Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer (26 page)

Machado subsequently contacted Lisa's father,
James Holden, who was also living in California, and explained to
him that the sheriff's office was placing Lisa at the top of their
priority list due to the tattoos that were described by him in his
initial contact with Portland detectives, as well as the
description provided by Lisa's grandmother. Machado said that
Lisa's tattoos matched those found on body #2 and the time of
Lisa's disappearance was consistent with the time the Molalla
victim was believed to have been killed.

Holden told Machado that he had last heard
from Lisa on July 22 or 23, when she called to say she was leaving
her husband because he was beating her and because he had hocked
her car, which had all of her clothes inside it.

"She said that all she had with her were some
shorts and a blouse," said Holden. "She asked me for a hundred and
fifty dollars. She was on something at the time, but I don't know
what it was. She wouldn't tell me. Lisa was really scattery."

Holden put Machado in touch with Lisa's
dentist in California, who agreed to send Lisa's dental charts to
Oregon immediately. When the dental charts arrived, Body #2 was
positively identified as Lisa Marie Mock, twenty-three.

Because no additional bodies were found in
the Molalla forest, the search for more victims was halted. Because
of the seriousness and enormity of the case, Sheriff Bill Brooks
assigned John Turner to head up the Molalla Forest Task Force, made
up of most of the detectives who were already involved in the case.
Sheriff Brooks directed that the task force's offices be kept
secret, separate from the day-to-day activities of the sheriff's
department, so that all involved could work with only minimal
interruptions. The plan was designed to keep the media out of their
hair. Captain Lloyd "Lonnie" Ryan, Lieutenant Donald Vicars, and
Deputy Candace Dufur would keep the media up to date with
information the task force deemed appropriate to release.

Deputies Dave Broomfield and Charles Bowen,
the department's crime analysts, moved their computer equipment
into place across the narrow office from Turner's desk. Once they
had it all set up, they would attempt to match up the thousands of
bits of seemingly unrelated information that they hoped would
produce some kind of pattern. On another side of the room,
detectives Strovink and Machado set up their work spaces where they
could easily confer with one another and compare notes without
having to leave their desks. Near their work spaces they added a
large bulletin board, where they could pin information and charts
within easy viewing distance. They placed a grid map in another
office across the hall, on which they plotted the locations of the
bodies and the evidence that was discovered. Nearby, support people
typed up the official reports from the detectives' handwritten
notes and answered the seemingly endless stream of telephone
calls.

Shortly after the task force offices were set
up, it was publicly announced that Dayton Leroy Rogers was the
chief suspect in the Molalla forest murders. Captain Ryan made it
clear that Dayton wasn't the
only
suspect being looked at
"to the exclusion of others," but that it appeared that Dayton was
their best suspect so far. The revelation, they hoped, would prompt
tips from concerned citizens and potential witnesses.

It wasn't long before the calls began pouring
in. Surprisingly, one of those calls was from Anna Buchanan, one of
Dayton's victims from twelve years earlier who was now working
Portland's streets as a prostitute. Anna's call was transferred to
Turner, and he agreed to meet with her when she explained the
nature of her call and former encounter with Dayton.

During their meeting, Anna told Turner that
she had only recently heard about Jenny Smith's murder. But she had
known Jenny, and remembered seeing her on the morning of August 7
near the intersection of Northeast Union Avenue and Wygant Street
in Portland. She saw Jenny cross the street and walk toward a
late-model, light-blue pickup. When Turner showed her a picture of
Dayton's pickup, Anna gasped.

"That's it!" she said.

"Would you be willing to testify to that?"
asked Turner.

"I sure would."

