Police Link New Victim to Slayings

The discovery Thursday was grisly enough, even before the police of Bossier City, La., connected it to anything else: a naked woman stabbed to death in the bedroom of her apartment above a Mormon Church.

But it was the registration of the pickup truck that police in this Shreveport suburb found outside that really panicked them.

The truck belonged to Glen Rogers, a blond construction worker who boarded a bus from Los Angeles on Sept. 30 after allegedly strangling a Santa Monica woman he met in a bar, and who has since been linked to three chillingly similar slayings in Mississippi, Florida and now Louisiana. He also is suspected in a fifth death in Ohio--and perhaps half a dozen more.

After piecing together the tortuous wanderings of the man they have dubbed “the cross-country killer,” authorities have concluded that after leaving Los Angeles, Rogers traveled across country by bus and car, working his charm on three young women--all red-haired----and stabbed them all to death over a span of nine days.

The Los Angeles Police Department is seeking the alleged serial killer on suspicion of the Sept. 29 murder of Sandra Gallagher, 33, a Santa Monica mother of three who was strangled after offering Rogers a ride home from a Van Nuys bar.

LAPD Detective Stephen Fisk told reporters this week that Rogers had boasted to friends “this is the eighth time” after allegedly killing Gallagher, which--if true--would bring his total to 11 with the three killings committed since then.

Rogers, 33, also is wanted for questioning in connection with the 1993 death of an elderly man in his hometown of Hamilton, Ohio. And Ontario, Calif., police said Thursday they consider him a possible suspect in an unsolved 1994 murder that bore a resemblance to the three killings in the South.

The most recent victim, 37-year-old Andy Sutton, was found by her roommate Thursday morning, Bossier City police officer William Grantham said.

According to police reports, Rogers met Sutton in a bar shortly after leaving behind a victim in Jackson, Miss. Falling for his seductive personality, Sutton allowed Rogers to move in with her.

But before killing her, he rode a bus to Tampa, Fla., where he met Tina Marie Cribbs in a bar in nearby Gibsonton, killed her Sunday and drove her truck back to Bossier City, where he then killed Sutton, according to police in Florida and Mississippi.

Grantham said Rogers fled Louisiana after killing Sutton on Wednesday.

“You kind of feel helpless back here, hearing about all this,” said a shaken LAPD Detective Angel Lopez on Thursday afternoon. She had just heard about the two killings within three days of each other in the South.

Rogers, who had lived on and off in Van Nuys since the 1980s, allegedly began his killing spree when he strangled Gallagher and then set her body afire outside his apartment there early on Sept. 29.

Taking a Greyhound bus to Jackson, he soon met Linda Price at a county fair and moved in with her.

“He was the most gorgeous man,” said Price’s mother, Carolyn Wingate, who found her daughter’s body naked in a bathtub on Nov. 3, four days after she was stabbed to death in the house she shared with Rogers.

Authorities believe Rogers already had moved on to Bossier City.

He met Sutton at a bar called A Touch of Class, which Bossier Police Sgt. Glenn Sproles described as “a redneck bar . . . out on what we call The Strip.”

He moved in with Sutton, who drove him to the New Orleans bus depot for his trip to Florida, where he met 34-year-old Cribbs and killed her, Tampa police said.

A woman at the desk of the Tampa 8 Inn said Rogers arrived by cab late Saturday with no luggage, claiming to be a trucker. He left Monday morning in Cribbs’ Ford Festiva, said the woman, who would not give her name.

When police arrived at Sutton’s apartment, they found a Datsun pickup truck--which papers showed Rogers had bought last month in Jackson, Miss.--parked outside the building, Grantham said.

The mounting number of killings attributed to Rogers has caused a stir in his hometown of Hamilton, Ohio.

“People are locking their doors and peeping out their windows,” said Dema Lunsford, a 56-year resident on Hunt Avenue, where she rents the house next door to Rogers’ mother, Edna.

Detective Dan Pratt of the Hamilton Police Department said he wants to question Rogers about the death of his former housemate, Mark Peters, 71. Rogers moved in with Peters in September, 1993, and a month later, both men disappeared. Peters’ body was found in an abandoned Kentucky house owned by the Rogers family in January, 1993.