Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer (2 page)

Before Rogers, the 1970s, for example, saw
the senselessness of the "Ted" killings, the vicious murders of
beautiful young coeds whose decomposed or skeletonized remains
often turned up on densely forested hillsides. Those murders would
later be attributed to the actions of a handsome, harmless-looking
former law student and political aide named Ted Bundy, a confessed
murderer that just about everybody has heard of by now. Although he
paid for his grisly deeds in "Old Sparky," Florida's electric
chair, in January 1989, he left behind a dark legacy of shattered
lives and broken dreams.

Then came the 1980s, so far the most
homicidal period in the region's—if not the entire
nation's—history, when the ever-increasing phenomenon of serial
murder continued to baffle law enforcement officials and mental
health professionals. In the early part of the decade the Pacific
Northwest, and particularly Oregon, was again terrorized, this time
by a masculine, good-looking young man named Randall Wood field. A
star athlete and an "A" student, Wood field was the type of man
that women, young and old alike, dreamed about. However, after
being drafted by the Green Bay Packers, Wood field chose to throw
away his chance to play pro football, and perhaps achieve wealth
and fame, by becoming the "1-5 Killer," a sex-fiend responsible for
raping, sodomizing, and murdering young women and children along
the busy freeway that runs through Washington, Oregon, and
California. He got life in prison, then went on to become Elizabeth
Diane Downs's prison pen pal.

There was also, of course, the "Green River
Killer," a serial murderer still at large who—if one can believe
Henry Lee Lucas's recantations or, more recently, Donald Leroy
Evans's as yet unsubstantiated claims that he has killed 72
people—has perhaps chalked up the most victims attributed to a
single killer. The Green River Killer's choice of victims consisted
mostly of prostitutes and drug addicts, some of whom were
teenagers, others mature women, but all of whom were seasoned and
streetwise. Although that murderer's activities have taken place
mostly in Washington (as far as authorities have been able to
determine), he managed to complicate matters for Oregon law
officers by leaving a handful of his victims in that state before
apparently ceasing, for any number of reasons, his activities in
the Northwest. Police officials believe the killer is either in
jail, dead, or has moved on to another location where he could
continue satisfying his addiction to murder without having to face
as much heat from the law.

Then, toward the latter part of the decade,
came Dayton Leroy Rogers, the "Molalla Forest Killer," the subject
of this book. As best as Detective John Turner of the Clackamas
County Sheriff's Department, the lead investigator in the case, and
other crime experts were able to determine, Rogers's lust for
killing reached its pinnacle in the summer of 1987. However,
Detective Turner unearthed a background which showed that Rogers
had been working up to committing murder for a long, long time.

Detective Turner located countless victims
who endured unspeakable acts of torture and mutilation at his
hands, acts of sadism that had been going on for nearly fifteen
years before the first body was found. Because all of Rogers's
crimes apparently were motiveless and sexual, Turner found that the
danger signals that Rogers would go on to commit murder—clearly
shown through the killer's prior crimes—had gone unnoticed, somehow
slipping through the cracks of a system that was designed to
prevent such tragedies from occurring.

In this complex case, Turner would eventually
conclude that Rogers was a paradox. A psychopath out of control on
the one hand, and—perhaps an even more chilling premise— a man very
much
in
control on the other. By day, while his mask of
sanity was firmly in place, he appeared to be a loving husband and
father, a highly skilled, intelligent, and respected businessman in
his community. By night, however, when the mask came off, Turner
would learn, Rogers became a sexual sadist, a brutal fetishist bent
on inflicting horrendous pain and suffering on his victims before
finishing them off in the most dreadful ways conceivable to a
normal mind.

The Marquis de Sade would have been proud of
him, and Jack the Ripper envious.

Many had come before him, capturing the
attention of law enforcement and the news media, and terrifying
entire communities. Killers such as Woodfield, Brudos, Bundy, the
Green River Killer, the Hillside Strangler, and countless others
had committed sensational, horrible crimes, to be sure. But they
had also, albeit unintentionally, forced the wheels of numerous
police agencies into motion as the bodies piled up while they
continued to kill, leaving corpses, some say, where they could be
more easily found for reasons not clearly delineated. Call it
sloppiness, carelessness, or a subconscious desire to be caught. No
one, likely not even the killers, really knows for sure.

