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The Casanova Serial Killer - The Hunt for Glen Rogers · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: Imagine for a moment that it's the fall of nineteen
0:04
ninety five.
0:05
Speaker 2: Wow, yeah, totally different world, right.
0:08
Speaker 1: Like, you really need to put yourself in that specific era,
0:10
because if you're listening to this on a smartphone, maybe
0:13
tracking your steps or you know, getting push notifications, I
0:17
want you to just strip all of that away.
0:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have to forget all the tech we rely
0:21
on today.
0:22
Speaker 1: Exactly. There is no GPS in your pocket. There are
0:25
no ubiquitous ring cameras on every single front porch recording
0:30
your movements.
0:31
Speaker 2: No social media footprint to just instantly verify someone's identity either.
0:35
Speaker 1: Right if you wanted to, I mean, you could get
0:36
in a car, drive across the state line and effectively
0:40
just cease to exist.
0:41
Speaker 2: You could become a complete ghost.
0:42
Speaker 1: You could. And we aren't talking about some phantom from
0:45
a campfire story today. We are talking about a ghost
0:48
who leaves a very real, very brutal trail across the
0:52
United States.
0:53
Speaker 2: And he had a really terrifying distinct pattern he did.
0:56
Speaker 1: He finds his victims, usually women, He charmed them, completely
1:01
disarms them by exploiting like the most basic social contracts
1:05
we all rely on.
1:06
Speaker 2: He isolates them in their own homes, which is just chilling.
1:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then he strikes with this devastating intimate violence,
1:13
and then just like that, he vanishes.
1:16
Speaker 2: Leaving local law enforcements scrambling.
1:18
Speaker 1: Right the authorities arrive, the yellow tape goes up, the
1:21
polaroid cameras flash, but the ghost is already states away.
1:25
He's completely off the radar, drinking in a new bar,
1:28
introducing himself to a brand new victim.
1:32
Speaker 2: It's basically the ultimate nightmare scenario for local police, especially
1:36
back in the mid nineties.
1:37
Speaker 1: Oh, I can't even imagine.
1:39
Speaker 2: You are dealing with an entity that is utterly untethered
1:42
from normal societal anchors. There's no fixed location, right, there
1:46
is an escalating level of violence and this terrifying ability
1:50
to just slip seamlessly into new environments.
1:53
Speaker 1: Because we usually think of criminals as being tied to
1:55
their communities, like they make mistakes where they eat and.
1:58
Speaker 2: Sleep exactly, But what a predator becomes fully nomadic. All
2:02
those traditional methods of investigation.
2:04
Speaker 1: Like knocking on neighbor's doors.
2:05
Speaker 2: Right, knocking on doors, interviewing co workers, it all becomes
2:09
almost entirely useless.
2:10
Speaker 1: And that is the terrifying reality we are diving into today.
2:15
So today's deep dive unpacks this frantic, fast moving cross
2:20
country manhunt. It's detail in the documentary series The FBI Files,
2:24
specifically an episode titled Deadly Stranger.
2:27
Speaker 2: It's a really intense piece of source material.
2:29
Speaker 1: It is we are going to explore the incredibly gruesome
2:33
crimes of a man named Glenn Rogers. But you know,
2:36
the mission of this deep dive isn't just to recount
2:39
a true crime timeline.
2:41
Speaker 2: Right, There's a much bigger picture here.
2:43
Speaker 1: Exactly. We are looking at the mechanics of a massive,
2:46
unprecedented response. We're going to look under the hood of
2:49
how multiple law enforcement agencies, local, state, federal, all raced
2:54
against a ticking clock.
2:55
Speaker 2: Now we're going to examine those tiny, almost imperceptible forensic
2:58
details that finally brought this guy down.
3:00
Speaker 1: So synthesizing all these sources, what's the big takeaway for you?
3:03
Speaker 2: I mean, the overarching narrative is clear. This is a
3:05
masterclass in interagency communication during an era where honestly that
3:10
communication was inherently difficult pre Internet. Basically, exactly, it is
3:14
a testament to forensic deduction, especially when the physical evidence
3:18
is actively being destroyed and perhaps most chillingly, it's a
3:23
stark look at how a charming facade can just flawlessly
3:27
mask it deadly predator.
3:29
Speaker 1: It really tests the absolute limits of the American justice system,
3:32
its ability to communicate across its own internal borders.
3:36
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
3:36
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this because you might wonder how someone
3:39
could cross state lines committing such brutal acts without immediately
3:43
getting caught.
3:43
Speaker 2: It seems impossible, right.
3:45
Speaker 1: The answer lies in the sheer speed of his movements
3:48
and his uncanny ability to blend into the background of
3:50
everyday life. So to really understand how this trail of
3:54
breadcrumbs begins, we have to transition away from the broad
3:57
overview of a cross country killer to zoom in. Yeah,
4:01
we have to look at a hyperspecific, terrifying discovery. We
4:04
have to go to Los Angeles.
4:05
Speaker 2: Okay, so picture the pre dawn hours of September twenty ninth,
4:08
nineteen ninety five. The Los Angeles Fire Department gets a
4:12
call about a vehicle fire.
4:13
Speaker 1: Which you know, carfires happen.
4:15
Speaker 2: They do. But the location here is what makes it
4:18
immediately anomalous. Ye, It's not in some remote, abandoned lot
4:22
out in the desert, somewhere.
4:24
Speaker 1: It's near a hospital parking area in Van Mese, a
4:26
completely public.
4:27
Speaker 2: Space, right, and the scene is chaotic.
4:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have a nurse arriving for her early morning shift.
4:33
It's still dark out. She pulls into the parking lot
4:36
and sees this pickup truck fully engulfed.
4:39
Speaker 2: In flames, just a massive inferno.
4:42
Speaker 1: And in the glow of that fire she sees something else,
4:44
the outline of a figure with long hair running away
4:47
from the burning truck.
4:48
Speaker 2: She doesn't see a face though, right, no face, just.
4:50
Speaker 1: A silhouette fleeing the scene as the flames are rupped. Well, wait,
4:53
let me ask you this. If you're trying to hide
4:56
a crime, why set a fire in a public hospital
4:59
pipe lot where nurses are arriving for shift changes. That
5:02
feels incredibly reckless.
5:04
Speaker 2: Well, it is reckless, but it also speaks to a
5:06
panic response. How so, Well, when you look at the
5:09
kinetics of an intentionally set fire, especially one involving an
5:13
accelerant in a confined space like a vehicle cab, it
5:16
goes from zero to an inferno in.
5:18
Speaker 1: Seconds, like, way faster than they expect.
5:20
Speaker 2: Exactly, the perpetrator likely didn't anticipate the sheer size and
5:24
immediate visibility of the blaze. They were just trying to
5:27
destroy evidence quickly, but.
5:29
Speaker 1: The fire itself became a massive beacon.
