Angels & Demons On June 4, 1989, the bodies of Jo, Michelle and Christe were found floating in Tampa Bay. This is the story of the murders, their aftermath, and the handful of people who kept faith amid the unthinkable.

Chapter 1: Sunset | Chapter 2: Haunted | Chapter 3: Neighbors | Chapter 4: The Tin Man | Chapter 5: Silver Bullet | Chapter 6: Night Stories | Chapter 7: The Magic Kingdom





Chapter 1: Sunset

One year had gone by since the murders, and then another, and now the investigators were deep into a third. They were working day and night, working weekends, putting off vacations, losing weight, gaining weight, growing pale and pasty and haggard, waking at 3 a.m. with a jolt and scratching notes on pads kept beside their beds.

Their sergeant did not know if they would ever find the answer. As far as he was concerned, the case was not even in their hands.

Ultimately, he believed, it was up to God whether they made an arrest.

A born-again Christian, the sergeant carried a Bible in his briefcase. He had no doubt that both heaven and hell were real. He saw good and evil not as theoretical or philosophical concepts, but as absolute realities walking upright through the world. He believed in the forces of light and darkness. He believed in demonic possession. He took it as a matter of fact that Satan and his cohorts currently reigned over the Earth.

“I believe there are demons all around us,” he would say, “just as I believe there are angels all around us.”

And when he looked at the evidence from the case before them now, studied the photos of the bodies and the ropes and the concrete blocks, the sergeant had no doubt that he and the other investigators were pursuing someone driven by Satanic forces.

Of course demons were real. They were hunting one now.

They were on their way to the Magic Kingdom.

The highways were filled with them. Couples in subcompacts, debating the wisdom of stopping at Stuckey’s for a pecan log. Tour groups in tour buses, fleecing their companions at gin rummy and keeping an eye on their driver in case he nodded off. Myriad configurations of moms and dads and stepmoms and stepdads and napping toddlers and whining third-graders and sprawling teenagers in full sulk and mothers-in-law with pursed lips and embittered outlooks, all struggling for peaceful coexistence inside the air-conditioned confines of their minivans.

They were pilgrims, embarked on the same passage so many millions had made before. From every corner of the country they came, descending through the lengths of Alabama and Georgia until at last they reached the threshold of their destination.

Even then, they were not merely crossing state lines. They were slipping over to the other side, entering the isle of eternal youth, dominion of the sun, temple of the mouse who devoured the world, paradise of glistening beaches and murmuring waves and hallucinatory sunsets and oranges dripping with ambrosia and alligators smiling jagged smiles and snowy-haired seniors who play shuffleboard as they wait cheerfully for their collect call from God and intrepid astronauts who climb aboard gleaming spaceships, launched with a roar into a heavenly blue sky.

The ’86 Oldsmobile Calais, pointed south on Interstate 75, was the color of that sky.

Inside the car, Jo Rogers and her daughters were making their escape. They were leaving the farm, leaving the sheriff’s deputies and the counselors and the lawyers, searching for someplace warm and safe where they could hide and forget and find a way back to themselves.

They had one week.

“We’ll be back,” Jo had told her husband.

It’s easy to picture her and the girls that first day. To see their two-door sedan climbing into the hills of southern Ohio, to hear the drone of the tires on the pavement, to sink into the quilted dark blue fabric of their bucket seats and gaze down the highway to the edge of the Earth, dropping off over the horizon.

Jo, tired as usual but glad to finally be off, was at the wheel, at least in the beginning; this much has been confirmed. Michelle, 17, the quiet one with the constellation of rings on her left hand, was probably up front as well, in the passenger seat. Christe, 14, the baby of the family, her father’s favorite, the cheerleader, the one with the mane of mall hair and the trio of friendship bracelets on her wrist, most likely would have been in the back.

They had a road atlas, and as they drove, they must have studied it closely, plotting their path straight through the heart of the country. They had a long way to go.

It was the afternoon of Friday, May 26, 1989. A few hours earlier, Jo and the girls had started out from their 300-acre dairy farm in Van Wert County, in the northwestern corner of Ohio. The night before, Jo had worked her usual midnight shift — she drove a forklift and worked the assembly line at Peyton’s Northern, a distribution center for health and beauty products on the other side of the Indiana state line — and had come home around dawn to their double-wide mobile home and grabbed a few hours of sleep while Michelle and Christe finished packing. Finally, around 1 p.m., the three of them got into the Calais, and Jo backed it up to the milk house to say goodbye to her husband.

Hal Rogers was outside, unloading corn gluten feed, when Jo backed around. He stopped for a moment, and Jo leaned through the window and gave him a kiss.

“Have a good time,” he said.

Hal had wanted to go with his wife and daughters. But the spring rains had been late that year, and there was still corn and wheat and soybeans that needed planting and 80 Holsteins waiting to be milked every day at 5:30 a.m. and again at 3 p.m., no exceptions. Somebody had to stay and keep it all going.

Jo and Michelle and Christe were determined to make the best of it, even without Hal. They had been buzzing about this trip for weeks, debating which theme parks to hit and which to avoid, logging sessions at a local tanning salon so they would have a good base of bronze to build on under the southern sun. They had good reason to be excited. This was the first family trip of their lives, the first time they had managed to free themselves from the daily rigors of the farm and get away together. Most years, the best they could hope for was a few days at the Van Wert County Fair.

“When you run a dairy farm,” explains Colleen Etzler, Jo’s sister-in-law, ”you don’t get a vacation.”

Early on, when they were planning the trip, Jo and the girls had talked about visiting Gatlinburg or Gettysburg. But in the end they had decided to be more adventurous and make the thousand-mile journey to Florida. The three of them wanted what every other tourist wants from the Sunshine State. They wanted to lie on the beach and shake Mickey’s hand and throw away a few dollars on overpriced souvenirs. They wanted to let go, to be renewed, to lose themselves inside the myth.

So off they went. That afternoon, after saying goodbye to Hal, they turned left out of the driveway and drove into the village of Willshire, a mile or so away from the farm, where they stopped at the bank for some money. Then they were truly on their way.

Headed for the interstate, they turned down two-lane county roads that stretched as straight as a ruler for miles and miles. They drove past fields crowded with rows of young stalks – the corn was only up to their ankles at that point – past windmills and silos jutting into the Midwestern sky, past farms that had been owned by the same families for more than a century. They went past the Riverside Cemetery and its big, black wrought-iron gate and past the Tastee Twirl and past the grain elevator in the little town of Rockford, with its one and only stoplight, and through the even smaller towns of Mercer and Neptune until finally, almost 50 miles after they left the farm, they reached the broad ribbon of I-75.

From there, it was a straight shot all the way to Florida.

Despite the late start, they made good time that first day. Jo almost certainly did most of the driving – Michelle, who had got her license just a few months before, was intimidated by highways – and Jo was not known for her strict adherence to speed limits. “I want to get there,” Jo would tell her friends. Either way, by the time they stopped for the night, they’d made it clear through Kentucky and Tennessee and were just across the Georgia border.

The next day they rode I-75 all the way through Georgia and into Florida, then cut east on I-10 over to Jacksonville. They stayed there for the evening, then checked out of their motel the next morning and headed for the Jacksonville Zoo, apparently their first bona fide tourist destination.

There at the zoo, they gazed up into the face of a giraffe, saw monkeys hanging by their tails, watched lions napping in the sun. These facts and others would eventually be learned from rolls of film recovered with the family’s belongings. They had a camera, a Nikon One-Touch, and as they moved through these days – days that, in retrospect, would become imbued with the intensity of a dream – they took frame after frame, leaving behind a series of snapshots that investigators would eventually pore over, study, burn into memory.

After finishing at the zoo, they left Jacksonville and turned south again until they reached the attraction at Silver Springs, where they took one of the famed glass-bottom boat tours. A great deal of investigation would eventually be devoted to the question of how little experience the Rogers women had with boats and water. For the girls, at least, the ride at Silver Springs was one of the few times – in Christe’s case, perhaps the very first time – they had ever set foot on a boat. Neither girl was a confident swimmer, especially in water over their heads, and their mother could not swim at all. In fact, Jo was terrified of her face being covered by water or anything else.

“Just pull the covers over her head,” says Hal, “and you got a hell of a fight.”

So what went through their minds that afternoon as they climbed into the glass-bottom boat? Were they nervous? Did one of them ask the guide if there were life jackets on board?

Or maybe they were calm. Maybe they surrendered to the hushed beauty of Silver Springs and to the realization that at long last they were truly on vacation. They were far away from everything and everyone who had hurt them. There was nothing in this place to be afraid of. Nothing for them to do at all, but sit in the boat and cast their eyes to the window at their feet and stare down through the clear, pale blue water to the thick carpet of grass, swaying hypnotically on the bottom.

First, and always first, was that farm.

Before you can understand anything about the Rogers family, start there. Start, if you can, by imagining what it would be like to get up on a black winter morning, hours before sunrise, when the wind is blowing and the thermometer is stuck somewhere south of zero and the Holsteins are waiting in the barn to be milked and fed and cleaned up after.

Picture crawling out from under the covers on a morning like that. Picture throwing something on, heading outside into the dark and the cold and trudging down the driveway, hands jammed in pockets, to put in another shift at the milking parlor. Located next to the barn, the milking parlor is not a parlor at all, but a concrete box of a room with one tiny window and a fluorescent light and a claustrophobic little rectangular pit cut into the center of the floor. For the next two or three hours, this pit will be your home. You will stand inside it so you can work the milking machines at eye-level with the udders. The cows will be above you, of course, clopping over from the barn to their stations on both sides of the pit, and while you work, hurrying from one end of the pit to the other, checking the flow of their milk into the milkers and dipping their teats in iodine and rubbing peppermint oil onto their skin, they will moo and complain and unceremoniously deposit manure onto the floor around you.

