Suspected Serial Killer Caught in Kentucky : Crime: Man sought in Van Nuys case is captured driving a victim's car.

By HENRY CHU and NICHOLAS RICCARDI

Nov. 14, 1995 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

RICHMOND, Ky. — Alleged serial killer Glen Edward Rogers was captured about 120 miles from his hometown Monday after leading police on a high-speed chase in a car that belonged to a Florida woman believed to be the third victim in a cross-country killing rampage that began in Van Nuys seven weeks ago.

Rogers--the subject of a nationwide manhunt--was seen on Kentucky 52, just east of Richmond, about 2:30 p.m. local time by state Police Detective Robert Stephens, who was carrying a photo of the fugitive in his car. Kentucky state troopers had received an anonymous call from a woman saying the 33-year-old blond laborer had just left her house, authorities said.

“I pulled up beside him and was able to get a look at him,” Stephens said. “I knew it was him.”

Rogers took a long drink of beer, threw the empty can at the police cruiser and sped off, Stephens said. He reached 100 m.p.h. in the victim’s car, at one point driving between two other patrol cars that were serving as a roadblock, Stephens said.

After a 15-mile chase, Rogers was run off the road and quickly taken into custody--smelling of alcohol and looking dazed. A single shot was fired during the pursuit, but no one was injured.

Rogers denied to a TV reporter at the scene that he had killed anyone. He has been linked to four recent murders of women in California, Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana.

“One-on-one talk to me, in person, alone,” Rogers told the reporter as he was put into a patrol car. He is being held in Richmond and “is cooperating to some degree,” State Police Capt. Charles Bowman said.

Detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department said they would send investigators as early as today to question Rogers in connection with a Sept. 29 killing in Van Nuys.

Authorities believe he may be responsible for still more deaths, because he once bragged that the Van Nuys slaying was his eighth, according to Los Angeles police.

Los Angeles prosecutors took the first step Monday toward bringing him back to California to face murder charges.

“We filed notice of extradition today,” L.A. County district attorney’s spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons said Monday. “It ultimately will be the decision of a judge in Kentucky where to send him.”

In his hometown of Hamilton, Ohio, Rogers is wanted for questioning in the 1993 death of his 72-year-old roommate, whose body was found last year in an abandoned cabin that Rogers’ family owns in nearby Beattyville, Ky.

The house where Rogers stopped Monday is across the highway from the cabin where the body of his housemate, Mark Peters, was found. Authorities were alerted to Rogers’ whereabouts from the house by a cousin.

In California, Rogers is a suspect in four unsolved killings in Ontario and Port Hueneme, where the victims were either strangled or stabbed, set on fire or left in bathtubs.

“A dangerous person is off the street,” said Detective Dan Pratt of the Hamilton Police Department in Rogers’ hometown, where he may have been heading when he was caught.

LAPD Detective Stephen Fisk predicted that even more slayings will be linked to Rogers.

“I think this man’s been doing this for a long time,” Fisk said Monday, after the arrest. As news of the arrest spread, friends and relatives of Rogers’ alleged victims reacted with joy and relief.

“I hope they do to him a whole lot worse than he did to her,” said Billy Morton, who manages the bar in Bossier City, La., where slaying victim Andy Jiles Sutton met Rogers.

In Florida, Jeannie Fuller, who worked with slaying victim Tina Marie Cribbs as a hotel maid, said she hopes the legal system deals harshly with Rogers.

After a funeral Sunday, she and other friends of Cribbs carried the woman’s ashes to Showtown USA, the Gibsonton bar where she met Rogers. They put the urn on a table, she said, and ordered a round.

The arrest was a great relief to Rein Keener, a 24-year-old bartender at McRed’s Cocktail Lounge in Van Nuys who fended off Rogers’ advances and then watched him leave with slaying victim Sandra Gallagher. Gallagher was found strangled and set on fire not far from Rogers’ apartment.

“I started crying,” said Keener, who has been under police protection since a man she said sounded like Rogers phoned her at work last week and warned: “You will pay.”

On Monday, as the chase and arrest videotaped by a local TV station were aired nationally, Keener posted a handwritten sign on McRed’s front door: “Thanks to the police. Serial killer caught. 11/13/95 12:20 p.m., Kentucky.”

