Judge Allows Details of 2 Killings

In a key ruling, the judge who will preside over the capital murder trial of suspected serial killer Glen Rogers in a Van Nuys slaying agreed Thursday to allow the jury to hear details of two of the three out-of-state killings he allegedly committed.

Now prosecutors will be able to portray Rogers to the jury as a serial killer whose hatred for women led him to pick up Sandra Gallagher at a Van Nuys bar with the intention of killing her, just as he did with other women later.

The issue of intent is vital, because in order to secure a death sentence, the district attorney’s office must show that the killing was premeditated and is covered by special circumstance provisions.

Rogers has already been condemned to death in Florida, where he was convicted of fatally stabbing a hotel maid who offered him a ride home, making him subject to the death penalty under California law on the special circumstance of multiple killings.

“I think this trial is about whether it’s a first-degree murder,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Patrick Dixon said in court Thursday. “The defendant’s actions over a very short period of time show this was a premeditated murder. It was a plan to seek out and kill women.”

Rogers’ lawyer, Deputy Public Defender James Coady, had argued that the manner of death and cover-up efforts in the killings differed. He also said Rogers’ alleged statements to a friend--that he had killed Gallagher after an argument--show the crime was not planned.

“What you’re really telling the jury is that the person before you is a serial killer who kills women,” Coady said. “I think any conviction he gets will be the effect of him being labeled as a killer.”

Coady said he intends to reopen the issue before trial and pointed out that evidence of other killings was kept away from jurors in Rogers’ murder trial in Florida.

Rogers is suspected of killing four women in as many states over six weeks, beginning with Gallagher, then 33, who he picked up at McRed’s lounge in Van Nuys in September 1995. Dixon said Rogers strangled her, stuffed her body in her pickup truck and set it on fire.

About a month later, he allegedly fatally stabbed Linda Pierce, 34, with whom he had been living in Jackson, Miss. He left town within days.

On Nov. 6, 1995, Tina Cribbs was found slain in Rogers’ Tampa, Fla., hotel room. She had given Rogers a ride home the night before after meeting him at a bar, Dixon said. It is this case, the only murder for which Rogers had been tried, for which he received the death penalty.

Three days after Cribbs’ body was found, Andy Lou Jiles was stabbed to death in her Bossier City, La., apartment. Authorities say Rogers met her in a bar, too, and again asked for a ride home.

Rogers was arrested while driving Cribbs’ car in Kentucky, after a nationwide manhunt that featured him on television’s “America’s Most Wanted.”

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Connor ruled that the jury can hear about the Florida and Louisiana killings, because they clearly show a “common plan and intent.” However, she denied Dixon’s motion to introduce the Mississippi slaying--at least until any penalty phase--ruling that it did not fit the pattern.