by Gary C. King
Chapter 25
There was a long line of people waiting to get inside the courtroom presided by Clackamas County Circuit Court Judge Patrick D. Gilroy on Thursday, February 4, 1988, well before the 9 A.M. scheduled start of Dayton Leroy Rogers's trial for the murder of Jenny Smith. Some of Dayton's relatives were there, as were several members of Jenny Smith's family. But mostly there were the curious, those who knew neither the suspect nor the victim but merely wanted to experience the drama of one of the state's most lurid murder trials.
There was a steady murmur as the spectators filed in and took their seats. Moments later a sudden hushed silence fell over the courtroom as Dayton was brought in through a side door leading from a holding room. He walked slowly, as much from the pace of the two armed deputies who walked on each side of him as from the leg brace he wore to keep him from running should he decide to bolt. He was seated next to his lawyer on the left side of the courtroom, facing the judge's bench. He appeared calm, stoic almost, as he stared at the yellow legal pad in front of him, as if he were there to attend an informative lecture rather than to fight for his life.
Following a number of legal formalities, Deputy District Attorney Andrejs I. Eglitis addressed the jury with his opening statements. He was dressed in a dark pinstripe suit, and his lack of sleep from the late nights he had spent preparing for the case was evident from the dark bags beneath his eyes, eyes which would only grow more tired with each successive day. Nonetheless, he faced the jury of five women and seven men and told them that Dayton Rogers had murdered Jenny Smith by design, following a pattern that he'd established with countless other prostitutes. In a voice that was sometimes angry, sometimes soft, but always to the point, Eglitis called Dayton a vicious predator who killed for a sexual thrill.
"You'll find that the reason he went to Portland was to satisfy what you will find to be his bizarre sexual appetite," said Eglitis. "You'll find that his sexual appetite included bondage, masturbation, and intent to inflict intense physical pain."
Dayton's attorney, Arthur Knauss, countered during his opening remarks by telling the jurors that they would not like his client, but insisted that they were there to decide whether what Dayton had done was tantamount to a criminal act. Dayton had killed Jenny Smith all right, said Knauss. Nobody was denying that fact. But he killed her by accident while defending himself. They were not there in the courtroom, he stressed, to judge Dayton's sexual mores.
Knauss maintained that Jenny had spotted more than $200 in Dayton's wallet when they stopped at a convenience store to buy orange juice, at which time she had made the decision to rob the defendant at knife point at the appropriate moment. She waited until later, until they had arrived at the GMAC parking lot, had drunk some of the crudely mixed screwdrivers, and Dayton had left the truck to urinate. At that time, contended Knauss, Jenny pulled a knife from the glove compartment of Dayton's truck and brought it up next to his throat, demanding his wallet. Dayton, however, refused to hand over his wallet and a struggle followed, which essentially turned into a wrestling match for the knife. During the struggle Jenny Smith had been stabbed several times, killed in the process purely by accident.
There it was, the preposterous claim of self-defense. Eglitis had known that it was coming, and he had prepared himself to accept that such a defense would be presented. He couldn't believe it, but he accepted it. He knew he would convince the jury otherwise. The evidence would show them the truth.
One by one, the victims who had survived Dayton's sadistic cruelty would tell the jurors exactly what they had told the detectives: how they'd been bound and tortured for hours on end. Other witnesses, including Michael Fielding, would describe how they had heard Jenny Smith scream in intense pain for at least two minutes before James Dahlke and Kurt Thielke found her blood-covered naked body. And of course Richard Bergio would testify how he chased Dayton Rogers's pickup in his own vehicle at high speeds until he could get close enough to write down the license plate number.
Would the jurors accept that an innocent man would flee the scene of a death he had caused by defending his own life? Eglitis didn't think so.
At one point, Eglitis had portions of Dayton's pickup brought into the courtroom as exhibits. Criminologists and detectives pointed out the evidence, mostly blood, cut and slash marks, and fingerprints that had been found on the pickup's door panels, door sill trays, seat frames, floor mats, floor coverings, seat bolts, and the actual seat and frame. Some of the fingerprints were Jenny's, and many of the bloodstains were believed to have come from Jenny, Dayton, and others.
