talkative. He bought drinks. He
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  Speaker 1: let people believe he had money. He had a way
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  Speaker 1: of making each person in front of him feel like
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  Speaker 1: the most interesting person in the room, and it worked
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  Speaker 1: especially well on women who, for one reason or another,
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: were having a hard time. A man like that did
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  Speaker 1: not need to force his way into anyone's life. He
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: simply had to wait until someone opened the door for him.
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  Speaker 1: Now we come to the woman who opened it in
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  Speaker 1: Los Angeles. Sandra Gallagher was 33 years old and the
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  Speaker 1: mother of three children. Her friends at the bar called
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: her Sam. She lived in the Los Angeles area and
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  Speaker 1: was married to a man named Stephen, though by the
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  Speaker 1: end of September their marriage was going through a rough stretch.
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  Speaker 1: They had been having problems, and for the last couple
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  Speaker 1: of nights they had been sleeping apart. But it was
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: not a marriage that had ended. They had been talking
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  Speaker 1: about reconciling and on September 28, 1995, they were still talking.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: She owned a pickup truck, which would later become a
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: crucial piece of evidence. Beyond those facts, the public record
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: tells us relatively little about her life. We do not have,
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: in the sources available to us, a detailed account of
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: where she grew up, what her parents were like, or
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: what her days looked like before that autumn. We know
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: that she had a sister, Jerry Vallicella, who would spend
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: the next three decades waiting for justice and who, in 2025,
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: spoke publicly about finally being able to rest. We know
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: that she was a mother and that at least three
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: children would lose her. And we know that on the
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: last day of her life she was, by all accounts, happy.
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  Speaker 1: That is the thing that makes the next part of
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  Speaker 1: this story so hard to tell. On the afternoon of Thursday,
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: September 28, 1995, Sandra Gallagher met her husband for lunch.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: They talked about the ordinary things that married people talk about,
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: the small news of the week, a possible promotion for
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: Stephen's brother, the question of whether the two of them
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: might find their way back to each other. Around two
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: in the afternoon, they parted. Neither of them had any
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: reason to think that this would be the last time
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: they would ever see each other. She went on with
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  Speaker 1: her day. And that evening, a little while after the
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: sun went down over the valley, she walked into a
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: neighborhood bar called McCred's. We know a surprising amount about
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: what happened inside McCred's that night, and we know it
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: because ordinary people paid attention. A bartender, a handful of regulars,
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: and a few customers who happened to be sitting nearby
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: all remembered Sandra Gallagher, and all of them would later
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: remember the man who spent the evening talking to her.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: That is one of the quiet lessons of this case.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: The investigation that ended in a Kentucky ditch began with
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: the memories of people who had no idea, at the time,
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: that they were witnesses to anything at all. Sandra walked
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: in with good news. Earlier that day she had won $ 1, 200
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  Speaker 1: in the lottery, which for a family that was struggling
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: a little was not a small thing, and she was
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: in the kind of mood where she wanted to tell everyone.
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  Speaker 1: She told the bartender. She told the regulars. She was
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  Speaker 1: bubbling over. And the people at McCred's would later say
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: that she told everyone she met about her luck. At
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: some point in the evening she even called her husband
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: from the bar. Stephen would later tell detectives that she
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: sounded very excited. that she told him she had hit
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: the lottery for $ 1, 200, and that the call was brief
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: and cheerful. It would be the last time he ever
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  Speaker 1: heard her voice. One of the people who heard her
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: tell the story was a man the regulars knew as Glenn.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: He had been coming into McCred's for the past few days.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: He had long blonde hair and a beard, and he
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: was easy to talk to. He had a reputation among
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: the people who had met him there as a generous guy,
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: the sort who bought a round for the room without
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: making a fuss about it. On that particular night, according
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: to the patrons who remembered him, he seemed especially interested
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: in the woman they knew as Sam. He sat with her.
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  Speaker 1: He talked with her for a long time. He bought
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: her drinks and he bought drinks for the people around her.
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  Speaker 1: And to the rest of the bar, it looked like
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: nothing more than a pleasant evening between two people who
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: had hit it off. Think about what Sandra had just
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: told him. In the middle of a crowded bar, to
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: anyone who would listen, she had announced that she had $ 1, 200
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: of fresh winnings. We cannot know what was in Glenn
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: Rogers' mind when he heard that, and we should be
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: careful about pretending that we can. But investigators who later
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: studied his pattern noted what happened in city after city.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: The women he met were, as a rule, alone, or
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: at least unattached for the evening. The men and women
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: around them were drinking and distracted. And Rogers consistently ended
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: up leaving with money, with credit cards, with a car,
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: with something that belonged to the woman who had trusted him.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: Whatever else was going on, money was part of it.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: We will return to the question of motive, but it
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: is worth noting here that when detectives searched Rogers' apartment
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: a few days later, they would find a woman's purse
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: with no cash in it and no identification. When the
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: bar closed that night, Glenn asked Sandra for a ride.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: He told her he lived close by, that it was
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: only a few minutes away. It was the kind of
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: request that people make and accept every night in every
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: city in America, the kind of small favor that costs nothing.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: and she agreed. The regulars watched them walk out together.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: Some of them would later say that it had looked
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: perfectly ordinary. A woman who was happy about her lottery win,
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: giving a friendly acquaintance a lift on her way home.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: Nobody thought twice, and the door of McCred's closed behind them,
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: and neither of them was ever seen walking into a
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: room again as the people they had been that evening.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: What happened next is known only from the physical evidence.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: and from what prosecutors would later argue to a jury
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: nearly four years afterward. Sometime after leaving the bar, in
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: the early hours of the morning of September 29, 1995,
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: there was a struggle. Prosecutors would say that it began
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: when Rogers made an unwanted sexual advance, and that when
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: Sandra resisted, he strangled her with his hands, so hard
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: that her windpipe was crushed. Then, according to the prosecution's case,
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: he tried to destroy the evidence. He poured gas over
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: her body in the cab of her pickup truck and
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: set it on fire. And then he ran. It was
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: still dark when the fire started. The truck was parked
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: in the lot of a hospital in Van Nuys, and
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: the person who saw it was a nurse arriving for
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: the early morning shift, before the sun had come up.
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: She would later tell detectives that she watched the pickup
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: go up in flames. She saw something that she would
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: never be able to fully describe. As the fire erupted,
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: a figure ran away from the truck. She could see
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: that the person had long hair. She could not see
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: a face. She had never seen the truck before, and
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: she had no idea who had been driving it. But
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: she called for help, and the Los Angeles Fire Department responded.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: Firefighters knocked down the flames. Then they looked inside the
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: cab and they stopped. There were human remains in the truck.
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: It was no longer a vehicle fire. Firefighters contacted the
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: arson and homicide division of the Los Angeles Police Department
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: and homicide detectives drove to the hospital parking lot in
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: the gray light of that Friday morning. The scene told
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: them several things quickly. The pattern of the fire damage
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: showed that it had started inside the cab and had
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: burned very fast. which meant that something had been used
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: to accelerate it. Investigators believed the fire had been set deliberately,
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: and the most likely accelerant was gasoline. The body in
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: the truck appeared to be a woman, but she had
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: been burned beyond recognition. There was no way to put
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: a name to her by sight. It was going to
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: have to come from the evidence. Fortunately, a few things
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: had survived. Inside the truck or near it were a backpack,
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: a camera, and a roll of undeveloped film. They were
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: charred and damaged, but they were intact enough to be useful.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: Technicians were also able to recover several documents that carried
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: a single name, Sandra Gallagher. By sunrise, detectives at the
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: Van Nuys station of the LAPD had run the license
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: plate on the truck through the Department of Motor Vehicles.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: The registration confirmed what the documents suggested. The truck belonged
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: to Sandra Gallagher. A detective named Mike Kublantz took the lead.