5:32
Speaker 2: Right, So when the fire department extinguishes the blaze, the
5:35
situation goes from a simple property damage call to a
5:39
major homicide investigation in an absolute instant.
5:43
Speaker 1: Because inside the cab of that burned out truck they
5:45
find human remains and that's.
5:47
Speaker 2: When the LAPD Homicide Division steps in.
5:50
Speaker 1: The body is burned completely beyond recognition, but thankfully, remarkably,
5:55
really some items survive the intense heat of that fire, which.
5:59
Speaker 2: Is pretty raw, a concentrated cab fire like that it is.
6:02
Speaker 1: The fire was concentrated in the cab, and investigators found
6:05
that an accelerant was likely used. But amids the wreckage,
6:08
they find a backpack, they find a camera, They even
6:10
find a role of undeveloped film, which is wild to
6:13
think about surviving a fire that is wild. And crucially,
6:16
they find documents bearing a name Sandra Gallagher.
6:20
Speaker 2: Now what's fascinating here is how the forensic science completely
6:24
shifts the trajectory of the entire investigation in those crucial
6:28
early days.
6:29
Speaker 1: Right because they initially thought she died in the fire exactly.
6:32
Speaker 2: When a body is found in a fire, the immediate
6:34
assumption by a lay person and sometimes even a beat
6:37
cop might be that the fire was the cause of death. Sure,
6:41
but the coroner's autopsy reveals something incredibly specific and vital
6:46
regarding the physiology of the victim. There was absolutely no
6:50
soot in Sandra's nose or her.
6:52
Speaker 1: Lungs, meaning she wasn't breathing when the fire started.
6:55
Speaker 2: That is the physiological absolute. Yea, if you were alive
6:58
in a fire, even for a few seconds, you take
7:01
a breath, It's an involuntary reflex to the heat and
7:04
the lack of oxygen. It can't help it, you can't.
7:07
And when you take that breath, you inhale smoke and
7:10
the microscopic carbon particles the soop coat your airway, your trachea,
7:14
and deep down into the alveoli of your lungs.
7:16
Speaker 1: Wow.
7:17
Speaker 2: So the complete absence of soot proved definitively that Sander
7:20
was dead before the fire was ever ignited.
7:22
Speaker 1: Oh that's chilling. So the coroner determined she had been
7:24
killed by manual strangulation.
7:26
Speaker 2: Right, the fire wasn't the murder weapon. It was a desperate,
7:30
accelerant fueled cover up.
7:32
Speaker 1: It's a terrifying pivot. So now detectives know they are
7:35
looking for a murderer who tried to erase a strangulation
7:38
with gasoline.
7:39
Speaker 2: And statistically, when a married woman is murdered, where did
7:43
detectives look first?
7:44
Speaker 1: They always look at the husband. It's investigative one oh
7:47
one exactly.
7:48
Speaker 2: They run the truck's plates, confirm it belongs to Sandra
7:52
and discover she is married to a man named Stez.
7:55
Speaker 1: It's more than just standard procedure, right, It's driven by
7:58
overwhelming statistical probabilit The vast majority of domestic homicides are
8:02
committed by an intimate partner.
8:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, and detectives learned that Steve and Sandra were actually
8:07
experiencing marital problems.
8:09
Speaker 1: They had spent a last couple of nights apart.
8:11
Speaker 2: So you have a strained marriage, recent domestic tension, and
8:15
a murdered spouse found in a burned out vehicle. From
8:19
an investigative standpoint, Steve is the prime suspect.
8:22
Speaker 1: You have means you have potential motive, and you have
8:25
this statistical likelihood.
8:26
Speaker 2: But I imagine this is where the timeline becomes Steve's
8:29
absolute saving grace.
8:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, it really is. Steve's story is what cracks the
8:33
investigation wide open and totally clears his name. He tells
8:37
detectives that he had lunch with Sandra on September twenty eighth,
8:40
the day before the fire.
8:41
Speaker 2: Okay, so they saw each other.
8:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, things were still tense, they weren't reconciling yet. But
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then later that afternoon, around two point pm, Sandra called
8:49
him and she was absolutely thrilled.
8:52
Speaker 2: Why was she thrilled?
8:53
Speaker 1: She had just won twelve hundred dollars playing the lottery
8:56
at a local bar called mcred's.
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Speaker 2: Ah. That phone call is the critical pivot point of
9:02
the early investigation.
9:03
Speaker 1: It changes everything.
9:04
Speaker 2: It shifts the entire focus of the LAPD away from
9:07
the husband's home and directly to this local bar. They
9:10
have location, a specific time frame, and a built in
9:14
witness pool.
9:15
Speaker 1: So detectives head straight to mcgred's. They shimme a photo
9:18
of Sandra and the bartender instantly recognizes her though they
9:21
knew her by her local nickname Sam.
9:23
Speaker 2: And the bartender confirms the entire timeline.
9:26
Speaker 1: Yep, Sandra was there. She was celebrating her twelve hundred
9:28
dollars win telling everyone in the vicinity about it, which
9:32
you know, is.
9:32
Speaker 2: A completely understandable human reaction when you get a windfall, totally,
9:36
but in hindsight it's incredibly dangerous. You are essentially broadcasting
9:41
your vulnerability.
9:41
Speaker 1: You really are. But the patrons at mcred's give the
9:44
police the most critical piece of the puzzle yet. They
9:48
noticed Sandra was spending the evening with a guy.
9:50
Speaker 2: A guy with long blonde hair and a.
9:52
Speaker 1: Beard, exactly, a physical description that perfectly, inextricably links back
9:57
to the silhouette the nurse saw running from the burning
10:00
truck just hours later.
10:02
Speaker 2: That's a huge break.
10:03
Speaker 1: And the patrons remember this man introduced himself to the
10:06
bar as Glenn, and Glenn was acting like a high
10:09
roller that night. Oh really, yeah, he was friendly buying
10:12
drinks for Sandra and the other people at the bar,
10:14
artificially embedding himself in her celebration.
10:18
Speaker 2: But let me stop you there, though, because if he's
10:20
buying drinks for people, he obviously has cash. So why
10:24
target someone who just won twelve hundred dollars? Is it
10:28
just pure greed or is it the thrill of taking
10:31
what someone else just got?
10:32
Speaker 1: It's likely a combination of like predatory opportunism and a
10:36
parasitic lifestyle makes sense. Someone operating on the margins, even
10:41
if they have some cash in their pocket at that
10:43
exact moment, views a twelve hundred dollars windfall as a
10:47
massive resource to be extracted.
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Speaker 2: Oh sure, he used his current funds to buy drinks,
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creating a sense of reciprocity and.
10:55
Speaker 1: Trust exactly essentially investing a few dollars to get close
11:00
to the larger prize. He was establishing a false bond,
11:04
so manipulative. The witnesses remember that when the bar closed,
11:07
Glenn asked Sandra for a ride home. He claimed he
11:10
lived nearby.
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Speaker 2: And Sandra, probably feeling generous and on a high from
11:14
her win.
