On his wife's 18th birthday, Glen E. Rogers hosted a party for the petite, girlish-looking woman with reddish-brown hair that hung over her tiny shoulders.Relatives remember Rogers and his wife, Deborah, getting along fine, but less than an hour after the party, Deborah was in a hospital, where she remained for days.
``He kicked her right between the legs with steel-toed boots,'' said Clifford Nix, Deborah's father. ``When he did, her insides almost fell out.''
Between the Aug. 6, 1982, attack and his Nov. 13 arrest in connection with the deaths of women in four states, Rogers was arrested or indicted at least 10 times on felony charges and 15 more times on misdemeanor charges. He was accused in criminal and civil courts 11 times of assaulting women.
But only one of those felony complaints resulted in a prison stay, for lessthan 10 months. Only one of the 11 alleged assaults on women resulted in a jail sentence, for two days in California.
An examination by the Dayton Daily News found that Rogers spent much of hisadult life avoiding prosecution or jail, despite having serious criminal charges lodged against him regularly.
Law enforcement officials blame crowded court dockets, overworked police and the fact that Rogers - though he committed a number of crimes - did not commit enough serious felonies to guarantee him a long prison stay.
Others think Rogers avoided jail because he worked as an informant for Hamilton police, helping set up as many as 40 undercover drug buys by vice officers.
``You know why they let him off,'' said Robert Leon Johnson, who served 10 months in an Ohio prison after selling Rogers and a female undercover officer crack cocaine in 1991.
Detective Dan Pratt, spokesman for the Hamilton Police Department, said he could not discuss the work of informants. He did say, however, police do not ask prosecutors to dismiss criminal charges for informants.
The newspaper found that Rogers moved from state to state as his criminal cases were processed. When he did show up for court, jail sentences were either not imposed or suspended, despite his criminal record. In some cases, fines were ``written off' or charges were dismissed or reduced.
Between 1982 and 1992, Rogers was arrested or charged at least 18 times with crimes, six of those felony cases, but his only prison sentence was for 18 months on a breaking and entering conviction in 1987. After nine months, Rogers was out of prison and arrested for violating his parole, a felony.
From as early as January 1991 until August of that year, Rogers worked as adrug informant for Hamilton police, the newspaper's examination found. Rogers and one of his girlfriends convinced their friends to sell drugs to police undercover officers, one a female officer on loan from a Cincinnati-area police departent.
Rogers was spotted in bars with the undercover officer, often introducing her to his friends.
``He said it was his wife,'' said Johnson, who sold crack to the undercoverofficer on Aug. 28, 1991.
On Dec. 2, 1991, a Butler County grand jury returned drug indictments on Johnson and 44 others, most of them people Rogers and his girlfriend helped police set up. Several, like Johnson, were friends of Rogers and his girlfriend.
Robert Timler said he used to buy groceries for Rogers' girlfriend and her family. In 1991, Timler said, he sold prescription medication to Rogers' girlfriend and a woman she brought with her.
``She bought two or three pills from me,'' Timler said. ``I think it was a dollar or two dollars apiece. It wasn't much. In fact, I was giving them away at first. I didn't know you could get money for them.''
Received beatings
Several former drug defendants said Rogers was beaten several times for helping police arrest his friends, and police recorded at least two beatings on Rogers. A source, who asked not to be identified, said Rogers sometimes called police to bars, where angry patrons threatened to beat him for being a police informant.On July 1, 1993, a 22-year-old former girlfriend of Rogers' reported to Butler County sheriff's deputies that someone pried her screen door open and took $820 in cash and the keys to a 1979 Capri. Four days later, Winchester, Ky., police spotted the car outside a local motel where Rogers was staying.
Rogers was arrested on a charge of receiving stolen property, a felony. On Aug. 4, a Clark County, Ky., judge dismissed the case.
``We probably had nobody there to establish anything about the vehicle,'' said Assistant Attorney William Pumphrey, who prosecuted the case. ``Otherwise, we wouldn't have dismissed.''
Asked why the case was not postponed until more evidence could be gathered,he said: ``If you'd asked me that question two years ago, I could have answered it. Today, I can't.''
The case was one of four lodged against Rogers in Clark County, Ky., between March 8 and Aug. 9, 1993, as Winchester police arrested Rogers four times.
In one of the other cases, officers went to Rogers' apartment after he called police stating he was ``going to kill someone.'' Rogers was charged with possession of marijuana, but he never showed up for court. After officersarrested him four months later, he pled guilty and got 30 days in jail.
Punched a boy
In another case, Rogers was charged with felony assault after he punched a 15-year-old boy in his chest so hard that a hospital X-ray machine found bruises ``all the way to his heart,'' court records show. Rogers pled to misdemeanor assault, serving a 30-day sentence, but he never paid the $702 restitution to the victim.An arrest warrant was issued to force Rogers to pay the money, but that warrant wasn't served until more than two years later, after he was arrested in connection with the killings in November.
Two of the felony cases against Rogers in Kentucky, and four other felony cases in Hamilton, do not appear on Rogers' FBI record, which is used by law enforcement officers to help identify suspects and by courts nationwide to identify repeat offenders.
Law enforcement agencies are supposed to report felony arrests to the FBI, which makes the information available to other law enforcement agencies nationwide.
Many agencies even report misdemeanor arrests. The Fairfield, Ohio, Police Department, for example, reported a 1982 misdemeanor theft and trespassing arrest on Rogers to the FBI.
But four felony arrests by Hamilton police did not appear on Rogers' FBI record: two for receiving stolen property and forgery in 1987, one for parole violation in 1988, and one for attempted arson in 1991.
After checking records, Hamilton police spokeswoman Sherry Marcum acknowledged that the department failed to provide the FBI with Rogers' felonyarrest records. She noted that the department was under a different administration at the time and that policies on sharing information with the FBI have changed.
``He was not fingerprinted in 1987 and 1991, and I don't know why,'' she said.