The Devil's Dozen (25 page)

Lieutenant Kuehn had promised Mulcahy’s widow that he would stay on the case until he found the killer, and during the late 1990s, she inquired into their progress. Although Kuehn had nothing to offer, he decided to reexamine the bags. The cold-case squad used cyanoacrylate fuming once more, and while they were able to obtain prints that were scannable for AFIS, they had no hits on a suspect.

Then, in November 2000, Kuehn learned about a fingerprint-lifting technique called vacuum metal deposition (VMD), which involved an expensive high-tech machine and was supposedly superior to Super Glue fuming for obtaining prints from plastic bags. He contacted scientists in Toronto, where this process was available, and they agreed to subject the bags from the body parts to the VMD analysis. However, they had to work on their own time, so it would not be a quick turnaround.

With VMD, an exhibit is placed inside the chamber of a machine, and four to five milligrams of gold and several grams of zinc are loaded into evaporation containers beneath it. Pumps are activated that reduce pressure and a low-voltage current evaporates the gold, leaving a minute deposit over the exhibit. The gold apparently absorbs into the fingerprint residue. In a separate dish, the zinc is then subjected to a similar method, heated and vaporized, and then deposited onto the exhibit. It adheres to the gold (but does not penetrate) to produce an image of the fingerprint valleys that lie between the ridges. This makes the print visible in sharp relief for photography.

Although this method had only recently been applied to latent-fingerprint analysis, it had been in use since 1976 for other purposes. It was most effectively used for prints on plastic and glass but had also worked on cloth and currency. Reportedly, VMD develops more fingerprints than any method of Super Glue fuming or other reagents. It can develop prints on more types of articles than other methods, including on leather surfaces, synthetic clothing, and polyethylene garbage bags. However, one issue that a defense attorney could raise is that, to get the best results, significant experience is required on the part of the examiner.

The New Jersey investigators sent the plastic gloves found with Mulcahy’s body and more than three dozen bags from the body parts of all four victims for analysis. It took six months, but finally the scientists were able to lift thirty-five fingerprints and a few palm prints from four bags that were of sufficient quality for identification. This supported what the New Jersey investigators had found with their most recent go at Super Glue fuming.

Lieutenant Kuehn sent packets with the prints and case details to all fifty states and Puerto Rico, to be run through all state-based AFIS systems. This time, he received the call he was waiting for. The prints were a match to a man in the system in Maine, Richard Rogers. His name had not popped up before, although his prints had been on file for three decades, because Maine had not been online with AFIS until 2001.

But Kuehn had encountered this name before: Rogers was a fifty-year-old registered nurse from Staten Island who had worked for the past twenty years at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. Kuehn had shown his photo, along with those of other male nurses, to Lisa Hall. He had certainly been in the area during the times of these crimes and it remained to be seen whether he had alibis. In addition, in 1988, he had been arrested for unlawfully imprisoning a man who had visited him, but was acquitted.

More interesting, Rogers had a checkered history. In 1973, he had used a hammer to bludgeon a housemate, Frederick Spencer, killing him. He then wrapped the body in a plastic tent and dumped it on the side of a road. When charged with manslaughter, he claimed he had attacked Spencer in self-defense and he was acquitted. While he had not dismembered this man, he’d wrapped him in plastic and dumped him along the road. It’s often the case that serial killers who have been linked to a victim but not convicted take pains to avoid future arrests. Cutting up a body to dump in the trash was less risky than dumping it whole.

It turned out, after checking records and talking with his colleagues, that Nurse Richard Rogers had no alibis for the times of the murders. In fact, he’d been seen with Michael Sakara just before he vanished. The D.A.’s office in New Jersey believed they had enough to bring him in, so on May 27, 2001, Rogers was arrested and charged with the 1992 murders of Thomas Mulcahy and Anthony Marrero. When confronted, he neither admitted nor denied his guilt, but instead nodded and passed gas.

Rogers resisted extradition to New Jersey. To get him there, the authorities had to prove that the incident considered a crime in that state was likewise considered a crime in New York, that the man in the warrant was the man detained in New York, and that the suspect had been in New Jersey. The crime was murder and they had his fingerprints, so the legal issues were easily resolved. He was brought to Ocean County.

