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As Killer Faces Sentencing, His Motive Remains Elusive

By Damien cave - The New York Times

January 27, 2006

One of the green plastic trash bags dumped 14 years ago off Route 72 in South Jersey contained the head of a man. Another bag held his torso and severed arms, while his legs were found in a third.

Ten months later, more bags surfaced. The police in Manchester Township, about 55 miles east of Philadelphia, found six bags near a dirt road, filled with the body parts of another man. Richard Rogers Jr., a Staten Island nurse, was convicted in November of murdering the two, Thomas Mulcahy, 57, a computer sales representative who was described by prosecutors as bisexual, and Anthony Marrero, 44, identified as a prostitute. Mr. Mulcahy, prosecutors said, was visiting Manhattan on business in July 1992.

Judge James Citta of New Jersey Superior Court will decide today whether Mr. Rogers should be sentenced to the maximum punishment of two life sentences. Mr. Rogers is suspected of at least two other murders, but prosecutors have said they do not have enough evidence.

Yet Mr. Rogers might never have been caught if not for the bags and the faint fingerprints they held. His crimes were meticulous, unobserved affairs hatched in the boozy haze of New York's upscale gay bars. Even now, after more than a decade of work, investigators say Mr. Rogers's motives remain a mystery.

"The big unanswered question in this case is why," said William Heisler, the Ocean County prosecutor who presented the case at a two-week trial in Toms River, N.J. "For whatever reason, he was targeting gay men in New York. All we know is they were drunk when they went missing."

The Townhouse Bar, on East 58th Street, between Second and Third Avenues, was one of Mr. Rogers's favorite haunts during the early 1990's. Little at the bar has changed over the years, according to employees, and last Saturday night well-dressed regulars sipped cocktails among paisley-print armchairs and bouquets of fresh lilies.

Rick Unterburg, the house piano player since 1989, said that Mr. Rogers used to show up on slow nights like Sundays. He described the convicted killer as nearly forgettable, of medium height and medium build, with a preference for warm sweaters and cold Scotch.

"He was dull," Mr. Unterburg, 47, said in an interview on Saturday just before his first set. "Just bland. The only reason I remember him is because he hung out at the piano."

Mr. Rogers, now 55, stopped going to the Townhouse around the same time that Mr. Mulcahy's body was found in New Jersey, said Mr. Unterburg, echoing his testimony at Mr. Rogers's trial. Mr. Mulcahy had been at the Townhouse shortly before he disappeared.

Mr. Mulcahy's death suggested a pattern. A year earlier, on May 5, 1991, the mutilated body of Peter S. Anderson, an investment broker from Philadelphia, was found wrapped in green plastic garbage bags along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The police determined that he, too, had been at the Townhouse before he was killed.

By the fall of 1993, two more bodies of gay men had been found: Mr. Marrero, 44, who often solicited men near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, according to court documents, and Michael Sakara, 55, a Philadelphia typesetter whose head and arms were placed in bags and left by Route 9W in Rockland County. His torso and legs were found wrapped in trash bags nine miles north, in Stony Point, N.Y. He frequented another gay bar downtown that Mr. Rogers was also known to visit.

Regulars at the Townhouse recalled that details of the slayings spread like gossip among gay men. The murderer became known as the "last call killer." The victims were drunk to the point of incapacitation when they were stabbed. For many, the image of body parts in trash bags proved indelible.

"It was horrible," said Abraham Levy, a Townhouse cocktail waiter in the early 90's, sitting at the bar on Saturday. "Every week there seemed to be another body."

The bags, however, held clues. Three or four prints were on the plastic that held Mr. Marrero's body and on another bag, a small plastic grocery sack labeled "Acme's President's Choice."

"We looked around and found out that the bags were in nine Acme stores, including one in Tuckerton, N.J., about three miles from where Mulcahy was found," said Mr. Heisler, the Ocean County prosecutor. "There was another one in Wrightstown and there was an Acme on Staten Island."

Staten Island looked especially promising, Mr. Heisler said, because a saw found in a bag with Mr. Mulcahy's wallet included a sticker from Pergament, a hardware chain with a location on Staten Island across the street from an Acme. Investigators hoped to find someone who lived nearby whose fingerprints matched those found on the bags, said Mr. Heisler, in a recent interview. But no local matches were found.

After the body of Mr. Sakara was found on July 31, 1993, investigators got a break: Lisa Hall, a bartender at the Five Oaks, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, told the police that Mr. Sakara had been drinking the night he disappeared with a man he introduced as Mark or John, a nurse from a St. Vincent's hospital. The police collected photographs of male nurses at several city hospitals and Ms. Hall thought she recognized Mr. Rogers.