11:15
Speaker 1: Agreed they left together. The patrons even thought his last
11:19
name might be Rogers.
11:20
Speaker 2: So LPD detectives hit the pavement right.
11:23
Speaker 1: They run the name Glenn Rogers through their sources, find
11:26
an address in the van Ney's area, just minutes from
11:28
where the truck was burned, and put together a photo lineup.
11:31
Speaker 2: And I'm assuming the patrons at the bar make a
11:33
positive identification.
11:34
Speaker 1: They do. Glenn Rogers was definitely the man with Sandra
11:38
armed with that identification and the timeline. They secure a
11:42
search warrant for his apartment.
11:43
Speaker 2: They don't know if he's in there, they don't know
11:44
if he's heavily armed.
11:46
Speaker 1: No. They go in tactically clearing room by room, but
11:49
the apartment is completely empty. It looks like he cleared
11:52
out in a massive panic hurry.
11:54
Speaker 2: But he didn't grab everything.
11:56
Speaker 1: And this is the part that always bothers me when
11:58
I look at these cases. Detectives find a woman's personal
12:01
wallet in the apartment, just lying there, just left behind.
12:04
It's completely empty of cash, no idea. And they find
12:07
a single woman's ear ring, an earring that Steve, Sandra's
12:12
husband later positively identifies as part of a pair he
12:15
bought for her months earlier. Wow, so let's talk about this.
12:19
He goes to the trouble of setting a car on
12:21
fire to destroy evidence of a strangulation, but then he
12:25
leaves an empty wallet and an earring from his victim
12:27
in his own apartment.
12:28
Speaker 2: It seems contradictory, right.
12:30
Speaker 1: I struggle to buy that this is just sloppiness. Is
12:33
he subconsciously leaving a calling card? Does he want them
12:36
to know it was him?
12:37
Speaker 2: It's tempting to assign a mastermind psychological motive, right, like,
12:42
there's a subconscious desire to be caught. But we really
12:45
have to look at the cognitive load of a fleeing suspect.
12:48
Speaker 1: Okay, what do you mean when a predator like.
12:50
Speaker 2: This makes this sudden, reactive decision to run, the preservation
12:54
of his own freedom supersedes everything, including basic logical crime
12:59
scene and clean up. So he's just panicking exactly. The
13:03
fire on the truck was his attempt at a cover
13:05
up at the primary scene. But once he fled that
13:09
scene and returned to his apartment, the adrenaline crash and
13:12
the realization of his exposure kicked down.
13:14
Speaker 1: He was in pure flight mode.
13:15
Speaker 2: Right. He grabbed the cash, uh the twelve hundred dollars
13:18
she won, dumped the wallet because it was dead weight,
13:21
and ran. The earring was likely dropped in a struggle
13:25
or just discarded without a second thought.
13:27
Speaker 1: This is not a calling card.
13:28
Speaker 2: No, it's just the chaotic debris of a frantic escape.
13:31
Speaker 1: That makes sense. Well, The LAPD officially charges Glenn Rogers
13:34
with the manual strangulation and murder of Sandra Gallagher.
13:38
Speaker 2: They have their man or, at least they have his name.
13:40
In his apartment because the physical man, Glenn Rogers is gone.
13:43
Speaker 1: Exactly, So the LAPD does what you do in nineteen
13:46
ninety five. They enter his name, his physical description, and
13:49
the homicide warrant into the NCIC AH.
13:52
Speaker 2: The National Crime Information Center. Yes, we really need to
13:55
pause and understand the mechanics of the NCIC because it
13:59
is in possible to overstate its importance in this story.
14:02
Speaker 1: It really is the backbone of this whole hunt.
14:04
Speaker 2: Right in nineteen ninety five. This isn't a cloud based
14:07
app that pings a notification to every cop smartphone, like.
14:10
Speaker 1: We were saying earlier. Strip all that tech away, then give.
14:13
Speaker 2: It more like a massive, clunky text based switchboard connecting
14:17
over fifty seven thousand local, state, and federal law enforcement
14:21
agencies across the entire country.
14:23
Speaker 1: Right, So, if you're listening and imagining a modern database
14:26
with facial recognition and instant photo sharing, scale that way back.
14:30
This is green text on a black CRT monitor.
14:33
Speaker 2: Exactly.
14:34
Speaker 1: If a police officer in Maine pulls someone over for
14:36
a broken tail light, they have to physically radio dispatch.
14:40
The dispatcher types the name into a terminal and if
14:43
the spelling is exactly right, The NCIIC tells them if
14:46
that person has a murder warrant.
14:47
Speaker 2: In California, it was the central nervous system of American
14:50
law enforcement, but it relied entirely on human input and
14:53
proactive query.
14:55
Speaker 1: So the LAPD essentially flooded that system with a massive
14:58
red alert for Glenn Rodgers.
15:00
Speaker 2: But that alert only works if another officer somewhere else
15:03
encounters him, detains him, and runs his specific names exactly.
15:07
Speaker 1: We leave California just as that digital switchboard is armed
15:10
with his data, and it doesn't take long for it
15:12
to be triggered. But when it does, it's not a
15:14
routine traffic stop. It's a triggering event all the way
15:18
in the Deep South, a few days after the LA murder,
15:21
local police in Jackson, Mississippi, get a tip.
15:24
Speaker 2: Wait, how did they find him? In Mississippi?
15:26
Speaker 1: Rogers called a friend back home, and he made the
15:29
call from a motel outside Jackson.
15:31
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
15:32
Speaker 1: The police get the location, They coordinate a raid. They
15:35
breached the motel room and it's empty.
15:37
Speaker 2: He was already gone.
15:38
Speaker 1: The coffee is probably still warm, but he had already
15:41
moved on. The ghost had slipped.
15:42
Speaker 2: Away again, which really highlights a major vulnerability in tracking
15:46
a highly mobile suspect. Law enforcement is always operating on.
15:50
Speaker 1: A time delay, always a step behind.
15:52
Speaker 2: Right by the time a tip is received, vetted, jurisdiction
15:56
is established, and a tactical team is deployed, hours are even, days.
16:00
Speaker 1: Have passed, and a suspect with a vehicle and cash
16:04
can cover hundreds of miles in that blind spot exactly,
16:07
which brings us to November third, nineteen ninety five. Jackson
16:11
detectives are called to a horrific scene. A thirty four
16:15
year old single mother named Linda Price is found dead
16:19
in her apartment by her own family members.
16:21
Speaker 2: Well, that's awful.
16:22
Speaker 1: She is in her bathtub. She has been stabbed repeatedly,
16:25
and her throat is slashed.
16:27
Speaker 2: The contrast between the two crime scenes is jarring, but
16:30
the underlying explosive violence is identical.
16:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, the method change, but the brutality didn't.
16:37
Speaker 2: In Los Angeles you had manual strangulation followed by a
16:40
massive fire. Here in Mississippi you have a brutal close
16:43
quarter's knife attack in a domestic setting.
