Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer

"Tracie screamed, 'please, this wasn't part
of the deal!' Her tormentor seemed to revel in her pain, and his
breathing became faster and heavier as he bit the teenager even
harder. She screamed again. She begged him to stop. But he became
more brutal. There was no stopping him until he had satisfied his
lust for blood."

The 16-year-old was lucky. She at least
survived her encounter with Dayton Leroy Rogers to detail its
horrors. But a long list of other women were not as fortunate.
Their stories had to be painstakingly pieced together by police
from the corpses on the most shocking trail of terror ever left by
a serial killer.

BLOOD LUST:

PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL SEX KILLER

Gary C. King

Accolades for Gary C. King

"Using the most intimate of facts, King draws
readers as far inside the mind of murderers as rational, moral
people can go--the rest of the journey, thank the gods, is beyond
our knowing. King's talent and faithful service does honor to the
dogged truth-seekers who finally bring justice for those whose
lives were stolen." Noreen Ayres, author of the Smokey Brandon
mystery series.

"A page-turner for true crime fans." Vincent
Bugliosi, author of HELTER SKELTER and THE PROSECUTION OF GEORGE W.
BUSH FOR MURDER.

"Gary C. King is one of the best true crime
writers on the scene today." R. Barri Flowers, Author of THE SEX
SLAVE MURDERS.

"You will never want to walk alone again
after reading this book." Dr. Maurice Godwin, Criminal Psychologist
and Author.

“In a serial murder case almost too ghastly
to comprehend, skilled true crime researcher (and writer) Gary C.
King leads the reader deep into a world of unimaginable depravity,
to meet a savage killer unlike any before him, who literally fed on
dozens of helpless young women—whose defiled bodies then
simply…disappeared. This book will jolt you…a page-turner.” Clark
Howard, author of City Blood and Love's Blood.

"Writer Gary C. King knows the dark side of
the Northwest as well as anybody…an unflinching account of one of
the most vicious reigns of terror by one of the sickest psychopaths
in the annals of crime."--
Official Detective

"Effective account of the worst serial killer
in Oregon's history."--
Publishers Weekly

Also by Gary C. King

Driven to Kill

Web of Deceit

Blind Rage

Savage Vengeance

An Early Grave

The Texas 7

Murder in Hollywood

Angels of Death

Love, Lies, and Murder

An Almost Perfect Murder

Butcher

Rage

The Murder of Meredith Kercher

Copyright Gary C. King Enterprises 2011

Cover image copyright Alexey Teterin 2011.
Used under license from Shutterstock.com.

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Books written by Gary C. King can be obtained
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For my mother and father

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following people
for their support and assistance during the writing of this book:
Teresita U. King, my more than significant "other"; Michaela
Hamilton, my editor, and all those involved at NAL/Dutton; Peter
Miller, my agent; Sheriff Bill Brooks, John Turner, Mike Machado,
W. Risley Bradshaw, John Gilliland, Lynda Estes, Jim Strovink, and
everyone else at the Clackamas County Sheriff's Department, without
question the finest law enforcement agency in Oregon; Rose
Mandelsberg-Weiss at
True Detective
magazine; the courage of
Michael Fielding to come forward with his information and
identification of Jenny Smith's killer; the courageous and valiant
efforts of Richard Bergio, James Dahlke, Stan Conner, Charles
Gates, Kurt Thielke, and Mike Travis; all of the surviving victims
who had the strength and courage to face the juries and painfully
recount the violence that was inflicted upon them; Don Moody, my
friend and my brother, for his inspiration and encouragement; and
reporter Ray Pitz, for freely sharing his clips and notes. Last,
but definitely not least, a very special thank-you to Kirsten and
Sarah for their continuing love, patience, and understanding for
their father, who regrets not always having enough time for the
"required" hugs and kisses.

Author's Note

This is a complex story of torture,
mutilation, and serial murder, based on hundreds of hours of
research of police files, trial accounts, psychological reports,
and dozens of interviews. The story is presented in the order that
it unfolded during the investigation for purposes of clarity and, I
hope, to enable the reader to visualize it from the investigators'
perspective.

Every incident presented herein is true, and
none of the characters portrayed are fictional or are composites
from my imagination. Although I have elected to change the names of
several people to spare them further embarrassment and shame,
particularly the survivors of sexual violence and torture as well
as those who had no direct connection to the crimes, I have made no
fabrications; the dramatizations stand on their own. Everything
presented here is as historically accurate as possible. An asterisk
(*) appears after a fictitious name at the time of its first
occurrence.

G.C.K.

Murder most foul, as in the

best it is;

But this most foul, strange

and unnatural.

William Shakespeare,

Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5

Whoso sheddeth man's

blood, by man shall his blood

be shed.