When you’re finally done milking and cleaning the equipment and hosing out the pit and the floor above the pit, you walk outside into the first glow of dawn. By this point your arms and legs are aching, and cow smell has settled in your hair and on your skin, and the manure has splattered all over your boots and clothes. You want to hurry back up to the house and take a shower. But before you do, have a good long look at the landscape around you. Gaze out over the fields, acres of brown, brown and more brown, stretching in every direction like a giant, mud-soaked quilt, and at the scattered stands of black and naked trees, and up into the low-hanging bowl of gray that is the sky.

As you soak all this in, remind yourself that you’ll have to go back into the pit, back with the cows and the smell and the manure, not just tomorrow morning but every morning and also every afternoon of every day of every year for as long as you can take it.

Now imagine what a week in Florida would look like from inside that kind of life.

Understand that, and you’ll understand a little about Jo and Michelle and Christe.

“They were hard-working people, I’ll tell you,” says Ginny Etzler, Jo’s mother. “They’d do what they had to do, and that was it.”

It would be wrong to suggest that there were no rewards on the Rogers farm. Hal and Jo made a decent living and were proud of their self-sufficiency and of the care they showed the animals.

“You don’t take no milk from ‘em,” Hal would say. “They give it to you, plain and simple.”

Michelle and Christe did their best to make things as fun as possible, or as fun as things could be when nearly every surface in sight tended to be draped in manure. The girls loved the cows – they loved animals, period – and knew their personalities and quirks. They had names for them all. There was Sage, Michelle’s favorite, and Rosie and Betty and Grandpa and April and May and June; Hal, who usually stuck with calling them by number, was inspired one day to give one the moniker of Crazy.

Christe thought of the cows as her pets. Sometimes, when she was working on her cheerleading routines, she would practice beside the barn, using the Holsteins as her audience. Hal would see her out there, jumping up and down and waving her arms for a bunch of cows, and he would smile. As long as the cows didn’t run away, he’d say, she must be doing something right.

Still, the grind of the farm was overwhelming. On top of the milkings and feedings, Hal and the rest of the family had to contend with a mountain of other tasks. There was the breeding — they’d owned a bull for a while, but switched to artificial insemination when he started chasing Jo and the girls — and delivering the calves and cleaning the barn every day and cleaning the milking parlor every day and keeping the machinery and equipment in good repair. They had to plow the fields and plant the crops and harvest the crops; sometimes, during harvest, Hal would go for three days straight without sleeping. And like the rest of us, they had to cook and do laundry and keep track of the bills and keep up with the usual chores of life.

They all pushed themselves. But none pushed harder than Jo.

“She could work me under the table,” says Hal.

Today, those close to Jo tend to describe her in generalities. They say she was fun. They say she was happy. But they struggle with details. Looking back, sorting through all the years, it’s difficult to know which bits and pieces are worth sharing, which are the ones that would sum her up and set her apart. What are the moments that define any of us? The odds and ends that make us real?

Her given name was Joan, but almost no one called her that. She was thin, with brown hair that she curled sometimes and sometimes wore straight. Like her husband, she wore shaded glasses that partially hid her eyes. Unlike her husband, she had an outgoing nature and could talk to anyone. Hal liked to say that she was his personality.

“She never knew a stranger,” remembers Jane Dietrich, a close friend who lived on a neighboring farm.

When she was little, growing up on a farm in the same county, Jo used to dress the family cat in baby clothes and walk it in a stroller. She led a sheltered childhood. She’d dated Hal in high school and married him a few months after graduation, when she was pregnant with Michelle. Though their wedding was held inside a church, her parents were so embarrassed by the pregnancy that they did not allow Jo to wear a wedding gown or to invite her friends to the reception. For their honeymoon, she and Hal were granted a weekend in nearby Fort Wayne, where they stayed at a Hospitality Inn.

Somehow Jo made the best of things. She had a ringing laugh. She loved country music, loved to dance, made a fantastic potato soup. She and Hal owned a motorcycle, a Honda Goldwing, and she liked to ride behind him, the wind in her face. She was independent and strong-willed and not afraid to stand up to Hal; she listened to him and respected his opinion, but if he said something stupid, she could silence him with a look. She used to make him take her out to dinner, just so they could get away from the farm and talk about something other than the corn and the cows. She liked to tease Hal and would make fun of his woeful attempts at singing. She wrote him cards, telling him she loved him. She was a tough woman — tougher than her slender frame would have led a stranger to believe — but underneath the toughness, friends saw an enduring glow, a persistently optimistic outlook that had survived all her struggles. In the months before she left for Florida, she talked about wanting to have another baby.

“You would have liked Jo,” says Vance Krick, a family friend who lived down the road. “You really would have.”

For all her spirit, though, the years had knocked something out of Jo. She had once been beautiful — you can see it in her high school senior photo — but by May of 1989 she carried with her an unmistakable air of depletion, a sense that her life had been far too hard for far too long. You could see it in the circles beneath her eyes, her gaunt cheeks, the tight line of her mouth. She was 36, but looked 10 years older.

And no wonder. It wasn’t just the demands of the farm or the job at Peyton’s Northern. It wasn’t just her migraines, either, or the stress of raising two teenagers, ferrying the girls to church and softball practice and cheerleading camp.

It was everything. She seemed to exist in a state of permanent exhaustion. She worked the midnight shift at Peyton’s — the night trick, some people called it — to supplement the income from the farm and to qualify her and the rest of the family for health insurance benefits. Early in the morning, she’d drive home from the job, and help finish with the first milking and the chores. She’d get the girls off to school, and then ride with Hal into Willshire for breakfast, and then go back home and catch whatever sleep she could before the girls came home from school and it was time for the mid-afternoon milking and for her to make dinner. In the evenings, she would try to nap again before leaving for the next midnight shift. But it was never enough. She would fall asleep while driving. Sometimes, when she was on her lunch break at Peyton’s, she would sit in the din of the break room and nod off in front of her co-workers.

“You’re killing yourself,” Rosemary Krick, Vance’s wife, would tell her. ”You’re killing me, just watching you.”

Another strain, a strain that would have broken almost anyone, was the problem with Hal’s younger brother. John Rogers was Hal’s partner. They owned the farm together, and John lived in a trailer beside the house and worked the farm along with the rest of the family.

People around Van Wert had always thought John was a little off — he liked to wear Army fatigues and often talked about taking on missions for the Secret Service and the CIA — but no one knew how deep the problems went until one day in March 1988, when sheriff’s deputies showed up at the farm and arrested him, charging him in the sexual assault of a woman who lived in his trailer.

The woman had once dated John, but now they were just sharing space. She told police that one evening she had come back to the trailer and been attacked by a man in a mask who handcuffed and blindfolded her and threatened her with a knife. When she reported the assault, the woman told detectives that she thought her attacker was John – she’d heard his voice — and that the rape had been videotaped. The detectives got a warrant and searched the trailer and found, inside a briefcase, a video of the rape.

Disturbing as this was, the worst was yet to come. Shortly after John was taken to jail, the detectives summoned Hal and Jo to the sheriff’s department and sat them down. They had something to tell them.

“We think Michelle’s been assaulted,” one of the detectives said.

The briefcase in the trailer had not just contained the video of the woman’s assault. It also contained pictures of Michelle, some of which showed her undressed and blindfolded. Searching the rest of the trailer and John’s car, the detectives had also found audiotapes on which a girl who proved to be Michelle could be heard screaming and pleading with John to leave her alone.

When the detectives asked her about the photos and the tapes, Michelle confirmed the worst. Her uncle, she said, had raped her repeatedly over the previous two years, starting when she was 14. Michelle said John had taken advantage of the times when Hal and Jo were away from the farm, off on weekend trips or other business. She said he had tied her hands and forced himself on her, threatening to kill her if she told anyone.

All of this had occurred under Hal’s and Jo’s noses. Both of them had noticed that Michelle seemed irritable and even nervous around John, that she didn’t like to be alone with him in the milking parlor. Jo had tried to get Michelle to tell her what was wrong, but Michelle wouldn’t say. Hal had written it off as a personality clash.

“If I’d known what it was,” says Hal, “I’d have killed the son of a bitch to start with.”

John Rogers denied everything. He said he was being framed.

The accusations and denials ripped the family apart. Irene Rogers, Hal’s and John’s mother, choose to believe her son and not her granddaughter. Michelle was lying, she told people. Stunned that his mother would chose to disregard the evidence, Hal cut off contact with his parents.

Caught in the middle of it all was Michelle. Now that John was off the farm, she wished the whole thing would just go away. She didn’t want to talk about it with her parents, wasn’t particularly interested in counseling, and had no interest in testifying against her uncle. At one point, she even suggested she would leave town if the case came to trial.

For his part, Hal sank into a depression in the months after the allegations came to light. He would retreat to the trailer John had lived in and lock himself inside, sometimes hiding there for days. Jo would come to the door of the trailer, trying to get her husband to open up.

“Let me in,” she’d say. “Talk to me.”

But Hal didn’t know how to talk about what had happened.

In the end, the whole thing went away and Michelle was not asked to appear in court. John Rogers eventually pleaded no contest to the rape of the first woman and was sentenced to a prison term of 7 to 25 years. Given Michelle’s reluctance to proceed further, the charges involving her were dropped.

All these years later, these terrible events still cast a shadow over any attempt to understand Michelle. It’s hard to separate the darkness from everything else, hard to remember that she had a life completely apart from whatever happened with her uncle. But she did. It was not an easy life, but it was hers, and by the time she left for Florida, she was well on her way to reclaiming it.

Most people, seeing Michelle for the first time, would have said she was pretty. Many would have described her as beautiful. She had wavy brown hair that fell just past her shoulders, a cautious smile, dark eyes that were somehow both playful and haunting. Like so many teenage girls, she was a shape-shifter. Sometimes, when she hadn’t put on all her makeup, she could pass for a middle school student; at other moments, when she was dressed up or when she tilted her head a certain way, she looked like a woman in her early 20s. Yet in both incarnations, there was something removed about her, a sense that an essential piece was kept in another room somewhere, under glass. The events of the past two years were in that wariness; they were there, too, in the lines already forming around her eyes.

