Hillsborough killer Glen Rogers to be executed Thursday evening
Glen Rogers, who almost 30 years ago stabbed a woman to death in a Tampa motel room, is set to be executed Thursday evening at Florida State Prison.
Barring a last-minute stay, he will be put to death by lethal injection at 6 p.m. for the 1995 murder of Tina Marie Cribbs.
Rogers, 62, a former carnival worker dubbed by media as the 'Casanova Killer' and the 'Cross-Country Killer,' is believed to have committed other murders.
Cribbs' slaying occurred the same day he arrived in Tampa in November 1995. He rented a room at the Tampa 8 Inn off Columbus Drive, near Interstate 4, telling a motel clerk he was a truck driver whose vehicle had broken down.
He later went to the Showtown USA bar and restaurant on U.S. 41 in Gibsonton. Patrons there remembered the long-haired, bearded stranger dancing to songs from a juke box and buying a round of drinks for a group of women.
Cribbs, 34, was with them. A native New Yorker, she'd moved to Gibsonton from Oklahoma a couple of years earlier. She lived three houses away from her mother, who gave her a pager so they could always stay in touch. She had two sons. She worked as a waitress at Steak 'n Shake and as a housekeeper at the Ramada Inn-Apollo Beach.
As she chatted with Rogers, Cribbs agreed to give him a ride to a nearby carnival lot. She left a cold can of beer on the bar and said she'd return. She never did. Her mother paged her more than 30 times that night, but got no response.
Two days later, a maid at the Tampa 8 Inn found Cribbs dead in the bathtub of Room 119. She'd been stabbed twice with a long knife.
The room had been rented to Rogers. He'd paid for an extra day, telling a clerk not to clean it and placing a handwritten 'do not disturb' sign on the door.
Police in California, Louisiana and Mississippi investigated Rogers for similar slayings of women he met in those states during a six-week period that year. He was also suspected, but never charged, in the death of a man in Kentucky.
In a jailhouse phone call with a Kentucky newspaper, Rogers asserted he had not killed anyone.
Physical and circumstantial evidence in the Cribbs case said otherwise. Investigators found her wallet discarded at a North Florida highway rest stop. His fingerprints were on it. When Kentucky state troopers found Rogers days after the crime, he led them on a high-speed chase in Cribbs' stolen Ford Festiva. Blood marked a pair of his shorts, which investigators determined contained DNA that matched Cribbs.
At trial, a jury heard about the criminal history of a man who was described as charming and sociable but prone to bursts of anger, especially when he drank. His defense presented evidence of an abusive childhood and an alcoholic father.
But it couldn't overcome the brutality of the murder. A medical examiner testified that the stab wounds Cribbs suffered formed an L-shape, indicating that the killer twisted the knife after plunging it into her.
A jury convicted him and unanimously recommended the death penalty. Rogers was also later sentenced to death in California for the murder of Sandra Gallagher, who was strangled and left in her burning pickup truck a few weeks before Cribbs' murder.
His appeals, as is typical, wound through courts for years. Cribbs' mother, Mary Dicke, told the Tampa Tribune in 2011 she feared she wouldn't live long enough to see her daughter's killer executed.
'My life stopped in 1995,' she said. 'My daughter was everything to me.'
The Tampa Bay Times was unable to reach Cribbs' family this week for comment.
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Rogers' death warrant last month, the fifth execution he has ordered this year after a period in which the state conducted relatively few. Florida only had one execution in 2024. Before that, in 2023, DeSantis carried out six executions, which occurred as he was running for president.
The reason for the current uptick in executions is unclear. The governor's office did not respond to an email for comment.
Rogers' final appeals included requests for a court to hear new evidence about extensive abuse he suffered as a child. From the age of 10 through his teen years, he was repeatedly raped by women and men, traded for drug money and exploited by the staff at an Ohio juvenile correctional facility, according to court records. Lawyers argued that a new jury might favor a life sentence if they heard those details, but courts declined to give him a new penalty hearing.
Ahead of the execution, Rogers' brother drove from Kentucky to see him for the last time. On Wednesday, Claude Rogers told the Tampa Bay Times the visit was less personal — occurring with a glass barrier between them — than their past meetings in the prison visitor room. He decided to head home, unsettled by the isolated atmosphere.
'I said my goodbyes to him,' Claude Rogers said. 'He's my brother and I love him. I asked God to guide him on this next journey.'
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