Glen E. Rogers could work a bar the way a chef shops a produce stand. He knew just what he was looking for, and he knew how to find it.He liked his women trusting, grateful and obliging. Rogers lived with Jim Bowman's sister, Pearl, several years ago, and Bowman watched Rogers scope outhis quarry when they went to bars in Hamilton, their hometown. He learned how Rogers would pan the room with predatory perception before deciding where to strike up a conversation.
``He would show me different women, which ones were vulnerable and which were not,'' Bowman said. ``He could tell by the way they carried themselves, or the clothes they wore. He didn't want anyone who looked confident.
``If she was drinking alone, that meant she was drowning her sorrows. He was going to be her Romeo and she was going to be willing.''
In 41 days this fall, four women who let Rogers charm and captivate them wound up dead in four states. Warrants for his arrest were issued in all four killings.
In addition, he is wanted for questioning in the 1993 disappearance of a 71-year-old Hamilton man, Mark Peters, who let Rogers share his home.
Rogers was arrested Nov. 13 about 30 miles southeast of Lexington, Ky., after fleeing police at 100 mph in a car belonging to one of the victims.
Women had seen him as Prince Charming. Police had seen him as a valuable informant.
But a Dayton Daily News examination of court and police records in Ohio, Kentucky and California paints another picture: Rogers, 33, 6 feet tall, 190 pounds, has sought and preyed on vulnerable women all his adult life. He has bilked and battered them consistently for at least 13 years, but he never served significant jail time for the beatings and often went unpunished.
His police and court records show dozens of violent offenses starting in 1982.
The only thing that shocked Rogers' sister, Clara Sue Rogers, was that her brother has been linked to the killings.
``I'm sure he would have been capable of hurting his girlfriends because healways beat them up,'' said Rogers' sister, whose friends call her Sue. ``He was a scary person. He scared me. He's threatened to kill me and kill my kids.He ought to be locked up.''
His abusive and obsessive behavior surfaced shortly after he married Deborah Nix on Jan. 2, 1981. He was 18 and she was 16. Rogers would padlock Debi in her room when he went to work, said her father, Clifford Nix. He beat her often. One time he ``kicked her right between the legs with steel-toed boots,'' Nix said, and Debi spent four or five days in a hospital.
A live-in girlfriend, Angel Wagers, filed assault charges against Rogers with Hamilton police five times in 1989 and 1990.
``He is very violent,'' she wrote on one police form. ``I am terrified of him. He has threatened to kill me and my family. I am afraid for my life, especially after the beating he just gave me.'' A court ordered Rogers to moveout.
Unaccepted defeats
Severed relationships were defeats that Rogers didn't accept. He had the letters ``DEBI'' tattooed on the fingers of his right hand after Debi divorcedhim. The word ``Angel'' appeared on a right shoulder after Wagers broke away.
It didn't take much to set Rogers off, his sister said. He knocked his California girlfriend to the ground just 30 days before police say he killed his first victim. Two months before Peters disappeared, Winchester, Ky., police said he punched a 15-year-old boy in the chest so hard that the boy ``was bruised all the way to his heart.''
Rogers' rap sheet includes assault and theft, forgery and breaking and entering, arson and inducing panic. He was an intravenous drug user and a harddrinker. He was rushed to hospitals twice in the past four years after excessive drinking caused seizures. In Winchester 2 1/2 years ago, he called police repeatedly with threats ``to kill someone.'' The cops found him with a bag of marijuana in plain sight.
Police say he stole cars, cash and jewelry from some of the murder victims,and from previous girlfriends. Working as an informant for the Hamilton policein 1991, he helped arrest nearly 45 people who trusted him enough to sell him drugs.
Now he's in custody and suspected in the killings of four women - Sandra Gallagher of Santa Monica, Calif.; Linda Price of Jackson, Miss.; Tina Cribbs of Tampa, Fla.; and Andy Sutton of Bossier City, La. He knew them all and lived with Price and Sutton.
``He always liked to get people to trust him, and then rob them or whatever,'' said Hamilton police Detective Dan Pratt, whose first arrest was of Rogers in 1987. ``Even before, I'd say most of the people he stole from, heknew them. He didn't just randomly go out and commit crimes.''