At Crestview High, where she had just finished her junior year, Michelle was an average student known for being both a little shy and a little wild. She could be withdrawn around people she did not know, but could also drop into a boy’s lap and flirt outrageously. She smoked occasionally. At parties, when others were drinking beer, she preferred wine coolers. On the way to school, she sat at the back of the bus with the guys from the agricultural club and listened to their off-color jokes and laughed when they grabbed for her rear.

The brazen exterior left Michelle with a bit of a reputation. In keeping with the age-old traditions of high school, other students spread whispered stories about her. Michelle knew she was a fixture of school gossip — she talked about it with her girlfriends — but she did not particularly care. Or at least she pretended not to care. The truth was, beneath the surface, there was a bruised sweetness to Michelle, a painful vulnerability more complex than either her reputation or the facade she presented to others.

Publicly she may have shrugged off the gossip. But privately she scribbled notes to friends, saying she was lonely. Sometimes, she talked about going to college and becoming a veterinarian, swearing she would never allow herself to wind up on a farm, staring at cows for the rest of her life. Other days, she said she wanted to get married and raise a family on a farm. She had a schoolgirl’s fascination with rings, wearing four of them — two gold and two silver — on her left hand, one on each finger. Her bedroom was decorated with pictures of unicorns. She belonged to the 4-H Club and to the Future Farmers of America. She chewed Bazooka bubble gum. She listened to Guns N’Roses, U2, Madonna. On weekend nights, she liked to cruise up and down Main Street in Van Wert. If she was going to a school dance, she made a point of stopping by her maternal grandparents’ house first so they could see her dress. She sometimes wore wide, pink-rimmed glasses, not to correct her eyesight but because she thought them stylish. During the summer, when she showed cows and sheep at the Van Wert County Fair, she would sleep in the barn with the animals.

“She was a tomboy,” remembers Jeff Feasby, the boy she was seeing when she left for Florida. “A typical farm girl.”

Michelle and Jeff had gotten together a month before the end of school, at a party after the prom. Neither had a date that night, and so they’d been free to pursue each other; they’d talked until the sun came up, by which point they were a couple. Although they’d dated only a few weeks, Michelle was already growing close to Jeff and had accepted his class ring as proof that they were going steady. The ring was adorned with a stone of cubic zirconium and a carving of a knight atop a horse — in honor of the Crestview High Knights — and Michelle was terrified of losing it while working in the barn. Instead of wearing it on one of her available fingers, she kept the ring in her purse.

The two of them were a good couple. They’d known each other since seventh grade and thought of each other first as friends. Between them there was true affection and respect. Jeff had heard the talk over the past year or so about something bad happening with Michelle and her uncle. But Jeff sensed that she did not want to talk about it and left the subject alone.

“Didn’t think it was any of my business,” he says.

The night before Michelle and her sister and mother began their trip, Jeff came out to the house. The two of them stood in the laundry room and kissed goodbye. Michelle got emotional, saying how much she’d miss him. To others, a week’s vacation to Florida would have been nothing extraordinary. To Michelle, it must have seemed like she was headed for the far side of the moon. She was excited about the trip and could not wait to get started. But that night, in her boyfriend’s arms, Michelle’s eyes filled with tears.

Christe Rogers did not have a boyfriend.

Only 14, she was officially not allowed to date for two more years. It was the story of her life: Christe had always been and would forever remain the little sister.

She was so much younger than Michelle, younger in ways that could not be chalked up solely to the three-year difference in their ages. There was an openness to her that had been squeezed out of Michelle. Christe was more outgoing, more carefree. Though the family’s ordeals had clearly affected her, she seemed to have emerged relatively intact. On the outside at least, she continued to present herself as the beaming cheerleader.

At the time of the Florida trip, Christe had just finished eighth grade at Crestview Junior High. Her school was on the same campus as the high school, which meant that she and her sister rode the same bus. While Michelle sat with the guys, Christe stayed toward the front with the other cheerleaders. She did not tolerate rude comments directed her way, did not allow boys to touch her suggestively. Morning after morning, she made it clear that she was not her older sister, that she had a different set of expectations for how her life was to unfold. Somewhere along the way she had been designated, or had designated herself, as the good girl of the Rogers family.

Christe fulfilled every requirement of the part. She rode a motorscooter, liked to roller skate, played catcher for her softball team, owned an unbelievable number of teddy bears. The word used most often to describe her was “bubbly.” She wore three friendship bracelets, braided and woven and marked with pink, green and white stripes, on her left wrist. She was sensitive about her height — she was 5-foot-1, at best — and deployed untold quantities of gel and spray in the task of making her bangs rise straight up in an astonishing 4-inch plume, just so she would appear taller. On the softball diamond, playing catch behind home plate, she was so fearless that the umpire had to continually tell her to back away from the batter.

“A little ball of fire,” remembers Jeff Feasby.

She had a round birthmark, about the size of a silver dollar, at the top of her right leg. She played the saxophone. She chewed her fingernails. Early every morning, when it was time for the first shift with the cows, she was the last one to wake up.

“Chris, you couldn’t have got her out of bed with a damn stick of dynamite,” says Hal.

She had always been especially close to her father. Before she was old enough to go to school, she used to follow Hal everywhere. When he was out plowing, she’d plop down under a nearby tree with a coloring book and some crayons. When he was working the combine, she’d ride with him in the cab, sitting on the heater, singing her little songs for him. Even after she grew older, the two of them remained best friends. Hal called both daughters his ”princesses,” but Michelle was shy, like he was, and Christe was warm and friendly and had such an easy charm that their dad was drawn to her. He loved and respected Michelle, but he felt a special bond with Christe and made little effort to hide it.

“There ain’t nothing about it,” says Hal. “That’s just my little girl.”

As with so many siblings, Christe waged an ongoing rivalry with Michelle, the two of them arguing over the chores and what to watch on TV and who had borrowed whose outfit last and not returned it. For her part, Michelle could not help feeling jealous of all the attention showered on Christe. It was hard enough that she was more popular at school; even more painful was the way she so clearly won out in the affections of their father. Michelle was not blind. She saw the signs, felt the sting.

Through it all, though, she remained protective of Christe.

This is the single most telling fact about Michelle Lee Rogers of Van Wert County, Ohio, the quiet girl who had just completed the 11th grade and would never make it to the 12th, who had chosen a seat at the back of the bus and would never find her way up front, who longed for an acceptance that would never be hers. This is the proof that, despite all she had endured and was yet to endure, the light within her had not yet been snuffed out:

During the worst of those years on the farm, before the allegations about her uncle surfaced and before anyone understood what she was going through, Michelle somehow had the strength and the presence of mind to guard Christe. She checked on her, paid attention to her whereabouts, tried not to leave her alone with John. Repeatedly she fought to make sure that Christe stayed safe.

Think of Michelle, then, and remember. When she was trapped and frightened and most alone, she kept watch over her little sister.

They did not have much time.

Due back in Ohio at the end of the week, they were determined to see everything, do everything, set foot inside the gates of as many theme parks as humanly possible.

That Sunday night, after they left Silver Springs, Jo and the girls drove to Titusville, near Cape Canaveral, and stayed at a Quality Inn. The next day, Jo wrote a postcard to Hal, telling him how the girls were dragging her everywhere. Michelle, meanwhile, wrote a postcard to Jeff Feasby. Jeff’s birthday was coming up in a couple of days, and Michelle wanted to send him something. She chose a card adorned with one of the Sunshine State’s most popular icons: the immortal, tacky image of a young woman in a bikini, on all fours in the sand, laughing provocatively despite the fact that a big bull gator is standing right behind her, its jaws open wide. FUN TIMES IN FLORIDA, it said beneath the photo.

On the back of the card, Michelle wrote:

Hi! How is everything with you? I’m doing great. Yesterday we went to the Zoo in Jacksonville. I was visiting my relatives and we found Geoffrey (you). Later we went to Silver Springs and rode on a glass bottom boat. Today we are going to a beach and then to Sea World. You have fun at work and behave yourself. Have a great birthday. I’ll be thinking of you! I miss you! Love ya, Chelle

It was Monday, May 29. The pace of the trip, already relentless, was about to kick into overdrive. The Rogers women were in the heart of vacationland now, poised to begin their run through the massive tourist attractions sprawled across the middle of the state. They began that day, as Michelle had said they would, with a trip to Sea World. Then the next day they went to Epcot, and then the day after that they went to Disney’s MGM Studios. Then they returned to their hotel, a Gateway Inn, and presumably collapsed.

The next day was Thursday, June 1. They left the Gateway Inn that morning shortly after 10 a.m. and turned the Calais back onto I-4 and headed for Tampa, where they were thinking of seeing Busch Gardens and perhaps lying on the gulf beaches.

They reached their hotel, the Days Inn at Rocky Point, just before 12:30 p.m. They checked in, picked up a brochure on Busch Gardens and went to their room, which was on the second floor, facing the shoreline of Tampa Bay. Room 251 was generic, cheerfully anonymous, drenched in teal: dark teal carpet, chairs with teal cushions, curtains made from a floral pattern set in teal, two double beds covered with teal quilts of a similar pattern.

Shortly after they went up to the room — phone records put the time at 12:37 p.m. — Michelle placed a long-distance call to Jeff Feasby at the Union 76 station where he worked in Van Wert. It was Jeff’s birthday, and Michelle had arranged to have flowers and balloons sent to the gas station that morning.

“Did you get the flowers?” she asked, laughing because she knew it would embarrass him to receive such a romantic gift at work, in front of the other guys.

“Yeah,” said Jeff, who was indeed embarrassed. The flowers were on display atop the station’s cigarette machine, but he was already planning to move them into the back room to get them out of sight.

Michelle and her boyfriend talked for close to 10 minutes that day. Questioned later about the conversation, Jeff would say he did not remember many of the exact words that passed between them — he was busy working the register when the phone rang — but he believes Michelle told him that the vacation was going well and they were having fun. He could hear Michelle’s mother, saying hi to him in the background, and Jeff said hi back, and Michelle talked about how she and Christe wanted to go to the beach but their mom wouldn’t let them near deep water. Then she said goodbye.