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: He did some work from the office that morning and
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: learned that Sandra Gallagher was married and that her husband, Stephen,
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: lived in the Los Angeles area. Detectives reached out and
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: made arrangements to interview him at the Van Nuys station.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: It was the first and most important decision of the
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: investigation and also the most routine because every homicide detective
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: knows what the numbers say. When a married woman is murdered,
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: the first person you look at is her spouse. That
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: is not cruelty and it is not an accusation. It
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: is a necessary step, and sometimes the fastest way to
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: clear a husband is to examine him closely. Stephen Gallagher
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: came in. Detectives did not yet have a positive identification
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: of the body, because dental records would take a few days,
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: but they believed they already knew who she was. They
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: placed the recovered items in front of him and asked
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: him to look at them. He recognized the backpack. He
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: recognized the camera. These were Sandra's things. Detectives then showed
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: him photographs from the roll of film that technicians had
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: managed to develop, pictures that had survived a fire that
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: destroyed almost everything else, and Stephen identified his wife in them.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: For a man being told that his wife may have
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: been burned to death in her own truck, it must
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: have been an unimaginable hour. Then came the questions. Detectives
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: asked about the marriage, and Stephen answered honestly. He told
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: them that he and Sandra had been having problems. He
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: told them that they had spent the last couple of
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: nights apart. He told them about lunch the day before,
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: about the plans to maybe reconcile, about the lingering strain
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: between them. He told them he had last seen her
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: around 2 o'clock the previous afternoon and that she had
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: called him that evening from a bar called McCred's, excited
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: about a $ 1, 200 lottery win. After that call, he said
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: he had not heard from her and had no idea
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: where she had gone. The detectives did not simply take
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: his word for it. they had a responsibility to verify.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: Domestic violence is a common backdrop to homicide, and Kublancz
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: and his colleagues wanted to eliminate the husband as a suspect,
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: while learning as much as they could about the victim.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: So they did what detectives do. They went to the bar.
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: The mention of McCreds gave them an immediate direction, and
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: in a case that had begun with almost nothing, it
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: was a gift. They wanted to find out who the
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: bartender was, who owned the place, who had been there
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: that evening. and who could look at a photograph of
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: Sandra and say whether they had seen her. The bartender
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: recognized her at once. She knew her as Sam. She
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: confirmed that Sandra had been in the bar on the
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: night of the 28th, and that she had been telling
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: everyone about her lottery win. As detectives questioned her, other
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: customers overheard the conversation and spoke up. They had been
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: there that night too. They remembered Sam. They also remembered
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: one man in particular who had spent the evening in
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: her company. The description they gave was consistent. The man
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: was called Glenn. Long blonde hair, a beard, friendly and talkative.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: A big spender who had been coming into the bar
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: for several days. He had left with Sandra when the
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: place closed, after asking her for a ride home. Some
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: of the patrons thought his last name might be Rogers,
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: though they were not sure. When the detectives heard the
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: description of the long-haired man who left with Sandra, it
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: matched something else they knew. a nurse had seen a
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: figure with long hair running from the burning truck. Through
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: department sources, detectives were able to identify a Glenn Rogers
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: living in the Van Nuys area, and they obtained photographs.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: Within a day or two, those photographs were shown to
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: witnesses from the bar in the form of a photo lineup,
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: and the witnesses identified Rogers as the man who had
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: been at McCred's with Sandra Gallagher. It was the kind
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: of moment that makes a detective's pulse quicken. They had
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: a name. They had a face. They had witnesses who
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: put him with the victim in the last hours of
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: her life. What they did not have was the man himself.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: They secured a search warrant for his apartment. It was
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: only a few minutes from the hospital parking lot where
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: the truck had burned. On the day of the search,
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: detectives did not know whether Rogers would be inside. And
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: they did not know whether he was armed. So uniformed
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: officers went in first to clear the rooms before anyone
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: else entered. The apartment was empty. Glenn Rogers was gone.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: It looked as though he had left in a hurry,
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: but he had not left everything behind. Detectives found a
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: woman's purse. Inside it was a wallet, and the wallet
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: was empty with no cash and no identification. They also
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: found a single woman's earring. It might have seemed like
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: a small thing, but it turned out to be significant.
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: When Stephen Gallagher was shown the earring, he identified it.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: He had bought it himself a couple of months earlier
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: as one of a pair for his wife. The earring
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: placed Sandra Gallagher inside Glenn Rogers' apartment, and it connected
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: his empty wallet and his empty apartment to the burned
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: body in the truck. After several days, the coroner completed
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: his report. Dental records confirmed what everyone had feared. The
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: remains in the truck were Sandra Gallagher's. But the autopsy
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: also revealed something more important. The coroner determined that she
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: had not died in the fire. In her nose and airway,
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: there was no sign of soot. no evidence that she
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: had breathed in smoke. That meant she had been dead
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: before the flames started. The cause of death was manual strangulation.
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: A mother of three had been choked to death, and
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: the fire had been an attempt to cover it up.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: Once the cause of death was known, the case became
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: a murder investigation with a named suspect. Los Angeles detectives
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: charged Glenn Rogers with the murder of Sandra Gallagher and
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: obtained a warrant for his arrest. Then they did what
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: investigators did in 1995 when a suspect was in the wind.
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: They entered his name and description into the National Crime
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: Information Center, the NCIC, a computer system that linked tens
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: of thousands of law enforcement agencies across the country. It
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: was the closest thing America had at the time to
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: a national memory for wanted people. If a police officer
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: in any state ran Glenn Rogers' name, the system would
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: flash a warrant for murder in Los Angeles. along with
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: the name of the investigating agency and the telephone number
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: of the detective to call. It was a powerful tool,
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: but it was only as good as the next traffic
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: stop or the next background check. Could not find Rogers.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: Could only wait for someone to run his name. So
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: detectives went back to the old methods. They began tracking
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: down everyone who knew him. They visited construction sites and
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: talked to his co-workers. They spoke to his friends. They
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: learned that Rogers drank heavily, that he did odd jobs,
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: mostly in construction, that he could be charming and fun,
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: and that he could also be explosively angry when he
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: was drinking. They heard about his temper and about domestic
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: violence involving former girlfriends. Kublancz would later say that this
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: was the point at which investigators understood they were dealing
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: with someone who could become violent, and who generally became
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: violent when he drank, exactly as had happened with Sandra Gallagher.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: One of Rogers' friends told detectives he had not seen
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: him in a while, but he promised to contact police
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: if he heard from him. A few days later, that
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: friend called. Rogers had phoned him. He was calling from
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: a motel outside Jackson, Mississippi. It is hard to overstate
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: how important that call was and how close it came
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: to ending everything right there. Detectives passed the information to
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: local police in Mississippi. Officers talked to the motel manager,
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: who gave them the number of the room where the
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: man was staying. They went to the door. They announced themselves.
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: They opened it. And the room was empty. Glenn Rogers
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: had slipped away again, one step ahead of the police,
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: and now he was in a new state with a
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: new set of strangers and the same appetites. The murder
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: suspect was on the run. The Los Angeles detectives who
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: had put the case together in a matter of days
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: had done everything right, and it still was not enough.
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: They issued an alert for the Jackson area and hoped
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: that someone, somewhere, would spot a tall man with long
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: hair and a friendly manner before he found another woman
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: who wanted to be his friend. Before we follow him east,
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: it is worth stopping to ask what we actually know
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: about why he killed Sandra Gallagher, because the honest answer
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: is that we know less than we would like. investigators
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: and prosecutors offered the pieces they had. There was money.
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: Sandra had announced a lottery win in a crowded bar,
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: and the wallet found in Rogers' apartment was empty. There
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: was alcohol, which friends said turned him violent. There was
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: an apparent sexual motive, because prosecutors told the Los Angeles
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: jury that the struggle began over an unwanted advance. There
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: was rage, the same rage that Deborah Nix had described
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: in a divorce filing 12 years earlier. and there was
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: a cold, practical streak, visible in the choice to burn
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: the truck and in the decision to flee within hours.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: But what none of the sources give us is a
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: confession that explains it. Rogers would later say things, enormous,
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: outrageous things, about how many people he had killed, but
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: he would also take them back, and his words were
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: never a reliable window into his mind. The truth is
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: that Glenn Rogers is not unique in this. Many of
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: the people who commit this kind of crime cannot, or
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: will not, explain themselves in any way that is satisfying.
