Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer (33 page)

At 9:45 the next morning, Turner and
Detective Lynda Estes responded to Clifford and Sherry Shirley's
place of business in Sherwood, Oregon, a small community southwest
of Portland. During the interview they were told that Dayton's
sister, Connie, had confided to a family friend that Dayton had
confessed to her and his mother about the murders. Connie, Clifford
said, had also questioned Dayton as to whether or not he was
involved in the Green River murders. Dayton had said that he
wasn't. However, when he was asked about two skulls that had been
found in the Tigard area, he had become evasive. Shirley could not
understand why Connie had not come forward with the information,
but felt that if Turner and Estes went to see her she would talk to
them.

Turner and Estes arrived at Connie's
apartment in Tualatin, a Portland suburb, at 11:05 A.M. When Turner
asked if he and Estes could talk to her about Dayton, Connie smiled
and said, "I like cops. I really do." She added that she
appreciated what they were trying to accomplish, but she did not
want to talk with them at that time.

"I'm sure you can appreciate the position I'm
in," she said. She told the detectives that she believed God had
put them there to do their job, but she just did not want to talk
to them.

They contacted other family members of
Dayton's, including his mother, but none of them would confirm
Clifford Shirley's report that Dayton had confessed the
murders.

On December 31, Estes contacted Clifford
Shirley by telephone. Before she could say why she was calling,
Clifford told her he was glad she had called. He said that he had
intended to call her or Turner anyway, to let them know that he and
his wife had visited with Connie and another of Dayton's relatives,
at which time Clifford had informed them that he had talked to the
police about Dayton's purported confessions.

Connie, in responding, had explained to
Clifford that she should not be saying anything at all about
Dayton's case on the advice of legal counsel, adding that she had
already said too much. She denied to the Shirleys that Dayton had
actually confessed the Molalla forest murders to her, but that it
was only in her own thoughts that she believed Dayton was guilty.
She did indicate that Dayton had confessed
something
to her,
but it was not the Molalla murders and she was not going to say
what it pertained to.

Before leaving for the evening, however,
Connie did reveal to the Shirleys that Dayton had called her on the
evening of the day that Turner and Estes had visited her. She said
she had told him that the detectives had been there, and it had
upset him that the police were still fishing for information.

As the new year of 1988 began, Turner had run
down additional information about Cynthia Diane DeVore, Dee Dee to
her street friends and johns. Among the things he learned was that
she was the daughter of an alcoholic mother and a father she never
knew. She practically grew up on the streets until state
authorities stepped in and removed her from her less than adequate
environment. Still, she seemed to have little or no idea where
life's road was taking her.

Gone were the beatings and the neglect, the
hunger and the fear of being left alone, once the state Children's
Services Division became involved and placed her in a series of
foster homes. Although saddened by the changes at first, she
eventually felt grateful that she no longer had to answer to her
mother for the things she had done "wrong," which, apparently, had
included merely being alive. When she was adopted out of a foster
home by a decent family at age eleven, Dee Dee's life suddenly took
on new hope. She made a lot of friends, her grades improved
markedly, and she even began dreaming about growing up and going to
college someday.

Slowly, however, her life began to turn again
for the worse. She began running with the wrong crowd and took to
the streets, hanging out at the video arcades on 82nd Avenue with
the other street kids and staying out late. She was soon
experimenting with drugs, first alcohol, then marijuana, and it
wasn't long before she advanced into the harder drugs and began
regularly using crank, a powerful methamphetamine. She eventually
became a "bag bitch" for her dealer, which helped to pay the costs
of her own drugs. Although her life had already begun to fall
apart, it wasn't until she dropped out of Cleveland High School
during her sophomore year that she truly headed down the dead-end
road of no return. As her dependence on drugs increased, she lost
much of her self-respect and began slipping farther and farther
into the abyss of death. Occasionally she would pull herself out of
the muck, and found herself in and out of a number of drug
rehabilitation centers, to no avail. Her adoptive parents, who had
initially been so optimistic about her future, soon felt hopeless.
When Dee Dee quit coming home, they nearly gave up on her. She was
lost, and there seemed to be no way back for her.

