Spree’s Victims Shared Hard Lives, Grisly Fates

They were waitresses and maids, mothers at an early age who had hard lives and harder deaths.

Bound by their reddish-brown hair and grisly fates, they also shared failed marriages, a love of country-Western music, and an ease with strangers less common among women of greater means.

All felt at home at their neighborhood bars or a nearby fair--normally safe havens. All had been seeking some simple fun when they ran into Glen Rogers, whom police have linked to their deaths.

And when Rogers asked for a kiss or a ride, all seemed willing to comply.

SANDRA GALLAGHER

Sandra Gallagher was a little woman with a big voice and a trusting nature.

“She was non-judgmental, very trusting, which can be good, but in her case, probably contributed to her death,” said her husband, Steve Gallagher. The couple met in the Navy in Jacksonville, Fla.

“She died too young.”

She was 33 when her path crossed Glen Rogers’ at a bar in Van Nuys.

Steve Gallagher said his wife liked spending nights in bars, then going out for a big breakfast with a group of friends. She liked people and games of chance.

Saturday, Sept. 30, the night she died, Gallagher was celebrating a $1,250 win at keno. An occasional player when the jackpots were big, she had placed a claim for the winnings that day at the state lottery’s Van Nuys office, near the North Hollywood home she had once shared with her husband before moving to Santa Monica.

Then she went to an old hangout, McRed’s.

It was country-Western night, bartender Rein Keener recalled. She said Rogers latched on to the diminutive Gallagher and kept pulling her onto his lap. Rogers tried to teach Gallagher the two-step, but ended up stepping on her toes, Keener recalled.

Later, Rogers tried to get Keener to drive him home, but she rebuffed him. When Gallagher left, her last words, the bartender recalled, were: “You know me, I never leave with anyone I don’t know.”

Hours later, Gallagher’s burning body was found in her pickup truck near Rogers’ apartment building. Police say he strangled her outside his apartment, then set her body afire.

Sandra Gallagher grew up in Downey and Fullerton, where her father played steel-string guitar at area gigs. Later, she sang at local bars.

Her three children by a previous marriage--ages 15, 10 and 9--all lived with family in Northern and central California.

LINDA PRICE

Life for Linda Price was always an adventure.

As a young woman, the petite redhead would walk to the edge of the highway and thumb a ride to places unknown, casting her fate with the truckers who roared through her hometown of Jackson, Miss.

Every time, her family fretted. But she always returned unharmed, full of stories of the open road.

But her life ended weeks after moving in with Rogers. Her naked body was found Nov. 3 stabbed to death in the bathtub of her two-bedroom apartment. A washcloth covered her face.

Price, a 34-year-old housecleaner, met Rogers during a country-Western concert at the Mississippi State Fair. “He seemed like a real nice person--the way he talked, smiling and all,” said Kathy Carrol, Price’s older sister.

That night Price returned with Rogers to his motel room. A few days later, she announced to her family that she was moving out of her mother’s home and into a $385-a-month apartment with Rogers.

“That was Linda for you,” Carrol said. “It’s hard to explain. Linda wasn’t afraid of nobody. She wasn’t afraid of nothing.”

For most of the three weeks they were together, Price and Rogers appeared to others to be happy. Price decorated the apartment with her collection of Harley-Davidson and Marlboro memorabilia.

“She was so proud of her little apartment,” Carrol said. “She wanted the manager to see how she had fixed it up. She was happy. She thought she had someone to love and someone who would fall in love with her too, I guess.”

Several of Price’s past relationships had gone wrong. Her first husband committed suicide seven years ago and a recent boyfriend beat her. “This time, Linda was happy. You could see the glow in her eyes,” Carrol said.

Carrol said Rogers was always talkative. “A charmer,” she said. Only toward the end did others begin to see that Rogers was not all he seemed.

A week before Price’s body was found, she was beaten by Rogers during an argument at a local bar, a family member who witnessed the incident said.

Price is believed to have been killed that weekend.

TINA MARIE CRIBBS

Tina Marie Cribbs was “happy-go-lucky” even though she worked two jobs to support her children, friends said.

She lived with her mother and two children, ages 12 and 13, in a trailer park, and worked as a part-time waitress and full-time maid at the Ramada Inn in Apollo Beach, Fla., a small town on U. S 41 just south of Tampa.

The weekend of Nov. 4 and 5 had been particularly busy at the hotel, and Cribbs and her friends had earned extra tips from a big group staying there. By Sunday afternoon, when the last beds had been made and the toilets cleaned, a celebration seemed in order.

They headed for Showtown USA, a county-Western hangout for wintering carnival workers in nearby Gibsonton.

“We had a rough day,” said Ruth Ann Negrete, 37. “The hotel was full. We had no intentions of getting plastered. We just wanted to have a drink.”

Friends say they noticed Rogers at the jukebox, a striking, muscular man who was brandishing $100 bills. Calling himself first Brandon and then Randy, he danced with one woman, then another, and soon began sending drinks their way.

Rogers then introduced himself and began asking each of the friends whether they had boyfriends or husbands, before finally honing in on Cribbs, long separated from her husband, recalled Cindy Torgerson.

Cribbs, 34, was a beer drinker but she also had a few shots that day, something her friend Torgerson had never seen her do. By the time Rogers had asked her “Would you take me somewhere?” she didn’t hesitate to say yes.

“Tina was the type to give you the shirt off her back,” said her brother, John Hall Cribbs.

She was found stabbed to death in a motel room registered to Rogers.

“He was picking us out, like oranges,” Torgerson recalled. “And Tina was the one that was ready to party.”

ANDY JILES SUTTON

Andy Jiles Sutton liked Wrangler jeans, cowboy boots, sipping Miller Light through a straw. She also quickly took a shine to good-looking, smooth-talking Glen Rogers, friends say.

“She liked to have fun,” said friend and bartender Deniece Hogue, who served the red-haired, 37-year-old mother of two the night she fell for Rogers at a dank watering hole near Bossier, La., called the Touch of Class.

Sutton, who was unemployed, stopped by the bar nearly every day. It was situated in a part of town Bossier police called “Podunk.”

The sparks of a seduction that led to Sutton’s death were kindled over two beers at the end of the bar, Hogue recalled.

“They were at the end of the bar arguing and bickering,” Hogue said. But at the time, Rogers did not seem the violent killer portrayed by police.

Hogue said Rogers was so charismatic that she can see how easily a woman could be deceived by him.

“It was his words, just the way he talked to you--he had charm,” she said. “I never thought of her as someone who would just take a guy home like that. But apparently she did.”

Thursday, Sutton became the latest of four slain women linked to Rogers.

Sutton’s nude body was found, stabbed multiple times in the chest and abdomen, in the bedroom she had shared with her new beau.

Her former husband has custody of her two children.

Times staff writers Aaron Curtiss and Jill Leovy and correspondents Nicholas Riccardi and Mike Clary contributed to this story. Clary reported from Miami.