16:45
Speaker 1: But the forensic footprint of the crime scene tells a
16:48
very specific story to the investigators, doesn't it.
16:51
Speaker 2: It does there is absolutely no forced entry, the windows
16:53
are intact, the doorframe isn't splintered.
16:55
Speaker 1: And furthermore, none of her valuables electronics, jewelry.
17:00
Speaker 2: And critically, the apartment door is locked from the outside.
17:03
Speaker 1: Meaning she led her kill her in or he already
17:05
possessed a key. This wasn't a random burglary gone.
17:08
Speaker 2: Wrong, right, It changes the entire psychological profile of the event.
17:11
How so, it means it was someone she knew, someone
17:14
she trusted enough to allow into her most vulnerable space,
17:18
or someone who had already integrated into her daily life.
17:20
Speaker 1: And when detectives interview Linda's mother, the disparate puzzle pieces
17:24
snapped together with terrifying clarity.
17:27
Speaker 2: What does she tell him?
17:28
Speaker 1: The mother reveals that Linda had a new boyfriend. They
17:31
met exactly a month prior, on October third, at the
17:34
Mississippi State Fair where he was working as a carnie. Okay,
17:37
he was incredibly charming, swept Linda off her feet, and
17:41
they moved in together almost immediately. And his name Glenn Rogers.
17:46
Speaker 2: Wow. Just one month from a charming meeting at a
17:49
state fair to a brutal murder and a bathtub.
17:52
Speaker 1: Her mother noted that while he started out incredibly charismatic,
17:55
Linda had recently become terrified of his volatile temper and
17:59
his wild eye, unpredictable mood swings.
18:01
Speaker 2: What we are looking at here is a textbook demonstration
18:04
of the Casanova killer archetype, blended with a profound lack
18:08
of impulse control.
18:09
Speaker 1: I've heard it called the mask of sanity.
18:11
Speaker 2: That's exactly it. He targets women who might be seeking connection.
18:15
He uses intense charm, mirroring their desires to disarm them
18:20
and fast track intimacy, and then.
18:21
Speaker 1: He just takes over their lives.
18:23
Speaker 2: Right, He embeds himself into their living situations, essentially making
18:27
them financially and emotionally responsible for his well being.
18:30
Speaker 1: And isolates them.
18:31
Speaker 2: Yes, he subtly isolates them from their usual support systems, friends, family,
18:37
by monopolizing their time.
18:39
Speaker 1: And then when the mask inevitably slips, triggered by some
18:43
perceived slight, an argument, or perhaps just his own internal rage,
18:47
he erupts into catastrophic violence. But here's where it gets
18:51
really interesting, though, I have to push back on the
18:53
logic of his movements.
18:54
Speaker 2: Okay, what do you mean.
18:55
Speaker 1: You look at this guy's behavior and it makes absolutely
18:57
zero sense for someone actively on the from a capital
19:01
murder charge in California. Usually a killer fleeing across the
19:05
country tries to be a ghost, right.
19:06
Speaker 2: They try to stay hidden.
19:07
Speaker 1: They use aliases, they pay in cash, They steal nondescript cars,
19:11
they avoid eye contact. But Rogers, he's introducing himself as
19:15
Glenn Rogers.
19:16
Speaker 2: It's wild.
19:16
Speaker 1: He's driving cars that either belonged to him or his victims.
19:20
It's like a bank robber standing outside the bank, eating
19:23
a sandwich and waving at the security cameras. Why is
19:26
any hiding? Is he just stupid?
19:28
Speaker 2: It is a glaring, massive contradiction. But it's not stupidity.
19:32
It's something much more dangerous.
19:34
Speaker 1: Why is it?
19:34
Speaker 2: Then? FBI special agent John Huber, who coordinated much of
19:38
the federal response, later on pointed this out. His assessment
19:41
was chillingly simple. Rogers possessed absolutely no fear of the law,
19:46
none at all. Zero. He was operating on a level
19:49
of pure impulse, entitlement, and arrogance. He wasn't acting like
19:53
a hunted man. He was acting like an apex predator
19:56
who genuinely believed he was untouchable.
19:58
Speaker 1: He thought he could just talk his way out.
19:59
Speaker 2: Of it anything exactly. He felt that his charm could
20:02
talk him out of any situation, and if it couldn't,
20:04
his violence could fight him out of it.
20:05
Speaker 1: That arrogance is just staggering. So Jackson Police enter his
20:09
NIEM into the NCIC and instantly that digital switchboard lights up.
20:13
Speaker 2: It flags the California warrant.
20:15
Speaker 1: Yes, the system flags the California murder warrant. Local law
20:20
enforcement in Mississippi suddenly realizes a terrifying truth. They aren't
20:25
looking for a guy who made one terrible violent mistake
20:29
in la and then another in Jackson.
20:31
Speaker 2: They are looking at an escalating cross country rampage.
20:34
Speaker 1: The timeline is compressing, the speed of his movements is accelerating,
20:39
and as we move into Florida, it becomes a literal
20:42
race against the clock.
20:43
Speaker 2: The acceleration is what really elevates this from a string
20:47
of tragic homicides to a national crisis.
20:49
Speaker 1: We have to look at the compression of the dates.
20:51
Speaker 2: Let's do it.
20:52
Speaker 1: The California murder was September twenty eighth. The Mississippi murder
20:55
was discovered November three. That's roughly a five week gap.
20:59
Speaker 2: But just three days after the discovery in Mississippi. On
21:02
November sixth, nineteen ninety five, police in Tampa, Florida are
21:05
called to a local motel.
21:06
Speaker 1: Right inside Room one nineteen, they find an unidentified woman.
21:10
She is dead in the bathtub, stabbed multiple times in
21:12
the back, chest and wrists.
21:14
Speaker 2: And the details of how her body was discovered highlight
21:17
Roger's cold, calculating nature amidst the absolute frenzy of his violence.
21:21
Speaker 1: Oh the sign on the door.
21:22
Speaker 2: Yes, the motel housekeeper had actually skipped cleaning Room one
21:27
nineteen the previous day, and the reason why is deeply unsettling.
21:31
There was a handmaid do not disturb sign hanging on
21:34
the outside doorknob.
21:35
Speaker 1: It wasn't the standard plastic hotel tag.
21:38
Speaker 2: No, it was a piece of paper ripped from the
21:40
phone book with the words scrawled on it.
21:42
Speaker 1: The motel manager pieces the timeline together for the police.
21:46
A man had rented that room. When he went to
21:49
the front desk and was told they didn't have any
21:51
official do not disturb signs left, he didn't just shrug
21:55
it off.
21:55
Speaker 2: He took the time to made one.
21:56
Speaker 1: He paid for an extra night in cash, went back
21:58
to the room and fell fash and his own sign
22:01
just to ensure the maids wouldn't come in the next.
22:03
Speaker 2: Morning, he bought himself a twenty four hour head start.
