Rogers Jury Issues Death Sentence Recommendation

For the second time, a jury has recommended death for Glen Edward Rogers, the convicted serial killer with a taste for strawberry blond women he picked up in bars.

A downtown Los Angeles jury on Tuesday decided that the former carnival worker should die for the 1995 strangulation murder of Sandra Gallagher, who authorities say was the first victim in a six-week killing rampage that included four women in as many states.

“We’re going to have a glass of champagne and toast this jury that had enough sense to know that this monster had no right to live,” said Jan Baxter, Gallagher’s mother.

Even relatives of Rogers said the death sentence was a foregone conclusion because of the number of killings attributed to him. Rogers is already on death row in Florida for the stabbing death of a hotel maid.

The jury deliberated on Rogers’ fate for more than a week.

Jurors seemed to have reached an impasse Friday, but after breaking for the holiday weekend, returned Tuesday and reached a unanimous verdict in just over an hour.

Jurors declined to speak with reporters, and Rogers’ defense lawyer said they did not explain to him what changed over the weekend.

“They were very tight-lipped,” said Deputy Public Defender Jim Coady. “I think they were very cautious not to give out anything that would affect an appeal.”

Sitting at the counsel table in a gray business suit, Rogers looked directly at the clerk and revealed no emotion as she read the jury’s verdict Tuesday.

The lack of reaction was simply another example of Rogers’s emotional problems, said Coady, who had tried to convince jurors that his client should be spared because he was a product of brain damage, physical abuse at his mother’s hands and early drug and alcohol abuse.

Claude Rogers, the defendant’s brother, said he believes his brother’s assurances that he did not kill Gallagher. He said the jury convicted him only because it was presented from the start with two other murders attributed to him.

He criticized the decision by the district attorney’s office to extradite Rogers for trial after he was put on Florida’s death row, calling it a political ploy to seem tough on crime.

“Let’s put it this way,” responded Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, “if your daughter was murdered, wouldn’t you want her killer brought to justice?”

At a sentencing hearing next week, Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Connor will decide whether to follow the jury’s recommendation or instead fix Rogers’ penalty at life without the possibility of parole.

Rogers, who has been described as charming, handsome and volatile, met Gallagher, 33, in September 1995 at McRed’s bar in Van Nuys, where she was celebrating a lottery win. She left the bar to take him home, and her burned body was found in her pickup truck the next day.

Rogers allegedly told a friend he had killed her during an argument, but that information was kept from the jury after the friend, who is in federal prison, refused to testify.

After Gallagher’s death, Rogers left town and allegedly killed three other women in Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Curtis Hazel said there is no question that Rogers is a serial killer.

“All of the women were picked up under similar circumstances,” Hazel said. “It’s just that the other murders were even more gruesome” than the Gallagher killing.

It was the death of his last victim, Tina Marie Cribbs, that brought Rogers his first death sentence. That case is currently on appeal.

After a nationwide manhunt, Rogers was caught in Kentucky in November 1995.

It was decided Rogers would be tried first in Florida, which had a death penalty case.

The governors of Florida and California decided that Rogers would then be extradited to California for trial, where because of the Florida conviction he is subject to the death penalty for multiple murders.

California authorities will return Rogers to Florida’s death row after sentencing.