Rogers
hadn't been careless, at least
not until he reached his eighth victim. Using fictitious names,
Rogers had remained unknown, free to troll city streets for his
next victims simply because his victims
weren't
turning up.
He liked his namelessness. In fact, he thrived on it because no one
was looking for him. If he hadn't become careless, or perhaps just
overly confident, who knows how long he could have gotten away with
his insidious maiming, torturing, and killing?

When Rogers finally did come under police
scrutiny, it soon became clear to Turner that he hadn't been
operating haphazardly. Turner and others close to the case agreed
that there was indeed a method to his madness.

Like most serial killers, Rogers's victims
were always women. As far as anyone knows, they were also always
prostitutes. He chose street whores because they were readily
available, easy prey, quite simply victims of opportunity. He also
knew that those he chose to kill would not be quickly missed
because of their transient lifestyles, nor would their
disappearances generate a great deal of attention when a friend or
loved one eventually did report their prolonged, unexplained
absences to the police. Likewise, he knew that those he had
not
killed would likely not go to the police because of the
illegal nature of their line of work and the fact that many had
warrants out for their arrests. Those who did report their
torturous encounters with him would initially not be taken too
seriously, or their stories would be simply dismissed as a hooker's
date gone awry. That is, until the case reached John Turner's desk.
Turner, clearly a dedicated lawman, took all of his cases
seriously, applying equal weight and concern to each and every
victim regardless of the victim's background or walk of life. The
victims, in his mind, were human beings first, and it was his duty
to see that justice prevailed and that examples were set to, he
hoped, deter other potential killers lying in wait from carrying
out their crimes against humanity.

Like Brudos, Rogers was a family man. Like
Bundy, he has appealing features. As with the Green River Killer,
he chose ladies of the night as his victims and cluster-dumped
their bodies at outdoor locations. He knew what he was doing, and
he became very proficient at it. Mutilation of conscious victims
was his forte or trademark and was always a part of the acting out
of his fantasies. But one day he would slip up, turn an entire
community inside out, and be named like all those who came before
him. He would lose his anonymity and would be remembered in the
darkest annals of crime history.

There are eight known dead victims, and
Turner and his colleagues suspect there are countless others whose
bodies haven't yet turned up, and perhaps never will. Here is the
chilling story of how Dayton Leroy Rogers became the Molalla Forest
Killer, a ravenous sexual psychopath whose lust for blood knew no
bounds.

Prologue

March 1987

Spring had arrived in northwestern Oregon
again, at least on the calendar. It would be at least another six
weeks, however, before the rhododendrons revealed their short-lived
blossoms of pink and white, about the same time that the abounding
rosebuds began to swell. It would be even longer before the warm
rays of sunshine broke through all the massive layers of gray,
ultimately proving that blue skies do exist above the dismal inkish
pall to which most northwesterners pay little notice. Until then,
the chilly mists and frequent downpours would continue their
atmospheric journey across the Coast Range Mountains, descending
upon virtually every parcel of earth west of the volcanic
Cascades.

Tracie Baxter,* barely sixteen, bowed her
head and careened her body against the frequent blasts of cold,
wind-driven March rain as she confidently claimed her usual
position along a block of Portland's busy Southeast 82nd Avenue,
between Foster Road and Flavel Street. Donning a short, tight denim
skirt that exposed a lot of thigh, provocative passion-pink
anklets, and black high-heel shoes, the blond, brown-eyed young
street whore shivered from the chill, wishing that she had dressed
in something less scanty. But she wanted to attract some business
fast, and dressing that way was the most explicit means she knew of
to entice a john to stop right away, short of publicly undressing.
She was the only hooker in sight that evening, at least so far, all
alone in the dark save for the late commuters who seemed to
literally parachute off the buses at the nearby transit stop.
Watching them as they impatiently filed off, she briefly wondered
how long she would have to wait for a paying customer to stop and
knew that, despite the wretched weather and the accompanying
discomfort she was feeling, she would remain on the block as long
as was necessary.