A few minutes later, at 12:57, another call was placed from the room phone, this time to the information line at Busch Gardens. It appears unlikely that the Rogers women actually made it to the theme park that day; the rolls of film recovered with their belongings contained no snapshots from Busch Gardens, and no receipts or souvenirs from Busch Gardens were found either. How the Rogers women spent that afternoon after checking into the motel remains a mystery.

There is a picture of Michelle from that last day, though, sitting on the floor of the motel room. She is wearing a blue bikini top, white shorts and sandals; draped over her right arm is a peach-colored blouse that she is either putting on or taking off. On her left hand, her collection of rings shines in the light. Her hair appears to be slightly wet, as though she has just taken a shower or been swimming. Her throat and neck are red with sunburn. Her face is tilted upward, staring directly into the camera.

She is not smiling. She is not frowning. If anything, her expression is matter of fact, with a touch of impatience. Photographed while changing her clothes, she is obviously in transition. She has somewhere to go, something to do, and she is ready to get on with it.

•••

They were seen that night at dinner.

A businessman from Houston, staying at the Days Inn for a conference, noticed them in the motel’s restaurant. The man arrived at the restaurant around 7. Eating his meal, he found himself watching the woman and two teenage girls at the booth beside his table. He did not mean to stare, he later explained, but they were directly in his line of sight; whenever he lifted his eyes from his food, he could not help but look their way.

The man was close enough to hear the sound of their voices, but not their exact words. They were obviously in a good mood, though, laughing and joking. When they finished eating and got up from the booth, Michelle looked at him.

“Hi,” she said, and then she and her sister and mother walked out.

That Thursday evening, they shot one more photo. It was the last snapshot on the last roll discovered in their room. Taken from the balcony outside 251, with the camera pointed toward the bay, it shows a cluster of palm trees silhouetted against a glowing evening sky.

Sometime after they snapped the picture, the three of them left the Days Inn and got into the Calais and drove toward the horizon they had just glimpsed from the balcony. They had an appointment to keep. Jo had written the directions on a piece of paper, and now she and the girls were on their way.

They would not see the sun again.

•••

That weekend, Hal Rogers kept watching the driveway. He would walk out of the milking parlor, finished with another shift with the cows, and glance up toward the house, hoping to see the Calais.

Hal didn’t understand it. He hadn’t heard from Jo or the girls for several days, but he was sure that Jo had told him they would be back on Saturday or Sunday at the latest. Jo was due back at work on Monday; Michelle’s summer school classes were starting.

He tried not to worry. He told himself everything was fine.

“They’re probably just dinking around someplace,” he said to a friend.

Still, it wasn’t like Jo to be late. Wasn’t like her not to call if the plans had changed or if something had gone wrong.

Where were they?

The first sighting was early that Sunday morning.

This was June 4, another hot and beautiful day. The Amber Waves, a sailboat on its way home to Tampa after a trip to Key West, had just crossed under the Skyway when several people on board saw an object in the water. It looks like a body, one of them said.

It was a female, floating face down, with her hands tied behind her back and her feet bound and a thin yellow rope around her neck. She was naked from the waist down.

A man from the Amber Waves radioed the Coast Guard, and a rescue boat was dispatched from the station at Bayboro Harbor in St. Petersburg. The Coast Guard crew quickly found the body, but recovering it from the water was difficult. The rope around the neck was attached to something heavy below the surface that could not be lifted. Noting the coordinates where the body had been found, the Coast Guard crew cut the line, placed the female in a body bag, pulled the bag onto the boat and headed back toward the station. The crew members had not yet reached the shore when they received another radio message: A second female body had just been sighted by two people on a sailboat.

This one was floating to the north of where the first body had been sighted. It was 2 miles off The Pier in St. Petersburg. Like the first, this body was face down, bound, with a rope around the neck and naked below the waist. The same Coast Guard crew was sent to recover it, and while the crew was doing so, a call came in of yet a third female, seen floating only a couple of hundred yards to the east.

The three bodies were taken to the dock at the Coast Guard station to be examined and photographed by the police investigators already arriving at the scene. The bodies were bloated and had begun to decompose, but it was still possible to determine that they were white women who appeared to be fairly young.

The hands and feet of all three were tied and bound in the same manner, though the left hand of the second woman was loose. Before dying, she had apparently wrested the hand free. All had duct tape over their mouths. The second and third bodies had concrete blocks attached to the ropes around their necks. Though the rope around the neck of the first body had been cut by the Coast Guard, it was assumed that a concrete block had been tied to that line as well.

The discovery of a triple homicide on a quiet Sunday morning — a morning so perfect, it was difficult to conceive of anyone having even a violent thought — galvanized law enforcement agencies from all around Tampa Bay. Divers were soon plumbing the waters near the Skyway, looking for the object that had been cut from the line attached to the first body. Police boats crisscrossed the bay, making sure there were no more bodies to be found. A plane circled overhead, searching for the same.

Back at the dock where the bodies had been brought, detectives were already trying to understand what had happened to the women. Given that all three were partially nude, sexual assault seemed likely. As for the cause of death, a quick examination of the bodies revealed no obvious bruises, knife wounds, or bullet holes. It was possible that the women had been bound and gagged, weighed down with the concrete blocks and then tossed alive into the water to drown at the bottom of the bay.

Disturbing as that scenario was, there was no time to focus on it just yet or to determine its plausibility. To know even the most basic facts of how the women died, the detectives would have to wait for the results of the autopsies. And before they could search for the killer, they needed to first learn who the victims were. No identification had been found on the bodies, and there had been no local reports of three women missing.

What were their names? Where did they live? Were they locals or tourists?

All the detectives had to go on was the bodies themselves and the clothing and jewelry they had been wearing. One of the women, probably the oldest of the three, had long brown hair and had been found in a black T-shirt and with a gold wedding band on the ring finger of her left hand. Another had medium-length brown hair and was wearing a peach-colored shirt and three cloth bracelets, braided and decorated with pink, green and white stripes, on her left wrist.

Finally there was the young woman who had apparently struggled hard enough to remove one of her hands from the rope. She had wavy brown hair and wore a black tank shirt over a blue bikini top. On her left hand, the hand that had broken free, she wore four rings. Two gold, two silver. One on each finger.

“Have they called?”

“Not yet.”

Jeff Feasby was getting impatient. Michelle was supposed to be back by now, and he missed her. So he kept phoning the farm, asking Hal Rogers if he’d heard from them.

Hal did not know what to say. As the days went by without a word, he was growing increasingly panicked. He called Jo’s friends and relatives to see if she’d contacted them, called Jo’s boss at the distribution center to make sure he’d understood correctly when she was due back on the job, checked with the Van Wert Sheriff’s Office and the Ohio Highway Patrol and reported them missing. No one had heard a thing.

Then, one night early that week, Jeff Feasby phoned again. He’d gotten a postcard from Michelle. The one with the girl in the bikini and the bull gator and the words on the front that said FUN TIMES IN FLORIDA. Hal asked him to bring it to the house. Jeff drove right over, and Hal held the postcard, reading it over and over, searching in vain for some hint of what might have happened.

Love ya, Chelle

Hal was pacing back and forth through the house, smoking one cigarette after the other. He was sure something had gone terribly wrong. Maybe they’d been robbed and left somewhere, he told himself. Or maybe their car had gone off the highway into a marsh or in some woods where no one would find them for weeks. Maybe they were still alive, trapped somewhere, hurt, waiting to be rescued.

The images played through his mind until finally he could not stand it anymore. Desperate to take some kind of action, he went to the bank that Wednesday and withdrew some money. He had a plan. He was going to get into the air and conduct a search himself. He would find a private plane and a pilot and together they would fly over the roads Jo and the girls had traveled between Ohio and Florida.

One way or the other, he was going to find his family.

•••

It was the next morning — Thursday, June 8 — when the maid at the Days Inn in Tampa spoke up about Room 251.

For days, the room had been untouched. The guests, obviously one or more women, had checked in a week before and had made it up to the room, leaving their suitcases on the floor and a purse on the table and other items strewn about. From that day on, though, there had been no sign of their returning. The beds had not been slept in. The shower and bath had not been used. The personal items had not been disturbed.

Now, on this Thursday, the maid studied the scene before her and decided something was wrong. Where had the guests gone?

That was how the chain began to unfold. The maid’s suspicions were passed along to the Days Inn’s general manager, who called the Tampa police and informed them that one or more of the motel’s guests appeared to be missing.

By this point the newspapers and TV news shows had been filled for several days with reports about the three bodies found in the bay. When officers from the Tampa police arrived at the Days Inn, it quickly became clear that the answer to the women’s identities might well be there.

The Tampa officers sealed off Room 251 and radioed for their superiors. Soon detectives were arriving from both Tampa and St. Petersburg, and the room was being searched and photographed and dusted for prints, and all the personal belongings were being inspected and bagged and numbered. A technician quickly matched prints from the room — including prints taken from a tube of Oral-B Sesame Street toothpaste on the vanity outside the bathroom — with the prints taken from the bodies in the bay.

“It’s them,” the technician announced. “This is their room.”

Meanwhile, preliminary identifications were being made from the information in the purse and on the registration form at the front desk.

Someone was going to have to call Ohio.

•••

That day, Jeff Feasby phoned the Rogers house again, hoping Michelle would be back.

Hal picked up. His voice was strange. He sounded furious.

“Who is this?” he demanded.

Jeff told him who it was and asked if he’d heard anything. With that, Hal broke down.

“They’re not coming home,” he said, his voice trembling.

Jeff paused for a second. He didn’t understand.

“What do you mean?”

So Hal told him. They were gone, he said. All of them.

The sheriff of Van Wert County, a friend of Hal’s since high school, had come out to the farm that afternoon. A little while later, a reporter — the first of many — had walked onto the property and tried to interview Hal as he came out of the barn.

