Alleged Serial Killer Captured : Crime: Glen Rogers is arrested after high-speed pursuit in Kentucky.

By HENRY CHU and NICHOLAS RICCARDI

Nov. 14, 1995 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

RICHMOND, Ky. —

Alleged serial killer Glen Edward Rogers was captured about 120 miles from his hometown Monday after leading police on a high-speed chase in a car that belonged to a Florida woman believed to be the third victim in a vicious, cross-country killing spree that began in Van Nuys seven weeks ago.

Rogers--the subject of a nationwide manhunt--was spotted mid-afternoon on a two-lane road just east of here by a state police detective who carried a photo of the fugitive in his car. Kentucky state troopers had received a phone call from Rogers’ cousin, saying the 33-year-old blond laborer had just left her house, authorities said.

“I pulled up beside him and was able to get a look at him,” Detective Robert Stephens said. “I knew it was him.”

After taking a long swig of beer, Rogers threw an empty can at the police cruiser and sped off, reaching 100 m.p.h., and at one point driving between two other patrol cars serving as a roadblock, Stephens said. He was run off the road after a 15-mile chase, then quickly taken into custody--smelling of alcohol and looking dazed, authorities said. Police said they fired a single shot during the pursuit, but no one was injured.

Rogers denied to a TV reporter at the scene that he killed anyone. Authorities have linked Rogers to four recent slayings of women in California, Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana.

“One-on-one, talk to me, in person, alone,” Rogers said to the reporter as he was put into a patrol car. He was being held in Richmond, and “is cooperating to some degree,” said Kentucky State Police Capt. Charles Bowman.

Earlier in the day, Rogers had dropped by the house of his cousins, Edith and Clara Smallwood, family members said. “He stepped up on the porch and asked them if they knew that what they’d been seeing on TV wasn’t entirely true,” said Sally Smallwood, Edith’s sister-in-law, who lives nearby.

Rogers told his cousins: “ ‘I just wanted to tell you all ‘by, and I love you, because I know when they catch me they’re gonna kill me,’ ” Smallwood said. Then Rogers began to cry and said, “ ‘Pray for me,’ ” before leaving, she said.

Edith Smallwood, concerned for Rogers’ safety, alerted state troopers, Sally Smallwood added.

The house where Rogers stopped Monday is across the highway from the family cabin where the body of Rogers’ former roommate was found in January, 1994, a death that authorities in both states are investigating for connections to Rogers.

Rogers was questioned for six hours, until he requested an attorney about 9:30 p.m. “He was cooperative and talkative,” Bowman said, without explanation. Authorities said Rogers was not entirely lucid, however.

Los Angeles police detectives from the Van Nuys Division said they would send investigators as early as today to question Rogers in connection with a Sept. 29 killing in Van Nuys.

Authorities believe he may be responsible for still more deaths. He bragged to acquaintances the Van Nuys slaying was his eighth, according to police.

In his hometown of Hamilton, Ohio, Rogers is wanted for questioning about the 1993 death of his 72-year-old roommate, whose body was found last year in an abandoned cabin Rogers’ family owns in nearby Beattyville, Ky.

And in California, Rogers is now a suspect in four unsolved killings in Ontario and Port Hueneme, where the victims were either strangled or stabbed, set on fire or left in bathtubs.

“A dangerous person is off the street,” said Police Detective Dan Pratt, of Hamilton, where Rogers may have been heading when he was caught.

Los Angeles Police Detective Stephen Fisk said that even more slayings may be linked to Rogers.

“I think this man’s been doing this for a long time,” Fisk said Monday after Rogers’ arrest. “I think we’re going to be amazed by all the bodies we find behind this guy.”

As news of the arrest spread, friends and relatives of Rogers’ alleged victims responded with full-throttle joy, and few thoughts of mercy.

“I hope they do to him a whole lot worse than he did to her,” said Billy Morton, who manages the bar in Bossier City, La., where slaying victim Andy Jiles Sutton met Rogers.

“Does Kentucky have capital punishment?” asked Sutton’s friend, bartender Denise Hogue. “If not, tell them they need to invest in that or send him back here and let us do it.”

In Florida, Jeannie Fuller, who worked with slaying victim Tina Marie Cribbs as a hotel maid, said, “I hope he gets castrated.”

After a funeral Sunday, she and other friends of Cribbs carried the woman’s ashes to Showtown USA, the Gibsonton bar where she met Rogers. They put the urn on a table and ordered a round.

Cindy Torgerson, who worked with Cribbs at the Ramada Inn and was with her the day she met Rogers, said, “We had our last drink with her.”

The arrest was a great relief to Rein Keener, a 24-year-old bartender at McRed’s Cocktail Lounge in Van Nuys, who fended off Rogers’ advances and then watched him leave with Sandra Gallagher. Gallagher’s body was found strangled and set on fire not far from Rogers’ apartment.

“I started crying,” said Keener, who has been under police protection since a man she said sounded like Rogers phoned her at work last week and warned, “You will pay.”

