Jury Recommends Death for Rogers

TAMPA — By a unanimous 12-0 vote, a jury recommended Friday that Glen Rogers be sentenced to die in Florida’s electric chair for the stabbing death of a hotel maid, one of four red-haired women he is accused of killing, including one found strangled in Van Nuys.

Rogers, a 34-year-old drifter and sometime carnival hand, was found guilty earlier this week of plunging a knife into the chest and buttocks of Tina Marie Cribbs, whom he met in a Florida bar, twisting it cruelly and leaving her to die in his motel room.

“The hands that twisted that knife are the hands of evil,” prosector Karen Cox said in urging jurors to recommend that Rogers be executed.

State Circuit Judge Diana M. Allen scheduled formal sentencing for June 20. Under Florida law, those convicted of first-degree murder can be sentenced only to death or life in prison without parole. The law specifies that the judge is to be guided by the jurors’ recommendation, but Allen can opt for the lesser penalty at her discretion.

In California, Rogers is charged with killing Sandra Gallagher, 34, a Santa Monica barmaid who was celebrating a state lottery win in a Van Nuys bar when she offered to give Rogers a ride home in September 1995. Her body was found in her burning truck, several blocks from the bar.

Rogers also faces murder charges in the stabbing deaths of two women in Bossier City, La., and Jackson, Miss. In addition, he is a suspect in the 1993 slaying of an elderly Kentucky man with whom he shared a house.

Before beginning deliberations on the penalty phase of the trial Friday morning, jurors Thursday heard from Claude Rogers Jr., a Palm Springs real estate agent and the defendant’s brother. He described their family upbringing in Hamilton, Ohio, as devoid of love and filled with anger and alcoholism.

One of Rogers’ court-appointed attorneys, Bob Fraser, asked jurors to keep in mind that his client had mental problems, was an alcoholic and came from a hardscrabble background. “The only thing surprising is that it took this long to get here,” Fraser said.

Mary Dicke, Cribbs’ mother, also addressed the jury Thursday, describing her daughter as a good mother to her two sons, kind-hearted, and “my buddy, my friend.”

“It has totally destroyed my life,” Dicke said of her daughter’s slaying. “She was all I had. I had lost my husband just before this happened to Tina Marie.”

Dicke, 55, tends bar at Showtown USA, the lounge where Rogers met her daughter.

Rogers, through his attorneys, did not deny taking Cribbs to his motel room. But he contended she was alive when he stole her car and fled.

Six days after Cribbs’ body was found, Rogers was arrested in Kentucky after a wild, televised police chase in which he threw a beer can at a pursuing officer.

While jailed in Tampa during the past year, Rogers several times called newspaper and television reporters to protest his innocence. “I’m completely innocent,” he told the Cincinnati Enquirer last month when asked about the slain women and the murder charges he faced. “Let’s just say I never believed in coincidence until this happened.”