Dayton himself brazenly took the witness stand, a maneuver that is seldom used in aggravated murder cases because it affords the prosecution a chance to cross-examine the witness, often drawing out testimony damaging to the defense in the process.
In Dayton's version of the events of the morning of August 7, he told the jurors how he had paid Jenny Smith $40 for a sexual encounter that involved bondage. He explained that when he got out of the truck to urinate, after having bound Jenny's hands and feet with shoelaces, she slipped out of her bindings and took a knife from the glove box.
"She attacked me when I got back inside the truck," said Dayton.
Still nude, Jenny held the knife to his throat and ordered him to give her his wallet, he said.
"Do it or die," he said Jenny told him.
He refused and fought back. Fearing for his life, he said, he knocked her arm away and wrestled her for the knife, which he eventually wrenched from her hands.
"I got ahold of it and used the knife on her. I was just going back and forth in virtually any direction I could," said Dayton. It was his explanation as to how Jenny had received so many cuts. She eventually jumped from the truck, he said, and he chased her across the parking lot. He eventually grabbed her, and she fell to the pavement. That, he claimed, was when he tripped over her.
"Both of our feet entangled," he said. "She went down backward, and I fell down on top of her. On the way down, that's when I stabbed her in the upper area here." He indicated the right side of his chest, near the shoulder.
Eglitis showed the jurors the photographs of Jenny's body, the ones that depicted the wounds that Dayton had inflicted while supposedly defending himself. Dr. Karen Gunson, deputy state medical examiner, explained each and every wound, including the one that pierced Jenny's liver and severed one of her major arteries. She also explained the torture wounds to Jenny's breasts, and the defensive wounds Jenny received while attempting to fight off her assailant.
Although it was stated in courtroom testimony that Dayton was left-handed, the issue of whether he received the wounds to his right hand from a hack saw, as he had said, or whether they were incurred during his struggle with Jenny Smith, was never fully cleared up.
Many people close to the case believed he was ambidextrous, although it was never shown in court, and thought it more likely that he had cut himself as he slashed at Jenny with the knife in his left hand while trying to hold or subdue her with his right hand.
"I know you find my client's contacts with prostitutes vile and disgusting," said Knauss in his closing arguments. "You have no sympathy for my client. I know you don't like Mr. Rogers, and you don't like what he's done to these girls. He's not here for a popularity contest. If he was going to go out on one of his usual dates and torture and sexually abuse a woman, where would he go? Would he go to one of the few establishments in Clackamas County that's open at one or two in the morning?"
"He's raised self-defense in this case," argued Eglitis when it became his turn to summarize his side of the case. "Self-defense against what? A naked, bleeding woman? The defendant's claim of robbery is hogwash. Jenny Smith was naked. If a prostitute is going to rob a customer, a john, she knows she's got to get away. What is she supposed to have said? 'Mr. Rogers, take the knife for a minute so I can get my clothes back on and get away?'
"Jenny's screams were screams of intense pain," continued Eglitis. "Pain so intense that thro
ugh the closed windows of a truck, Michael Fielding could hear that pain from his apartment. It got him out of bed! Now, somehow Miss Smith frees herself from her bonds and wants to escape. She's out of the truck, and she's running for her life." Eglitis wanted to know how a man chasing a naked woman, wounded and bleeding, can claim self-defense.
"The intent of the defendant in this case is of crucial importance," continued Eglitis. "It is absolutely clear in this case. The intent, in the presence of a subdued, naked female, was to inflict intense physical pain. He does it by bondage, and he does it by dominance. Is there any doubt that a woman who is struggling, screaming, exhibiting intense pain does not excite him? He committed the ultimate act of dominance that he so craves. He not only bound and tortured Jenny Smith, but he killed her as well."