Although broad in the hips, Dee Dee, despite
her life-style, was still a good-looking girl with long, flowing
brown hair, blue eyes, long, thin arms, and a large bust. At five
feet seven inches tall and 120 pounds, she naturally attracted a
number of boys and young men, with whom she frequently slept
around. At nineteen she became pregnant and defiantly announced to
everyone that she was going to keep the child when it was born.
Still using crank, though less frequently, she had quit using the
needle during her pregnancy for the sake of her unborn child. But
she still had to survive and, preferring the streets to going home,
it wasn't unusual to see her walking the boulevards, her abdomen
bulging, propositioning potential johns with her pet pit bull at
her side, given to her as a birthday present by a boyfriend.

Dee Dee's most prized possession arrived with
the birth of her daughter, whom she'd had out of wedlock. She took
the baby with her nearly everywhere when she wasn't hooking.
Because of her life-style, however, a caseworker at the Children's
Services Division, after having been anonymously tipped off, began
taking steps to remove the child from Dee Dee's custody after it
was decided that she would be safer and better cared for in a
foster home. But Dee Dee wasn't about to make that task an easy one
for the caseworker. By then a full-blown methamphetamine freak, Dee
Dee had few possessions and moved from drug house to drug house
when she wasn't living out of some seedy motel room with some
equally sleazy man looking to make a quick buck from her
misery.

After Turner checked with all of his contacts
and informants, Tracie Baxter's name came up again in connection
with Dee Dee. When he contacted Tracie, he learned that she may
have been the last person to have seen Dee Dee alive on July
eleventh, between five and six o'clock in the evening. When she
last saw her, said Tracie, Dee Dee was trying to pick up a john on
82nd Avenue near Powell Boulevard.

It was ironic, reflected Turner as he talked
with Tracie, that only days earlier Tracie had pointed out Dayton
Leroy Rogers's light-blue pickup truck to Dee Dee while walking
with her on 82nd Avenue and Flavel. Tracie had even told her, just
as she was telling everyone that she knew, how the man in the
pickup had taken her into the forest, hog-tied her, cut her foot,
and threatened to kill her. Tracie had cautioned Dee Dee to avoid
the guy like the plague, insisting that he was dangerous. But just
as certain as Reatha, Lisa, Noni, Christine, and Maureen had
disappeared without a trace, so had Dee Dee.

Like the others, Turner learned, Dee Dee was
soon missed by her friends and family, and many openly wondered
what had happened to her. But because of her transient lifestyle
and addiction to drugs, no one bothered to report her missing.
Everyone assumed that she would turn up one day soon, they hoped
alive and well. But she hadn't. Instead Dee Dee had vanished, swept
away into the night just as mysteriously as the other girls had
been.

On January 15,1988, however, Dee Dee's
whereabouts were no longer a mystery. Using dental records at the
Oregon Health Sciences University Dental School, Cynthia Diane
DeVore was positively identified as Molalla forest Body #4.

Chapter 24

After failing at several repeated attempts to
get Dayton's wife, Sherry, to talk to him, Turner enlisted the aid
of his colleague, Lynda Estes, to get the job done. Sherry had
talked to Estes before, so she might be willing to do so again. His
reasoning for using Estes was simple. They were both women, and
Estes, though known as a relentless investigator, possesses a
captivating and sympathetic quality about her that gets people to
open up. Although they couldn't force Sherry Rogers to talk to them
or to testify against her husband, it was Turner's hope that she
would talk, if only to help clear up some minor details, such as
Dayton's frequency of staying out all night and whether or not he
ever used her car.

Estes reached Sherry at her father's home and
explained that she needed to talk to her about Dayton. Sherry was
reluctant to meet with her and said she really didn't want to talk
unless she absolutely had to. She added that she would not do
anything to protect Dayton, but she wanted to stay as far removed
from the situation as possible. Estes insisted that she understood
Sherry's feelings, but explained that it had come to her attention
that Sherry had seen a bag of jewelry on one occasion that didn't
belong to her and she needed to talk about it. Still, Sherry did
not want to discuss it.