But Ms. Hall never made a positive identification, and because Mr. Rogers worked at Mount Sinai Hospital, not a St. Vincent's hospital, the police moved on.

The case stayed cold until about 1999, when Margaret Mulcahy, Mr. Mulcahy's widow, called Lt. Matthew Kuehn of the New Jersey State Police for an update. The call prompted Lieutenant Kuehn to send the bags that had held the bodies of Mr. Mulcahy and Mr. Marrero to the Toronto Police Department, where officers were using a new technique to lift fingerprints from evidence.

"They start re-running the bags and they raise 33 prints mainly from the bag with Mulcahy's personal effects and the saw," Mr. Heisler, the prosecutor, said. "We ran them in New Jersey and got a latent hit; the Mulcahy and Marrero prints were from the same guy."

Lieutenant Kuehn sent out 51 packets in 2000 with the prints and an explanation of the case to authorities in every state and Puerto Rico, and asked them to check their databases for a match. In early 2001, nearly a decade after Mr. Mulcahy's body was found, "a call came in from Maine," Mr. Heisler said. "They said 'we got him.' "

Old records indicated that in 1973, when Mr. Rogers was a graduate student at the University of Maine in Orono, he had killed his housemate with a hammer. He claimed self-defense and was acquitted. But New Jersey authorities now had a name to match the prints: Richard Rogers Jr., the oldest of five children raised in Massachusetts and Florida.

On May 28, 2001, Mr. Rogers was arrested at Mount Sinai Hospital. When investigators searched his home at 62 Bridge Court on Staten Island, they found a bottle of Versed, a sedative that can be used as a date-rape drug, rug fibers consistent with those found with Mr. Mulcahy's body, and "several photographs of unknown men on which stab wounds had been drawn," according to court documents.

Prosecutors in Rockland County and Pennsylvania said this week that they had not decided whether to charge Mr. Rogers in the killings of Mr. Sakara or Mr. Anderson.

David Ruhnke, Mr. Rogers's lawyer, said that his client would appeal the murder convictions after his sentencing. "Mr. Rogers has always maintained that he was innocent of all these crimes," Mr. Ruhnke said, "and he still maintains that he is innocent."

At the Ocean County trial, Judge Citta allowed the prosecution team of Mr. Heisler and Hillary Bryce to present evidence from the murders of Mr. Sakara and Mr. Anderson to show what they considered a pattern. The jury deliberated for four hours and returned a guilty verdict. Mr. Heisler can only speculate on a motive. "Maybe something happened during sex or foreplay," he said, though he also noted that the bodies showed no sign of forced sex.

Mrs. Mulcahy, now 71, said she and her four children were still considering what to say, if anything, to Mr. Rogers in court."We find it very satisfying that it's nearing the end."

Richard W. Rogers Jr.

May 30, 2001

The Manhattan district attorney's office said nurse Richard Rogers, accused of murdering two men found dismembered on New Jersey highways, is fighting extradition from New York. Rogers is also under investigation for as dismemberment deaths of men last seen in Manhattan gay bars in the early 1990s. The murders, attributed to "The Last Call Killer," remain unsolved.

The dismemberment killings of at least two other men will probably be tied to Rogers, said Carl Locke, director of client services for the New York Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project. Locke wondered whether links to more murders will be uncovered: "I can't believe that a man who was a serial killer and mutilated men would just stop."

Officers from the Ocean County prosecutor's office, the Pennsylvania State Police and Rockland (N.Y.) County prosecutor's office searched Rogers' condominium in Staten Island, N.Y., looking for hairs, blood stains and surgical toolsthat would link Rogers to more killings. Rogers, 50, was arrested at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, where he has worked for more than 20 years, and charged him with two murders, which took place in 1992 and 1993.

Remains of the victims were found in plastic bags. The break in the case came three weeks ago when fingerprints from the bags were matched with prints of Rogers in Maine, where he beat a manslaughter charge 27 years ago.

Rogers was 22 and a graduate student studying French at the University of Maine in 1973 when he became a suspect in the death of a Frederic A. Spencer, who lived in his apartment building in Orono. Spencer's body was found a few days after his death by two bicyclists riding along a deserted road near Old Town.

After his arrest, Rogers told police he caught Spencer in his apartment and that Spencer came at him with a hammer. He said he managed to get the hammer away and beat Spencer until he died. Six months later, Rogers was acquitted of manslaughter in Penobscot County Superior Court.

