Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer (24 page)

During the drive to Portland, Machado told
Turner about a call he had received earlier from a man named Paul
Samarin concerning information about Dayton Rogers and the Molalla
forest case. Samarin had told Machado that he'd heard about the
bodies in the Molalla forest and that his wife had shown him a map
of the area that had appeared in the
Statesmen Journal
, a
Salem newspaper. When he looked at the map, Samarin said he
realized that he had been fishing in that same area with Dayton.
Samarin said that the location was Dayton's favorite spot. The
detectives considered it unusual that anyone would call in with
information that connected Dayton to the forest location when
Dayton's name hadn't been mentioned publicly yet in connection with
the case.

It was 7:30 P.M. when they arrived at 103
Northeast Sacramento Street in Portland. The house, situated on the
northeast corner of Sacramento Street and Rodney Avenue, was
boarded up. Although it looked like no one lived there, lights had
been left burning on the front and back porches. While Machado
knocked at the front door, Turned went to the back door. Neither,
however, got an answer.

Before leaving the city. Turner and Machado
enlisted the help of the Portland Police Bureau to find Heather
Brown. When they ran her rap sheet they learned that she was a
prostitute, as Turner had suspected when he first read the report
in July. They also obtained her mug shot, along with a promise that
the Portland Police Bureau would contact them if they located
Heather.

Now that they had Heather's mug shot, Turner
telephoned Mike Travis from Portland. He had a few questions he
wanted to ask him, and wanted to know if it was okay to drop in on
him even though it was getting late. Although he had been asleep,
Travis said he didn't mind. It was about 9:45 P.M. when Turner and
Machado arrived at Travis's apartment in Molalla.

"Yes, that's her," said Travis when he saw
Heather's photo. "That's the girl I picked up on the logging
road."

Turner then showed Travis a photo display of
six men, similar to the one he had been using in the Jenny Smith
case. Travis looked carefully at the display.

"No, I don't think it's any of them," he
said, adding that he hadn't obtained a very good look at the
driver. "I'm pretty sure that the driver of the pickup is not
there." However, he kept looking at photo number three in the upper
right-hand corner, the one of Dayton Leroy Rogers. But he kept
shaking his head. "No, I can't swear to it."

Turner took out some photos of Dayton's
pickup.

"That sure looks like his pickup. That's the
color of the pickup I saw. I can't swear on the license plate, but
it was a real nice pickup like this one. That's the color,
yeah."

Travis continued to stare at the photo
display of possible suspects, his gaze focused on photo number
three.

"I can tell you which ones it isn't," he
finally said. He pointed to photos one, two, four, and five, but
continued to stare at photo three. "I just can't swear to it."

It was 10:30 P.M. when Turner arrived back at
his office. He had planned to call it a day and go home, but his
phone began ringing as he walked into his cubicle. Lisa Daniels*
was on the other end of the line, and she told him she had some
information about a frightening experience she'd had with Dayton
Leroy Rogers. When Turner heard Rogers's name, he suddenly became
very interested and got his second wind. Sleep would have to
wait.

Although Dayton hadn't been named publicly as
a suspect in the Molalla forest murders, Lisa had heard of his
alleged involvement in Jenny Smith's murder and the extreme
violence associated with it, and had put two and two together. She
didn't remember the exact date, she said, but she had met Dayton in
1984 on Highway 99E in Woodburn. She was walking toward the town of
Hubbard about midafternoon one day when a pickup approached her
from behind. The driver pulled up next to her and his eyes moved up
and down her body. He drove a few feet ahead of her, then
stopped.

The driver rolled the window down and said,
"You're a beautiful woman." He asked her how she was, what she was
doing, where she was going, trying as hard as he could to engage
her in small talk. He finally offered her a ride in his pickup and,
unafraid, she accepted. Lisa described the pickup as a Nissan, a
newer model, brown with gold stripes on the sides.

"Are you sure about the color?" asked
Turner.

"Oh, yes. I'm positive."

