by Gary C. King
"Tracie screamed, 'please, this wasn't part of the deal!' Her tormentor seemed to revel in her pain, and his breathing became faster and heavier as he bit the teenager even harder. She screamed again. She begged him to stop. But he became more brutal. There was no stopping him until he had satisfied his lust for blood."
The 16-year-old was lucky. She at least survived her encounter with Dayton Leroy Rogers to detail its horrors. But a long list of other women were not as fortunate. Their stories had to be painstakingly pieced together by police from the corpses on the most shocking trail of terror ever left by a serial killer.
BLOOD LUST:
PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL SEX KILLER
Gary C. King
Accolades for Gary C. King
"Using the most intimate of facts, King draws readers as far inside the mind of murderers as rational, moral people can go--the rest of the journey, thank the gods, is beyond our knowing. King's talent and faithful service does honor to the dogged truth-seekers who finally bring justice for those whose lives were stolen." Noreen Ayres, author of the Smokey Brandon mystery series.
"A page-turner for true crime fans." Vincent Bugliosi, author of HELTER SKELTER and THE PROSECUTION OF GEORGE W. BUSH FOR MURDER.
"Gary C. King is one of the best true crime writers on the scene today." R. Barri Flowers, Author of THE SEX SLAVE MURDERS.
"You will never want to walk alone again after reading this book." Dr. Maurice Godwin, Criminal Psychologist and Author.
“In a serial murder case almost too ghastly to comprehend, skilled true crime researcher (and writer) Gary C. King leads the reader deep into a world of unimaginable depravity, to meet a savage killer unlike any before him, who literally fed on dozens of helpless young women—whose defiled bodies then simply…disappeared. This book will jolt you…a page-turner.” Clark Howard, author of City Blood and Love's Blood.
"Writer Gary C. King knows the dark side of the Northwest as well as anybody…an unflinching account of one of the most vicious reigns of terror by one of the sickest psychopaths in the annals of crime."--Official Detective
"Effective account of the worst serial killer in Oregon's history."--Publishers Weekly
Also by Gary C. King
Driven to Kill
Web of Deceit
Blind Rage
Savage Vengeance
An Early Grave
The Texas 7
Murder in Hollywood
Angels of Death
Love, Lies, and Murder
An Almost Perfect Murder
Butcher
Rage
The Murder of Meredith Kercher
Copyright Gary C. King Enterprises 2011
Cover image copyright Alexey Teterin 2011. Used under license from Shutterstock.com.
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Books written by Gary C. King can be obtained either through the author’s official website:
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For my mother and father
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following people for their support and assistance during the writing of this book: Teresita U. King, my more than significant "other"; Michaela Hamilton, my editor, and all those involved at NAL/Dutton; Peter Miller, my agent; Sheriff Bill Brooks, John Turner, Mike Machado, W. Risley Bradshaw, John Gilliland, Lynda Estes, Jim Strovink, and everyone else at the Clackamas County Sheriff's Department, without question the finest law enforcement agency in Oregon; Rose Mandelsberg-Weiss at True Detective magazine; the courage of Michael Fielding to come forward with his information and identification of Jenny Smith's killer; the courageous and valiant efforts of Richard Bergio, James Dahlke, Stan Conner, Charles Gates, Kurt Thielke, and Mike Travis; all of the surviving victims who had the strength and courage to face the juries and painfully recount the violence that was inflicted upon them; Don Moody, my friend and my brother, for his inspiration and encouragement; and reporter Ray Pitz, for freely sharing his clips and notes. Last, but definitely not least, a very special thank-you to Kirsten and Sarah for their continuing love, patience, and understanding for their father, who regrets not always having enough time for the "required" hugs and kisses.
Author's Note
This is a complex story of torture, mutilation, and serial murder, based on hundreds of hours of research of police files, trial accounts, psychological reports, and dozens of interviews. The story is presented in the order that it unfolded during the investigation for purposes of clarity and, I hope, to enable the reader to visualize it from the investigators' perspective.
Every incident presented herein is true, and none of the characters portrayed are fictional or are composites from my imagination. Although I have elected to change the names of several people to spare them further embarrassment and shame, particularly the survivors of sexual violence and torture as well as those who had no direct connection to the crimes, I have made no fabrications; the dramatizations stand on their own. Everything presented here is as historically accurate as possible. An asterisk (*) appears after a fictitious name at the time of its first occurrence.
G.C.K.
Murder most foul, as in the
best it is;
But this most foul, strange
and unnatural.
William Shakespeare,
Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5
Whoso sheddeth man's
blood, by man shall his blood
be shed.
