Fifth Body Tied to Serial Killer Found

Louisiana police Thursday uncovered a fifth body linked to alleged “cross-country serial killer” Glen Rogers, the corpse of a 37-year-old woman found stabbed to death in the bedroom of a house she shared with the former Van Nuys resident.

Like two of Rogers’ other alleged victims, police say, Andy Sutton met Rogers in a bar. Mississippi and Louisiana police said Rogers, skilled at charming women whom he meets casually, apparently moved in with Sutton shortly after killing a 33-year-old woman in nearby Jackson, Miss., on Oct. 31.

Sutton drove Rogers to a bus station in New Orleans last week, where he took a bus to Tampa, Fla., met 34-year-old Tina Marie Cribbs and killed her, police said. Rogers then stole Cribbs’ car and returned to Bossier City, La., where he killed Sutton and fled, Louisiana police said.

Rogers, described as armed and extremely dangerous, is the object of a nationwide manhunt. The trail of bodies from California to the Gulf Coast prompted police to dub him “the cross-country killer.”

Rogers’ spree allegedly began when he strangled and then set afire Sandra Gallagher, 33, a mother of three from Santa Monica, outside his apartment in Van Nuys on Sept. 30. An LAPD detective said Tuesday that Rogers boasted to friends that Gallagher was his eighth victim.

“You kind of feel helpless back here, hearing about all this,” said LAPD Detective Angel Lopez on Thursday afternoon.

Sutton’s roommate found her body Thursday morning in their apartment in a complex above a Mormon church in Bossier City, a community of 53,000 outside Shreveport, Bossier police Officer William Grantham said. When police arrived, they found a pickup truck--which papers showed Rogers had bought last month in Jackson, Miss.--parked outside the building, Grantham said.

Grantham said Sutton had been killed within the previous 24 hours.

Born in Hamilton, Ohio, Rogers is also wanted for questioning in the death of his 71-year-old former roommate in that city north of Cincinnati. Mark Peters’ badly decayed body was found Jan. 10, 1994, under a pile of furniture in an abandoned backwoods Kentucky house owned by Rogers’ family, Hamilton police said.

When that body was uncovered, Rogers had already moved to Los Angeles. In the next year he was twice arrested by the LAPD: once after allegedly setting fire to one girlfriend’s clothes in a closet in their Hollywood apartment, and the second time on suspicion of attacking two men in Hollywood with a knife, according to detectives. He was never convicted, they said.