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: The motive, if there is a single one, died with him.
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: What the record can show us is a pattern. An
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: encounter in a bar, a request for a ride, a
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: private place, a death, an attempt to erase the evidence,
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: money gone, and a rapid departure. That pattern was about
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: to repeat itself in Mississippi. Jackson, Mississippi, is the capital
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: of the state, a city of government offices and old neighborhoods, and,
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: in the fall, the grounds of the Mississippi State Fair.
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: Every October, the fair turns a patch of the city
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: into a small world of its own, with rides, livestock barns,
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: fried food, music, and workers who travel from fair to
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: fair for the season. Glenn Rogers, who was always looking
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: for the next job and the next town, found work
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: at the fair. And it was there, in early October
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: of 1995, just days after the killing in California, that
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: he met Linda Price. Linda was 34 years old, a
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: single mother with two children, who were then 15 and 18.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: She was close to her family. Her sister, Kathy Carroll,
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: would later remember the way Linda talked about the new
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: man she had met at a beer tent at the fair.
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: Linda kept repeating how good-looking he was. She was smitten,
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: and the man in question was happy to be adored.
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: He was charming, he was attentive, and he was tall
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: with striking blue eyes. To a woman who had spent
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: years raising children on her own, it must have felt
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: like a wonderful surprise. Like several of the other women
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: who would cross his path. Linda had red hair and
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: was in her mid-thirties, a detail that reporters would notice
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: and that investigators would turn over in their minds for years.
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: Things moved quickly. Within weeks, Rogers and Linda had rented
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: an apartment together in Jackson. At first, her family said
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: she seemed happier than she had been in a long time.
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: but the happiness did not last. Linda began to confide
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: in her mother. She told her that she was no
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: longer sure she had made the right decision. She said
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: that Glenn had a bad temper. She said that his
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: mood swung from warm to dark without warning, and that
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: she was beginning to be afraid of him. They are
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: the kind of words that families replay in their heads
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: for the rest of their lives, because they sound so
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: much like a warning that no one knew how to hear.
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: The last time Kathy Carroll saw her sister was the
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: night before Halloween. The two sisters had made plans for
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: Kathy's grandchildren to go trick or treating at Linda's apartment,
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: a small, ordinary holiday tradition. But when the day came,
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: Linda did not answer her door. There was no sign
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: of Rogers. The days that followed brought a growing sense
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: of dread because Linda had stopped calling, and she was
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: not the kind of person who simply stopped calling. By
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: the beginning of November, her family was certain that something
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: was wrong, and her mother, who believed that Rogers had
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: hurt her, went to the apartment to see for herself.
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: On November 3, 1995, family members found Linda Price dead
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: in her bathtub. Accounts differ slightly on exactly when she
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: was killed, which is one of those small uncertainties that
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: the passage of nearly 30 years has not resolved. But
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: the family's discovery on that day is not in dispute.
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: She had been stabbed repeatedly, and her throat had been cut.
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: Jackson police were called. and technicians photographed the scene and
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: lifted numerous clear fingerprints from the apartment. They did not
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: find the murder weapon. Nothing of obvious value seemed to
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: be missing. There were no signs of forced entry, and
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: the door had been locked by the person who left.
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: Those details told the Jackson homicide detectives something important, and
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: it was the same thing the Los Angeles detectives had
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: concluded about Sandra Gallagher in a different way. Linda Price
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: had been killed by someone she knew. The next morning,
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: They interviewed her mother, who told them about the new boyfriend.
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: His name was Glenn Rogers. Detectives ran the name through
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: the NCIC, and the computer returned a warrant for murder
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: in Los Angeles. That was the moment when two separate investigations,
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: in two separate cities three states apart, became one. The
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: Jackson detectives called Detective Kublancz in Los Angeles, and Kublancz
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: told them everything he had. The two men compared notes
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: and found that the stories rhymed. In both cases, a
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: woman had met a charming man in a social setting.
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: In both cases, he had moved quickly into her life,
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: isolating her. In both cases, she had been killed in
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: a brutal and personal way, in a place where she
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: should have been safe. And in both cases, the man
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: had vanished almost immediately. Investigators looked at each other and
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: understood that they were looking at a pattern and that
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: the person responsible was not going to stop on his own.
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: They felt, as Kublancz would later put it, that they
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: had a major problem on their hands. If Rogers was
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: not apprehended, there could very well be more victims. Jackson
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: police appealed to the public for help, asking anyone who
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: saw Rogers in the area to call. Witnesses began reporting sightings,
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: but Rogers remained one step ahead of the authorities. The
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: Jackson detectives then contacted the FBI field office in the city.
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: They believed Rogers had left Mississippi, just as he had
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: left California. and the agents filed a federal warrant for
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. It was a legal tool
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: that allowed the FBI to bring the resources of the
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: Bureau to the hunt. The man who would coordinate the
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: multi-state investigation was Special Agent John Huber. The case, Huber
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: later said, was very high speed. The Jackson murder had
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: happened on or about the 3rd of November. And then,
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: almost immediately, there was another. We turn now to the
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: Tampa Bay area of Florida, and to a place called Gibsonton.
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: Gibsonton is a small community on the Gulf Coast of Florida,
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: southeast of Tampa, and it has a peculiar and colorful
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: history as the winter home of carnival and circus performers.
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: It is the kind of place where people know their
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: neighbors and where a family bar is exactly that, a
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: place where parents and grown children and friends gather to
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: watch television and talk. One such place was the Showtown Bar.
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: On the night of November 5, 1995, A 34-year-old mother
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: of two named Tina Marie Cribs went there after work
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: to meet some friends. She was also supposed to meet
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: her mother. Tina, by every account, was close to her mother.
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: They were the kind of mother and daughter who kept
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: in touch constantly, and who, as her mother would later say,
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: had such a close relationship that she knew instantly when
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: something was wrong. Tina owned a white Ford Festiva, a small,
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: practical car. She had two children of her own. That
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: night she was in a good mood, relaxed among familiar
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: faces in a familiar place and there was a man
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: in the bar named glenn the bartender remembered him she
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: said he was very friendly that he talked with tina
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: and with the people around her and that he bought
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: a round of drinks using a hundred dollar bill it
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: was a gesture that made him seem prosperous and generous
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: and it won people over tina the bartender recalled started
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: talking with him and she was won over quickly after
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: a while he asked her for a ride He told
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: her that his motel room was close, only a few
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: minutes away, and that she would be back in plenty
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: of time to meet her mother. Tina agreed. She told
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: her friends she would be right back. She never came back.
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: Her mother arrived at the Showtown bar, sat down, and waited.
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: When her daughter did not appear, she began to page her,
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: again and again, hoping to hear that Tina had simply
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: been delayed. There was no answer. It was a time
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: before everyone carried a cell phone, when a pager was
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: how you reach someone, and the silence on the other
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: end of those pages must have been unbearable. She would
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: later say that she knew, in the way that only
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: a mother can know, that something terrible had happened. The
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: next morning, or within a day or two, depending on
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: the account, a housekeeper at a Tampa area motel made
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: the discovery that would put the cross-country killer on the
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: front pages. She had been working her usual rounds. Outside
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: the door to room 119, she had noticed a handwritten
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: do not disturb sign. The day before, she had left
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: the room alone out of respect for the privacy of
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: the guests. Now, after the checkout time had passed, The
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: guests had not left. When she finally opened the door
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: and went into the bathroom, she found a woman in
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: the bathtub. Homicide detective Julium Suchi took charge of the scene.
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: The victim had no identification with her, so detectives had
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: to work from what they could see. The woman had
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: a tattoo of a cross on her shoulder. Her jeans
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: and shoes were piled near the toilet, and a bracelet
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: had been left in the sink. A closer examination suggested
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: that she had been stabbed through her clothing from behind,
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: in the back, the chest, and the wrist, which meant
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: she had never been undressed. Her shoes had blood spots
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: on the top, indicating she had been standing, wearing them,
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: when she was attacked. Someone had afterward placed her in
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: the tub. Towels had been used to wipe blood off
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: the floor, and the bathwater had been run, apparently in
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: an attempt to wash away any trace of the killer.