22:06
Speaker 1: He engineered a delay in the discovery of the body,
22:08
and the manager remembered seeing that same man packing up
22:11
a small white car to.
22:12
Speaker 2: Leave, and the registration card for room one nineteen signed
22:16
in his own handwriting by Glenn Rogers.
22:19
Speaker 1: He's just signing his name everywhere. So now we have
22:22
to look at this velocity. We are on November sixth
22:25
in Florida. Four days later, on November tenth, nineteen ninety five,
22:30
in Bossier City, Louisiana, another woman is found.
22:33
Speaker 2: Andy Giles Sutton, Yes.
22:35
Speaker 1: A mother of four, found stab to death in her apartment.
22:39
Her roommate had heard her come home the night before
22:42
with a new boyfriend she just met at.
22:43
Speaker 2: A local bar, a guy named Glenn Rodgers.
22:45
Speaker 1: And neighbor saw him leave the next morning in a
22:47
white car.
22:48
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, the sheer
22:52
velocity of this violence completely breaks the traditional criminological models.
22:57
Speaker 1: Right the timeline is insane.
22:58
Speaker 2: September twenty eight in California, November three in Mississippi, November
23:02
six in Florida, November ten in Louisiana.
23:05
Speaker 1: It's like he's not even sleeping.
23:07
Speaker 2: Traditional serial killers, the ones heavily studied by the FBI's
23:10
Behavioral Science UNI, almost always have a cooling off period between.
23:13
Speaker 1: Murders, a time to reset.
23:15
Speaker 2: Exactly, it's a time to decompress, to relive the fantasy,
23:18
or to meticulously plan the next attack. Rogers had practically none.
23:23
Speaker 1: Agent Hubert described it as a time game.
23:25
Speaker 2: Right. Law enforcement was constantly reacting to bodies, processing complex
23:30
crime scenes, dealing with jurisdictional paperwork, while Rogers, fueled by
23:35
momentum and stolen vehicles, was already hundreds of miles away
23:39
in another state, actively hunting his next victim.
23:42
Speaker 1: Let's jump back to that Tampa crime scene for a
23:45
second because I want to highlight the forensic deductions made
23:48
there by Tampa homicide Detective Julie Masucci Are.
23:52
Speaker 2: Her work was incredible, because.
23:53
Speaker 1: This isn't just about finding a body, It's about reading
23:56
the room. You have this unidentified woman in a bathtub.
23:59
But detective Mazouchi notices the granular details the shoes. Right, Yes,
24:04
the victims jeans and shoes are piled near the toilet,
24:08
but there are blood spots on the top of the shoes,
24:10
and the stab wounds on the body perfectly match cuts
24:13
through the clothing she isn't wearing anymore.
24:15
Speaker 2: This is where crime scene reconstruction becomes an absolute science.
24:19
Those details completely rewrite the narrative of the struggle. A
24:23
lay person sees a body in a tub and assumes
24:26
she was attacked while bathing. But the blood spatter, physics
24:30
drops landing on the top of the shoes, and the
24:32
corresponding fabric tears mean the victim was fully clothed, wearing
24:36
her shoes, standing upright when she was ambushed, likely from behind.
24:40
Speaker 1: So the bathtub was just a cleanup site.
24:42
Speaker 2: Exactly, the killer placing her in the bathtub, removing her clothes,
24:46
running the water, leaving towels scattered around. It was all
24:50
a frantic post murder attempt to wash away trace evidence,
24:54
hair or fibers before he fled.
24:56
Speaker 1: It wasn't a ritualistic display, it was forensic counter measure exactly.
25:00
Speaker 2: Shows his methodology as messy. It's frantic, but it's incredibly brutal.
25:04
Speaker 1: But who was the victim in Tampa? Because for days
25:07
she is just a Jane do right. They had no
25:09
idea The identification only comes because of a mother's intuition
25:12
and the sheer force of relentless local media coverage. A
25:16
woman reports her daughter, Tina Marie Cribs missing. She sees
25:20
the news reports, contacts the police, and positively identifies the body.
25:25
Speaker 2: And the story of Tina's last hours is just heartbreaking.
25:27
Speaker 1: It really is. Tina had gone to a local spot,
25:30
the Showtime Bar, to meet her mother. She got there early,
25:33
met some friends.
25:34
Speaker 2: And, according to the bartender and witnesses, a friendly, charismatic
25:38
guy named Glenn was there.
25:39
Speaker 1: Of course he was.
25:41
Speaker 2: He struck up a conversation, seamlessly embedded himself in their
25:44
social group, and at one point, to prove his generosity
25:48
and establish his status, he bought a round of drinks
25:52
with a crisp one hundred dollars bill.
25:54
Speaker 1: See he uses money as bait. We saw it in
25:56
Los Angeles with Sandra's twelve hundred dollars lottery win, where
26:00
he latched onto her newfound wealth. Here in Florida, he
26:03
flips the script right.
26:04
Speaker 2: He's playing the rich guy.
26:05
Speaker 1: He's the one flash in the cash slapping down one
26:08
hundred dollars bill to buy drinks for strangers. He creates
26:11
this immediate false sense of security. He's the fun guy,
26:15
the generous guy.
26:16
Speaker 2: Yeh, soul manipulation.
26:17
Speaker 1: If you've ever been in a social situation where someone
26:20
is just a little too eager to pay for everything,
26:22
It's almost like an anglerfish using a glowing lure in
26:25
the pitch dark of the ocean.
26:26
Speaker 2: Oh that's a perfect analogy.
26:28
Speaker 1: You are drawn to the light, to the generosity, completely
26:31
unaware of the teeth waiting just behind it.
26:33
Speaker 2: That anglerfish analogy perfectly encapsulates the psychological trap. He uses
26:38
charm and perceived financial stability to bypass normal social defenses.
26:42
Speaker 1: People definitely drop their guard around generosity.
26:45
Speaker 2: He do so. He asks Tina for a quick ride
26:47
to his motel, claiming it's just down the road, his
26:50
car is having issues, and she'd be back before her
26:52
mother even arrived.
26:53
Speaker 1: It's a low stakes request.
26:55
Speaker 2: Right, Tina feeling socially obligated to the guy who just
26:58
bought a round of drinks.
27:00
Speaker 1: And the other tragedy of this is that her mother
27:03
arrives at the bar shortly after Tina leaves. Oh man,
27:07
she sits there waiting. She starts beeping Tina's pager beeping.
27:11
It relentlessly over and over, knowing instantly with that terrible
27:15
gut feeling only a parent has that something is terribly
27:18
wrong walies. And while that pager is going off, vibrating
27:21
on a counter or in a purse somewhere, Rogers is
27:24
tearing a piece of paper from a phone book to
27:26
make a do not disturb sign.
27:28
Speaker 2: It's a chilling, devastating juxtaposition of two realities. The mother's
27:33
desperate high tech for the nineties attempts to reach her daughter,
27:37
met only with silence because the killer is methodically using
27:40
absolute low tech means a rip piece of paper to
27:43
buy himself the time he needs to escape.
