Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer (4 page)

"Go ahead and scream if you like," he said
quietly. "Nobody will hear you up here." Her heart pounding against
her rib cage, Tracie remained silent. For the moment.

The man unbuttoned his shirt and slipped his
pants down but did not remove them. The sight of the bound and
hog-tied naked girl brought forth a prompt erection as he moved
across her body, still face down on the seat. Tracie craned her
neck to see what he was doing, but she couldn't turn her head far
enough around. But when he moved into a different position, she
could see that he was well endowed, larger than most men she had
seen. Tracie nervously wondered if she would be able to accommodate
his largeness.

He ran his hands down her back, across her
buttocks, and along the inside of her upwardly extended thighs. He
slowly worked his way over her legs to her feet, showing little
interest in engaging in intercourse. At one point, however, he
lubricated himself with saliva, freed one of her legs, and entered
her forcefully. His largeness and the awkward way that her body was
situated caused her some discomfort, and she cried out. But he
withdrew seconds later and bound her legs together again. He was
clearly fascinated with Tracie's feet, and little else. He seemed
to begin slipping in and out of a fantasy state, and often referred
to Tracie as "Maureen," even though he knew that wasn't her
name.

"Maureen, your toes are so pretty, so sexy,"
he said. "They really turn me on, Maureen."

He forced her to put the bottoms of her feet
together again, her toes pointing upward. After lubricating himself
with Vaseline that he kept in the glove compartment, he held her
feet together with his hands and began pushing his penis between
them, rhythmically pulling himself in and out. This went on for
some time until he apparently became tired or bored. But he wasn't
finished. Far from it.

He began nibbling at "Maureen's" toes, and
for a moment Tracie relaxed a bit and wondered if the woman he kept
talking about was the same Maureen that she knew. As he continued
to nibble, she put the thought out of her mind. It actually felt
kind of good, at first. Being tied up in such a fashion was scary,
but it was possible she could come out unscathed if she just played
along. She pretended, for the moment, that she was enjoying it.

He ran his lips and tongue across her right
foot, and in short gradual motions moved toward the bottom until he
reached the arch, laying silent wet kisses along the path.
Suddenly, without warning, he began gnawing viciously at her tender
arch. As his excitement grew, he put more and more pressure into
each bite. Each time he closed his mouth, he bit harder. Tracie
withstood the pain as long as she could, but it soon became too
much for her to endure.

She screamed in agony. Her tormentor seemed
to revel at her pain, and his breathing became faster and heavier
as he bit the teenager even harder. She screamed again and again,
each time bringing a more severe response from the sadist. The more
she begged him to stop, the more brutal he became. He had worked
himself into a frenzy, and it became clear that there was no
stopping him until he had satisfied his lust for blood.

"Please! This wasn't part of the deal," cried
Tracie. She continued to struggle frantically, and at one point her
hands broke free and she managed to shift her body around. But he
immediately grabbed on to one of her breasts with his mouth and bit
down hard, mumbling that he wasn't going to let go until she
allowed him to tie her hands again. Fearing that she would lose her
nipple, she yielded once again to his command.

His victim again in bondage, the man moved
toward her buttocks, biting and leaving deep impressions everywhere
his mouth touched her body. When he tasted her blood, he moved back
up to her breasts, biting each nipple so ferociously that Tracie
feared he would tear them off with his teeth.

"You know, there's only one way out of this
for you," he shrieked, his voice resounding off the walls of the
cab in a high pitch as he neared the apex of his frenzy.

"Yeah? How's that?" Tracie sobbed.

"Either you let me cut your tits off," he
said, his voice growing higher and more unnatural with each word,
"or I'm going to strangle you."

He opened the glove compartment and took out
a kitchen paring knife. When he closed his hand around the knife
and stared at its brilliance beneath the dome light, it perversely
completed him and made him whole. He was holding it close to her
breasts, and Tracie's whole body tightened as she anticipated the
worst. He gently ran the blade around each nipple, occasionally
breaking the skin. Tracie took a breath, wincing sharply at the
cutting of her flesh. At one point she thought she would faint.