Genesis, IX, 6
Preface
As a detective story writer of the true-crime genre, it was inevitable that the strange serial murder case of Dayton Leroy Rogers, also known as the Molalla Forest Killer, would come to my attention. Such cases always do, but unless the investigative work is particularly fascinating or the crimes are inherently interesting, they don't always get written. But the Rogers case grabbed my interest from the probe's outset in August 1987, in part because of the lurid nature of his crimes but more so because of my seemingly never-ending preoccupation with trying to understand what creates such people or otherwise causes them to do what they do. Studying a cold and calculating psychopathic sex murderer, a man addicted to power and control over others, can be unsettling at times, often disgusting, even frightening, but never dull.
Not surprisingly the Rogers homicide probe, which came to a head in midsummer 1987, would be remembered as the worst serial murder case in Oregon's history. Before then, residents and law officers alike had never even realized that a sadistic serial killer had been operating in their midst. Rogers had been slick, as such killers often are, at literally plucking women off Portland's streets, some never to be seen again alive. By the time the authorities had Rogers in custody, the killer had claimed the lives of at least eight young women, all prostitutes.
Unlike those of many serial killers, Rogers' crimes were not committed over a large geographical area, with bodies scattered here and there. If they had been, and if corpses had begun to turn up one by one, police agencies would at the very least have been aware that a serial killer was at work and they could have duly enlightened the public.
They could have warned people to be on the lookout for certain characteristics, such as
the killer's method of operation, the type of vehicles he was believed to have been driving, and, if authorities were lucky enough to have found one or more eyewitnesses, a physical description. The police could have taken steps that, ideally, would have eventually led to the killer's identification and apprehension, preferably before rather than after he'd chalked up such a large number of victims. But before they could have even hoped of doing anything about it, the police needed evidence that the crimes were being committed. They needed to know that women were disappearing and being murdered. Naturally, the lawmen who would eventually work this case were just as shocked as the general public when the bodies did, in fact, turn up, quite by accident.
Every good cop knows that identifying a serial killer, much less catching one, is a monumental task even under the best of circumstances simply because of the nature by which such killers operate. In most "routine" homicides, investigators often have a suspect to scrutinize right away, even before the body has become cold. In those cases the suspect is someone related to the victim, a business associate, or someone that the victim perhaps knew, even if only remotely, under other circumstances. There is, in those instances, at least some kind of a connection between the suspect and the victim, even if it is veiled or unknown at the probe's outset.
In true serial murder cases such as this one, investigators have no such luxury. The typical serial killer is shrewd, clever, and never chooses anyone that he knows well or is close to as his victim. Instead, he "trolls" until he finds the perfect stranger, quite often teenage runaway girls and prostitutes, anyone who cannot be easily connected to him. When his carnage is finally discovered, all he has left the police to work with are dead bodies and mounting frustration.
He frequently disposes of his victims' bodies at secluded locations, places where he can return to again and again, if not to dump new corpses, then to savor the "trophies" or souvenirs of his earlier kills. He often follows news accounts of his crimes, which unintentionally aid him in staying one or more steps ahead of the law. That way he knows when a body has been found and what additional evidence, if any, has been discovered, and whether or not he needed to alter his method of operation or flee to another locale where he is not yet known.
This wasn't the first time that the state of Oregon had been plagued by the savage, feral acts of such a killer, many of whom have characteristically trolled city streets, shopping malls, and even country roads to find their usually unsuspecting victims. But by the time the investigators wrapped up the case they found themselves hoping—futilely, they knew—that it would be the last of its type, at least in their jurisdiction.
In the late 1960s, Oregon lawmen had to contend with the carnage of Jerome Henry Brudos. Brudos, a brilliant electrician, married man, and father of two, liked to kidnap and hold young women captive in his garage workshop. He would dress them in his specially selected lingerie and photograph the terrified females for his very private collection. Afterward he would torture his victims for hours on end before strangling them with his powerful hands, then would chop off body parts, which he kept for souvenirs. A sadistic devil if ever there was, Brudos had been the record holder in Oregon for the number of slayings attributed to a single killer, until Dayton Leroy Rogers came along.
The Pacific Northwest in general, with its vast, dense forests and mountainous terrain, seems to be the perfect backdrop for killers such as Rogers. It provides ample out-of-the-way dumping grounds and the right climate and atmospheric conditions for rapid decomposition of a victim's body. Under such conditions a victim's remains can lay undiscovered for months, even years, while the killer continues his unsavory deeds virtually unnoticed, with little or nothing to connect him to his crimes.
Before Rogers, the 1970s, for example, saw the senselessness of the "Ted" killings, the vicious murders of beautiful young coeds whose decomposed or skeletonized remains often turned up on densely forested hillsides. Those murders would later be attributed to the actions of a handsome, harmless-looking former law student and political aide named Ted Bundy, a confessed murderer that just about everybody has heard of by now. Although he paid for his grisly deeds in "Old Sparky," Florida's electric chair, in January 1989, he left behind a dark legacy of shattered lives and broken dreams.