Southeast 82nd Avenue, one of the city's main
north-south arteries, embodied insanely whizzing traffic and muted
flashes of chrome at all hours of the day and night. It was a lot
like Los Angeles' Sunset Boulevard, but without all of the famous
landmarks and glitter of Hollywood. As with Sunset Boulevard, 82nd
Avenue was a haven for prostitutes, pimps, johns, runaways, drug
addicts, pushers—the dregs of society, the discarded remnants of
human hope gone astray. Most went by street names such as Dee Dee,
Mo, Gypsy, Noni, and so on, some so far gone that it took
considerable effort for them to remember their names, streetwise or
real. Many of the street "residents" lived merely for their next
fix of heroin or rock of crack.

Most didn't know where they would sleep from
one night to the next, and the more desperate ones who ended up
there because there was no place else for them to go often sold
their bodies for a hamburger and a milk shake or a $15 motel room.
And the regular cruisers who had money to blow, the friendless
pariahs from the outer circle, knew just where to go to find what
they wanted. If it was illegal, they could easily acquire it on
82nd Avenue.

Streetwise and aged beyond her tender teenage
years, Tracie knew 82nd Avenue well and in a normal workday—or
evening, as the case may be—traversed much of it. But she preferred
to work along the active strip in front of what then was known as
Bob's Big Boy Restaurant, where, it seemed, she had the greatest
success hooking johns. Over time, it became
her
block, well
within the boundaries of what she considered
her
territory.
Most of the other hookers, in an unspoken code of ethics, stayed
clear of it, at least as long as Tracie was there. Tracie, in turn,
respected the other girls' territory most of the time.

Tracie, who had been coached by her
boyfriend/pimp to treat the sale of her body as a business, came to
value her spot along the busy avenue. They had chosen it carefully
a few weeks earlier after deciding that the downtown core area of
the city was not for her. There were too many cops downtown, and
the streets there seemed to attract a greater cross-section of
Portland's "weirdos" and "creeps," as she called them, the enema
freaks, torture aficionados, bestiality enthusiasts, and other
deviants with whom she didn't want to do business. Not only did the
82nd Avenue location hold greater potential for scoring a number of
customers on any given night due to the volume of traffic, but
most, she mistakenly believed, were of a more respectable nature.
She also saw fewer young boys, the "punks," climb into lawyers' and
businessmen's Mercedes and Jaguars there, and she seemed less at
odds with others in the trade on 82nd. She also liked her location
because she could easily duck inside Bob's Big Boy if she spotted
police cruisers coming down the block, or she could simply slip
inside, where she was becoming well known, to sip on a cup of hot
coffee and warm up in the unlikely event that it turned out to be a
tough night. She could also occasionally proposition a lone male
customer, as long as the management wasn't watching. However, she
knew it was best to keep her business outdoors. That way she could
avoid running the risk of getting eighty-sixed from Bob's.

It was a Friday, payday for many, she knew,
as she walked and danced up and down the block, twirling her
now-opened umbrella and feigning happiness, waving and smiling at
the passing motorists, each a potential john. Tracie made no
pretense, particularly to herself, of her simple objective: she
needed to earn enough money to keep her and her boyfriend supplied
with a motel room, a little food, crack cocaine, and liquor for at
least a couple of days, or risk having the shit beat out of her at
the end of the night. But her slim figure and petite build had
helped make her a hot, profitable item, so she never worried too
much about encountering a sudden downturn in business or meeting
her objective.

It was a few minutes past 7 P.M. when she
first noticed the light-colored silver-blue Nissan pickup pass
slowly in front of the restaurant. The driver turned his head
toward her and peered out of the passenger window as he drove by,
and Tracie thought she detected a smile through the darkness. As
her gaze followed the pickup's taillights, she momentarily recalled
conversations with other hookers in which she had been warned of a
man driving just such a vehicle. The other girls had said that he
liked kinky sex and bondage and was especially attracted to women's
feet. But he sometimes became violent, even savage. He liked
knives, they said, and often cut his victims. The girls who had
unwittingly accepted his offers said he was sexually aroused at the
sight of their blood, and many came away from their encounters with
him scarred for life, both emotionally and physically. Although he
was known to pay as much as $150 for a "date," they advised Tracie
to stay away from him. Even for that kind of money, they said, a
girl would have to be desperate, crazy, or both to take a chance on
him. Paying little heed to their warnings and concluding that such
a thing could never happen to her, Tracie tried to put the guy out
of her mind.