It was like an explosion had gone off. The news was all over the radio and the TV. Television crews were starting to pull up on the road beside the farm. Michelle’s and Christe’s friends were calling one another, sobbing. So were different members of the family.

“They found Jo and the girls,” Jim Etzler, Jo’s brother, told his wife that day over the phone. “They’re dead.”

“Surely not all of them, Jim,” said Colleen.

Jeff Feasby was overcome with anger. Moments after hanging up with Hal, he went downstairs to his family’s basement and punched a hole in the door. Then he got into his pickup truck and went tearing down the road, tires screeching.

An hour or so later, Jeff went over to the farm. Hal was there with a friend who’d been helping him hold things together while Jo and the girls were on vacation. Hal and the other man were outside, taking another load of hay into the barn.

Hal was beside himself with rage and grief.

“Not all of them,” he told a friend. “Why everybody?”

But he did not have the luxury of collapsing. The cows had to be milked and fed, just like any other day. The farm had to go on.

Tears in his eyes, Hal kept working.

That same day, two things happened in Tampa Bay.

First, the police found the Calais.

They got the make and model and tag number off the motel registration form, and when it didn’t turn up in the lot at the Days Inn, they searched the surrounding area until someone discovered it parked just a couple of miles away, at a boat ramp along the Courtney Campbell Parkway.

The car appeared to have been undisturbed since Jo and the girls had left it there a week before. The doors were locked; the passenger seat was pushed forward, as though someone had just climbed out of the back.

Scattered within the interior was a Clearwater Beach brochure, a deck of Uno cards, a puzzle book someone had been working on in the back seat. On the front passenger seat was a sheet of Days Inn stationery, marked with directions – written in Jo’s hand – that had guided them from the motel to the boat ramp.

The directions said:

turn rt (w on 60) – 2 1/2 mi – on rt side alt before

bridge

Beside these words was one more instruction:

blue w/wht

The police were a long way from discovering who had lured the Rogers women out onto the water. Whoever they were, though, it was a fair bet that they owned a blue and white boat.

•••

The second big lead — and undoubtedly the most startling — came that same day, while one of the investigators was talking over the phone with the chief of detectives from the Van Wert County Sheriff’s Office. The detective wanted to make sure that the investigators working the homicides were aware of all the facts about the Rogers family. So he told them about Michelle and her uncle John.

Even though John Rogers had been in prison at the time of the murders, the investigators could not ignore the similarities between what had happened to Michelle on that farm and here in Tampa Bay. Both times, she had apparently been subjected to bondage, with her hands tied. Both times, it appeared, she had been raped.

The investigators needed to consider the possibility that John Rogers might have somehow orchestrated the murders from behind bars, possibly arranging for someone with a boat to get them out on the water. They needed to know more about the Rogers family, period. The better they understood Jo and Michelle and Christe, the better their chances of discovering exactly how the three of them wound up out on the bay at night, alone with someone who wanted to hurt them.

The day after the bodies were identified, two detectives were on a plane, headed for Ohio.





Chapter 2: Haunted

Usually, when someone from Zion Lutheran Church died, the church would call a man who lived nearby and ask him to help with the graves. This man was a member of the congregation; more importantly, he had a backhoe, and opening the graves took him only a few minutes.

But in June of 1989, when they asked him to bring his backhoe for the burial of Jo and Michelle and Christe Rogers, he told them they would have to find someone else this time.

Like so many others in Van Wert County, Ohio, he had known the Rogers family for years. He was one of Hal’s best friends — they had hung out together since elementary school — and Jo had been like a sister to him. Michelle and Christe had grown up in front of him, playing on his back porch; Christe used to help him load cows.

How could he dig three holes in the ground for them?

“No, I can’t,” he told the church. “I can’t. I can’t do that.”

The size of it, the depth and scale and unthinkable nature of it, was almost impossible to comprehend.

At first, when the bodies were being flown back to Ohio and preparations were being made for the funeral, family members struggled to come to terms with what had happened. They worried about what clothes Jo and the girls should be wearing in their caskets; then they remembered how long the three of them had been in the water and knew the caskets would be closed.

Somewhere in that first numbing week, Colleen Etzler — married to Jo Rogers’ brother, Jim — was sitting with Bill Etzler, her father-in-law and Jo’s father, when Bill got this strange look on his face.

“Do you realize how many pallbearers we need?” he said.

No one was in greater shock than Hal Rogers. Even in those first days, when the news was all over the newspapers and the TV and the entire county was reeling, Hal managed somehow to keep the farm going. He got a couple of hands to help him and continued with the milkings and the feedings and whatever else had to be done. But inside he was lost.

Hal kept waiting for someone to tell him that there had been a mistake, that the bodies sent up from Florida weren’t his family after all, but someone else. The phone would ring, and he would pick it up, expecting to hear Jo’s voice on the other end of the line, apologizing for making him worry. In the mornings, he would come out of the milking parlor and look toward the house, hoping to see the Calais pulling into the driveway and Jo and the girls piling out, grinning and waving.

But no one called, and every time Hal checked the driveway there was no sign of the Calais, and the hole inside him kept growing.

One day he turned to Colleen Etzler.

“I should have went with them,” he said. “This wouldn’t have happened.”

Colleen looked at Hal, enveloped in a loss that defied the imagination, and tried to think of what to say. What could anyone say? How was this possible? How could Jo and the girls be alive one day and then sealed inside their caskets the next?

No. It made no sense.

“Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference if you had gone,” she said.

•••

The pallbearers took up four rows of pews.

Though it was mid-June, the day of the funeral was windy and cool, the sky overcast. Inside Zion Lutheran, an imposing Gothic structure with red-brick walls and green spires that stretched high above the surrounding farmland, the sanctuary was overflowing. So many people came to pay their respects, they were crowded into the church’s basement and fellowship hall. Outside, the road was lined with vans and trucks of TV news crews. Not allowed within the church, reporters stood beside the road with their microphones, looking into the cameras. Driving by, Hal Rogers counted 12 news crews.

Hal was wearing his only suit, a gray pin-stripe Jo had given him, and a raspberry-colored shirt that Jo had always liked on him. (“I ain’t afraid to wear pink or orange,” he says.) When Hal arrived at the church, the caskets were up front, each covered with flowers and adorned with a framed picture. There was Jo in her high school senior photo, looking like she had all the time in the world, and Michelle in her junior class photo, smiling a camera smile and wearing her glasses with the pink frames, and Christe in another school portrait, beaming as her hair defied gravity and achieved its usual mousse-induced liftoff. At Hal’s request, a teddy bear had been placed inside each of the girls’ caskets.

Before the service began, Hal nearly lost it. They sat him up front, and then they made room beside him for his mother. This was the woman who had chosen to believe that Michelle and Jo had made up the rape charges against her son John, and she and Hal had barely spoken in the year since then. When Hal saw her there in the church, he could barely contain himself.

“I was about ready to cold-cock her,” he would remember.

The service got under way. The congregation sang How Great Thou Art, and when it was time for the sermon, the pastor asked aloud the question that was on so many people’s minds: How could God have let this happen? That night out on Tampa Bay, when Jo and Michelle and Christe were praying for their lives, where was the God?

“Why? Oh, dear God, why?” said the Rev. Gary Luderman. “Where were you, God, when this was going on? What was God doing when this was going on? What in the world was going through God’s mind when He decided to allow this to go on?”

The pastor told the congregation that God in fact had been with them on the water that night, watching over them as they moved not toward death but toward eternal life. If heaven could open up at this moment, he said, the congregation would see Jo and Michelle and Christe, bathed in joy and glory.

“Don’t you see?” he said, his voice rising. “Don’t you see how Jesus loved Joan and Michelle and Christe? Don’t you see how Jesus loves you? How God must feel right now as he looks into our hearts and sees our pain and our sorrow and our grief?”

The church was silent, but from outside came the sound of a sparrow chirping.

Luderman went on. God, he said, had not intended for something so horrible to happen. “He never meant for you to suffer this pain. He never meant them to have this death. He loves us.” Here the pastor’s voice dropped. “What a terrible thing it must be to be God. How in paradise at this moment He must be weeping with you.”

In the pews, the congregation was indeed weeping. It seemed that tears were falling down every face. People were holding those sitting next to them, even if they did not know each other.

The most noticeable exception to these displays of grief came from Hal Rogers. Wearing his tinted glasses as usual, Hal did not show anyone his tears. He sat silently up front, his movements almost robotic, his face a blank and unreadable text.

The pallbearers stood up and carried Jo and Michelle and Christe down the red carpet of the center aisle and out the arched front doors. To the tolling of church bells, three hearses took the caskets to the tiny cemetery across the road where three freshly dug graves were waiting. As the final prayers were spoken and the bodies were ready to be committed to the earth, some of Michelle’s and Christe’s friends began to sob and cry out.

Hal walked over to the caskets, took some flowers from the arrangements, and handed them, one by one, to his daughters’ grieving friends. When the service was over, he went back across the road.

“I just want to be by myself,” he said.

He went inside the sanctuary, walked across its old, creaking floor to one of the pews and sat alone, leaning over, wrapped inside himself. A neighbor’s son stood guard at the front doors to make sure no reporters or photographers disturbed his solitude.

Later that afternoon, Hal returned to the farm. He took off his pin-striped suit, put on his overalls, and went out to the barn to grind some feed for the cows. It was all he could think to do.

The police investigation was already hurtling in a dozen different directions. And already running into a dozen different complications.

Nothing in the case was to be easy. To begin with, it had not been clear which city’s police department should have jurisdiction over the murders. The bodies had been recovered in St. Petersburg waters, but Jo and her daughters had disappeared from a motel room in Tampa. So a special task force was formed, made up of more than two dozen investigators from both cities’ departments and from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Florida Marine Patrol.

Of course, since the bodies had been found in the water, the task force was being asked to solve a crime without the wealth of information and evidence that a murder scene typically provides.