27:46
Speaker 1: During the investigation, detective Masucci also learns a crucial vehicular detail.
27:50
Speaker 2: Right Yes, she learns that Tina drove a white Ford Festiva,
27:54
the exact same make, model, and color of the car
27:58
the motel manager saw Rogers packing his bags.
28:00
Speaker 1: Into, so Masuci updates the NCIC database again. Now the
28:04
alert isn't just for a man. Every cop in the
28:06
country isn't just looking for Glenn Rogers's face. They are
28:09
looking for a white Ford Festivote with specific Florida plates.
28:13
Speaker 2: At this point, the scope of the tragedy is undeniable
28:16
and impossible for federal authorities to ignore.
28:18
Speaker 1: Right four women dead across four states California and Mississippi, Florida,
28:22
Louisiana in roughly six weeks.
28:24
Speaker 2: The FBI officially elevates this to a national emergency.
28:27
Speaker 1: They recognize that local jurisdictions, no matter how dedicated or
28:30
well funded, cannot catch a highly mobile killer alone. They
28:35
are restricted by state lines. He is not.
28:37
Speaker 2: They need a net big enough to cover the entire
28:39
interstate highway.
28:40
Speaker 1: System, which leads to a massive, coordinated media blitz. The
28:45
FBI takes the extraordinary step of putting Glenn Rogers on
28:48
the ten most Wanted list.
28:49
Speaker 2: That's a huge deal.
28:50
Speaker 1: It is now I want to talk about this list
28:52
because it isn't just a symbolic gesture or a pr stunt.
28:56
Placing someone on the ten most wanted list legally unlocks
28:59
the mac some level of federal resources, fireteps, surveillance exactly,
29:03
and guarantees wall to wall national media attention.
29:07
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate escalation by federal law enforcement. They
29:10
broadcast his face, his specific modus operandi, and the granular
29:15
details of that stolen white Ford festiva.
29:18
Speaker 1: Everywhere, but They don't just rely on the evening news anchors.
29:21
Speaker 2: No, they target the people who spend their lives on
29:23
the asphalt. They broadcast the details over CEBE radio frequencies
29:27
directly to long haul truckers.
29:28
Speaker 1: That's brilliant.
29:29
Speaker 2: They physically plaster wanted flyers in truck stops, waystations, and
29:34
rest areas across the interstate system. They effectively turn thousands
29:38
of motorists and truckers into amateur deputies.
29:41
Speaker 1: But I have to imagine that casting a net that
29:43
wide is incredibly risky, right, because the average person is
29:47
terrible at eyewitness identification.
29:49
Speaker 2: You're touching on something crucial, and it is a massive
29:52
double edged sword. When you launch a media campaign of
29:56
that magnitude, you do generate crucial, case breaking tips, but
30:01
you also flood the system with absolute noise. The FBI's
30:05
tip lines were inundated with false sightings, fueled by paranoia
30:09
and people wanting to be part of the story.
30:11
Speaker 1: Like the pool hall incident.
30:12
Speaker 2: Yes, at one point, multiple callers swore they saw Rogers
30:16
at a pool hall back in Mississippi. Federal agents have
30:19
to take every tip seriously.
30:20
Speaker 1: So they gear up tactics.
30:22
Speaker 2: They swarm the location they secure a massive perimeter, they
30:24
breach the building only to find a guy who just
30:27
happens to have long blonde hair playing pool. Oh that's
30:29
frustrating every single false led trains, manpower, budget, and time
30:34
they desperately didn't have.
30:35
Speaker 1: They needed to stop reacting to where he had been,
30:38
which is what the tips were telling them, and start
30:40
predicting where he was going.
30:42
Speaker 2: That requires a shift from reactive policing to behavioral prediction.
30:46
And this is where the strategic pivot in the investigation happens.
30:49
Speaker 1: What did they pivot to?
30:50
Speaker 2: Special Agent Huber and the Federal Task Force operate on
30:53
a well established behavioral theory, the familiarity.
30:57
Speaker 1: Principle, meaning he'd go home.
30:59
Speaker 2: Essentially, Yes, fugitives under extreme pressure, when the whole world
31:03
is actively looking for them and their faces on every
31:06
TV screen, tend to psychologically retreat to familiar territory. They
31:11
seek out the known.
31:12
Speaker 1: For Glenn Rogers, that meant focusing their resources heavily on
31:15
his home state of Kentucky exactly. And this is where
31:18
the narrative introduces someone who has been waiting in the
31:21
wings this entire time, Kentucky State Police Detective.
31:24
Speaker 2: Bob Stevens He's a key player here.
31:26
Speaker 1: When the FBI prioritizes Kentucky and sends out the alerts,
31:30
Detective Stevens is already well aware of Glenn Rogers. He
31:33
isn't just learning the name from a wanted poster faxed
31:36
over from Washington. He has been hunting Rogers for two years.
31:40
Speaker 2: It's an incredible convergence of past and present crimes. Let's
31:44
rewind to nineteen ninety three, long before this cross country
31:48
rampage began.
31:49
Speaker 1: What happened in ninety three.
31:50
Speaker 2: Rogers was the prime suspect in a cold case in Kentucky.
31:54
A seventy one year old man named Mark Peters was
31:56
found dead, bound and tied up inside a cabin shared
32:00
with Rogers.
32:01
Speaker 1: Oh wow, did they have evidence?
32:04
Speaker 2: The physical core used to bind the elderly man matched
32:06
a spool of cord found in the home. But forensic
32:09
pathology has its limits and the exact cause of death
32:12
couldn't be definitively proven by the coroner at the time,
32:15
preventing an immediate murder charge.
32:17
Speaker 1: And while they waited, Rogers vanished.
32:19
Speaker 2: Yep. He had been traveling off the grid by greyhound
32:22
buses and hitchhiking, making him nearly impossible to track pre NCIC.
32:26
Speaker 1: Escalation until now, because on November thirteenth, nineteen ninety five,
32:29
just three days after the Louisiana murder, the behavioral strategy
32:33
of focusing on Kentucky pays off in a massive way.
32:36
Speaker 2: The relative's phone call, Yes.
32:38
Speaker 1: A relative of Rogers living in Lee County, Kentucky, calls
32:40
the local police. Rogers had just shown up at her
32:43
house unannounced, visited briefly, and then drove off.
32:46
Speaker 2: And what was he driving?
32:46
Speaker 1: A small white car heading west toward Interstate seventy five.
32:51
Speaker 2: So detentionive Stevens gets the dispatch call and immediately sets
32:55
up a static position on the most logical road to
32:57
the interstate. He knows the area, he knows the geography
33:00
of this road, he knows the psychological profile of the suspect,
33:03
and he knows exactly what's stolen vehicle to look for.
33:07
And sure enough, a white Ford Festiva drives right past
33:11
his cruiser.