Lisa described the interior as very clean,
with black leather seats. She said Dayton had music playing on the
stereo, rock and roll. He drove her to her apartment in Hubbard and
asked her what she was doing later that night. When told that she
had no plans, he asked her for a date. She asked him if he was
married, and he said, "No. It's just me and my cat up in the
trailer on the outskirts of Canby." He said that he had just gotten
off work at the Coast to Coast store in Woodburn. Lisa agreed to go
out with him, and he picked her up at her apartment about 7 P.M.
that night.

They left in the same brown pickup, said
Lisa, and Dayton was dressed "sharp." He was wearing brand-new
jeans, a checkered western-style cowboy shirt that buttoned up the
front, and "real fancy" shiny brown cowboy boots with sharp-pointed
toes. They stopped at the Woodburn liquor store, where Dayton
purchased vodka for mixed drinks.

"Do you recall the brand of vodka?" asked
Turner.

"No, but they were in tiny bottles."

"You mean the miniature type, like those
served on airlines?"

"Yeah, those kind. There were at least five,
maybe more, and he kept them in a sack. Then he stopped at Safeway
and bought orange juice."

After leaving Safeway, they headed south on
Interstate 5. Their destination was Eugene, a hundred-mile drive
from Hubbard. During the drive, Dayton kept placing his hand on her
leg, rubbing it. She was wearing slacks, and said that he did not
touch her sexually during the drive there. Lisa didn't drink
anything on the way to Eugene, but did so after they arrived. She
said Dayton took her to a restaurant for dinner, then to a bar for
drinks. He seemed to have a pocketful of money and took her to
places she considered "swanky."

It was late when they left Eugene. Lisa
couldn't recall the precise time, but remembered that before she
knew it they were on the outskirts of Molalla. She said they
eventually turned onto some logging roads, and she did remember
passing water but didn't know if it was a lake, river, or pond.

"As we were driving," said Lisa, "Dayton said
he wanted to tie my hands behind my back. At first I thought he was
joking. But as we continued driving, he placed his right arm over
the back of the passenger seat behind my back. Suddenly he grabbed
me with his right hand, forcing me against the passenger door. He
managed to grab my hands and get them behind my back while his left
hand was still on the steering wheel. I wasn't sure what he was
trying to do. He managed to get some rope from behind the seat and
was able to make knots with one hand. After he got me tied up, he
began saying that he was going to cut my boobs off. I didn't know
if he meant it or what."

Lisa explained that she was so frightened
that she got under the dashboard on the passenger side and sat on
the floorboard. She didn't know how to escape, so she just sat
there, terrified.

"He asked me what was the matter," she said.
"And I asked him if he was going to cut my boobs off. He then asked
me, 'What do you think?' He never said anything else about cutting
off my breasts."

They continued driving for a while, but
Dayton eventually stopped and untied her hands. He then drove a
little farther, then parked. There were other people in the area,
parked there like them. She wasn't sure where they were, but
believed they might have been at a county park. They definitely
were not parked along a street or busy roadway, she said. He forced
her to drink some more vodka, two small bottles, straight, and gave
her some kind of dope to smoke. He put the cigarette in her mouth.
She said she didn't know what kind of dope it was, but it
definitely was not marijuana. Lisa became nauseous, as much from
the drinking as from the dope, and began vomiting. Just before they
left, Dayton threw all of the vodka bottles and orange juice
container out of the pickup window, then dropped her off at her
apartment at approximately 3 A.M.

"I didn't file a report," she said, "because
I was freaked out and paranoid. I didn't know what he'd do if I
filed a report.

"I saw him a couple of times after that," she
continued. "I went into the Coast to Coast store a couple of times.
I still didn't know if he'd been playing a game with me or what. He
came over to me in the store and thanked me for going out with him.
He said he'd had the best time he'd ever had. I didn't know how to
respond. When I asked him about tying me up and the threats, he
denied ever doing it. He said he never remembered doing it."

Turner found Lisa's story interesting, to say
the least. Moreover, he was amazed that two calls had come in
during the same day tying Dayton Rogers to the Molalla forest,
especially since he hadn't yet named Dayton as a suspect publicly.
The only thing Lisa told him that hadn't fit was the color of
Dayton's truck, which she had said was brown. But then again, maybe
it did fit, reflected Turner. The incident with Lisa had occurred
in
1984
, and Dayton's light-blue Nissan was a 1985 model.
Since Lisa hadn't been able to remember the date or even the month,
it was possible that her date with Dayton had occurred before the
1985 models went on sale in late 1984. Dayton had been driving a
different vehicle.