“We absolutely have nothing to go on,” one Tampa homicide detective told a reporter. “And we’re just hoping someone saw something.”

No suspicious fingerprints had been identified so far in Room 251 of the Days Inn at Rocky Point. Most of the prints in the room that had been checked belonged to the Rogers women or one of the maids. No unusual prints had yet been identified on the exterior or the interior surfaces of the family’s car, either. In fact, the Calais was remarkably clean; the technician who processed the vehicle for prints said the car looked like it had gone through a car wash. There was the Clearwater Beach brochure, however. Found inside the car along with other personal items, the back of the brochure showed a map of Tampa Bay. The map was marked with directions, written in a hand different from Jo Rogers’, that described how to get to the Days Inn.

Obviously the Rogers women had met someone on the day they were killed, probably when they first reached Tampa, and this person had helped them find their way to the motel. But who this person was, or how the person met up with them, was unknown.

Even the question of how the three women were killed could not be answered with precision. The autopsies showed that they had died of asphyxiation, but the medical examiner could not determine whether they had drowned or been strangled by the ropes around their necks. Because the bodies had been in the water for several days, it was no longer possible to tell if there had been any sexual assault. Still, the most likely scenario appeared to be that the women had been tied and gagged, raped and then dropped into the water, one by one.

As for how many assailants had been involved, that was anybody’s guess. Some theorized that it would have likely taken at least two attackers to subdue three victims. Others pointed out that one person, pointing a gun at a mother and her daughters, would have had no trouble compelling one of the victims to gag and tie up the other two before she was restrained herself. However many assailants there were, the nature and scope of this crime made it seem unlikely that the killer or killers were novices. It also seemed probable that the killer had derived some sadistic pleasure from forcing each of the women to witness what was happening to the others.

Using credit card records and receipts found in the motel room, the investigators reconstructed the itinerary of the Rogers women in Florida. They developed the rolls of film discovered in the motel room and examined the snapshots for clues. The Nikon One-Touch used to shoot the film, however, had not been found in either the motel room or the car. This suggested that the killer may have used the camera to take photos of the attack and then kept the film and the camera as souvenirs of the murders.

Fanning out across Florida and northward into Georgia, investigators compiled lists of all the guests and employees at the motels where Jo, Michelle and Christe had stayed. Then they began the long process of talking to as many of these people as possible.

They interviewed the employee at the Days Inn who had helped Jo Rogers register for the room.

They interviewed the businessman who had seen Jo and the girls at dinner the night they were killed.

They interviewed boaters at the boat ramp where the family car had been found.

They searched construction sites near the boat ramp, looking for concrete blocks that matched those found tied to the bodies.

They consulted with agents at the FBI’s behavioral science unit, hoping to develop at least a preliminary profile of the kind of person who could kill three people in this fashion.

They spoke with tidal experts at the University of South Florida, who confirmed that, based on the flow of Tampa Bay waters and the locations where the bodies had been found, it would have been impossible for the bodies to have been dropped from land or from a bridge. In other words, there was growing evidence to support the theory that the three women had been invited to the boat ramp by someone who took them out in a boat and killed them.

This led investigators back to the directions Jo Rogers had scribbled down and left in the car, the ones that suggested she and her daughters had been meeting someone with a blue and white boat. The detectives combed the boat ramp, asking if anyone had seen a blue and white boat on the day the women disappeared. They took the lists of the guests who had stayed at the same motels as the Rogers women, then cross-checked them against the names of more than 700,000 boaters registered in Florida as well as the names of thousands of others from Ohio.

Day after day, they described the boat in news releases and in fliers, appealing to the public for help. They offered a $ 5,000 reward to anyone providing information leading to an arrest and conviction.

In the following weeks, the task force received more than 800 tips. Keeping track of so much information was a struggle. Unable to follow up on every phone call, the investigators logged the tips and graded them, assessing which ones appeared the most substantive. One by one, these leads were checked out. One by one, they were eliminated.

“We’ve worked it hard,” said Sgt. Bill Sanders, the St. Petersburg officer overseeing the case. “But we just haven’t gotten anywhere.”

Early on, one promising lead involved a Hillsborough County man who owned a blue and white boat and who had been seen offering a ride on the boat to a couple at the same ramp from where Jo and her daughters had disappeared. The man had given the couple his name and phone number, and the police soon discovered he had been charged in years past with burglary, grand theft and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

Detectives went to the man’s home. The boat was parked in the driveway. On the ground behind the boat were two concrete blocks, one with a dark stain on top of it; inside the boat was some yellow rope and white rope, similar to what had been used to tie up the Rogers women. When the detectives knocked on the man’s door and questioned him and his wife, he told them that on the day of the murders he had been out in his boat with some friends. A few moments later, though, the man pulled one of the detectives aside, out of earshot of his wife.

He hadn’t told the investigators the whole story yet, he whispered.

On the night of the murders, the man said, he had been out with a girlfriend. His wife did not know about her, he said.

Inquiries followed. The man’s alibi checked out. He agreed to take a polygraph examination and was judged to have had no knowledge of the murders.

Another dead end.

Of all the early leads, none attracted as much attention as the one that led northward along I-75, away from Florida and back into Ohio, straight to the Rogers family farm.

In those first weeks of the investigation, a pair of detectives — Ralph Pflieger, from the St. Petersburg police, and Henry Duran, from the Tampa police — traveled to Van Wert County twice. They were there to learn more about Jo and Michelle and Christe and to gather whatever insights they could into the women’s personalities, habits, state of mind. The most pressing question before them, however, was whether there was any link between the murders and the sexual assaults that Michelle had allegedly suffered at the hands of her uncle, John Rogers.

Certainly the uncle had no shortage of possible motives to have sought revenge against Michelle and the rest of the family. Did he have the means to carry it out?

“I wouldn’t be surprised if John could have something to do with it,” Hal Rogers told the detectives. “But to put it bluntly, I think it would be a very remote possibility.”

John Rogers was in prison when the murders occurred. Just before he was sentenced, though, he had visited the Tampa Bay area. His parents sometimes wintered in Manatee County, staying at a trailer park in Ellenton, just a few miles south of the Sunshine Skyway. Over the years, John had often joined them there. His last visit had been in early 1989, a few months before the murders, and he had stayed for several weeks.

Obviously, Pflieger and Duran needed to consider the possibility that John had somehow arranged the deaths of Jo and the girls during that visit. But after interviewing John at the Ohio prison where he was serving his sentence, the detectives agreed with Hal’s assessment and decided that it would have been extremely difficult for John to have had anything to do with the Rogers murders.

To begin with, there was no evidence that he was even aware of the three women’s vacation plans, making it unlikely that he could have hired someone else to carry out the attack.

The only visitor he had received in recent months had been his mother, who had come to see him in April, long before Jo and the girls had made all their preparations for the trip. He had received no packages at the prison in recent weeks, and phone records showed that the only long-distance call he had made had been after the murders, when he called his parents’ home on Father’s Day.

Inmates housed with Rogers confirmed that John was a loner with few friends inside the prison and that he did not have the connections to arrange a triple homicide. After meeting with John themselves, Pflieger and Duran agreed that he seemed too isolated to have put together such a conspiracy.

As they conducted their investigation, however, the detectives discovered that John Rogers was not the only member of the family whose behavior had raised questions. They learned something strange about Hal Rogers, something that had long troubled many people in Van Wert County.

In the spring of the previous year, after John Rogers was arrested, Hal had arranged for his brother’s bail. Hal knew that John was accused of raping Michelle, and yet he had personally posted the $ 10,000 surety bond.

There was something else unusual. In early June, after Jo and the girls were killed but before their bodies had been identified, Hal had withdrawn $7,000 in cash from an account at Van Wert National Bank. Where had that money gone?

Pflieger and Duran easily established Hal’s whereabouts on the day and night of the murders. As always, he had been on the farm, milking the cows until late that afternoon, and had been back at it before dawn the next morning. This was on a farm approximately an hour away from the nearest airport of any size, which was across the Indiana border in Fort Wayne. There had been no time for him to get down to Florida and commit the murders. And there was nothing to suggest a motive for an act as heinous as killing his entire family.

Still, the cash withdrawal begged the question. Was it possible that, for reasons unknown, Hal had hired someone to commit the murders?

The detectives spent much of their time in Ohio on the farm, interviewing Hal at length. He was clearly numb with grief and appeared to be moving through the days on automatic pilot. His eyes, as Pflieger would later describe it, had a “blank, hundred-mile stare.”

Even so, Pflieger and Duran needed some answers. One of the first things they asked was why he had posted his brother’s bond.

Others had asked the same question, and the reply that Hal repeatedly had given was odd and unsettling and completely consistent with his proud and stubborn personality. He had agreed to post the bail, he said, after John was accused of raping the woman who had shared his trailer. By the time Hal learned about the allegations involving Michelle, he said, he had already given his word. And once he gave his word, he was required to keep it, no matter how hard it was or how unusual it appeared to others.

Speaking privately to Pflieger and Duran, Hal said more. He said he had wanted to be supportive of Michelle but had also wanted to keep the peace with his brother and his parents. He said that he believed Michelle but was aware that someone was lying – either his brother or his daughter – and that he wanted to wait to see if the truth became any clearer. Furthermore, he said he had agreed to fulfill his pledge to his brother and post the bond only after John agreed in return to sell his half of the farm and never come near the property or Michelle again.

As for the $ 7,000 he had taken out of the bank, Hal explained that he had withdrawn it during the agonizing days when Jo and the girls were missing. He had needed the money, he said, to travel between Ohio and Florida, searching for his family. He had to withdraw it in cash because he had no credit cards; didn’t believe in credit cards, he said. Before he got the chance to carry out his plan, he had learned his family was dead.

Hal did his best to answer the detectives’ questions. He understood why they had to ask these things and wanted to resolve any suspicions about him so they could move on and pursue other leads.

At the end of one interview, as the two investigators were preparing to back out of the driveway, Duran turned to Hal and asked, almost off-hand, one last question.

