Dayton Leroy Rogers 3746005
Oregon State Prison
2605 State Street
Salem, OR 97310-0505
Dayton and I exchanged letters for a while then he wanted me to join him in a sports betting adventure. He was going to pick all the teams we were to bet on for that week… I decided not to do it but I bet he’d do it with you.
Dayton Leroy Rogers was born in Idaho in 1954. His family eventually ended up in Oregon where Rogers would one day join the long list of West Caost Serial Slayers. His first serious offense occurred at the age of eighteen when he stabbed his fifteen-year-old girlfriend in the stomach, but escaped with only a lengthy probation sentence. A year later Rogers was confined to a mental facility for a sexual assault on two teen girls. He was also found innocent of a 1976 rape before being finally sent to prison for five years after the knifepoint rape of a young woman.
Rogers served seventeen months initially and another ten soon after his release for parole violations, but his criminal life was not slowed down. In August of 1987 several witnesses fingered him in the murder of Jennifer Smith. Rogers was seen crouched over the prostitute in an Oak Grove, Oregon, parking lot. A brave citizen followed Rogers and took down his license plate number as the apparent killer fled the scene in his truck. Police arrsted Rogers at this engine repair business early the following morning.
In the meantime the bodies of seven women were discovered in a wooded area near Mololla. One has remained unidentified (thus Rogers has never been charged with her murder) but the other six were Lisa Mock, 23, Maureen Hodges, 26, Christine Adams, 35, Nondace Cervantes, 26, Reatha Gyles, 16, and Cynthia Devore, 21. Only one did not have links to prostitution or drugs. Rogers was not a suspect until an evidence search of the dump site revealed that the ground was littered with small individual containers of orange juice and miniature vodka bottles that Rogers was almost never without.
In his trial for the murder of Smith, Rogers pleaded not guilty but was sentenced to life in prison. He had claimed self-defense, claiming Smith had held a knife to his throat prior to his killing her. At his subsequent trial for the slayings of the six known Mololla victims he was found guilty and sentenced to death and now sits on Oregon’s death row. At his two trials several surviving victims testified to Rogers’ taste for bondage and torture, facts corroborated by the injuries inflicted on the murderered women, some of whom had their feet cut off, possible while still alive.