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: Under her body, investigators found a man's watch, which they
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: believed belonged to the person who had killed her. The
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: housekeeper told the detective about the Do Not Disturb sign,
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: and the motel manager remembered the man who had rented
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: the room. He had asked for a Do Not Disturb
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: sign the day before, and when they told him the
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: motel did not have one, he paid for another night
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: and told the staff at registration that he did not
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: want anyone cleaning his room. He apparently went back to
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: the room, tore a page out of a phone book,
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: and made his own sign. The manager also remembered something else.
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: That evening she had seen the same man packing a
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: small white car. She had warned him about recent break-ins
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: at the motel and told him not to leave anything
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: in the car overnight. He had paid for the extra
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: night so she had not thought he was leaving. The
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: detectives checked the office records and found the registration card
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: for room 119. It carried a name and a signature
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: in the guest's own hand. Said Glenn Rogers. fingerprints recovered
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: in the room would match his a computer check by
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: detective msuchi quickly turned up the warrants from california and
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: mississippi and she called the other agencies and the fbi
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: as she would later explain it was then that investigators
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: began to realize very quickly that glenn rogers was possibly
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: a serial killer but tampa still had a jane doe
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: in the morgue she was a young woman with a
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: cross tattooed on her shoulder and no one had yet
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: come forward to say who she was identification mattered for
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: more than the sake of procedure. It mattered because every
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: fact about her last hours might point to Rogers' next move,
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: and because a woman who had lived a life deserved
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: to be called by her name. Fortunately, the news was spreading.
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: A woman whose daughter had been missing for two days
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: saw the coverage and came forward. She looked at the
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: evidence and identified the body as that of her daughter,
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: Tina Marie Cripps. Tina's mother told Detective Masucci about her
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: daughter's last day. Detectives learned that Tina had worked that day,
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: that she had gone to the Showtown bar to meet friends,
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: and that she had been supposed to meet her mother there.
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: They visited the bar, and the bartender confirmed everything. She
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: also told them that a man named Glenn had been
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: there that night. Detectives also learned that Tina owned a
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: white Ford Festiva, the same type of small white car
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: that the motel manager had seen Rogers packing with his belongings.
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: Msucci updated the NCIC report on Rogers. adding the make
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: of the car and its license plate number. Tina's wallet,
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: detectives would also learn, turned up at a rest area
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: in North Florida. The killer was now driving his victim's car.
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: The more the investigators learned about Glenn Rogers, the more
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: puzzled they were by one aspect of his behavior. He
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: did not seem to be trying to disappear. Special Agent
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: Huber was struck by it. Rogers used his real name
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: when checking into motels. He gave his real name to
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: the people he met. He drove cars that were not
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: stolen in the conventional sense, cars that either belonged to
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: his victims or to himself, and that could be easily traced.
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: It was as if he did not care whether anyone knew.
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: In Huber's words, he did not seem to care if
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: people knew what was happening, and he was not trying
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: to hide. There are different ways to interpret that, and
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: the honest answer is that no one has ever been
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: able to say which is right. Perhaps Rogers was reckless.
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: Perhaps he believed his charm would always carry him through.
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: Perhaps he simply lived in the moment, moving from one
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: place to the next, and never thought about consequences beyond
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: the next few hours. Or perhaps he had a deeper arrogance,
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: the belief that he was simply smarter than the people
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: chasing him. Whatever the reason, it gave investigators something to
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: work with, and it meant that the way to catch
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: him was not by outwitting him but by being fast
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: enough to get to the places he had already been.
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: And that was the problem. The speed. By any ordinary standard,
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: the manhunt was moving at remarkable speed, with local detectives,
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: state police, and the FBI trading information within hours. But
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: Rogers was moving faster. Huber later put it simply, Rogers
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: was killing people faster than investigators could figure out where
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: he was. It was a time game, and for a
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: while they were losing it. The next stop on his
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: journey was Louisiana. On November 9th or 10th, again depending
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: on the account, A mother of four named Andy Sutton
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: was found dead in her apartment in Bossier City, in
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: the northwest corner of the state. Like Sandra Gallagher, like
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: Linda Price, like Tina Cribs, she had been killed in
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: a brutal fashion, with multiple stab wounds to her upper
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: body and back. Her body was found on a punctured waterbed.
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: A Bossier City detective interviewed her roommate and her former boyfriend.
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: The roommate was a waitress who had worked late the
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: night before and returned home in the early morning hours.
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: As she came in, She heard a bedroom door close,
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: and she assumed it was Andy and Andy's new boyfriend,
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: Glenn Rogers, retiring for the night in the apartment's single bedroom.
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: Blankets had been left on the couch, so the roommate
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: went to sleep there. After daybreak, someone knocked on the
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: apartment door. It was Andy's ex-boyfriend, who wanted to talk
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: to her. The roommate went to wake her, and in
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: the bedroom, she found Andy's body under a sheet. Andy
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: Sutton had met Glenn Rogers in a bar. They had
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: been dating only a few days. Neighbors told police that
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: they had seen Rogers leaving in a white Festiva. Detectives
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: ran his name through the NCIC and saw the three
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: other murder warrants. They called the other agencies and the FBI.
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: Los Angeles faxed a photograph, and Louisiana television stations began
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: carrying the story, warning viewers to be on the lookout
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: for the man but cautioning them not to approach the fugitive.
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: By now, investigators believed that Glenn Rogers had killed four
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: women in about six weeks, in four different states. After each,
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: he had fled. The places he chose seemed random. There
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: was no obvious pattern that would let the FBI predict
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: where he would be next. And the pressure to catch
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: him was becoming overwhelming, because the families of the victims
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: were grieving and the public was afraid, and because everyone
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: involved understood that another woman somewhere was probably going to
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: meet a friendly stranger within days. So the agents did
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: what the FBI had always done when a fugitive was
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: moving across the country. They widened the net. They sent
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: requests out over citizens' band radio, asking long-haul truckers to
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: watch for a small white Ford. Truckers were, in those days,
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: the eyes and ears of the interstate millions of miles
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: of highway observed by people who spent their lives on it.
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: Agents posted wanted flyers at truck stops and rest areas.
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: They held press conferences to get Rogers' face in front
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: of the public. They released details about the way he
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: found his victims and about the route he had traveled,
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: in the hope of warning potential victims and of persuading someone, anyone,
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: to pick up a phone. The Bureau also began the
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: process of adding Glenn Rogers to its 10 Most Wanted
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: Fugitives list. The list was not simply a matter of prestige.
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: As Huber explained, getting someone onto the list increased the
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: amount of resources the Bureau put into a case, and
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: it increased the amount of media attention. and the attention
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: worked because the tips began to pour in. Hundreds of them.
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: Callers claimed to have seen Rogers in a Jackson motel.
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: Agents surrounded the hotel, set up a perimeter, and sent
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: an entry team to the door, only to discover that
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: the man they found was not Rogers. They searched the
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: entire hotel and the ones around it, and found nothing.
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: A caller reported that Rogers was at a pool hall
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: in Mississippi, and two agents went to check. Again, the
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: man was not him, It was the price of a
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: successful media campaign, and Huber would later describe it as
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: one of the pitfalls, the many false sightings from well-intentioned citizens.
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: Each false lead cost hours, and hours were what the
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: investigators did not have. So they tried to think like him.
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: Huber had worked plenty of fugitive cases, and he knew
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: that when people are in trouble, they often go to
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: the places they know. They head for familiar areas or
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: for friends and family. In Rogers's case, His relatives and
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: friends were mostly in the Kentucky area, and that is
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: where the FBI focused a large share of its resources.
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: Authorities in Kentucky were sent priority teletypes about the fugitive,
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: and when the teletype crossed the desk of Kentucky State
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: Police Detective Bob Stevens, the name was not a new
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: one to him. Stevens had been looking for Glenn Rogers
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: for almost two years. ever since the day a body
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: had been found in a family cabin in the hills
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: of Beattyville. Now, at last, the two investigations had converged.