“I got one more thing to ask you. I almost forgot,” Duran said, looking up at Hal through the car window. “About that money you withdrew from the bank? That $ 7,000? What happened to it?”

Motioning to the detectives to follow him, Hal walked over to his pickup truck, parked a few feet away. He opened the truck’s unlocked door, opened the glove compartment and showed them a bank bag. Inside the bag was $ 6,000 in cash.

The other $ 1,000 was in Hal’s pocket.

So much for the road to Ohio.

When the detectives returned from their rounds of interviews up north, neither Hal nor John Rogers was considered a viable suspect. In fact, the investigators had found nothing to suggest that the crime had any connection to Ohio whatsoever.

“We got nothing there,” Sgt. Sanders said. “We’re coming back with zilch from Ohio … It’s something that happened here.”

If the murders were something that had begun and ended in Florida, that suggested a random meeting between the women and their killer. Apparently they had stopped at some point, run into someone, struck up a conversation and then felt safe enough with this person to accompany him — given the probable sexual nature of the attack, it was almost certainly a man — on a boat ride on Tampa Bay.

Such randomness made the task of solving the case that much more difficult. As the weeks went by, the chances of finding the killer began to seem increasingly remote. The early flood of tips dwindled to a trickle; the most encouraging leads were all proving to be nothing. The multiagency task force was disbanded and the case was left in the hands of the St. Petersburg police.

In the beginning, there had been more than 20 investigators working on the case. Soon that number was cut to four.

Then two.

Even the commanding officers in charge of the investigation admitted they were stymied and simply hoping that someone would step forward with new information.

“That’s what we’re down to now,” said Maj. Cliff Fouts, the officer who headed the department’s criminal investigation section. “We really have no place to go.”

•••

The lack of progress in Florida only added to the sense of hopelessness felt by those who cared about Jo and Michelle and Christe.

Jeff Feasby, Michelle’s boyfriend, was gripped with a searing, unshakable rage. Jeff had not attended the funeral – he couldn’t bear it, he said – and since then had refused to go anywhere near Zion Lutheran Church or the little cemetery across the road. He did not like to let his friends out of his sight and would get upset it if he saw one of them talking to a stranger.

Jim Etzler, Jo’s brother, would wake up at night from horrible dreams, flailing his arms. His wife, Colleen, found him out in the barn one evening, hurling a soda can at the wall over and over. Colleen would go to Van Wert, shop for groceries, come home and realize she had been in a trance throughout the errand and could not remember a single detail of what had just transpired.

Colleen felt a terrible connection with the murders. Not long before Jo and the girls were killed, during a vacation in South Carolina, Colleen had been raped while taking a morning walk along the beach. She had screamed for help, but the waves of the ocean had drowned out her cries. Now her memories of that day combined with her grief and terror from the murders. Knowing that Jo and the girls had died at night, Colleen could not stand to be alone after dark. She hated to drive anywhere at night, even short distances. She began to view the world as a randomly cruel and unpredictable place, a place steeped in blood and violence.

One night Colleen had a dream and found herself standing at the edge of a body of water — a lake, a river, it wasn’t clear — and on the other side was Jo.

“I haven’t seen you for a long, long time,” Jo said.

They were all haunted. Colleen’s 12-year-old daughter, Mandi, stayed upstairs in her bedroom for hours with the door locked, because it was the only place she felt safe. A counselor, trying to help, asked Mandi what would happen if an attacker came into the house while she was in the bedroom. What if this attacker were downstairs, doing something to another member of the family?

Mandi shook her head. “I just don’t want to know,” she said.

Ginny Etzler, Mandi’s grandmother and Jo’s mother, went into her basement one day, where Michelle and Christe used to play, and found a little blackboard, still marked with their scribblings from years ago. A heart had been drawn on the blackboard, and beneath the heart were the words — written in Michelle’s cursive — “I love . . . ”

Hal Rogers was disappearing further inside himself. He didn’t want to talk, didn’t know how to explain what he was feeling, had no interest in the reporters and camera crews who kept showing up at the farm.

No matter what the detectives had concluded, many people in Van Wert County were wondering if Hal and his brother John were involved in the murders. People said the Rogers family was strange. They talked especially about Hal, how quiet he was, how he never broke down after the murders, how he always wore the tinted glasses, even at the funeral. He was hiding something, they said. Why hadn’t anyone seen him cry?

No one accused Hal of anything to his face, but his friends heard the talk and did their best to stop it.

“Goddamn it, that ain’t nothin’ but rumors,” said Darrell Dietrich, one of Hal’s neighbors and closest friends. “Hal didn’t do nothin’. You just don’t know Hal.”

Darrell and others pointed out that there was no way for Hal to have committed the murders, that he had been seen on the farm in the hours shortly before and after Jo and the girls were killed. They talked about how much he had relied on Jo and how he had doted on Michelle and Christe.

“Those girls were his life,” Rosemary Krick told one accuser. “He worshiped the ground they walked on.”

But the rumors didn’t stop. Sometimes when Hal walked into a restaurant or a bar, he could feel people staring at him, wondering if he had arranged for the slaughter of his family.

“People just couldn’t believe that they were picked out at random,” says Colleen Etzler.

Hal did not want to show his grief to the reporters or the cameras or the rest of the world, but the grief was there. He didn’t like to go inside the girls’ rooms and see all their clothes and books and knickknacks. He could not bear to sleep inside the house, in the bed he had shared with Jo, so for months he spent his nights on the couches of friends. Often, he showed up at Vance and Rosemary Krick’s house. He would stretch out on one of their recliners, watch TV with them for awhile, then close his eyes and fall asleep, never having said a word to them all evening, just appreciating the fact that he could find quiet refuge in their home. Vance and Rosemary would put a blanket on him before going to bed; in the morning, when they woke, Hal would already be gone, off for the first milking of the day.

Like others, the Kricks pushed Hal to seek counseling.

“You’ve got to get help,” Rosemary told him. “You have got to talk to somebody.”

“No,” he would say. “I have to do it myself.”

A month or so after the murders, Hal went out to the mailbox and found Jo’s credit card bill listing a charge from the Days Inn at Rocky Point for his family’s stay in Room 251. Jo and the girls had spent all of a few hours in the room before they disappeared, but a week had gone by before they were identified, and for days the room had technically still been theirs. Now the charge for the room — to be exact, $ 321.46 — was included in the credit card bill.

Hal wrote the check, sealed the envelope, sent it off.

The first break came that October.

Jim Kappel, the lead detective on the case since the day the bodies were pulled from the water, was looking at a bulletin issued every month by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Someone else had seen the bulletin and passed it on to Kappel, pointing to an item about a rape in the waters off Madeira Beach. The victim was a 24-year-old Canadian woman. She had been vacationing in Pinellas County and had met a man who took her out on his boat in the gulf off John’s Pass and assaulted her.

Kappel checked the date of the rape:

May 15. Two weeks before the Rogers women were killed.

He checked the description of the boat:

light blue and white interior.

•••

A flurry of things happened very quickly.

Kappel spoke to the Madeira Beach police investigator who had handled the rape back in May and learned the details of the assault. Then Kappel and another detective flew to Canada to interview the victim. They returned convinced that the man who had committed the rape probably was involved in the Rogers murders.

The woman had been on vacation in Madeira Beach with a girlfriend, also from Canada. The two of them had stopped one night at a 7-Eleven, when a man in the parking lot struck up a conversation with them. He was in a dark-colored four-wheel-drive vehicle with tinted windows and a Florida license plate; later the women would describe it as similar to a Ford Bronco or a Jeep Cherokee. He was older than the two of them, perhaps in his mid-30s. He was white, about 5 foot 10 and 180 pounds, with blond, slightly reddish hair and a ruddy complexion. He said his name was Dave Posner — or Dave Posno, the woman wasn’t sure — and that he owned an aluminum company and lived in Bradenton.

He seemed nice enough, polite and easy to talk to, and he offered to take the two women out on his boat the next afternoon. The 24-year-old woman had wanted to go, but her girlfriend had not, and so she went alone. That afternoon, they went out into the gulf briefly and then cruised the Intracoastal Waterway. The man was friendly, talkative, appropriate with his words and actions. When he returned the woman to shore, he offered to take her and her friend out that evening for a sunset cruise. It would be pretty on the water, he said, and they should bring a camera.

Again, the 24-year-old woman wanted to go, but her friend did not. And when she showed up at the dock that evening, the man seemed happy to see her but irritated that her friend had not come along. He took the woman out onto the water anyway. She had brought her camera, and as they rode across the water, talking, she took the man’s photo. By now it was getting dark, and they were a ways off shore. Suddenly the man’s demeanor changed. Now he was touching and hugging her, talking about how pretty she was, saying he wanted to have sex with her. When she refused, he insisted.

The woman screamed. The man told her she was wasting her time.

“What are you doing? Nobody’s going to hear you,” he said. “What are you going to do? Jump out of the boat?”

He told her to be quiet. If she didn’t stop screaming, he said, he would cover her mouth with duct tape.

“Is sex something worth losing your life over?” he said.

He ripped off her top, pulled down her shorts and the bottom of her bathing suit, and raped her. When it was over, he told her to get dressed. He gave her a thermos of water and told her to rinse herself, ripped the film from her camera and threw the film overboard.

As the woman huddled in the boat, shocked and terrified, the man apologized for what he had done.

“I’ve taken something from you that you can never get back,” he said.

When they headed back to shore, he seemed to want to talk. He said he knew she would report what had happened, but he would appreciate it if she waited a little because his mother was old and he wanted the chance to tell her first, so she would not have a heart attack when the police showed up at the door.

Several times, he threw up over the side of the boat. At first she had thought he was vomiting out of remorse. Later, though, she and others would wonder if it was because he remembered the friend on shore and knew that someone else could identify him if he killed her there on the gulf.

The man pulled the boat into the shallow water off John’s Pass and stopped, letting her get out and walk back to shore.

“Watch your step,” he said.