People talked about Rogers as if he could charm the fins off of a shark. ``He could pick up women in a bar as easy as you and me tying our shoes,'' Bowman said. Vicki Lakes, a Hamilton girlfriend for ``four or five months'' in1989, said Rogers ``made me feel real special, the way he'd caress you or say that special thing.''
Even Nix, his former father-in-law, said, ``Everybody would like him. One minute, he could be the best guy in the world.'' He would beat his wife one day and slap Nix's back with a hearty chuckle the next. ``I don't like even talking about it because it makes me so mad,'' Nix said. Women admired Rogers' pressed shirts, his well-trimmed blond beard and his fancy belt buckles. They loved his eyes and their glistening intensity.
``He didn't look charming or handsome the time I met him,'' said Joan Burkart, the daughter of Mark Peters. ``He looked like a sleazeball.'' He only charmed a certain kind of woman, his sister said. ``They would probably be easy to pick up. Down on their luck, or just lonely. Hard up.''
Hard-luck stories
The four dead women all had hard-luck stories. Three were heavy drinkers, two were unemployed, all were unlucky in love. Floridian Cribbs even asked hermother: ``When will it ever be my turn to be happy?''
They were not women with careers and crowded calendars, or even steady jobsand permanent addresses. Friends described all the victims with such phrases as ``very trusting'' and ``always there for you'' and ``never met a stranger.''
Three of the victims - and most of Rogers' previous girlfriends - had a reddish tint to their hair, just like his mother. Edna Rogers, widowed since Rogers' father died in 1987, lives in Hamilton. She declined to be interviewed.
``The more women cried, the happier he was,'' Bowman said. ``It was a need he had, I guess from being hurt that first time by a woman. I don't know when that was.''
Even people who knew him well knew little about Rogers' childhood or his family. ``It was something I couldn't understand, as much as we BS'd about everything,''said Mark Crouch, who worked and socialized with Rogers at Ohio Taxi in the early '90s. ``Everybody talks about their family.''
Sue Rogers, 47, didn't remember anything remarkable about the family, whichhad five brothers in addition to Sue and Glen. Their father, Claude, worked ata paper company and was mostly quiet. ``Until he drank,'' Sue said. That was often, she said. Claude had a stroke when Glen was about 15, and never fully recovered in the 10 years he stayed alive.
Expelled from school Rogers was expelled from Harding Junior High School in Hamilton on March 2,1978, apparently for truancy, school administrators said. He was a 15-year-oldninth-grader. He made little or no impression on seven former school administrators who were contacted.
Deborah Ann Nix dropped out of school in 1980, also in ninth grade. She hada B in math, a C, a D, an F in civics and two incompletes. She lived in the Cincinnati suburb of Lockland, where school administrators recalled her being absent often.
Rogers married Nix on Jan. 2, 1981, shortly after she gave birth to anotherman's child, whom she named Clinton. ``He visited her in the hospital,'' his sister said, ``and then he adopted that boy.'' Glen and Debi also had a son, Jonathon.
On Debi's 18th birthday, her dad and stepmother brought some T-bone steaks and corn on the cob over to Debi and Glen's place for a barbecue. It was Aug. 6, 1982. When they returned home, her parents got a phone call that Debi was in the hospital.
Rogers had bludgeoned her with his steel-toed boots. ``We never saw him again,'' Clifford Nix said. Debi moved the next year to Houston, where her sons are now in foster care.
She had long since returned to Lockland when she died on March 22, 1994, eightmonths pregnant. She died of complications from diabetes mellitus. The death certificate noted ``cocaine abuse'' as another significant contributing condition.
She filed for divorce May 10, 1983, nine months after Rogers left. She was unemployed, earning $263 a month on public assistance and paying $175 a month in rent.
Five days before that, her lawyer filed an affidavit. It said Rogers ``has threatened to do her great bodily harm, and she reasonably fears he will do great bodily harm unless restrained.''
By then, Rogers was living in Pasadena, Calif. He had gone there right after the birthday beating and an Ohio warrant was out for his arrest. He was using a false birth date. He would spend the rest of his life drifting in and out of Hamilton. As his sister said, he was ``probably on the run.''