By the end of the nearly two-week innocence or guilt phase of the trial, the jury couldn't buy the premise that Dayton had killed Jenny Smith in self-defense. On February 20, after thirteen hours of deliberation, they convicted him of aggravated murder. The verdict thrust the case into the penalty phase.
For the next two weeks the same jury considered arguments for and against imposing a death penalty. They heard additional testimony, particularly about Dayton's past crimes and his childhood. Under Oregon law, the jurors had to answer three questions in deciding his fate: Was the murder deliberate? Was it an unreasonable response to any provocation from the victim? And would Dayton pose a continuing threat to society? Judge Gilroy instructed the jurors that they could not consider whether escape by or parole of the defendant was possible when making their decision, and that a unanimous vote was required for the imposition of a death sentence.
"No one wants Dayton Leroy Rogers released," Knauss had said only minutes before the jury left the courtroom to decide his client's fate. "I don't want him released. You don't want him released. I question whether Mr. Rogers even wants himself released. What is needed is permanent isolation of this man. In his fantasyland, he's become the sexual monster you've heard about from these girls. He's developed and nurtured these feelings into a ritual. It's a pattern you can't ignore. He's a sick man.
"But do we kill him? Do we have a death sentence for people who are as sick and depraved as this?" continued Knauss. "Look at the evidence. After the killing of Miss Smith, he goes back to work and thinks about going out to a coffee shop. The state has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he's a sick man." But, argued Knauss, he doesn't deserve a death sentence.
Four hours later, the twelve jurors returned and announced that they had unanimously voted that the murder of Jenny Smith was deliberate. They also unanimously voted that Jenny's murder was an unreasonable response to any provocation from the victim. However, after one juror adamantly opposed the death penalty, all twelve agreed that Rogers would not pose a continuing threat to society because he would be imprisoned for life. Judge Gilroy immediately sentenced Dayton to life in prison.
Detective John Turner and his colleagues were devastated by the sentence. The jurors apparently thought that a life sentence meant that Dayton would never be released, but they had been wrong. Under a life sentence he would be eligible for parole someday, even if it was twenty or thirty years down the road. They had inadvertently given Dayton Leroy Rogers yet another chance to escape his just punishment, another chance to slip through the cracks of the system.
But with the Molalla forest case looming in the future, the prosecution had another chance to get a death sentence for Dayton. It was the good guys' ace in the hole, and they would play it. For the next two months, Turner and his colleagues worked closely with the D.A.'s office and presented the worst serial murder case in Oregon's history to a grand jury. On May 4, 1988, Dayton was indicted on several charges of aggravated murder under various theories of law for the deaths of Reatha Gyles, Lisa Mock, Noni Cervantes, Cynthia DeVore, Christine Adams, and Maureen Hodges. He was not charged in the death of the unidentified victim, although the investigators were certain that he had murdered her, too. As before, Dayton pleaded innocent. This time around Christopher E. Burris, not Arthur Knauss, was hired to represent him.
Turner and his fellow detectives spent the next eight months rounding up additional witnesses to interview, as well as re-interviewing many of the others. They carefully went over the evidence, and they put their case books in order. By the time the trial began, they knew the case frontward and backward.
Jury selection, which began on February 6, 1989, took nearly two months to complete. Ironically, considering the types of crimes Dayton was being charged with committing, an all-woman panel of twelve was seated, with an additional female as an alternate.
When the trial finally opened on March 30, 1989, this time in the courtroom of Clackamas County Circuit Judge Raymond R. Bagley Jr., Eglitis outlined his case for the jurors, contending that a knife identical to the one that was used to kill Jenny Smith was found near the Molalla forest victims' bodies. He described the torture, the grisly details of victims having their feet sawed or cut from their bodies, and how one, Noni Cervantes, had been eviscerated. By the time Eglitis was finished with his presentation of what the jury would be considering, there was little left for the imagination.