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: For two years, Stevens had been chasing a man for
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: the death of Mark Peters. Now he was chasing the
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: same man for four more. On November 13, 1995, Rogers
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: visited one of his relatives in Lee County, Kentucky. It
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: was a short visit. When he left, the relative called
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: the Kentucky State Police. She said that her nephew, the
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: one they had been looking for, had just left, driving
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: a small white car and heading west toward Interstate 75.
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: It was exactly what Stevens had been waiting for. He
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: positioned himself on the road he believed Rogers would take.
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: And it was not long before a white Ford Festiva
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: drove past. Stevens began to follow. He wanted to be sure.
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: He did not want to stop an innocent driver, and
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: he did not want to lose the opportunity. He ran
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: the tag on the Festiva, and the plate came back
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: as stolen. He pulled up alongside the car, as though
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: he were going to pass, and looked over. The face
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: matched the photograph he had been carrying for two years.
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: He called for backup, and a local police officer who
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: was parked nearby, a rookie from Irvine, Kentucky, named Charles Cox,
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: joined the slow pursuit. The two officers followed Rogers for
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: a distance. Stevens recalled that Rogers seemed to be watching
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: him as closely as he was being watched, and that
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: by then Rogers probably understood that there was a police
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: officer behind him. They came to a stoplight. Rogers ran it,
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: forcing other drivers off the road. Stevens fell in behind
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: him with his emergency lights on. Rogers did not stop.
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: He sped up. What followed was a chase of about
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: 13 miles through the Kentucky countryside near the small community
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: of Waco. Rogers ran several cars off the highway. He
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: ran a school bus off the road. At times he
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: drove on the wrong side of the highway. Several miles ahead,
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: other officers, including State Trooper Ed Robinson, set up a
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: roadblock and tried to clear the road of traffic. Armed
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: officers waited. When the white car came into view, Robinson
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: fired a shotgun blast at the tires. The blast struck
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: the rear tires, but the car did not stop. It
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: was decided that Rogers had to be stopped before someone
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: was killed. Sergeant Joey Barnes, who had once served with
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: the Florida Highway Patrol and who knew a thing or
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: two about pursuit tactics, brought his patrol car up alongside
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: the Festiva and tapped it, a precision maneuver that spun
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: the smaller car off the highway and into a ditch.
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: A local television news crew filmed the chase and the arrest.
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: so that the images of the final moments of the
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: manhunt were broadcast across the region that evening. Officers surrounded
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: the car. Nobody knew whether the fugitive was armed. Stevens
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: was one of the first to approach. He would later
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: describe what he saw. Rogers looked upset. He looked aggravated,
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: and he was very defiant. He did not want to
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: be taken into custody. But he was in custody. After
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: a two-month killing spree that had spanned the country and
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: left four women dead, Glenn Rogers had been stopped on
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: a country road in Kentucky, not far from the hills
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: where Mark Peters had died. The car told its own story.
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: The plate number confirmed that it belonged to Tina Marie Cribs.
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: Technicians went over it carefully and found a pair of
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: shorts stained with blood, a blanket, and a woman's purse.
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: These and other items would help link Rogers to the
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: killings in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida. Rogers, for his part,
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: said that Tina Cribs had lent him the car. and
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: that she had been alive when he left Tampa. And
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: then there was the matter of the number. In the
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: first hours after his arrest, Rogers told police that he
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: had committed nearly 70 murders. It was a staggering claim
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: and it electrified the country because it suggested that the
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: four women the FBI knew about might be only a
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: small fraction of the total. A week later, he took
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: it back. He said it was a joke. He said
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: he had not actually killed anyone. Investigators never accepted that
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: and neither did the families, but they also never found
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: any evidence to support the larger claim, and the number
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: 70 remains one of the great unanswered questions of the case.
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: We will return to it. For now, it is enough
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: to say that the man who had been unwilling to
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: hide for six weeks was suddenly very interested in telling stories.
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: With Glenn Rogers in custody in Kentucky, the manhunt was
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: over and a different kind of work began. For murders
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: had taken place in four states, and a fifth death
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: that of Mark Peters, was still hanging over a family
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: cabin in Beattyville. Each investigation had its own detectives, its
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: own files, its own prosecutors, and its own grieving families.
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: Every one of them wanted Rogers. And there was only
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: one of him. Someone had to decide who would go first,
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: and what the evidence would allow, and how a system
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: built around separate jurisdictions could handle a defendant who had
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: deliberately crossed all of their borders. The answer came in
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: a meeting room in Kentucky. Agents and detectives from five
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: states gathered there to lay out what each of them had.
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: Special Agent John Huber helped plan the meeting, and he
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: later explained the idea behind it. They put together all
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: the information that everyone had. They shared it openly, which
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: is not always what happens when rival departments each have
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: a high-profile case. And they agreed that the FBI laboratory
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: would process the evidence from every scene, so that a
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: single agency would hold custody of all of it and
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: run the analysis. It sounds like a small administrative decision,
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: but it is one of the most important in the
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: entire story. It meant that the bloody shorts, the fingerprints,
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: the watch, the purse, and the registration slip would all
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: be tested to the same standard, under the same chain
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: of custody, in a single laboratory. When the detectives and
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: prosecutors compared their cases, they agreed that the strongest one
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: was in Florida. Detective Masucci met with prosecutors to review
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: what Tampa had, and the list was long. They had
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: Tina Kribs' car, in which Rogers had been arrested. They
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: had a pair of shorts belonging to him with Tina's
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: DNA on them. They had the motel registration slip that
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: Rogers had signed himself. They had fingerprints that matched his
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: from inside room 119 and miscellaneous items recovered from the
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: car when he was captured. And they had the watch
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: found under the victim's body. A photograph of Rogers with
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: Linda Price in Mississippi showed him wearing a watch of
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: that very type. Misucci was confident. In a case about
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: a man who had been so careless about leaving traces,
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: the physical evidence did most of the talking. A word
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: here about the early days of his custody. Kentucky authorities
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: held him following the arrest, and Los Angeles prosecutors wanted
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: him for the Gallagher killing. So there were extradition proceedings,
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: which at one point were postponed. For a brief time,
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: there was a sense that the law was struggling to
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: catch up with a man who had refused to stay
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: in any one jurisdiction. In the end, Florida got the
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: first trial because it had the strongest case and because
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: the victim there had been identified so cleanly, and Rogers
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: was transferred to face charges in Hillsborough County. He appeared
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: in a Tampa courtroom for pretrial hearings in 1996, standing
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: next to his court-appointed lawyer, a public defender named Joan Corses.
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: Photographs from those hearings show a man who looked, to
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: the people who saw him, much less glamorous than the
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: Casanova of the barroom. The charm was still there. People
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: who followed the case described how he could turn it
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: on for a moment, even in a courtroom. But the
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: person in front of the judge was a defendant in
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: jail clothes, not a friendly stranger buying drinks. The trial
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: itself took place in the summer of 1997. It was built,
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: as the detective had hoped, around the physical evidence. The
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: prosecution called the housekeeper who found the body, the motel
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: manager who remembered the man and the sign he made
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: out of a phone book, the bartender at the showtown
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: who saw him buy a round with a $ 100 bill,
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: and the investigators who had tied together the car, the shorts,
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: the watch, and the fingerprints. They told the jury how
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: Tina Cribs had gone out for the evening to meet
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: her mother and had never come home. The defense, led
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: by the public defender's office, faced a difficult task. Rogers
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: himself had told police that Tina had lent him the
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: car and that she had been alive when he left Tampa.