•••

The detectives listened to the woman’s account and made a mental list of all the details that were similar to the Rogers case. The attacker had made his approach in a public place on two tourists, offering them a scenic ride in his boat. He had not been deterred by the thought of having two women on board; in fact, he had clearly preferred for both of them to be on the boat. On top of that, he had threatened to use duct tape, he had removed the clothing from the lower half of the victim’s body, and he had taken advantage of the victim’s unfamiliarity with her surroundings, both on land and on water.

They asked the Canadian woman to help them put together a composite drawing of her attacker. She had helped with a composite for the Madeira Beach police, but in that drawing he had been wearing a hat and they wanted one that showed his whole face.

The detectives flew back to Florida. They already knew there was no Dave Posner or Dave Posno who owned an aluminum company or lived in Bradenton or anywhere else around Tampa Bay. They decided to make public the composite drawing, along with a description of the man and his boat and his four-wheel-drive vehicle. For days, the composite was everywhere. It was printed on fliers and copied to other law enforcement agencies and shown on the TV news and printed in the newspapers.

The floodgates opened once more. The investigators received more than 400 tips. Once again, extra detectives were assigned to the case. Once again, they scrambled to investigate as many of the tips as possible.

And once again, the tips they checked out all proved worthless.

It was maddening. Kappel and the other investigators were confident that they had the right suspect and that they had a good description of him. But they still had no idea who he was. As the weeks passed, the number of detectives was cut again.

•••

By now it was December of 1989. Jo and Michelle and Christe had been dead for six months.

Hal Rogers decided to head to Florida himself. He drove down a few days before Christmas. He was in the Calais, the same car Jo and the girls had been driving when they disappeared. The police had returned the car to him months before.

For a long time Hal had not been able to even look at the Calais; anxious to keep it out of sight, he had left it at a friend’s house. But eventually he got over that and returned the car to his own driveway. Some nights, when he couldn’t bear to sleep inside his house, he slept out in the car, the key in the ignition, drifting off to a country station on the radio.

Now here he was, making his own pilgrimage to Florida, sitting behind the same steering wheel as Jo, heading down the same stretch of highway that she and the girls had taken.

He arrived in Tampa on Dec. 23. It was cold and raining. He didn’t have the heart to visit the Days Inn, but he did drive over to the boat ramp on the Courtney Campbell Parkway. He walked to the edge of the bay and stared out over the water. He wanted to see what his wife and daughters had seen, to feel what they had felt. Maybe then everything would make more sense.

But it didn’t help. How could it?

Hal got back in the Calais and drove away.

The one-year anniversary of the murders was approaching, and the case was literally stuck on the shelf, summed up inside a few black notebooks filled with reports that almost no one had time to read anymore.

There was a new sergeant overseeing the investigation. He was a novice to homicide, had almost no experience with solving murders, but he did not think that mattered. In fact, he thought it might help.

His name was Glen Moore. He had some ideas on how to tackle the investigation from a fresh angle, and some notions on how to get those ideas translated into reality.

Sgt. Moore had never met Jo or Michelle or Christe. Still, he hated to think of them dying alone on the bottom of Tampa Bay and then being abandoned to die again inside a handful of notebooks on a shelf. He did not intend to leave them there.

•••

Across the bay, a woman stood inside the kitchen of her Tampa home, looking at the newspaper clipping hanging on her white Kenmore refrigerator.

The clipping showed the composite drawing of the man from the Madeira Beach rape case. To Jo Ann Steffey, the drawing resembled one of her neighbors.

Steffey thought the man was maybe 40 or even older, about 5-10, with reddish-blond hair and a ruddy face. He was an aluminum contractor, married, with a little girl. He drove a dark blue Jeep Cherokee and lived two lots down the street from Steffey, in a house on Dalton Avenue, on the far west side of Tampa, only a few miles from the boat ramp where the three Rogers women had disappeared. His house was on a canal that led straight to the bay, and until a few months ago, he had owned a blue and white Bayliner that he liked to take out at night.

For some time, even before she read the story in the newspaper about the Madeira Beach rape, Steffey had felt that there was something off about this neighbor. He was so talkative, he tried so hard to seem friendly and helpful. When he looked at her, she got an uneasy feeling.

Then the composite came out in the paper. That morning, after Steffey read the story, she was driving down her street past the neighbor’s house when suddenly it hit her.

“Damn,” she said to herself. “It’s him.”

Now she stared at the clipping on the refrigerator. She gazed at the face in the drawing. It was him, she told herself.

Definitely.





Chapter 3: Neighbors

One night, when he could take it no longer, Hal Rogers grabbed a spade and a shovel and drove to the cemetery.

He knew others would not understand. But he did not care.

He wanted to know if it was really Jo and the girls sleeping in the ground.

For months, Hal had been tormented with the notion that the three bodies flown up from Florida the previous summer were not his wife and daughters. After all, the bodies had been identified in Pinellas County, through dental records sent from Ohio, and had been shipped in sealed containers that had never been opened, not even at the funeral home in Van Wert County. There had been no chance for Hal or anyone else who knew Jo and Michelle and Christe to look at the bodies and say, yes, that is them.

The same questions kept running through Hal’s mind. What if the authorities in Florida were wrong? What if there had been a terrible mistake, and the bodies were those of three other women, and his own family was alive somewhere?

“It’s not them,” he told his friends.

The idea plagued him. He could not even bring himself to buy headstones for the three graves. Months after the funeral, they were still distinguished only by copper markers embedded in the ground.

Finally Hal decided he had no choice but to dig them up. No matter how horrible it would be, he had to see for himself.

He drove to Zion Lutheran cemetery in his pickup truck, the spade and shovel in the back. He got out and stepped over the fence surrounding the tiny property and its rows of graves, some of them dating back as far as the 1830s. The place was empty and silent.

Hal found the markers for Jo and the girls and sat in the grass. He stayed there for what seemed like a long time, thinking and wondering and trying to find the strength to do what was in his heart.

Then it hit him. If he carried through on this, people would think he had snapped. He would probably be sent to an institution, taken away from his farm and his home and everything he had shared with Jo and the girls. Plus, the episode would be all over the news, a spectacular display of untrammeled grief, perfect for the front page.

“This is exactly what those bastards at the newspaper really want,” Hal said to himself. “This would make a good story here.”

He stood up, got his tools and walked back to the truck.

•••

The man was out there.

It was about 10 o’clock on a Saturday evening. Jo Ann Steffey had just gone inside the kitchen of her Tampa home, where the composite drawing still hung on her refrigerator. She was convinced that the face in the drawing belonged to her neighbor two houses down on Dalton Avenue. She had been staring at the composite for weeks; cut out from the newspaper, it was starting to curl and yellow. Now she was debating whether to report her hunch to the police. Trying to decide, she had shown the composite to a friend.

“Look at it,” she said. “Doesn’t it look just like him?”

Her friend did not think so. At least, he didn’t think the composite looked anything more like the neighbor than like 10,000 other people with blond hair. He told her she should be careful making such accusations; she could ruin an innocent man’s life.

Her friend’s warning held Steffey back. Besides, she wasn’t eager to have her name dragged into something so frightening.

Then, that Saturday night, Steffey walked into her kitchen and looked out the window toward the street. Suddenly she caught her breath. There, standing in the grass near the edge of her driveway, was the very neighbor she suspected.

He was maybe 35 feet away. She could see him clearly, because there was a streetlight nearby, illuminating the scene. She could not tell what he was doing, but he was looking in her direction.

Steffey rushed to turn off the lights. She stepped back into the shadows and kept her eyes fixed on the man. He was still standing in the grass, gazing toward her house. For what seemed like a long time, the two of them stood there motionless. Finally the man turned and called out a name. A little, fuzzy, white dog answered the call, and then he and the dog walked away.

When the man was gone, Steffey sat down, terrified. That was it. She could not ignore her feelings about the neighbor any longer.

The notebooks haunted the new sergeant.

There were three of them in all, each a 4-inch black binder, and they sat in Glen Moore’s cluttered little office on the second floor of the St. Petersburg police station. The books were filled with reports and photos and notes on tips and leads that had been pursued and eliminated. Taken together, they contained the sum of all that had been learned so far in the Rogers investigation.

Moore, transferred to homicide almost six months after the murders, was troubled by the lack of progress in the case. He didn’t like to see the notebooks stuck on a shelf, with no one looking inside them. He wanted updates. He wanted movement.

“What’s happening?” he would ask Jim Kappel, the detective who had been lead investigator on the case since it began the previous summer. “What’s going on?”

There wasn’t much Kappel could say. He was an experienced and respected homicide investigator; several years before, the St. Petersburg Exchange Club had named him the department’s officer of the year for his work on another murder case. For months, Kappel had poured himself into the Rogers investigation, sometimes working 14-hour days for weeks straight. And he had made some invaluable contributions, establishing the probable connection between the murders and the Madeira Beach rape. But by the spring of 1990, the tips generated by the composite drawing from the rape had long since stopped. There were no new leads. The case was growing colder by the minute.

“It just kind of died,” Kappel would later say.

As far as Moore could tell, Kappel was a good detective. But with all the problems that came with the investigation — no crime scene, almost no physical evidence, the apparently random selection of the victims — Kappel and the rest of the investigators had always been fighting against the odds. As the months went by, Kappel’s superiors had clearly lost confidence that the murders could ever be solved.

“Our department had never run into a case like this before,” says Moore.

Complicating the situation was the fact that the department’s two homicide squads were swamped with other murders. In the year that the Rogers women died, there were 45 other homicides in St. Petersburg — a record for the city. The strain was showing; there were too many killings and too few detectives. A disturbing number of cases were not being solved.

Something had to give. Kappel was still officially assigned to the Rogers case, but for some time now he had also been assigned to other cases that took up most of his time. Unless new information was developed, the Rogers case was going nowhere.

Moore wanted to give it another shot.

•••

A detective who had been with the St. Petersburg police for two decades, Moore had spent years working patrol, vice and narcotics, and burglaries. When he was transferred to homicide in November 1989, he had never 