For the next five weeks, the jury heard horrifying testimony from Tracie Baxter, Heather Brown, Deniece Raymond, Cindy Jones, Anna Buchanan, Lydia Clark, Linda Morris, Janine Phall, Lisa Daniels, Beth Crane, Darla Johnson, Lena Hastings, and many others, all women whom Dayton Leroy Rogers had violated and tortured at one time or another. Each explained in graphic detail, often tearfully, the atrocities that Dayton had committed against them.
One former prostitute testified about her fifth and final date with Dayton, an encounter that lasted in excess of six hours after he picked her up on Southeast 82nd Avenue and drove her to the Molalla forest.
"He got out of the truck," she testified, "and went over to the side where you could see over the forest. He said how beautiful it was. I went back to the truck and started to get undressed. He came up behind me and started to put the bondage devices on. When I told him they were too tight, that they were cutting into my wrists, he said that's what he wanted to do.
"He started biting on my breasts," she continued. "He was biting and tearing. I told him to please stop. 'That's too rough! This isn't right!' I cried and I begged for him to stop. And the more I pleaded and begged, the worse the abuse got. When I screamed too loudly, he became concerned and put something up against my neck, which I assumed was a knife. He told me to be quiet, or else I'd really have something to cry about. I didn't say anything, and I tried to stifle the sobs as much as I could."
"Did you say anything to the defendant?" asked Eglitis.
"No."
"What were you doing then?"
"Just existing."
Roy Miller also testified, telling the jurors how he helped Dayton establish his business and then closed it down after Dayton's arrest. He told of how he found all of the suspicious items in the wood stove inside Dayton's shop. He burst into tears twice during his testimony and diverted his eyes away from Dayton most of the time he was on the witness stand.
In tears and in tones that were barely audible, Floria Adams, the fifteen-year-old daughter of victim Christine Adams, testified that decorative studs, star-shaped grommets that were found in Dayton's wood stove, came from her mother's pants. Sobbing, she told the jurors that she recognized the studs.
Bob Thompson, the Oregon State Police criminologist who worked closely on the case, explained how he found the pieces of colored glass in Lisa Mock's hair and how, although he hadn't been able to determine their source, they were similar to the glass parts found inside Dayton's wood stove. He also testified that hairs found inside Dayton's pickup were macroscopically and microscopically similar to head hairs he compared from the remains of Lisa Mock, Noni Cervantes, and Cynthia DeVore.
"This man—" said Eglitis in his closing argument, pointing at Dayton, "this man is obsessed, totally consumed in a sexual way with a woman's
feet and dominance. What is the ultimate act of dominance? It is to remove that foot. We submit that is what happened in the Molalla forest."
Eglitis also reminded the jurors about all of the orange juice containers and miniature liquor bottles found at the Molalla forest crime scene, insisting that they made up a part of his "signature."
"If there is a signature to a crime, under those circumstances you can look at the signature," said Eglitis, "and see the identity of the killer. This evidence is the mark of Zorro. It's the signature. The defendant, ladies of the jury, not only committed these murders, but he might as well have written his name on the victims' corpses."
As in the Jenny Smith case, there had been little doubt at the trial's outset that Dayton would be convicted of the Molalla forest murders, which is precisely what happened on May 4. After barely six hours of deliberation, the jury found Dayton guilty of aggravated murder on all counts. For the first time in public, Dayton, dressed in a conservative dark-blue suit, displayed emotion by covering his head with his hands. Shaking his head, he could be heard saying "No" repeatedly.
Only the question of his sentence remained. Much of the testimony the jury would hear to decide his fate centered on Dayton's character, his worthiness to remain alive, and psychological arguments about his past violence.
James B. Hupy, a vocational instructor at the Oregon State Correctional Institution, explained how he had taught Dayton the skills he needed to become a mechanic when Dayton was in prison for the 1976 attack on Linda Morris and Janine Phall, the two Keizer, Oregon, high school girls he had picked up when the girls skipped school. Dayton learned fast, said Hupy. In barely two years he went from being a person with little or no mechanical skills to someone with high skills. Hupy said he selected Dayton to be his apprentice a few months before Dayton was due to be released from prison.