Then came the 1980s, so far the most homicidal period in the region's—if not the entire nation's—history, when the ever-increasing phenomenon of serial murder continued to baffle law enforcement officials and mental health professionals. In the early part of the decade the Pacific Northwest, and particularly Oregon, was again terrorized, this time by a masculine, good-looking young man named Randall Wood field. A star athlete and an "A" student, Wood field was the type of man that women, young and old alike, dreamed about. However, after being drafted by the Green Bay Packers, Wood field chose to throw away his chance to play pro football, and perhaps achieve wealth and fame, by becoming the "1-5 Killer," a sex-fiend responsible for raping, sodomizing, and murdering young women and children along the busy freeway that runs through Washington, Oregon, and California. He got life in prison, then went on to become Elizabeth Diane Downs's prison pen pal.
There was also, of course, the "Green River Killer," a serial murderer still at large who—if one can believe Henry Lee Lucas's recantations or, more recently, Donald Leroy Evans's as yet unsubstantiated claims that he has killed 72 people—has perhaps chalked up the most victims attributed to a single killer. The Green River Killer's choice of victims consisted mostly of prostitutes and drug addicts, some of whom were teenagers, others mature women, but all of whom were seasoned and streetwise. Although that murderer's activities have taken place mostly in Washington (as far as authorities have been able to determine), he managed to complicate matters for Oregon law officers by leaving a handful of his victims in that state before apparently ceasing, for any number of reasons, his activities in the Northwest. Police officials believe the killer is either in jail, dead, or has moved on to another location where he could continue satisfying his addiction to murder without having to face as much heat from the law.
Then, toward the latter part of the decade, came Dayton Leroy Rogers, the "Molalla Forest Killer," the subject of this book. As best as Detective John Turner of the Clackamas County Sheriff's Department, the lead investigator in the case, and other crime experts were able to determine, Rogers's lust for killing reached its pinnacle in the summer of 1987. However, Detective Turner unearthed a background which showed that Rogers had been working up to committing murder for a long, long time.
Detective Turner located countless victims who endured unspeakable acts of torture and mutilation at his hands, acts of sadism that had been going on for nearly fifteen years before the first body was found. Because all of Rogers's crimes apparently were motiveless and sexual, Turner found that the danger signals that Rogers would go on to commit murder—clearly shown through the killer's prior crimes—had gone unnoticed, somehow slipping through the cracks of a system that was designed to prevent such tragedies from occurring.
In this complex case, Turner would eventually conclude that Rogers was a paradox. A psychopath out of control on the one hand, and—perhaps an even more chilling premise— a man very much in control on the other. By day, while his mask of sanity was firmly in place, he appeared to be a loving husband and father, a highly skilled, intelligent, and respected businessman in his community. By night, however, when the mask came off, Turner would learn, Rogers became a sexual sadist, a brutal fetishist bent on inflicting horrendous pain and suffering on his victims before finishing them off in the most dreadful ways conceivable to a normal mind.
The Marquis de Sade would have been proud of him, and Jack the Ripper envious.
Many had come before him, capturing the attention of law enforcement and the news media, and terrifying entire communities. Killers such as Woodfield, Brudos, Bundy, the Green River Killer, the Hillside Strangler, and countless others had committed sensational, horrible crimes, to be sure. But they had also, albeit un
intentionally, forced the wheels of numerous police agencies into motion as the bodies piled up while they continued to kill, leaving corpses, some say, where they could be more easily found for reasons not clearly delineated. Call it sloppiness, carelessness, or a subconscious desire to be caught. No one, likely not even the killers, really knows for sure.
Rogers hadn't been careless, at least not until he reached his eighth victim. Using fictitious names, Rogers had remained unknown, free to troll city streets for his next victims simply because his victims weren't turning up. He liked his namelessness. In fact, he thrived on it because no one was looking for him. If he hadn't become careless, or perhaps just overly confident, who knows how long he could have gotten away with his insidious maiming, torturing, and killing?
When Rogers finally did come under police scrutiny, it soon became clear to Turner that he hadn't been operating haphazardly. Turner and others close to the case agreed that there was indeed a method to his madness.
Like most serial killers, Rogers's victims were always women. As far as anyone knows, they were also always prostitutes. He chose street whores because they were readily available, easy prey, quite simply victims of opportunity. He also knew that those he chose to kill would not be quickly missed because of their transient lifestyles, nor would their disappearances generate a great deal of attention when a friend or loved one eventually did report their prolonged, unexplained absences to the police. Likewise, he knew that those he had not killed would likely not go to the police because of the illegal nature of their line of work and the fact that many had warrants out for their arrests. Those who did report their torturous encounters with him would initially not be taken too seriously, or their stories would be simply dismissed as a hooker's date gone awry. That is, until the case reached John Turner's desk. Turner, clearly a dedicated lawman, took all of his cases seriously, applying equal weight and concern to each and every victim regardless of the victim's background or walk of life. The victims, in his mind, were human beings first, and it was his duty to see that justice prevailed and that examples were set to, he hoped, deter other potential killers lying in wait from carrying out their crimes against humanity.