33:12
Speaker 1: I can't even fathom the adrenaline spike in that specific moment.
33:16
You've been looking for a guy for two years, for
33:18
an elderly man's death in a cabin, and suddenly he
33:21
drives past your windshield now wanted for four more brutal
33:24
murders across the entire country.
33:26
Speaker 2: It must have been surreal, but Stevens relies on his training.
33:30
He doesn't just hit the lights and sirens immediately right.
33:32
Speaker 1: You don't want to shoot out on the highway exactly.
33:34
Speaker 2: In law enforcement, especially with a suspect this dangerous, you
33:38
have to be absolutely sure before you initiate what will
33:41
likely be a lethal confrontation. He pulls out, falls in
33:44
a safe distance behind the Festiva and runs the physical
33:47
license tags.
33:47
Speaker 1: The dispatcher confirms the plates are stolen out of Florida.
33:51
The trap is finally closing.
33:53
Speaker 2: So Stevens pulls his cruiser up beside the Festiva on
33:56
the highway, pretending he's just passing in the left lane.
34:00
Speaker 1: He looks over and locks eyes with the driver. It's
34:02
an exact visual match for the photos it is Glenn Rogers.
34:05
Speaker 2: And Rogers, operating on pure survival instinct, knows he's made the.
34:10
Speaker 1: Second may lock eyes that chases on. Rogers floors the accelerator,
34:15
he blows through a red light. He intentionally crosses the
34:18
median and is driving on the wrong side of the
34:20
highway into oncoming traffic.
34:22
Speaker 2: That is just incredibly dangerous.
34:24
Speaker 1: He is physically running civilian cars and a school bus
34:28
off the road into ditches in his sheer desperation to escape.
34:32
It's incredibly reckless, putting dozens of innocent lives in immediate
34:36
lethal danger.
34:37
Speaker 2: At this point, the police command makes the decision that
34:40
they have to end the pursuit quickly before he kills
34:42
a family in a minivan.
34:43
Speaker 1: Right, they can't just let him keep going.
34:45
Speaker 2: So they coordinate a rolling roadblock ahead of him on
34:47
the highway. As Rogers approaches the roadblock, navigating at high speed,
34:51
a police sergeant executes a textbook pit maneuver. Now explain
34:55
how that works mechanically, because we see it in movies,
34:58
but the physics of it are intense, the precision immobilization technique.
35:03
It requires incredible skill.
35:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can't just ram them.
35:06
Speaker 2: Right, you don't ram them. The pursuing officer matches the
35:09
speed of the suspects vehicle, pulls up alongside the rear
35:12
quarter panel and gently but firmly taps the side of
35:16
the suspects rear bumper with the front bumper of the
35:19
police cruiser.
35:19
Speaker 1: And that spins them.
35:21
Speaker 2: It immediately breaks the rear tire's traction with the asphalt,
35:25
causing the suspects vehicle to violently spin out of control,
35:28
usually one hundred and eighty degrees, stalling the engine and
35:31
forcing it off the road. Wow, So the sergeant tacks
35:34
the Festiva, spinning it violently into a ditch.
35:37
Speaker 1: The car is disabled, smoking in the grass. Armed officers
35:40
swarm the vehicle with weapons drawn, and even in that moment,
35:44
completely surrounded by state police, Rogers is defiant.
35:48
Speaker 2: He's a surrender quietly.
35:50
Speaker 1: No, he's angry, he's aggressive, shouting at the officers. But
35:53
he is finally permanently in handcuffs. So what does this
35:58
all mean? The chase reads like a sequence from a
36:01
Hollywood action movie, but the reality is this was the
36:05
terrifying combination of a cross country nightmare.
36:08
Speaker 2: It really was.
36:08
Speaker 1: Think about it. It took a stolen tag on a
36:11
victim's car, an observant relative willing to make the call,
36:15
and a local detective who had been holding a grudge
36:17
for a nineteen ninety three cold case to finally force
36:20
this monster off the road.
36:22
Speaker 2: It highlights the extreme fragility and the required interconnectedness of
36:26
the justice system.
36:26
Speaker 1: Because if one thing goes wrong.
36:28
Speaker 2: Exactly one broken link in that chain. If the relative
36:32
had hesitated out of family loyalty, if Stevens had been
36:35
looking down at as radio as the car passed, if
36:37
the pit maneuver had failed, and Rogers might have made
36:40
it to the interstate, ditched the car and vanished into
36:43
the ether again.
36:44
Speaker 1: But the physical capture of Glenn Rodgers, as dramatic and
36:48
violent as it was, was only half the battle. Now
36:50
you have a massive jurisdictional and bureaucratic nightmare little red tape.
36:54
Five different states, California, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, and Kentucky all
36:58
have a piece of this puzzle. They all have victims,
37:00
They all have families demanding justice.
37:03
Speaker 2: They have to figure out how to put him away
37:04
for good without stepping on each other's toes, violating his rights,
37:09
or jeopardizing the prosecution.
37:10
Speaker 1: And that requires checking massive state egos at the door.
37:14
You have district attorneys who all want to be the
37:17
one to slay the dragon.
37:18
Speaker 2: But the FBI steps in to act as the central
37:21
clearinghouse for all the physical and forensic evidence agents and
37:26
detectives from all five states physically traveled to Kentucky.
37:30
Speaker 1: They literally sit around a massive conference table and lay
37:33
out everything they have, every crime scene photo, every fiber analysis,
37:38
every timeline, and what.
37:39
Speaker 2: They find cataloged in that stolen white festiva is legally damming.
37:43
They find a pair of Rogers short stained with blood.
37:45
Speaker 1: And Tina Cribb's personal purse.
37:47
Speaker 2: Yes, the physical evidence linking him directly to the Florida
37:50
murder is undeniable.
37:52
Speaker 1: This raises an important question, though, when you have four
37:55
capital murders in four different states, how do the prosecutors
37:59
sit in a room and legally decide who goes first,
38:01
who gets the first shot at putting him on trial?
38:04
Does the federal government just mandate it?
38:05
Speaker 2: No, it's actually a strategic consensus based entirely on the
38:09
strongest forensic foundation.
38:10
Speaker 3: Okay, so whoever has the best case exactly, you want
38:14
the most airtight, bulletproof, scientifically sound case to go first
38:19
to ensure a conviction that will lock him away immediately
38:23
and permanently.
38:24
Speaker 1: Because if the first state tries him and somehow loses
38:27
on a technicality, it jeopardizes the momentum of all the others.
38:32
Speaker 2: Right as they reviewed the evidence on that table in Kentucky,
38:35
it became glaringly clear that Florida had the strongest hand
38:38
to play.
38:39
Speaker 1: Let's run down the list of what Florida had, because
38:41
the sheer volume is overwhelming compared to circumstantial cases.
38:44
Speaker 2: They had a lot.
