Public Offers Leads on Suspect

The public is in the hunt.

Nearly 100 viewers telephoned the television show “America’s Most Wanted” early Saturday night after it aired a short segment on suspected killer Glen Rogers, a program spokeswoman said.

The initial wave of calls--an “amazing number,” according to publicist Ivey VanAllen--came after the syndicated program was shown in the nation’s eastern time zone at 9:30 p.m. She expected more calls as the program was repeated in other time zones.

The tips telephoned into the Washington, D.C.-based show will be passed to police and federal agents, who spent Saturday monitoring places in several states where Rogers has visited.

VanAllen said 385 fugitives have been captured after being featured on “America’s Most Wanted” since the program first aired in 1988.

In the San Fernando Valley, where Rogers allegedly began a killing spree Sept. 29 by strangling a woman in Van Nuys, many calls made directly to police “seemed to be coming from Ventura Boulevard,” said Los Angeles Police Lt. Don Hooper.

“Yesterday, one [caller] was at Starbucks and thought he saw him drinking a cup of coffee,” Hooper said. “By the time we got there, the individual was gone.”

In Houston, police watched the home of Rogers’ two teen-age children while FBI agents fanned out through the area. “Houston’s just one of the five or six cities we’ve got leads in,” said Rolando Moss, an FBI spokesman.

Police say Rogers, 33, seems to be stopping in places he knows, possibly from his days as a food worker at country fairs and carnivals. He has lived in two of the sites of recent killings--Tampa, Fla., and Jackson, Miss.--as well as in states from Tennessee to Oklahoma.

Times staff writer Leslie Berger and correspondent Nicholas Riccardi contributed to this story.