Estes reiterated her understanding of
Sherry's feelings, but added that the task force had seven
homicides that they were investigating and that there might be
more, the implication being that there were probably more bodies
out there somewhere. Sherry acknowledged that she knew what Estes
had implied and, as luck would have it, she agreed to talk with
Estes and Deputy District Attorney Andy Eglitis. Sherry made
arrangements to meet them at the home of one of her friends in
Canby.

Appearing somewhat withdrawn and hesitant,
Sherry told Estes and Eglitis that she had found a bag containing
jewelry inside Dayton's pickup about two weeks prior to his August
7 arrest. The jewelry, she said, did not belong to her.

Earlier in the day, she said, a Sunday
afternoon in late July, she and Dayton had gone to Costco Wholesale
to make some purchases. Dayton bought supplies for his business,
while Sherry made some purchases for their home. She didn't recall
precisely what they had done after leaving Costco, but she said she
thought they had gone out to dinner. At any rate, it was dark when
they arrived home and both of them were tired. Dayton felt so tired
that he went directly into the house.

Under normal circumstances, Sherry said, she
had nothing to do with Dayton's truck. But on that occasion, she
said, she had loaded Dayton's business supplies from her car, a
Honda, into his pickup. However, suspecting for some time that
Dayton had been going out on her, she decided to take the
opportunity to snoop.

There were two paper bags on the floor inside
the pickup, she said. One contained machine parts. The other, which
she described as a very small brown paper bag, contained various
items of jewelry. Using a flashlight, she also looked inside the
glove compartment and found two small containers of liquor, both
full. Not being a drinker herself, she couldn't recall what kind of
liquor was in them.

While she was in the process of going through
the pickup, Dayton looked outside. She said it made her feel
somewhat sheepish, but she decided to take the small bag of jewelry
inside the mobile home with her. She went directly into the
bathroom, where she dumped the jewelry out onto the counter. There
were two silver chains that appeared to be broken, and a ring that
may have had a turquoise stone set in it. There was also a silver
cigarette lighter. There were other items as well, but they were
all wadded together and she said it was doubtful that she would be
able to identify any of it if she saw it again.

She had not had much time to examine the
jewelry because Dayton walked into the bathroom while she had it
out on the counter. As she returned the pieces to the bag, she
asked Dayton where he had obtained the jewelry. He told her that he
had found it in the trash, and left it at that. He took it away
from her, and she never saw it again.

"Do either of you smoke?" asked Estes.

"No, neither of us does."

"Have you ever noticed any of your pantyhose
missing?" Estes was thinking about all of the pairs of knotted
pantyhose found in the Molalla forest.

"I wouldn't know. I have a drawer full."

Sherry explained that when she got runs in
her stockings, she always threw them in a drawer so she could save
them to wear under slacks at a later time. She had so many pairs,
she said, it would be difficult to know if any were missing.

"When you would do the laundry, did you ever
notice anything suspicious, such as blood, on Dayton's
clothes?"

"No. Never."

"Did you ever own any dogs?"

"Yes. We owned a couple of dogs a few years
ago."

"Did they wear collars?"

"Yes. The last one came with a collar."

Sherry explained that they hadn't kept the
dogs very long. They just didn't fit in with their life-styles.
When asked if she knew what had become of any of the collars, she
said she didn't know.

"Do you know whether or not Dayton is a
drinker?" asked Estes.

Sherry said she thought there might have been
one time before they were married that she suspected him of
drinking. But she had never smelled alcohol on his breath and has
wondered about the reports of his drinking that she'd heard about
after his arrest.

As for being out late, Sherry said that
Dayton often would say that he was working at the shop or had been
with friends. When asked if she knew Tommy Parker, Dayton's gay
lover, she said that she did. She said she knew that Dayton visited
him, but she did not believe that it was frequently.