Genesis, IX, 6

Preface

As a detective story writer of the true-crime
genre, it was inevitable that the strange serial murder case of
Dayton Leroy Rogers, also known as the Molalla Forest Killer, would
come to my attention. Such cases always do, but unless the
investigative work is particularly fascinating or the crimes are
inherently interesting, they don't always get written. But the
Rogers case grabbed my interest from the probe's outset in August
1987, in part because of the lurid nature of his crimes but more so
because of my seemingly never-ending preoccupation with trying to
understand what creates such people or otherwise causes them to do
what they do. Studying a cold and calculating psychopathic sex
murderer, a man addicted to power and control over others, can be
unsettling at times, often disgusting, even frightening, but never
dull.

Not surprisingly the Rogers homicide probe,
which came to a head in midsummer 1987, would be remembered as the
worst serial murder case in Oregon's history. Before then,
residents and law officers alike had never even realized that a
sadistic serial killer had been operating in their midst. Rogers
had been slick, as such killers often are, at literally plucking
women off Portland's streets, some never to be seen again alive. By
the time the authorities had Rogers in custody, the killer had
claimed the lives of at least eight young women, all
prostitutes.

Unlike those of many serial killers, Rogers'
crimes were not committed over a large geographical area, with
bodies scattered here and there. If they had been, and if corpses
had begun to turn up one by one, police agencies would at the very
least have been aware that a serial killer was at work and they
could have duly enlightened the public.

They could have warned people to be on the
lookout for certain characteristics, such as the killer's method of
operation, the type of vehicles he was believed to have been
driving, and, if authorities were lucky enough to have found one or
more eyewitnesses, a physical description. The police could have
taken steps that, ideally, would have eventually led to the
killer's identification and apprehension, preferably before rather
than after he'd chalked up such a large number of victims. But
before they could have even hoped of doing anything about it, the
police needed evidence that the crimes were being
committed
.
They needed to know that women were disappearing and being
murdered. Naturally, the lawmen who would eventually work this case
were just as shocked as the general public when the bodies did, in
fact, turn up, quite by accident.

Every good cop knows that identifying a
serial killer, much less catching one, is a monumental task even
under the best of circumstances simply because of the nature by
which such killers operate. In most "routine" homicides,
investigators often have a suspect to scrutinize right away, even
before the body has become cold. In those cases the suspect is
someone related to the victim, a business associate, or someone
that the victim perhaps knew, even if only remotely, under other
circumstances. There is, in those instances, at least some kind of
a connection between the suspect and the victim, even if it is
veiled or unknown at the probe's outset.

In true serial murder cases such as this one,
investigators have no such luxury. The typical serial killer is
shrewd, clever, and never chooses anyone that he knows well or is
close to as his victim. Instead, he "trolls" until he finds the
perfect stranger, quite often teenage runaway girls and
prostitutes, anyone who cannot be easily connected to him. When his
carnage is finally discovered, all he has left the police to work
with are dead bodies and mounting frustration.

He frequently disposes of his victims' bodies
at secluded locations, places where he can return to again and
again, if not to dump new corpses, then to savor the "trophies" or
souvenirs of his earlier kills. He often follows news accounts of
his crimes, which unintentionally aid him in staying one or more
steps ahead of the law. That way he knows when a body has been
found and what additional evidence, if any, has been discovered,
and whether or not he needed to alter his method of operation or
flee to another locale where he is not yet known.

This wasn't the first time that the state of
Oregon had been plagued by the savage, feral acts of such a killer,
many of whom have characteristically trolled city streets, shopping
malls, and even country roads to find their usually unsuspecting
victims. But by the time the investigators wrapped up the case they
found themselves hoping—futilely, they knew—that it would be the
last of its type, at least in their jurisdiction.

In the late 1960s, Oregon lawmen had to
contend with the carnage of Jerome Henry Brudos. Brudos, a
brilliant electrician, married man, and father of two, liked to
kidnap and hold young women captive in his garage workshop. He
would dress them in his specially selected lingerie and photograph
the terrified females for his very private collection. Afterward he
would torture his victims for hours on end before strangling them
with his powerful hands, then would chop off body parts, which he
kept for souvenirs. A sadistic devil if ever there was, Brudos had
been the record holder in Oregon for the number of slayings
attributed to a single killer, until Dayton Leroy Rogers came
along.

The Pacific Northwest in general, with its
vast, dense forests and mountainous terrain, seems to be the
perfect backdrop for killers such as Rogers. It provides ample
out-of-the-way dumping grounds and the right climate and
atmospheric conditions for rapid decomposition of a victim's body.
Under such conditions a victim's remains can lay undiscovered for
months, even years, while the killer continues his unsavory deeds
virtually unnoticed, with little or nothing to connect him to his
crimes.