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: But the story had to contend with the registration card
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: bearing his own signature, and with the fingerprints in the room,
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: and with a purse, a wallet, and a victim's car
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: that no one had explained. The details of the jury's
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: deliberations are not something that the public sources available to
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: us record, so we will not guess at how long
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: they took. What we do know is the result. On
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: July 11, 1997, Glenn Rogers was convicted of first-degree murder
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: in the death of Tina Marie Cribs. He was also
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: convicted of armed robbery and grand theft auto. and he
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: was sentenced to death. For the family of Tina Cribs,
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: it was the first measure of justice. For Rogers, who
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: had spent two years in custody and whose charm had
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: finally failed him, it was the beginning of what would
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: become a nearly 30-year wait on Florida's death row. It
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: was not the end of his legal troubles. Los Angeles
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: still wanted its day in court, and about two years
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: after the Florida conviction, Glenn Rogers was extradited to California
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: to stand trial for the strangulation of Sandra Gallagher. The
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: case was different in character from the Florida one. There
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: was no body in a motel room and no signed
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: registration card. Instead, the prosecution had to reconstruct the last
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: hours of a woman's life from witnesses at a bar,
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: from a burned truck, from the testimony of a husband,
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: from an earring that had been found in the wrong place,
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: and from the coroner's findings that she had died before
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: the flames. Prosecutors called the people who had been at
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: McCred's that night. They called the bartender who knew her
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: as Sam. They put on the nurse who had seen
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: a figure with long hair running from the flames. They
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: called the detectives who had developed the roll of film
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: from the backpack and who had searched the apartment in
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: Van Nuys. They presented the coroner's evidence that the cause
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: of death had been manual strangulation, so severe that Sandra's
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: windpipe had been crushed. They showed the jury that she
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: and Glenn Rogers had left McCreds together on September 28th,
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: and they laid out their theory of the crime. At
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: some point, they said, there had been a struggle. Perhaps
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: it began when Rogers made an unwanted sexual advance. He
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: strangled her, and then, trying to destroy the evidence, he
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: drenched her body and the cab of the truck with
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: gasoline and set it on fire. Stephen Gallagher, the husband
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: who had been so carefully examined in the first hours
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: of the investigation, was a witness for the state. So
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: was the earring he had given his wife. In a way,
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: the case came full circle. A man who had been
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: briefly a subject of suspicion became the key to proving
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: who had really killed his wife. The jury also learned
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: about the other cases, although the exact legal limits on
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: what could and could not be presented in court are
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: not detailed in the sources we have, and we will
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: not pretend to know more than we do. On June 22, 1999,
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: a Los Angeles jury found Glenn Rogers guilty of the
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: first-degree murder of Sandra Gallagher, with special circumstances, along with arson.
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: The following month, on July 16, 1999, he was sentenced
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: to death in California as well. It was his second
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: death sentence in two states for two different women. And
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: with that, the remaining prosecutors faced a quiet and difficult decision.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: In Mississippi, where Linda Price had died, and in Louisiana,
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: where Andy Sutton had died, prosecutors held cases that were
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: serious and, by all accounts, strong. But Glenn Rogers already
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: had two death sentences. A man can only be executed once.
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: And putting the families through a full trial with its
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: graphic testimony, its photographs, its appeals, and its years of
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: delay would be a heavy price to ask of people
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: whose loved ones were already known to be his victims.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: So prosecutors in both states made a decision that must
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: have been painful in its own way. They chose to
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: spare the families the emotional ordeal of additional trials. They
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: would not prosecute Rogers for the deaths of Linda Price
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: and Andy Sutton. The cases were never tried, and Rogers
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: was never convicted for either one in a court. That
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: is why, to this day, the official record lists two
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: convictions even though the investigators had linked four women to him.
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: Mark Peters, too, had no trial since there had never
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: been a cause of death. It is a decision that
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: deserves a moment of reflection because it illustrates a tension
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: in American justice that does not often come up. A
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: trial is meant to hold a defendant accountable, but it
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: is also an experience that families must live through, and
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: in some cases the benefits of another conviction do not
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: outweigh the cost. The families of Linda Price and Andy
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: Sutton did not get a verdict. They got something else,
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: the knowledge that the man who took their loved ones
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: was in prison under sentence of death, and in time
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: they would get the final outcome. When the legal proceedings
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: were all added up, Glenn Rogers had left at least
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: 11 children without mothers. Sandra Gallagher had three children. Tina
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: Cribs had two. Linda Price had two. Andy Sutton had four.
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: Eleven young people grew up without the women who had
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: raised them, And for most of those years, the man
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: responsible remained alive. Detective Masucci, who had worked so hard
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: on the Tampa case, spoke about it plainly some years later.
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: Not as a police officer, she said, but as a woman.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: She felt that a lot of women could feel safe
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: that Rogers was off the streets. He had no regard
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: for human life, she said, and none for the families
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: left behind. She was happy he was behind bars and
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: happy that he would never set foot outside a prison again.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: the question of how many other victims there might have
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: been remained. Investigators suspected, and have said so repeatedly, that
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: Rogers was responsible for other unsolved murders. At the time
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: of his arrest, he had boasted of nearly 70. Afterward,
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: he told family members that he had killed dozens. He
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: later insisted that it was all a joke. There has
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: never been a public accounting of any further victims proven
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: to be his. The authorities have said they would continue
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: to pursue unsolved cases that could be linked to him,
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: and families of other missing and murdered women have, over
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: the years, wondered whether their own loved ones might be
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: among them. For most of those families, there has been
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: no answer. And now, as we will see, there never
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: will be one from him. The long years that followed are,
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: in a sense, a story of waiting. In Florida, the
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: legal process moved at the speed that capital cases tend
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: to move. Rogers appealed his conviction to the Florida Supreme Court,
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: arguing that the state had not presented enough evidence, that
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: the trial court should have granted motions for a mistrial
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: because a witness had been allowed to testify about a
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: misdemeanor conviction from California, and that the prosecution had been
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: allowed to make an improper argument in its closing. The
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: appeal was delayed until March of 2001 and was ultimately denied.
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: He went on to file other challenges over the years,
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: and each of them failed. In California, his death sentence
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: joined the thousands of others on the largest death row
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: in the nation, in a state that in 2019 imposed
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: a moratorium on executions. Whatever the courts in California decided,
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: Glenn Rogers' fate was going to be decided in Florida.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: In the meantime, a different kind of story grew up
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: around him. In 2009, Rogers began a lengthy correspondence with
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: a criminal profiler named Anthony Mioli, and in letters and
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: paintings he began to describe a connection to one of
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: the most famous murders in American history. Rogers claimed that
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: he had known Nicole Brown Simpson and that in 1994
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: he had been involved in the killings of Nicole Brown
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: Simpson and Ron Goldman. His brother Clay, in a filmed interview,
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: said that Glenn had told him something similar. A 2012
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: documentary called My Brother the Serial Killer put the allegations
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: before the public. and in 2019 a film called The
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson dramatized them. The response from
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: the people with the most authority to judge was unequivocal.
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: The Los Angeles Police Department said it knew who had
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, and that it
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: had no reason to believe that Rogers was involved. Fred Goldman,
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: Ron Goldman's father, said that the evidence at the criminal
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: trial had shown that one person and only one person
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: had committed the murders, and that the person was not
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: Glenn Rogers. We raise it here for a reason. This
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: was a man who, whatever else was true of him,
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: had a long habit of making enormous claims, and those
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: claims have to be weighed against what can actually be proven.
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: No court has ever found that Rogers had anything to
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: do with those killings, and the evidence for it has
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: never been presented in any form that would meet that standard.
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: It is part of his legend, but it is not
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: part of the record of what he was convicted of doing.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: For nearly three decades, then, Glenn Rogers lived on death
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: row at Union Correctional Institution in Rayford, Florida, a man
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: whose name had once been in every newspaper and who
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: had slowly slipped out of the public mind. Then, in
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: the spring of 2025, the long wait came to an end.
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: Florida was in the midst of an unusually active year
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: for executions. In the middle of April, Governor Ron DeSantis
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: signed a death warrant for Glenn Rogers, setting his execution
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: for May 15. He was 62 years old. He would
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: be the fifth Florida inmate that year to face a
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: scheduled execution, after others whose cases had also been decades
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: in the making. His lawyers tried to stop it. On
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: May 5th, they went to the Florida Supreme Court, arguing
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: that sexual abuse Rogers had suffered as a child should
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: have been taken into account when he was sentenced, and
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: raising concerns about the drugs that would be used in
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: the lethal injection. The court rejected the appeal on May 9th.