Tracie, horrified at his words and actions,
had had enough. She wasn't about to willingly let him carve her up,
but being bound as she was, she couldn't fend him off. All she
could do was attack him verbally. She knew she had little to lose.
He was probably going to kill her anyway.

"You're not going to cut my tits off, you
sonofabitch! Who the hell do you think you are? I'm not going to
walk around scarred for life because of you. You're going to have
to kill me!" she said, determined that she wasn't simply going to
succumb to this maniac without saying or doing something, anything.
Her bladder full from the vodka and orange juice she drank earlier,
Tracie relieved herself by urinating in the cab of the man's
pickup, as much from fear and discomfort as from revenge. Although
he was aware of what she had done, he didn't seem to care. He made
no attempt to clean up her urine.

"Have it your way," he said, his voice no
longer shrieking but now back to its normal soft tone. "I'm going
to strangle you."

But he didn't. He just sat there, looking
vacant and spent, and feeling defeated. Tracie didn't realize it
yet, but her boldness had taken away the power and control her
captor had held over her, and that had meant everything to him. She
had killed his thrill, and by doing so had saved her own life.

Angry that he had failed to have his way with
Tracie, he took the knife and in one swift move sliced her across
the heel of her left foot. It was a deep cut, and she flinched and
cursed at him again as she felt her own blood trickling down her
foot. As her hope for survival began to fade again, her date did
the unexpected. He undid her bindings and allowed her to dress, and
they drove quietly back to Portland. He stopped near 92nd and
Powell, about ten blocks from where he had picked her up hours
earlier.

Tracie let out a sigh of relief as she
stepped out of the blue pickup and limped in pain down the street,
her shoe full of blood. She watched as he passed by, and considered
calling the police. But she didn't. They would ask a lot of
questions, and she didn't relish the thought of having to relive
her terrible ordeal so soon. She was just grateful to be alive. Not
only that, she had several outstanding warrants for her arrest on a
variety of charges, and after what she had just been through she
didn't want to spend the night in jail. Tracie, and numerous other
women, would not begin telling the police about their terrifying
encounters with the man who called himself Steve for another six
months.

The ordeal had been devastating to the man in
the blue pickup truck as well, but in a different way. Even though
he had felt and tasted the young girl's blood, he had been let
down, disappointed, and was far from being satisfied. Driven by the
sight of blood and the sounds of his victims' cries, he knew, in
the future, that he would have to do things differently, go much
farther to achieve the intense climax, the ultimate fulfillment he
was seeking.

A few days after her horrifying encounter
with the man in the blue pickup truck, Tracie Baxter, now hobbling
around on crutches because of the injuries to her foot, ran into a
friend, Maureen Ann Hodges, twenty-six, a fellow prostitute known
as "Mo" on the streets. It was in the early afternoon when Tracie
met up with her on 82nd Avenue, not far from Bob's Big Boy. Mo was
working, but she told Tracie that she was having a tough time. She
needed a fix fast, but had no money to pay her drug dealer for the
heroin. She already owed him money, and he had put her on a
strictly cash basis until she could clear up her debt to him.

Mo was known around town as a hooker with a
heart of gold, but she was also a heroin addict with an $80-a-day
habit. Described by other street people as a "really mixed-up"
woman, she was far more desperate than Tracie and was known to "do
anything and go anywhere with anyone" if it meant getting money to
buy her drugs. Tracie was sympathetic to her needs and was sorry
that she couldn't help her out with a loan. But she had enough
problems of her own without taking on any additional burdens.

