As he faces death, Hillsborough killer's troubled youth is an untold story

Yahoo

13-05-2025

TAMPA — The state plans to execute Glen Rogers on Thursday evening, almost 30 years after he stabbed to death a 36-year-old mother of two in a Tampa motel bathtub.
Barring a last-minute stay, the execution will affirm what a jury long ago unanimously decided should be Rogers' fate. Yet his lawyers have argued there is much that the jury never heard — enough that if another jury heard it, Rogers might instead receive life in prison.
Courts have repeatedly rejected efforts to reduce the sentence for Rogers. Rulings essentially say his arguments are meritless and should have been made long ago.
As he faces the now imminent prospect of the death penalty, Rogers' lawyers say his story is yet to be fully told.
Well documented is the tale of the blue-eyed charmer known as the Casanova Killer or the Cross-Country Killer, twice convicted of murder and suspected in at least three other deaths across the U.S. Less known is the tale of a damaged young man whose early life experiences in state facilities and as a victim of sexual abuse that put him on a path to murder, his attorneys contend.
'Glen basically is a creature that was built by the state,' said Dan Sikes, the attorney handling Rogers' federal appeals. 'And people wonder why he's accused of doing the things he's accused of doing.'
Glen Edward Rogers was born in 1962, the second-youngest of seven children who grew up in Hamilton, Ohio, a hardscrabble industrial town about 20 miles north of Cincinnati.
His father was described in court records and news accounts as an alcoholic, prone to fits of rage wherein he'd break things in their home and fire a gun outside. When his drinking caused him to lose his job at a paper mill, the family moved into a dilapidated house.
Their mother was described in court as a battered woman who would severely punish the children if they woke their dad from his drunken naps. They were seldom disciplined otherwise, even when they got caught burglarizing houses.
New details surfaced about five years ago, when experts — among them, a former FBI agent — working for Rogers' defense uncovered what were described as repressed memories of horrific sexual abuse he endured. Witnesses were lined up to corroborate.
Court records filed in 2020 include a detailed summary.
When he was 10, Rogers spent 'many nights' with a woman in his hometown who raped him until he was replaced by another boy. He was the same age when he began spending time in a local brothel, known as the 'cathouse.'
One of his older brothers, who is now deceased, took advantage of Rogers by 'pimping him out' to obtain drug money, court records state. The records name two women who raped the boy, but also offered him to men who produced child pornography.
When he was 11, court records state, a man described as a 'notorious child molester' gave Rogers a job sweeping his Hamilton radio store, using it as a 'grooming' opportunity for sexual favors. He gave Rogers gifts and showed up at his house if he missed work, reminding him of his generosity to get him to acquiesce to the abuse.
Rogers was interviewed later as part of a criminal investigation against the man, but denied being molested by him, court records show. He recalled that once, when he and the man were alone on a boat, the man told him he 'could murder him anytime he wanted.' The man pleaded guilty to a sex crime in an unrelated case, records state.
'Mr. Rogers' family and local community failed him,' attorney Ali Shakoor wrote five years ago. 'It is no wonder that he began a life of crime at such a young age and was eventually sentenced to juvenile correctional facilities, where he was further ruined.'
In his early teens, Rogers began using drugs. He ended up in the Training Institution of Central Ohio, a defunct juvenile detention facility. Rogers recalled further sexual abuse there at the hands of male guards. He also was regularly locked in a room, where he was kicked and punched, then held in solitary confinement.
One night, staff awakened Rogers. He was told to go outside and dig a hole. A boy's body was later placed inside it and buried, court records state.
'The state of Ohio failed to protect Mr. Rogers and is partially responsible for him eventually becoming a capital defendant,' Shakoor wrote.
Rogers had worked as a cab driver in his hometown, according to news accounts. He'd also been described as a carnival worker.
Before he turned 30, Rogers had been arrested more than 25 times, news accounts state. The crimes ranged from petty theft to attempted arson to assault.
The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1995 described him as a 'free-spending Goodtime Charlie who wooed women in honky-tonks and taverns.' But the same story, drawing on reports from people who knew Rogers, called him disturbed, angry and a man who could turn mean, especially when he drank.
Police questioned him in 1994 after a man named Mark Peters turned up dead, tied to a chair in a dilapidated cabin in northern Kentucky. Peters, 71, a neighborhood handyman who repaired old clocks and restored antique furniture, had let Rogers stay in his house. Investigators were unable to determine a cause of his death. Soon after, Rogers left town.
He surfaced in Van Nuys, California, near Los Angeles in September 1995. A bartender at McRed's Cocktail Lounge remembered the well-dressed, bearded stranger romancing Sandra Gallagher, a 33-year-old mother of three who was celebrating a $1,250 lottery win. He was seen getting into her truck. The truck was found the next day, burned. Gallagher's body was inside. She'd been strangled.
In early October that year, a woman named Linda Price met Rogers in a beer tent at the Mississippi State Fair. She had two children. She worked in sales and, like Rogers, lived out of hotels. Quoted in news stories from the time, friends said she was lonely and fell immediately for him.
They got an apartment together. She was found there in early November, stabbed to death in the bathtub.
Days later, Rogers appeared at Showtown USA, a bar and restaurant in Gibsonton, a carnival town on the eastern shore of Tampa Bay. Tina Marie Cribbs, another young mother, was there with friends. Rogers bought them drinks and flirted with her. She offered to give him a ride and said she'd be back. She never returned.
She was found two days later in the bathtub of Room 119 at the Tampa 8 Inn motel off Columbus Drive, near Interstate 4. She, too, had been stabbed. Rogers had rented the room. Her Ford Festiva was missing. Her wallet turned up at a highway rest area in North Florida. His fingerprints were on it.
As a nationwide manhunt ensued, Rogers turned up in Bossier City, Louisiana. People saw him shooting pool in a bar called It'Il Do and dancing with a woman named Andy Jiles Sutton. Her roommate found her two days later, lying nude on a leaking waterbed. She'd been stabbed.
Days later, Kentucky State Police located Rogers driving Cribbs' stolen car. He was arrested after a high-speed chase.
Juries in Florida and California found him guilty for the murders of Cribbs and Gallagher; authorities in the other states chose not to prosecute him.
Defense lawyers presented some evidence of Rogers' troubled upbringing, along with claims that he was mentally ill. Rogers denied killing anyone. But he also denied, in a 1997 jailhouse interview after his trial, that he'd had an abusive childhood. Whether his claim is true is unclear.
It wasn't enough, anyway, to overcome the brutality of Cribbs' murder.
'This totally destroyed my life,' her mother, Mary Dicke, said in a sentencing hearing. 'She was all I had.'
The Florida Supreme Court last week turned down Rogers' latest appeal, which included the claims about his childhood.
His remaining legal avenues include a challenge to the constitutionality of lethal injection, pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, and a new pleading filed Monday, which challenges the quality of the legal representation death row inmates receive from the state.
If neither of those appeals succeeds, Rogers will be executed at 6 p.m. Thursday at Florida State Prison, near Starke.