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: His attorneys turned to the Supreme Court of the United States,
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: And on May 14th, the day before the scheduled execution,
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: that court denied the final appeal without comment. On the
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: afternoon of Thursday, May 15th, 2025, at Florida State Prison
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: near the town of Stark, Glenn Edward Rogers was put
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: to death by lethal injection. He had requested for his
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: last meal pizza, chocolate cake, and soda. Several members of
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: the victim's families were present. They had come, some of
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: them from hundreds of miles away. Debbie Spikes, the older
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: sister of Linda Price, attended with her husband Ronnie, her sister,
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: and her mother. Before the execution, Rogers was given the
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: chance to make a final statement. He addressed the families
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: of his victims, saying that he knew they had many questions,
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: that he promised the questions would be answered in the
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: near future, and that he hoped the answers would give
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: them some kind of closure. Then he turned his attention
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: to the sitting President of the United States, wished him
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: well and said he was ready to go. The official
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: time of death was 6.16 in the evening. The promise
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: of answers was never kept, and it is hard not
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: to see the irony in that. A man who had
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: spent 30 years refusing to explain himself, who had offered
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: up wild claims and then recanted them, who had told
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: the world he might have killed 70 people, finished his
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: life with another vague promise. If there were additional victims,
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: their families have not received any information and as a
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: result of his death. If there was a motive that
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: went beyond what investigators pieced together, it is gone. The families,
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: for their part, reacted in different ways, which is how
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: real grief works. Jerry Valasella, the sister of Sandra Gallagher,
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: said that after nearly 30 years she could finally rest.
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: She and her family had waited all that time for
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: his death sentence to be carried out, and the execution
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: gave her a sense of safety she had not had before,
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: the knowledge that Rogers could not hurt anyone else. Debbie
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: Spike said that her family found closure, although she admitted
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: that it was hard to watch. She said she was
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: angry that he had shown no remorse for what he
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: had done. And Randy Roberson, the son of Andy Sutton,
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: said that the execution gave him closure too, but that
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: the death had been too peaceful for what Rogers had done.
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: It looked, he said, like going to sleep. These three responses,
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: from three different families, say more than any essay could
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: about the impossibility of a single right feeling in the
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 1: face of something like this. And that brings us to
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: where the story stands today. Glenn Edward Rogers is dead.
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: He was executed on May 15, 2025, at the age
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: of 62. He was the fifth person executed in Florida
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: that year, and the 16th in the United States. His
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: two death sentences, one in Florida and one in California,
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: ended in the same place. The prisons that held him
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: no longer hold him. The courts that sentenced him are
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: finished with him. The legal cases against him are closed.
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: There is no remaining appeal and no possibility of release.
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: The deaths of Linda Price, Andy Sutton, and Mark Peters
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: were never the subject of a conviction, and now they
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: never will be. The question of whether Rogers killed other
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: people in other places remains officially unanswered. So what do
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: we take from this? Why 30 years later does it matter?
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: The first thing to notice is the importance of connection.
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: The reason Glenn Rogers was caught is not that any
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: one agency was brilliant. It is that eventually they talked
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: to each other. A detective in Los Angeles called a
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: detective in Jackson who called the FBI who called Tampa
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: who called Louisiana. A national database carried a warrant from
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: one state to another. A Kentucky detective who had been
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: hunting the same man for two years recognized the name
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: when a teletype landed on his desk. If any one
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: of those links had failed, Rogers might have gone on
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: for weeks or months longer. It is not a coincidence
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: that the most dangerous stretch of his spree came in
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: the days when the agencies did not yet know that
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: they were chasing the same man. The lesson for any
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: society is that jurisdictions are boundaries on paper, and criminals
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: do not honor them. The institutions that protect us are
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: only as strong as their willingness to share what they know,
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: quickly and without ego. The second lesson is about attention.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: Nearly every important breakthrough in this case came from an
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: ordinary person who noticed something. A nurse saw a figure
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: running from a fire. A bartender remembered a woman's nickname.
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: Customers recalled a friendly man with long hair. A motel
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: manager remembered a homemade do not disturb sign. A housekeeper
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: respected a guest's privacy and then had the courage to
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: open the door. A mother who read a news story
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: realized that the unidentified woman in the morgue might be
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: her daughter. A relative in Kentucky picked up the phone.
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: None of them were trained investigators. All of them mattered.
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: Public safety is not just the job of the police.
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: It is the sum of what everyday people choose to
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: see and to say. The third lesson is uncomfortable. and
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: it is about the warning signs that existed long before 1995.
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: Glenn Rogers had a documented history of violence toward women,
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: going back to his teenage marriage. Friends and former girlfriends
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: knew about his temper and about what happened when he drank.
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: And an elderly man who had opened his home to
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: him in Ohio was dead by 1993, in a case
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: that was never closed. None of that was hidden. It
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: was simply scattered. A fact here, a rumor there, a
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: police report in one county and a family story in another.
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: Systems that treat each incident as an isolated event and
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: that do not connect the dots between a history of
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: domestic violence and the risk of something worse will always
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: be a step behind. The lesson is not that every
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: angry man is a killer. It is that patterns of
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: abuse deserve to be taken seriously and that the people
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: who see them, whether relatives, friends, or co-workers, need to
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 1: be believed when they speak up. The fourth lesson is
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: about the strange power of charm. We are taught to
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 1: fear strangers who look dangerous. Glenn Rogers did not look dangerous.
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: He looked like the most fun person in the bar.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: It is a reminder that character is not the same
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: as charisma and that the people who are best at
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: winning trust are not always the ones most worthy of it.
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: That does not mean any of the women he met
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: did anything wrong. They did not. They made choices that
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: countless people make every day to accept a ride, to
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: enjoy a drink, to believe a friendly face. The responsibility
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: belongs to the person who exploited that trust and to
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: nobody else. But communities can look out for one another
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: in simple ways, by noticing who leaves with whom, by
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: checking in, by asking the questions that a drunk and
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: lonely room tends not to ask. The fifth lesson belongs
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: to the question of justice itself, and here honesty requires
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: acknowledging that thoughtful people disagree. For the families of Sandra Gallagher,
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: Linda Price, and Andy Sutton, the execution brought a kind
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: of peace, even if it was imperfect and long-delayed. Others
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: look at a process that took nearly 30 years from
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: crime to punishment, at the cost and the delay and
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: the pain it imposed on survivors, and at the irreversible
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: nature of the penalty, and they ask whether any system
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 1: should have that power, or whether a sentence of life
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: in prison would have served the families better and sooner.
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: This particular case happens to be one in which the
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: evidence of guilt in the cases that went to trial
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 1: was overwhelming, and in which the defendant himself had never
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: offered a convincing alternative. But the debate over the death
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: penalty is bigger than any one man, and a good
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: story should leave room for it. And finally, the most
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: important lesson of all is simply to remember. Sandra Gallagher, 33,
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: a mother of three who had just won $ 1, 200 and
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: was happy to tell anyone who would listen. Linda Price, 34.
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: A mother of two who thought she had found someone
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: who would love her. Tina Marie Cribs. 34. A mother
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: of two who went out to meet her own mother
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: and never arrived. Andy Sutton. A mother of four who
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: met a friendly man and gave him a place to sleep.
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: Mark Peters. A 71-year-old veteran and retired electrician who opened
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: his door to a young man who needed a roof.
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: These were real people with real lives. They deserve to
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: be more than a footnote in the biography of the
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 1: person who killed them. Their names are the true center
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: of this story, and the best thing that we can
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: do with a case like this one is to say
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: them aloud and to carry them forward. The cross-country killer
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: is gone. The men and women who stopped him, the nurse,
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: the bartenders, the detectives in four states, the agents, the
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: truckers who listened to their radios, the Kentucky officers who
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: drove down a country road in pursuit of a white
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: Ford Festiva, did their jobs. And the families, who waited
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: nearly 30 years, are at last free of one particular fear.