Chapter 15

Autopsies were conducted by Dr. Larry V.
Lewman and began late Friday afternoon, September 4, at the Oregon
State Medical Examiner's Office in Portland. Detectives Turner and
Machado were present, as was Detective Matt Haney, sent down to
Portland from the Green River Task Force in Seattle to make
comparisons between their case and Clackamas County's case and
determine, if possible, whether they were related.

Each corpse was photographed and fluoroscoped
prior to autopsy. Later, following the autopsies, the hands of each
corpse would be removed and sent to Lieutenant Colleen Aas of the
Oregon State Police Identification Bureau, Latent Print Division,
in Salem. Lieutenant Aas would review the hands and then begin
processing them for identifiable fingerprints that could, the
detectives hoped, identify the victims if their prints were on file
anywhere.

The autopsies revealed that Body #1 was a
Caucasian female, approximately five feet two inches tall, teens to
early twenties, reddish brown hair. Lewman noted that the victim
had previous surgery in the pelvic and hip regions and that the
distal tibia, where the left foot had previously been cut off, had
been incised or sawed through about eighty percent of its depth,
the remainder broken. Tool marks were clearly delineated, and he
was certain that they hadn't been caused by animal chewing. He also
found perforating defects in the posterior trunk, varying in size
from one-quarter to five-eighths inches, the shape of which were
generally round to elliptical. He characterized the defects as
probable stab wounds.

Body #2 was also a Caucasian female, likely
in her early twenties at time of death, about five feet six inches
tall, with long, somewhat curly brown to reddish brown hair. Lewman
observed a series of multiple incised wounds, possibly saw marks
but definitely some kind of tool marks, on the posterior lateral
surface of the left femur about two inches above the condyles, the
smooth surface area at the end of a bone comprising part of the
joint. Both feet had been cut or sawed off about six and a half
inches above the heels. Lewman noted and retrieved several minute
fragments of a green glasslike substance from the victim's hair,
which he deposited into an evidence container for the crime lab to
later examine.

The corpse was turned over, where Lewman
removed a patch of flesh displaying a tattoo from the left buttock
or flank region. The flesh was placed in water to enhance the
detail, and the word "Harley" was clearly visible, as was a Harley
Davidson motorcycle emblem. Under closer observation he could see
that the tattoo read: "Biker Harley Davidson Bitch." There was
another tattoo near the left posterior shoulder, an elaborate
drawing of a Pegasus or unicorn.

Lewman found two nearly vertical
one-half-inch long stab wounds within the area of the Harley
Davidson tattoo and found corresponding stab wounds in the
underlying tissue. He found another stab wound five inches to the
left, and two others left of the vertebral column.

Body #3 was either a Caucasian or a Caucasian
Mongoloid mix. Like the others, the victim was female. She had long
brown hair, and Lewman estimated her age to have been in the late
twenties to early thirties. She had previous surgery to her left
jaw and was about five feet six inches tall. In life, she would
have had a notable overbite.

Lewman noted that the victim had been
eviscerated, cut open from the pubic bone to the ster-num. The cut
was deep, reaching the underlying muscles and subcutaneous tissue.
The victim, if conscious when the cut was made, would have died
horribly. Lewman also pointed out that the nipple/areola of the
left breast was missing. In its place was an oval-shaped defect,
one and three-quarters inches in diameter, where it apparently had
been incised, cutting the nipple completely off. The pain, if done
while the victim was conscious, would have been unbearable.

The revelation hit John Turner like a
locomotive as he recalled his conversation the previous evening
with Lisa Daniels, in which she had said that Dayton Leroy Rogers
had threatened to cut off her breasts. What kind of sadistic
monster was Turner dealing with here? Was there nothing that Dayton
wouldn't do to his victims to achieve his sick form of sexual
gratification? Turner and his colleagues had no reason to believe
that the victims were unconscious when all the cutting and sawing
occurred. Instead, the evidence was beginning to indicate that they
were likely very much alive and conscious during their horrible
encounters with the killer. They likely went into shock and died
while being tortured.