On Thursday, September 10, Detective Jim
Strovink met with prostitute Beth Crane,* twenty-three, at a
Southeast Portland apartment. Beth had called the task force
earlier, claiming she had some information about Dayton Leroy
Rogers that might interest the detectives. Beth had indicated that
in November 1986 she had a frightening experience with a man who
seemed to fit Dayton's description. She had met the man around
midnight in the Shilo Inn parking lot on Union Avenue. When she got
inside his truck, she negotiated a $50 price for straight sex. The
man, however, didn't want to go to her motel. He said he wanted to
go up into the woods, about a forty-five-minute drive from
Portland, where he took all of his dates.

"Can you describe the man's vehicle?" asked
Strovink.

"It was an '85 Nissan pickup, a light blue
one, almost a grayish blue. It seemed like the only color that
Nissan made for that year."

"How do you know it was an '85 Nissan
pickup?"

"Well, after I got inside the truck, I tried
to roll down the window. But the window wouldn't roll down. I got
nervous, so I tried to open the door and the doorknob, er, door
handle came off. I got real scared and nervous, so I started
talking, mainly about my car, which is an '84 Sentra. He told me
his pickup was an '85 and that it was a five-speed.

"Did he say anything to you about the window
or door not working?"

"No. He just had a kind of Cheshire cat grin
on his face, like it had all been planned to happen that way."

"Did this individual identify himself to you
by name?"

"Yes, he did. He said his name was Steve and
that he was from Reno. He asked me to come to Reno where he said
his sister worked as a call girl."

"What else did you talk about?"

"He told me how his sister had molested him
when he was a child, how she had tried to bite his penis off."
Somewhat embarrassed, Beth began to laugh. "He said she had done
other things to him, such as putting her finger into his
rectum."

"Did he offer you anything to drink?"

"Yeah. Some of those plain little bottles of
vodka. The miniature type."

Beth explained that she didn't drink any
because she doesn't touch liquor. But she knew it was vodka. She
could smell it when he mixed it with the orange juice.

"Do you remember the brand name of the orange
juice?"

"They're green-labeled, in plastic bottles.
The kind you get at convenience stores. They have the green,
peel-away top. I remember he poured some orange juice out, then
poured two or three of those little bottles of vodka into the
orange juice. Mixed it together."

"Where did he keep the vodka?"

"In the glove compartment."

"Did you notice anything else in the glove
compartment?"

"Yeah. Leather straps. The kind you can buy
in the adult sex paraphernalia stores. They were brown, about an
inch wide, and they fastened like a belt."

"Did he have you remove any clothing while
you were driving to the forest?"

"Yes. My shoes. He started talking about how
he had these fantasies, a foot fetish of some sort."

"Were you scared?"

"Yeah, I was scared, all right. As we were
driving, he reached under his seat and pulled out a gun. He didn't
point it at me, but he set it on the seat. He started talking about
how he hated people, especially women, because of what his sister
had done to him. I began to think that I had the Green River Killer
for my date. I was real scared."

"When you reached the forest, what
happened?"

"He started playing with my feet, then began
rubbing my feet and legs. The whole time he kept talking about how
he liked feet, especially the arches. He unzipped his pants, took
his penis out, and began rubbing it against my feet."

"Did he have you take off your clothes?"

"Yeah. I took my shirt and pants off, and I
asked him if I really had to take off all my clothes, and he said
yes. After I took my bra and underpants off, he told me to lay flat
on my stomach. I thought he was going to kill me, and I asked him
if that was in his plans. He told me to shut up. He made me place
my hands behind my back and grasp my fingers so that my wrists
would be closer together. He put the strap on around my wrists,
then put the ankle straps on. Then he took wire, I think it was a
coat hanger, and wrapped it between the two straps, so that both my
hands and feet were behind my back. An exit swan. You know how that
swan style is? You know, your feet and hands are back there?"

"Then what happened?"

"He started to bite on me, slightly, just a
nibble. He started on my upper back, on my shoulders. Then he
proceeded down my back, and as he got closer to my butt, he started
to really bite hard. He bit so hard that my butt began to bleed.
Then he proceeded down the back of my legs, and he kept telling me
what a high tolerance of pain I had. He said he couldn't believe
the amount of pain that I could take. He started to bite on my
feet, then he turned me over. He bit my breasts. He drew blood from
biting my nipples. He was really biting, like he was trying to take
'em off. He never even touched me in the area of my vagina."