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: But the story does not end with relief. It ends
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: with a question for the rest of us about whether
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: we are paying enough attention to the people around us,
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: whether our institutions are talking to one another quickly enough,
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: and whether we will listen the next time someone says
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: that they are afraid. The room was in an ordinary place,
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: the Tampa 8-In, on 46th Street at East Columbus Drive
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: in East Tampa. Rogers had signed in for three nights,
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: and the room was number 119. The story of how
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: Tina Cribs ended up there is told in slightly different ways.
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: One account says she was a maid at a Ramada
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: Inn in Apollo Beach, out after work with three co-workers,
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: and that Rogers gave the women two different names, neither
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: of them Glenn. That conflicts with the bartender's memory of
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: a man called Glenn, and the sources never settle it.
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: The destination is also disputed. The documentary version has him
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: asking for a ride to a nearby motel. A 1997
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: Tampa Bay Times account says he wanted a lift to
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: a carnival winter quarters on Nundy Street, a few blocks away.
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: The same article adds a detail that is hard to forget.
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: As Tina and Rogers walked out the north door of
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: the bar, her mother was walking in through the south door,
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: and she had been working there off and on after
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: selling her own restaurant. They missed each other by seconds.
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: The mother appears as Mary Dick in 1997 coverage and
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: as Lisa Dick in a later television report, and I
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: could not reconcile the two names. Inside the room, accounts
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: differ on the wounds. One account has Tina lying face
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: down in the tub. Court-based summaries describe stab wounds to
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: the chest and buttocks, while the documentary mentions the back
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: and wrist. The physical links to Rogers were small and ordinary.
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: Officials testified that the key to the locked room turned
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: up in his luggage. Tina's wallet was found at a
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: rest area, and two of his fingerprints were on a
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: receipt inside it that matched prints in the room. As
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: for early leads and abandoned theories, I found no record
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: of any other suspect. People had seen the two together,
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: so Rogers was the obvious suspect from the moment the
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: body was found. One unconfirmed account says he phoned a
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: relative in Ohio, said he had killed someone, and said
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: there would be more. Only one source gives that, and
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: it is worded cautiously. the news traveled fast and a
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: long way. On the day of his arrest, the bartender
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: at McCred's in Van Nuys, Rain Keener, was photographed watching
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: the television reports from behind his own bar. For Tina's family,
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: the waiting was the longest part. Her mother said in
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: 2016 that she had been promised the state would carry
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: out the sentence within seven years. In the decades since,
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: She survived lung and brain cancer while her grandchildren grieved
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: their mother. Glenn Rogers sits at the center, and almost
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: everyone else connects to him through someone who passed information along.
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: He was born in Hamilton, Ohio, one of seven children,
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: and was expelled from junior high. He married a teenage girlfriend,
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: Deborah Nix, who divorced him in 1983 alleging physical abuse.
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: Friends later described the pairing of charm and temper that
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: his victims met. Alcohol, money, and anger recur in every account.
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: Mark Peters is the hidden link. Peters, 71, took Rogers in,
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: vanished in October 1993 with his car, guns, and coins,
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: and was found in January 1994 in the Rogers family
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: cabin in Beattyville, Kentucky. Rogers' brother Clay helped lead police there.
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: Clay returns after the spree. appearing in a 2012 documentary
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: that claims Glenn confessed to the Simpson killings. Los Angeles
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: police and Fred Goldman rejected that claim. Kentucky detective Bob
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: Stevens hunted Rogers for two years and made the arrest.
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: The victims share a pattern more than a past. Sandra
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: Gallagher had a lottery win and a marriage under strain.
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: Her husband Steven identified an earring that placed her in
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: Rogers' apartment. Linda Price met him at the Mississippi State Fair,
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: where he worked, and her family later named him to police.
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: Tina Cribs' mother walked into the bar just as Tina
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: and Rogers walked out. Andy Sutton's roommate heard the bedroom
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 1: door close. In each case, a relative or witness became
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: the next investigator's lead. What led to the crimes? Peters'
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: death left Rogers wanted for questioning, with no stable home,
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: drifting by bus, truck, and borrowed car. That drift carried
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: him from Ohio to Van Nuys, Jackson, Tampa, and Bossier City.
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: His motive is undocumented beyond money, drink, and rage. After
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 1: the killings, the Los Angeles warrant in the national database
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: tied the later murders together. Detectives Kublantz and Mzuchi and
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: FBI agent John Huber coordinated the case. A relative who
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: phoned Kentucky police and officers Cox, Robinson, and Barnes finished
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: the chase. Florida tried him first and California second. Relatives
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: of the other women attended his 2025 execution. There is
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: a quiet tendency in true crime for a story to
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: get smoother every time it is retold. Edges get sanded off,
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: numbers get rounder, and a messy human case becomes a
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: tidy legend. The Glenn Rogers story has been through that process,
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: so let us gently put a few things back. Most
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: people assume he was convicted of the whole spree. In fact,
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: there were two convictions. Tina Cribs in Florida, and Sandra
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: Gallagher in California. Linda Price and Andy Sutton were never
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: tried because prosecutors chose to spare their families another ordeal,
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: and Mark Peters' death never led to charges at all.
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: The distinction matters because a conviction is a promise the
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: evidence kept, and the other women deserve to be remembered
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: as victims, not as items on a rumor list. Many
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: also repeat that Rogers killed 70 people or even Nicole
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 1: Brown Simpson. He did say nearly 70, and he took
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: it back. Los Angeles police rejected the Simpson claim, and
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: no court ever found it true, stating it as fact
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: turns a boast into a verdict. People like a single hero,
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: often a profiler or the FBI. In truth, this was
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: solved by ordinary things. A nurse, a bartender, a husband
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: who recognized an earring, fingerprints, a relative who phoned Kentucky police,
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: and a national database that connected warrants. The FBI coordinated
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: and the laboratory processed evidence, but local detectives did the legwork.
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: The credit also belongs to Detective Bob Stevens and the
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: Kentucky officers who ended the chase. Rogers is also imagined
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: as intimate with his victims. He knew them for hours
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: or days, which is part of why trust was so
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: easy to exploit. Finally, motive is told with false certainty.
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: The record shows money, drink, and rage, but no confession
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: explaining it. Taken together, The Fuller story is less about
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: one extraordinary man than about ordinary attention and cooperation, and
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: about women who were far more than the last chapter
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: of his legend. Ten lessons in about 300 words can
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: only be brief, so some are a sentence each. The
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 1: sign-off line is the exact one you use. Glenn Rogers
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: taught the first lesson without meaning to, which is that
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: charm is not character. Bartenders and regulars liked him, and
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: that likability was how he got close to women in
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: four states. It is also why Linda Price's fear, spoken
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: only to her mother, mattered so much. Warnings often arrive
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: quietly and a society that dismisses them has already chosen
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: not to hear. The warnings existed long before 1995. His
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: first wife accused him of violence in a divorce filing
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 1: and friends knew his temper when he drank. Mark Peters
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: was found dead in a family cabin in Kentucky and
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: no cause of death could be established. Without a charge,
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: a dangerous man stayed free, which shows how fragmented records
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: let patterns hide. When he was finally caught, it was
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: through ordinary people. A nurse watched a truck burn, a
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: bartender remembered a nickname, and a husband recognized an earring.
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: Safety is shared work and so is cooperation. Detectives in
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: Los Angeles, Jackson, Tampa, and Kentucky had to trust one
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: another faster than he could kill. The public helped too,
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: though false sightings showed that attention without care costs time.
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: None of the women were at fault. Accepting a ride
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: is an act of trust, and the blame belongs to
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: the one who exploited it. Then there is mercy. Mississippi
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: and Louisiana declined to try Rogers, sparing families further ordeals,
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: though it left two women without a verdict. His execution
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: came nearly 30 years later and brought three families three
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: different feelings. Closure was never a single thing. Some questions remain.
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 1: His motive was never explained, and his 70 killings claim
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: was never proven or disproved, stating either as settled fact
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: fails the victims and the truth. Taken together, these lessons
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: say that justice depends on attention, honesty, and cooperation, and
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: that the people he harmed deserve to be remembered first.
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: This is U.S. Hidden Crimes Podcast. Stick to U.S. for
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 1: more crime news of this sort.