38:45
Speaker 1: They had the victim's car, which he was physically driving
38:48
when arrested. They had his shorts with Tina Cribb's blood
38:51
on them. Now, in nineteen ninety five, DNA testing wasn't
38:54
the overnight PCR rapid testing we have today.
38:56
Speaker 2: H It was likely RFLP testing, which took weeks and
39:00
acquired larger.
39:00
Speaker 1: Samples, but they had enough blood to eventually make a
39:03
definitive match. They had the motel registration slip filled out
39:06
in his own handwriting. They had his latent fingerprints lifted
39:09
from the inside of Room one nineteen.
39:11
Speaker 2: And perhaps the most damning inescapable piece of physical evidence
39:16
linking the entire timeline together. Underneath Tina's body in the
39:20
backtub submerged in the water, detectives found a man's watch.
39:24
Speaker 1: Wow, just left there.
39:26
Speaker 2: When they compared that watch to a photograph of Rogers
39:28
taken when he was living in Mississippi with Linda Price,
39:31
it was a perfect identical match.
39:34
Speaker 1: He had literally left his watch at the scene of
39:36
the crime while frantically trying to wash away the evidence.
39:39
Speaker 2: It's an undeniable physical link placing him at the exact
39:42
side of the murder.
39:43
Speaker 1: With that absolute mountain of evidence, Florida gets the green light,
39:47
the other states agreed to wait. On July eleventh, nineteen
39:50
ninety seven, after a trial presenting all of this forensic proof,
39:54
a Florida jury convicts Glenn Rodgers of first degree.
39:56
Speaker 2: Murder and he is sentenced to death.
39:58
Speaker 1: But the system isn't done with him. And yet Florida
40:01
secured the first lock, but California wanted their turn.
40:03
Speaker 2: That's right. Two years later, on July sixteenth, nineteen ninety nine,
40:07
he is extradited back across the country to where this
40:10
specific accelerated rampage began, California.
40:14
Speaker 1: The Los Angeles prosecutors meticulously lay out the final hours
40:17
of Sandra Gallagher. They don't just rely on the bar witnesses.
40:21
They detail the forensic reality of the struggle after they
40:25
left mcred's bar.
40:26
Speaker 2: The manual strangulation that crushed her windpipe.
40:29
Speaker 1: And the horrific calculated attempt to burn her body in
40:32
the truck to destroy the evidence. The California jury finds
40:36
him guilty and he is handed a second death penalty.
40:39
Speaker 2: At that point, prosecutors in Louisiana and Mississippi make a
40:45
very difficult, but I think profoundly compassionate decision.
40:48
Speaker 1: They dropped the charges right basically.
40:50
Speaker 2: Yes, since Rogers already has two death sentences hanging over
40:53
his head in two different states. They choose not to
40:56
formally prosecute the murders of Linda Price and Andy Jilsutton.
40:59
Speaker 1: Why put the families through that?
41:00
Speaker 2: Exactly? They decided to spare the families of those victims
41:03
the grueling trauma of sitting through a public, gruesome trial
41:07
where autopsy photos are displayed on large screens.
41:09
Speaker 1: Amanda's never seeing the outside of a cell again. The
41:12
priority shifts from courtroom victory to protecting the victims' families
41:16
from fulder unnecessary pain.
41:18
Speaker 2: It's a highly pragmatic and deeply human decision by the prosecutors.
41:22
The psychological devastation left in his wake across the country
41:26
is hard to fathom.
41:27
Speaker 1: Across these connected crimes, at least eleven children were left
41:30
without their mothers.
41:31
Speaker 2: Eleven kids detected. Julie Masucci from Tampa, who was instrumental
41:36
in identifying the Florida timeline summed up the feeling of
41:39
law enforcement perfectly.
41:40
Speaker 1: What did she say?
41:41
Speaker 2: She said her satisfaction wasn't just as a cop closing
41:44
a complex case or getting a commendation. It was as
41:47
a woman knowing that a predator who, in her words,
41:50
had no regard for human life, was permanently, irrevocably off
41:54
the streets.
41:55
Speaker 1: We started this deep dive with an unidentifiable body in
41:58
a burning truck and a public parking lot in Los Angeles,
42:01
a case that initially looked almost impossible to solve without
42:05
a confession, and we.
42:06
Speaker 2: End with a unified front of local, state, and federal
42:08
law enforcement sharing evidence at a single table in Kentucky.
42:11
Speaker 1: The system, relying on the clunky nineteen ninety five NCIC switchboard,
42:16
massive media cooperation, and relentless pavement pounding detective work actually worked,
42:22
but it worked at a terrible, terrible cost.
42:24
Speaker 2: If you recap the incredible pace of this investigation, it
42:28
really is a marvel of its specific era.
42:30
Speaker 1: Tracking a guy across the country in six weeks in ninety.
42:33
Speaker 2: Five, right, the fact that law enforcement could track a
42:35
transient cash carrying man from California and Mississippi, down to Florida,
42:40
over to Louisiana, and finally intercept him in Kentucky.
42:44
Speaker 1: It's astounding they did this without Internet databases, without cellular triangulation,
42:50
without license plate readers on every toll booth.
42:53
Speaker 2: They relied entirely on human vigilance, the broadcast media, the
42:57
CBE radios of truckers, and the relentless phone to ear
43:01
communication between desparate agencies who realized they were hunting the
43:05
same ghost.
43:06
Speaker 1: It's an incredible testament to the detectives who refused to
43:09
let the case go cold, and ultimately Rogers's own psychopathic
43:13
arrogance was his undoing.
43:14
Speaker 2: It really was.
43:15
Speaker 1: He used his real name because he thought he was
43:17
smarter than everyone else. He drove his victims cars because
43:20
he felt entitled to them. He left his watch at
43:22
a crime scene.
43:23
Speaker 2: He trusted that as an aaron, charm would always buy
43:25
him away out of trouble, and it finally spectacularly failed him.
43:28
Speaker 1: But before we wrap up, I want to leave you
43:31
with one final, very provocative thought. We know Glenn Rodgers
43:36
was convicted of these brutal murders. He sits on death row,
43:39
but after his capture, he didn't show an ounce.
43:43
Speaker 2: Of remorse, No, quite the opposite.
43:45
Speaker 1: Instead, he bragged to his family member. He claimed that
43:48
his actual victim count wasn't four or five. He claimed
43:52
it was in the dozens, which is terrifying. Authorities are
43:55
still to this day trying to link his DNA and
43:57
his travel timeline to other cold cases across the country.
44:01
So I leave you at this. When you are out
44:03
and someone seems a little too charming, a little too
44:06
quick to embed themselves.
44:07
Speaker 2: In your life, or a little too eager to buy
44:09
a round of drinks with a crisp one hundred dollars.
44:11
Speaker 1: Bill, you have to wonder how many other deadly strangers
44:15
have successfully remained ghosts, hiding out there in plain sight
44:18
with their own handmade do not disturb signs. Thank you
44:22
for joining us on this exploration. We'll be back next time.