A dozen detectives from New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania searched Rogers’s condominium for evidence that the murders had been committed there, but found no blood or cutting instruments. They did turn up a bottle of Versed, often used as a date-rape drug; rug fibers consistent with those found on Mulcahy’s body; a Bible with earmarked pages in the Book of Kings, in which passages that mentioned decapitation and dismemberment had been highlighted; videotapes of horror films, including
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre;
and photos of shirtless men on which wounds had been drawn with red ink. They also found plastic bags similar to those in which body parts had been wrapped, as well as a New Jersey road map. The bags were an Acme brand, and there was an Acme store in the same mall on Staten Island where the gloves had been purchased. Despite failing to turn up the proverbial smoking gun, this was a lot of good circumstantial evidence.

The D.A.’s office announced what they had against Rogers: eighteen of his fingerprints on bags that wrapped the remains of Peter S. Anderson; sixteen on the bags wrapping Thomas Mulcahy; and two fingerprints and a palm print on a bag wrapping parts of Anthony Marrero. Rogers had been seen in the company of Michael Sakara, the
New York Law Journal
typesetter, and they had a witness for that. In addition, there was potentially a fifth victim linked to Rogers—or sixth, if one counted Spencer. Matthew Pierro, twenty-one, who was last seen in 1982 leaving a gay bar in Orlando, Florida, had been found murdered off Interstate 4 in Lake Mary. While he was not dismembered, he’d been stabbed multiple times, a nipple bitten off, and an odontologist indicated that another bite mark on his body could be a match to Rogers’s teeth. Rogers had been in Florida at the time for a class reunion.

On January 21, 2003, a New Jersey grand jury indicted Rogers on two counts of murder and two counts of hindering apprehension. He denied involvement and said he was innocent. Prosecutors hoped to bring all five cases into evidence against him, believing that the patterns from one case to the next would be convincing. Failing that, they still had his fingerprints associated with both victims found in New Jersey.

At a hearing in September 2005, Detective Steven Colantonio, from Rockland County, testified before Judge James N. Citta in Toms River, New Jersey, about the similarities between the Sakara murder and the other three. “It was the opinion of the investigators [and] the opinion of the medical examiners,” he said, “that there were such similarities that if you found the person who did one of them, you would find the person who did all three of them...It was as if you were looking at the same case, but they were different.”

Dr. Fred Zugibe, the chief medical examiner of Rockland County at the time, described how the victim had been expertly decapitated by someone familiar with the easiest places to saw through a body. Similar testimony was offered about the Anderson case. In addition, fingerprints from the bag holding Anderson’s parts were a match to the defendant, as were prints on bags from Mulcahy and Marrero.

Deputy Chief Mark Whitfield, a member of the task force from Ocean County, New Jersey, discussed how the body parts had been cleaned up in each of the cases, “as if they were drained so they were not as messy to move.” He also discussed the similarity of victim type, adding that Rogers had frequented both the Five Oaks Bar and the Townhouse, connected to three of the victims. All of the men had been drinking or high when they went missing, and all appeared to have been incapacitated before they disappeared.

Judge Citta found the testimony compelling. He ruled that, based on significant similarity, he would allow accounts about the Anderson and Sakara murders into the double murder trial, which considerably strengthened the collection of evidence against Rogers. However, he thought the fifth case, the murder of John Pierro in Florida, was too far removed in time and place, and too dissimilar. That one would not be allowed.

The trial of Richard W. Rogers got under way on October 26, 2005. During jury selection, Rogers was offered a deal: plead guilty to manslaughter in both cases and receive two thirty-year sentences with the possibility of parole in fifteen years. Also, if he pleaded to third-degree murder in the Anderson case from Pennsylvania, he would receive just ten to twenty years in prison. Rogers indicated that he’d take it under consideration. Trial watchers anxiously waited out the weekend, wondering if he might short-circuit the process and admit to guilt. It wasn’t a bad deal, unless he believed the case against him was weak. No one knew what his attorney, David Ruhnke, told him.

