California May Be 1st to Prosecute Rogers : Crime: Three other states are expected to lodge formal requests for extradition of the alleged serial killer and former Van Nuys resident.

The state with the strongest case against alleged serial killer Glen Edward Rogers will very likely be allowed to prosecute him first, according to a governor’s spokesman in Kentucky, where the former Van Nuys resident remains in custody after his arrest there last week.

Besides prosecutors in California, authorities in Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida are expected to lodge formal requests for Rogers’ extradition during the next few days, triggering negotiations with Kentucky officials who must decide where he should be sent first.

“The [Kentucky] governor’s office will work with our attorney general’s office in cooperation with the prosecutors in various states to try to come up with a solution that, basically, is a cooperative effort to decide where he should go first,” said Joe Lilly, press secretary to Kentucky Gov. Brereton Jones.

No extradition requests had been received by Jones’ office as of Friday, Lilly said.

The 33-year-old laborer has been held without bail in Kentucky’s Madison County Jail since his capture on Monday. Authorities believe Rogers is responsible for a seven-week, cross-country killing spree that began in Van Nuys between Sept. 29 and 30 and claimed three more lives in Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana before he was stopped in rural Kentucky, driving a Ford Festiva that belonged to one of his alleged victims.

Rogers has been wanted nearly two years for questioning about the 1993 death of his elderly housemate in Rogers’ hometown of Hamilton, Ohio.

After his arrest last week, Ohio police also began seeking possible links between Rogers and the 1993 death of a Hamilton woman, Kelly Ann Camargo, last seen getting into a car with a stranger outside a local bar.

Police coast-to-coast are also checking a host of other unsolved killings for links to Rogers, a suave bar-hopper who laughingly told two Kentucky State Police detectives after his arrest last week that he may have killed 70 people.

“I advised him that we were looking at him concerning the murder of five people, and we had five bodies,” Kentucky State Police Officer Robert G. Stephens wrote in an affidavit seeking a search warrant.

Then Rogers told Stephens’ partner, Floyd McIntosh, “that it’s more like seventy bodies and laughed as he said this,” Stephens wrote.

On Thursday, a Madison County grand jury returned a three-count indictment against Rogers, accusing him of wanton endangerment and criminal mischief during a nationally televised pursuit that reached speeds of 100 m.p.h.

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Rogers was also scheduled for a court hearing Tuesday to put him on official notice that he is considered a fugitive by other states that will be seeking his return, Lilly said.

Kentucky has jurisdiction in one death linked to Rogers--his elderly housemate, 72-year-old Mark Peters, who died between late 1993 and early 1994.

Both men disappeared from Hamilton in the fall of 1993, and Peters’ tied-up remains were found hidden in a cabin owned by Rogers’ family in rural Beattyville, Ky., in January, 1994.

A cause of death was never established because the body was badly decayed. McIntosh, a Kentucky detective handling the case, declined to comment last week on whether charges would be filed against Rogers.

In Los Angeles, the district attorney’s office was preparing an extradition request Friday but did not expect to submit it to California Gov. Pete Wilson’s office, as procedure requires, until Tuesday at the earliest. Wilson’s office will then forward the request to Jones’ office in Kentucky.

Rogers is wanted here for questioning in the slaying of 33-year-old Sandra Gallagher of Santa Monica, who met him at McRed’s Cocktail Lounge in Van Nuys the night of Sept. 29.

She was last seen leaving the bar with him about 1:30 a.m. About five hours later, her parked pickup truck was reported on fire a few blocks from Rogers’ Van Nuys apartment, and her strangled and burned body was found inside.

Los Angeles Police Detective Mike Coblentz, who is investigating the Gallagher slaying, acknowledged Friday that the truck fire consumed potential evidence. But he also said he had witnesses, adding, “I feel my case is strong.”

Coblentz went to Kentucky last week after Rogers’ arrest.

There, he met for several hours Wednesday with investigators from other states, who were reviewing the deaths of Linda Price in Jackson, Miss., Tina Marie Cribbs outside Tampa., Fla., and Andy Jiles Sutton in Bossier City, La. He declined to compare them or to speculate on who will prosecute first.

Investigators in Kentucky were also trying to rule out Rogers as a suspect in several unsolved killings across the country by establishing a chronology of his travels based on information that he told them and evidence they found in the Festiva, McIntosh said.

He would not elaborate, other than to say Rogers had some papers in the car that helped establish “where he may have been.”

Kentucky State Police also collected for other agencies hair and blood samples from Rogers, as well as new sets of fingerprints, McIntosh said.

In Ventura County, where Port Hueneme authorities are investigating Rogers in connection with three 1993 slayings, police said they will request DNA samples if Rogers’ blood type matches evidence collected at the death scenes.

Times correspondent Eric Wahlgren contributed to this story.