As Tracie limped along with her for a couple
of blocks she told Mo, in between listening to Mo's hard luck
stories, how she had been hog-tied and cut on the foot by a man who
called himself Steve. When Mo heard the man's name and Tracie's
description of his truck, she became visibly alarmed, clearly
unnerved. Without hesitation, she warned Tracie to stay away from
him. Mo had dated him on three or four occasions, and his name
wasn't Steve. It was Dayton Leroy Rogers, and he liked to tie up
his dates. He had a foot fetish, and while he hadn't cut her on her
prior dates with him, he had caused her a great deal of pain,
particularly when he had bitten her feet. She said that he had
never asked her to get undressed for him, that he only wanted to
"screw" her feet.

"He must really have a thing for you,"
offered Tracie. "He kept calling out your name when he was with
me."

"Christ," Maureen said under her breath,
disgusted and even more troubled. "Listen, if he tries to pick you
up again, get the hell away from him. Call the police if you have
to, but don't ever get in that truck with him again." Mo added that
he was strange, and that she was terrified of him. She didn't want
any more to do with him.

As they parted company, Tracie assured her
that she would be careful. When Tracie looked back and waved
goodbye from down the block, Mo had slung the long-strapped dark
blue canvas bag that she always carried with her over her shoulder
and was propositioning the passing motorists from her spot on the
sidewalk. When a car pulled over to the curb, Tracie knew that Mo
would soon have the money she needed to get her through the
night.

Tracie would see Mo infrequently over the
next few months, always on 82nd Avenue. Despite the fact that Mo
had told Tracie that she didn't want anything further to do with
Dayton Leroy Rogers, Mo would go on one more date with him three
and a half months later, out of a desperate need for more of her
drug. Tracie, and a number of other people, would be left wondering
what had become of her. Unknown to Tracie, at least six other women
would mysteriously vanish without a trace between July 8 and August
2, 1987.

Monday, July 13, 1987

Clackamas County Sheriff's Department

Oregon City, Oregon

The first clue to the horror that was
already well under way came to Clackamas County Sheriff's
Department Detective John T. Turner, a tall, distinguished-looking
man of Anglo-Saxon descent, then forty-four, in the form of a
routinely filed crime report. The veteran detective had no way of
knowing it yet, but the evil outrage that was taking its toll on
Portland's streetwalkers would virtually consume his life for much
of the next two years. The report concerned an alleged
second-degree kidnapping that had been reported the week before, on
Tuesday, July 7. It would eventually lead him to the most vicious
and remorseless killer with whom he had ever dealt or would likely
ever face again.

Case number 87-20998 was near the top of the
pile in his in-basket when he settled into his chair at his
workstation that summer morning, a cup of coffee in hand. As he
studied the various reports, unconsciously arranging them according
to seriousness of offense, he lit up a Marlboro Light from the
packet he always kept tucked in his left shirt pocket. Occasionally
rubbing a hand over his closely cropped graying hair, he saw that
there were the usual barroom assault and battery cases from Friday
and Saturday night, a robbery, and a couple of domestic disputes.
As it turned out, case number 87-20998 ended up on top.

Turner carefully began reading about the
incident, originally investigated by Deputy Bill Strosser. He was
oblivious to the steady buzz of his colleagues and the
near-constant ringing of the telephones around him as he studied
the handwritten document with much interest. He had become
accustomed to the noise and frequent interruptions that go with
police work, somehow able to shut out everything but that which
interested him or pertained to a case he was working on.

According to the report the victim, Heather
Brown,* thirty-one, had been picked up by an unknown white male in
Portland at approximately noon on July 7. She had just left her two
young children with a friend and began walking to a nearby 7-Eleven
store to buy cigarettes when a man in a blue pickup stopped and
offered her a ride. She accepted and got inside, and was driven to
a wooded area somewhere near Oregon City and Molalla.

Heather reportedly had told the man that she
only needed to go to the 7-Eleven, located only a few blocks away,
but he said that he needed to go to Oregon City. He said he would
like to have her along for company, and that he would bring her
back later, if she didn't mind. Heather told Deputy Strosser that
she had consented to go with him.

As the man drove south on McLoughlin
Boulevard toward Oregon City, he introduced himself as Steve. He
said that he was from Reno and had been in the Portland area for
about a week. He described himself as a professional gambler.