The bar’s owner quickly added his own headline: “Glen Rogers caught. Ladies 1/2 price on all drinks.”

Rogers became the subject of an intense national search last week and was in the process of being named to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list after police in Bossier City linked him to the slaying of Sutton, whose body was discovered naked and stabbed in the apartment they briefly shared. By that time, Rogers also had been linked to the slaying of Linda Price, whose body was discovered in Jackson, Miss., on Nov. 3, as well as Cribbs’ death outside Tampa, Fla., days later.

The case was aired Saturday night on the TV program “America’s Most Wanted,” drawing 400 phone calls--an unusually high number, according to the program’s publicist.

Ivey Van Allen noted that a high concentration of tips to the show--more than a dozen--came from Kentucky, so she was not surprised that Rogers was arrested there.

Rogers was caught near the once-bustling industrial city of Hamilton, Ohio, where he grew up. He was one of six children born to Edna and Claude Rogers, a pump operator at the local Champion paper company who has since died. The family lived on what residents consider the wrong side of town, with some acquaintances describing the clan as of “Hamiltuckian stock.”

Rogers reportedly had a unremarkable childhood, but as a teen-ager he was known as a troublemaker with a hair-trigger temper. By the time he was 16, he was expelled from Wilson Junior High School. Within months of his expulsion, Rogers’ childhood sweetheart, Deborah Ann Nix, became pregnant. The teen-agers married and moved to Southern California, where he got a job at the Highland Press printing company in Pasadena.

But she divorced him in 1983, becoming the first of several women to accuse him of physical abuse. Rogers began to crumble, according to friends, and returned to Hamilton in 1986 or 1987. There, he became ensconced in a pattern that would mark his adult life: holding menial jobs and racking up a criminal record that includes public drunkenness, theft, assault and arson.

Rogers also began burnishing a reputation for his skill at picking up women in bars, using his blond good looks and free-spending charm.

A talent for preying on physically or emotionally vulnerable women came to serve him well as a killer, according to police, who say Rogers pursued the four recent slaying victims in local bars and at a state fair before strangling or stabbing them.

He left Ohio again in 1993, the same year that Peters, his housemate, disappeared. At the time, friends and acquaintances thought little of Rogers’ departure because he often left Hamilton for weeks or even months at a time, always returning but never saying much about what he had done.

But then in January, 1994, Peters’ badly decomposed body was found bound and hidden in the nearby Kentucky cabin owned by Rogers’ family. Rogers was sought for questioning but had already returned to Los Angeles.

He lived in Hollywood and Van Nuys. He was accused of routinely beating a girlfriend and of setting her clothes on fire during one fight, but was never convicted because she refused to testify against him. The woman was so frightened of Rogers, according to friends and relatives, that she fled to her native Hungary in late summer, returning this fall to learn he was wanted for murder.

While she was gone, authorities allege, Rogers began the string of slayings that led to his arrest, beginning with Gallagher. The Santa Monica resident had been out for drinks celebrating a win at keno and apparently gave Rogers a ride home.

“To me,” said Steve Gallagher, her husband, “there is no retribution great enough that would be justice for what he’s done.”

Times staff writers Leslie Berger, Aaron Curtiss, Efrain Hernandez Jr., Jill Leovy, Ann W. O’Neill, Frank B. Williams and special correspondent Mike Clary contributed to this story. Chu reported from Richmond, Ky., and Clary reported from Miami.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

End of the Trail

Glen Rogers, 33, was captured Monday after a high-speed chase by police in Kentucky. A nationwide search began last week after authorities said he was connected with at least five killings in several states.

THE VICTIMS

1) Mark Peters, 71.

* Body Found: In Lee County, Ky., in January of 1994.

* Cause of Death: Undetermined.

****

2) Sandra Gallagher, 31.

* Body Found: In her burning pickup truck early Sept. 30, 1995, near Rogers’ Van Nuys apartment building.

* Cause of Death: Strangulation.

****

3) Linda Price, 34.

* Body Found: In the bathtub of her apartment Friday in Jackson, Miss.

* Cause of Death: Slit throat.