Another brush with the law came August 19, 1988, when Rogers was arrested on Staten Island and accused of drugging, binding and injuring a Manhattan man who visited his apartment a month earlier.

Rogers is now charged in the murders of Thomas R. Mulcahy, of Sudbury, Mass., and Anthony E. Marrero, of Manhattan. Ocean County Prosecutor E. David Millard said the two had been "meticulously dismembered with a knife and handsaw."

The killing of Michael Sakara, 56, of New York, was linked last year to the murders of Marrero and Mulcahy. Sakara's head and arms were found July 31, 1993, at a rest area known as "'The Lookout" off Route 9W in Haverstraw, N.Y., a day after he was last seen leaving a gay bar. His legs and torso were recovered August 8, 1993, about eight miles farther north on Route 9W. 

Locke, of the gay rights group, said Rogers is probably responsible for the deaths of Sakara and Peter Stickney Anderson, 54, of Philadelphia, whose remains were found along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1991.

Man Charged In Dismemberment Slayings

A former nurse has been charged with the early 1990s dismemberment slayings of two men he had recently met in Manhattan.

Richard W. Rogers Jr., 51, was indicted by an Ocean County grand jury on two counts of murder and two counts of hindering apprehension, the county prosecutor announced Tuesday.

Authorities say he killed Thomas Mulcahy, 57, of Sudbury, Mass., dismembered his body, placed it in plastic garbage bags and dumped them along Route 72 in Woodland Township, Burlington County, and at a Garden State Parkway rest area in Stafford Township on July 10, 1992.

Mulcahy's head, torso and arms were left in Woodland, while the rest of his body was dumped into trash cans at the Stafford Forge rest area, where they were found by New Jersey Highway Authority workers emptying the trash cans.

Rogers is also charged with killing Anthony E. Marrero, 44, of New York, whose dismembered body was found May 10, 1993, on a dirt road in the Whiting section of Manchester Township.

Ocean County Prosecutor Thomas F. Kelaher said both victims were stabbed repeatedly. Mulcahy died from three stab wounds to the chest and abdomen, while Marrero was stabbed six times in the back.

Because of similarities in the deaths, as well as several other unsolved cases involving mutilated bodies found near highways in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, a multiagency task force was created to investigate. Kelaher could not say whether Rogers is a suspect in any other deaths.

Fingerprints lifted from the plastic bags containing the victims' remains were matched against a nationwide fingerprint database of criminal suspects, but no matches were found initially, Kelaher said.

Authorities resubmitted the prints to the nationwide Automated Fingerprint Identification System in April 2001. The next month, Maine State Police advised the task force that the fingerprints submitted from the dismemberment case matched those of Rogers, who had previously been arrested in Maine. Rogers was arrested in 1973 as a suspect in a homicide, but was later acquitted of manslaughter charges.

Maine had not been a member of the automated system when the prints were first submitted, Kelaher said.

"The fingerprints tied both victims together, and to Mr. Rogers," Kelaher said.

Two weeks later, Rogers was arrested by New York City police and taken to the Ocean County Jail, where he has been held ever since.

The prosecutor said Rogers had just met both victims shortly before they were killed, declining to speculate on the nature of their relationship. Mulcahy was last seen alive on July 8, 1992, at the Market Street Bar near the former site of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Marrero was last seen on May 4, 1993, near the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan.

Kelaher said the nearly two-year delay between Rogers' arrest and indictment was not unusual because investigators from various agencies had to compare evidence and run numerous tests.

"They had to get search warrants for his apartment and his locker at work," Kelaher said, declining to say whether any useful evidence was recovered from either location.

Kelaher said it is not immediately clear whether Rogers was familiar with Ocean County, or whether he purposely selected it to dump the bodies. But he said the county has occasionally been used by killers to dispose of bodies because it has many rural, sparsely populated areas where such activity is not likely to be witnessed.

At the time of his arrest, Rogers was living in Staten Island, N.Y., and had been employed as a registered nurse at Mount Sinai Medical Center for more than 20 years.

He is being held on $1 million bail. No arraignment date has yet been set.

Accused serial killer is offered plea deal

October 19, 2005

TOMS RIVER — The Ocean County Prosecutor's Office has given accused serial killer Richard Rogers a short opportunity to accept an offer that would afford him a chance of getting out of prison within 15 years if he admits to two murders in New Jersey and one in Pennsylvania.