"What else did he do to you?"

"He mainly concentrated on my breasts and on
my stomach. He bit the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet.
He bit my toes, too, so hard I thought he was going to bite them
off."

"Did the biting of your toes draw blood?"

"Yeah. I remember, uh, the next morning, I
couldn't even walk because my feet were so sore. And my hands, I
couldn't be touched."

"Did he masturbate at all?"

"During the course of the time that he was
biting me he was masturbating."

"Which hand did he use?"

"His left hand. I remember it was his left
hand because that's the arm his watch was on."

"Did he say he was going to kill you?"

"No. He just started telling me that he hated
women. And every time I asked him if he was going to kill me, he
just said, 'Shut up, bitch.' "

"How long did the biting last?"

"Three to four hours."

"What did he do with all of the empty
containers?"

"Threw them out. He didn't want to mess up
his truck interior, you know."

When it was all over, the man dragged Beth
out of the truck, naked and incoherent, over at least ten feet of
gravel. It was very cold outside, and she was crying. He removed
the bondage devices and took them with him, but tossed the wire
into the brush. He then threw Beth's clothes out of his pickup and
walked over to where she lay.

"He was probably about two feet from me. I
looked up at him, and it was like I wanted to just jump up, but I
had no strength. He just said 'I hope you die' and left."

Beth explained that she eventually flagged
down a truck driver, who drove her to a restaurant in Molalla where
she was able to clean herself up. He then drove her to her motel in
Portland because he felt sorry for her.

"What prompted you to tell this story?"
Strovink wanted to know.

"Because, when I remembered Molalla, I got to
thinking about all those girls, and then I thought about him. He's
been heavily on my mind 'cause when I first came back to Portland
from Seattle, he was the first person I saw when I hit the streets.
That was four or five months after he did all that to me. He was
sitting outside a tavern near Third Avenue and Burnside in downtown
Portland."

Strovink placed the photo montage of six men
in front of Beth and asked her if her assailant was among those
shown. It took her only two seconds to point out her attacker.

"Oh, my God! That's him—oh, my God, that is
him. I would never forget his face!" She pointed to the photo in
the number three position, the one of Dayton Leroy Rogers.

Beth's telephone call had been only a trickle
of the flood of telephone calls that followed, mostly from Portland
area hookers claiming to have been victimized by Dayton Leroy
Rogers. Nearly all of the girls had been bitten and cut by their
assailant, and nearly all claimed that their john mixed
screwdrivers using miniature bottles of Smirnoff vodka and
disposable plastic containers of orange juice. There was indeed a
pattern to the crimes, and before it was over the detectives would
talk to nearly fifty prostitutes and former prostitutes, twenty-six
of whom would come forward with information specific enough about
their encounters with Dayton Leroy Rogers that detectives could use
in court to positively link him to the Molalla forest victims.
Crime analyst Deputy Dave Broomfield received thousands of tips and
bits of information to put through his computer, and in order for
anyone to make any sense out of it all, Broomfield had to compile a
booklet of case similarities.

Broomfield's booklet clearly showed the
relationships and similarities of Dayton's method of operation
relative to the hookers he dated. He compiled a master chart which
showed forty-three different elements related to these encounters,
elements that included how the women were tied, number of times
dated, whether or not he wanted to see his victim screaming and in
pain, presence of weapons and type of weapons, how he injured them,
whether or not he masturbated or had intercourse with the victim,
and so on. Broomfield also compiled breakdowns that showed which
Denny's restaurant a particular girl was taken to, whether or not
she was taken to Molalla, other locations, what types of clothing
had been lost, and so on. The case similarities were astonishing
and provided the detectives with answers at a glance. About the
only question it didn't answer was why Dayton chose to let some
women live.