On Monday, as the chase and arrest captured by a local TV station were aired nationally, Keener posted a handwritten sign on McRed’s front door: “Thanks to the police. Serial killer caught. 11/13/95 12:20 p.m., Kentucky.”

The bar’s owner quickly added his own line: “Glen Rogers caught. Ladies 1/2 price on all drinks.”

Rogers became the subject of an intense national search last week after police in Bossier City, La., tied him to the slaying of Sutton, whose body was discovered naked and stabbed in the apartment they briefly shared. By that time, Rogers had also been tied to the slaying of Linda Price, whose body was discovered in Jackson, Miss. on Nov. 3, as well as Cribbs’ death outside Tampa, Fla., days later.

The case was aired Saturday night on the TV program “America’s Most Wanted,” drawing 400 phone calls--an unusually high number--according to the program’s publicist.

“We can get 1,000 calls on a Saturday night, but to have 400 calls on one segment, plus 100 within the first half-hour after the show goes off the air is remarkable,” said Ivey Van Allen.

Van Allen also noted that a high concentration of tips--more than a dozen--came from Kentucky, so she was not surprised to learn of Rogers’ arrest there.

Police believe Rogers was heading to his hometown of Hamilton, a once bustling industrial city. He is one of six children born to Edna and Claude Rogers. His late father was a pump operator at the local Champion paper company. The family lived in a rough part of town, and acquaintances described the clan as being of “Hamiltuckian stock,” a disparaging reference to the backwoods culture of Appalachia.

Rogers had a reportedly unremarkable childhood, but as a teen-ager he began building a name as a troublemaker with a hair-trigger temper. By the time he was 16, he was expelled from Wilson Junior High School. Within months of his expulsion, Rogers got his childhood sweetheart, Deborah Ann Nix, pregnant. The teen-agers married and moved to Southern California, where Rogers got a job at the Highland Press printing company in Pasadena.

But “Debi” divorced him in 1983, becoming the first of several women to accuse him of physical abuse. Rogers began to crumble, according to friends, and returned to Hamilton in 1986 or 1987. There, he became ensconced in a pattern that would mark his adult life: holding down menial jobs and racking up a criminal record that includes public drunkenness, theft, assault and arson.

He also began burnishing a reputation for his skill at picking up women in bars and country-Western joints, using his blond good looks and free-spending charm to seduce those who were physically or emotionally vulnerable, friends said.

It was a predatory talent that would serve him well as a killer, according to police, who say Rogers pursued the four recent slaying victims in local bars and at a state fair before strangling or stabbing them.

He left Ohio again in 1993, the same year that his housemate, Mark Peters, disappeared. At the time, friends and acquaintances thought little of his departure because Rogers had often left Hamilton for weeks or even months at a time, always returning but never saying much about what he had done.

But in January, 1994, Peters’ badly decomposed body was found bound and hidden in the nearby Kentucky cabin owned by Rogers’ family. Rogers was sought for questioning, but had already returned to Los Angeles.

He lived in Hollywood and Van Nuys, repeating behavior by then well-known to his friends back home. Rogers was accused of routinely beating his most recent girlfriend and of setting clothes in her closet on fire during one fight, but was never convicted because she refused to testify against him. The woman was so frightened of Rogers, according to friends and relatives, that she fled to her native Hungary in late summer, returning this fall to learn he was suspected of murder.

While she was gone, authorities allege, Rogers began the string of slayings that led to his arrest, beginning with Gallagher. The Santa Monica resident, who relatives said was trusting, had been out for drinks and apparently gave Rogers a ride home.

Steve Gallagher, her husband, speculated Monday that Rogers tried to rape her and then choked her to death when she resisted. An autopsy failed to show there was a sexual assault, LAPD detectives said.

“To me,” Gallagher said, “there is no retribution great enough that would be justice for what he’s done.”

Times staff writers Leslie Berger, Aaron Curtiss, Efrain Hernandez Jr., Jill Leovy, Ann W. O’Neill, Frank B. Williams and special correspondent Mike Clary contributed to this story. Chu reported from Richmond, Ky., and Clary reported from Miami.

Inside / SIGHS OF RELIEF: Customers at McRed’s in Van Nuys toasted the capture of murder suspect Glen Rogers, who had once been a regular at the bar, with half-price drinks and expressions of relief. A14

* LAB WORK: Port Hueneme police have asked the FBI to send DNA samples from murder suspect. B1

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

End of the Trail

Glen Rogers, 33, was captured Monday after a high-speed chase by police in Kentucky. A nationwide search began last week after authorities said he was connected with at least five killings in several states.

THE VICTIMS

1) Mark Peters, 71.

* Body Found: In Lee County, Ky., in January of 1994.

* Cause of Death: Undetermined.

****

2) Sandra Gallagher, 31.

* Body Found: In her burning pickup truck early Sept. 30, 1995, near Rogers’ Van Nuys apartment building.

* Cause of Death: Strangulation.

****

3) Linda Price, 34.

* Body Found: In the bathtub of her apartment Friday in Jackson, Miss.

* Cause of Death: Slit throat.