Rogers on Tuesday did not immediately take the deal, and jury selection began for his trial on charges that he killed two men whose dismembered bodies were found at roadside locations in trash bags in New Jersey in the early 1990s.

Rogers, 55, of Staten Island, a former surgical nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, is set to stand trial before Superior Court Judge James N. Citta for the murders of Thomas Mulcahy, 57, a bisexual businessman from Sudbury, Mass., and Anthony Marrero, 44, a homosexual prostitute from Manhattan.

William J. Heisler, chief trial attorney in the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office, offered to downgrade the two murder charges to aggravated manslaughter and said he would recommend concurrent, 30-year prison terms, with parole eligibility after serving 15 years, if Rogers would plead guilty.

Heisler said he was authorized by the Lancaster County District Attorney's Office in Pennsylvania to extend him an offer of 10 to 20 years in prison if he would plead guilty to third-degree murder in the killing of Peter S. Anderson, 54, a homosexual investment banker from Philadelphia whose mutilated body was found in a trash barrel at a rest area on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on May 5, 1991.

Heisler also said he was authorized by the Rockland County, N.Y., District Attorney's Office to relay that it would not charge Rogers in the murder of Michael Sakara if he pleaded guilty to the murders of Mulcahy, Marrero and Anderson.

The dismembered body of Sakara, 55, a typesetter from Manhattan, was discovered over a nine-day period in July and August of 1993 in garbage bags at two locations along Route 9W in Rockland County, N.Y.

Mulcahy's remains were found at two locations in New Jersey on July 10, 1992: at the state Department of Transportation's Red Lion Maintenance Yard at routes 70 and 206 in Woodland Township, Burlington County, and in trash barrels at the Stafford Forge Rest Area on the Garden State Parkway in Stafford, Ocean County.

Marrero's remains were found in bags on Crow Hill Road in Manchester, Ocean County, on May 10, 1993.

Heisler said if Rogers took the plea offer, prison terms for each of the three killings to which Rogers would be required to admit would run concurrent to one another.

Heisler would not comment afterward on why he made the plea offer to Rogers.

The judge told Rogers he would likely face 60 years in prison without parole if convicted of the two New Jersey murders. Citta also told Rogers that because he would be given credit for time he has already served in the Ocean County Jail awaiting trial since his arrest May 28, 2001, and that he would also be given commutation credits and credit for good behavior, he could be considered for parole as soon as 10 or 11 years from now.

Citta also told Rogers that based on evidence introduced at pretrial hearings last month, "In my view, the state is going to convince 12 people beyond a reasonable doubt that Richard Rogers is guilty of the murders of both of these individuals."

Citta reminded Rogers that the evidence includes his fingerprints on garbage bags containing the body parts of the two New Jersey victims and the victim in Pennsylvania, and testimony that Sakara was last seen alive with him. Citta added the evidence includes that the saw and saw blade believed to be used to dismember the bodies, as well as some of the plastic bags in which some body parts were packaged, were traced to a mall on Staten Island located close to Rogers' home.

When Citta was finished explaining the potential outcome of a trial, Rogers responded politely, "I appreciate the advice that you've given me. I will take it under consideration."

Jury selection for the trial began minutes later.

Heisler said Rogers has until completion of jury selection to accept the offer.

In addition to the murders of Mulcahy, Marrero, Anderson and Sakara, Rogers also is a suspect in the murder of Matthew John Pierro, 21, of Bloomfield, whose body was found in bushes off Interstate Highway 4 in Lake Mary, Fla., on April 10, 1982, with a bite mark that dentists said was made by Rogers. Rogers has only been charged with the New Jersey murders.

  

Gay Serial Killer Trial Begins

October 27, 2005

A male nurse charged with killing, dismembering and then dumping the bodies of two gay men is innocent his lawyer charged as the trial of Richard W. Rogers opened in Toms River.

In Maine, Rogers was found not guilty of beating his roommate to death with a hammer in 1973. In that case, he claimed he acted in self-defense.

  

November 10, 2005

The accused "Last Call" serial killer seemed as though he were beginning to crack on the final day of his three-week trial in Ocean County, N.J.

His fingerprints were on file in Maine because he had been tried in November 1973 for the slaying of his graduate school roommate at the University of Maine, Frederick Spencer. Claiming self defense, Rogers was acquitted in that hammer-beating death. 

“This is kind of a completion of a long struggle for two of the victim’s families,” said Clarence Patton, executive director of the gay victims group. “We don’t want to pile on, but what we would like to see is some of these additional cases get adjudicated so those families can get some measure of closure.”