On Monday, it was clear that jury selection would resume; Rogers was not accepting the deal. William Heisler, the assistant prosecutor and chief trial attorney for Ocean County, had teamed up with Hillary Bryce. They told the jury the state could prove its case against Rogers beyond a reasonable doubt. In an interview later, Heisler recalled the experience. “It’s difficult when you have a defendant with no statement. You don’t know what he’s going to come up with. He’s a meek, mild-looking guy, which struck me as kind of strange. But nothing about this case
wasn’t
strange. He’s a smart guy. I don’t know what he would have said. Half the time, these guys make stuff up on the fly and then you have to check it out and disprove it. But what could he say about his fingerprints?”

In his opening address, defense attorney David Ruhnke indicated that Rogers was innocent, and that his fingerprints on these bags indicated only that he had carried something in them at some point in time. In addition, a few prints on the bags were not linked to him, indicating that others had handled them. “Maybe,” he said, “they don’t have the right guy.”

The prosecution opened with accounts from the various witnesses who had discovered the bodies. Then Deputy Chief Mark Whitfield, the lead investigator on the Marrero case, described how he had looked at several suspects just after the dismembered bodies were found, and took their fingerprints, but was unable to make reliable comparisons until 2001. (Describing the situation in Maine was disallowed because it would bring in suggestive details from a case in which Rogers had been acquitted.)

Two fingerprint analysts, Detective Sergeant Jeffrey Scozzafava of the New Jersey State Police and Detective Eugene Thatcher of Ocean County’s Criminalistics Investigation Unit, testified that the sixteen fingerprints on the bags used to wrap victim Thomas Mulcahy and two fingerprints and a palm print from the bags containing the arms and head of Anthony Marrero matched former surgical nurse Richard Rogers. One fingerprint from the Mulcahy bags and a palm print from the Marrero bags remained unidentified. Ruhnke attempted to attack the examiners by noting mistakes made in fingerprint analysis, including those committed by the FBI. He talked about how the FBI had mistakenly identified a U.S. citizen as the person who had planted a bomb on a train in Madrid. Ruhnke also tried to discredit the unusual method of VMD. While it was not the only method used, it had contributed sufficiently to the case to warrant an expert in the courtroom. (Allen Pollard from the Toronto Police Service testified about the process and results.) While the method was not widely used, because of its expense, this was no indication that it was not a viable scientific technique. When Judge Citta limited Ruhnke’s questioning about fingerprint analysis, the lawyer retorted that the jury was “entitled to learn that it is not a perfect system.”

Medical Examiner Lyla Perez then described the wounds she had noted during Mulcahy’s autopsy. After he was stabbed to death, she said, his body had been eviscerated and cut into seven separate parts. She had photographs of the gory remains, but because of their disturbing nature, Ruhnke attempted to limit what the jury would actually view. They reviewed five photos. Mulcahy’s blood alcohol level was high, Perez told them, and there were ligature marks on his wrists that indicated he’d been bound.

The next day, Lieutenant Kuehn described the murder of Michael Sakara. Its relevance lay not just in the way it resembled the two in New Jersey, but that it was the only case in which Rogers had been identified by a witness. This brought in Lisa Hall, the former bartender at the Five Oaks, who stated that on the night Sakara disappeared, July 30, 1993, he had introduced her to Rogers. While he had used a generic name, Hall had identified Rogers from a photo and was able to point him out in the courtroom. She said she had no doubt he was the man she had met.

But there was another issue. Lieutenant Kuehn stated that a rigorous search had produced no evidence that Rogers had killed either man on Staten Island, which would have transferred the case to New York’s jurisdiction. Defense attorney David Ruhnke challenged this, saying that no crime scene had been established in New Jersey, only dump sites, and indicating that Rogers (if he did it) would more likely have committed murder on familiar turf. Lieutenant Kuehn responded that it would have been quite difficult for Rogers to have killed and dismembered the victims in his fifth-floor condo and then carried the bloody bags through the halls without anyone noticing.