Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer (16 page)

He also practiced strict censorship. He was
the approving authority for whatever was watched, read, or listened
to inside his house. Carrying such beliefs to the extreme, Ortis
went so far as to fully dress the hula dancers clad in grass skirts
on the covers of his collection of Hawaiian record albums by
drawing clothes on their bodies with black felt pens so that they
wouldn't be exposing any flesh except for their faces and hands.
When visitors asked about the unusual practice, Ortis always
explained that the women were "sluts" and that he wouldn't tolerate
such a display of pornography inside his house. But he did like the
Hawaiian music.

Ortis also taught his children that women who
had sex prior to marriage or who necked with boys on dates "should
be stoned," just like the whores depicted in the Bible.

Dayton's early years could best be described
as chaotic. His father, semi-skilled as a painter, baker, and
sometimes teacher in church-run schools, followed jobs and moved
the family wherever employment took him. As a result they moved
frequently, sometimes as often as three or four times a year. It
was a rarity if the children were in school for more than a year in
any one place, which naturally made it difficult for them to make
friends or form relationships. Some people even said that Ortis and
Jasperelle were emotionally insecure and held an unreasonable fear
that if they allowed their children to make friends and form bonds
with others, someone outside the family would steal their love away
from them.

Adding to all the chaos of Dayton's, as well
as the other children's, home life, according to Dayton's
brother-in-law, was Ortis and Jasperelle's irrational belief that
Armageddon was near and that "they needed to be away from wicked
big-city influence." As a result, related the brother-in-law, they
nearly always lived in the country or in small towns, "away from
everything." Occasionally they lived in homes with no electricity,
occasionally in trailers, and sometimes in cars. Once, when they
moved to Idaho, Ortis was so down on his luck that he actually
moved his family into an abandoned chicken coop with a dirt floor
and converted it into a "house."

Soon after, when family members were in a
forced close proximity to one another, Dayton developed an interest
in his sisters' feet. If anyone noticed, they didn't let on, but
his sisters always seemed to be looking for their shoes. At night,
after everyone was asleep, Dayton would fantasize and masturbate,
often while holding one of his sisters' shoes. He would later tell
acquaintances that after the family moved again his sisters became
whores and would force him to engage in sexual acts with them, a
highly doubtful story likely directed toward his parents to cause
them pain, shame, and embarrassment for all of the chaos and
maltreatment he had received. Although it could have been seen as
his way of settling the score, it just wasn't enough. Dayton
apparently thought that they needed to suffer more, much more, just
like he had suffered.

By the time Dayton entered middle school,
Ortis Rogers and his family had moved to College Place, Washington,
a small town in the eastern part of the state near Walla Walla,
where he obtained employment at a bakery owned by relatives. Dayton
worked at the bakery, too, part-time, while attending Walla Walla
Valley Academy, a Seventh-Day Adventist school, where he earned
barely average grades. He wasn't ignorant or incapable of learning.
He just had no interest in school. It was during this time that
Dayton, while in the seventh grade, had his first and only scrape
with the law as a juvenile. Bored with small-town life and looking
for excitement, he and a friend were caught by police shooting at
passing cars with a BB gun, trying to break the motorists' car
windows. Although each got off with only probation for the acts of
malicious mischief, Dayton, as usual, caught hell from his father.
Ortis's way of dealing with such matters, rather than facing the
real problem, was to beat hell out of Dayton and then forget it. In
his mind, might was right.

Jasperelle would later tell a detective that
she had always wanted Ortis to warm up to Dayton, to be more
fatherly, "to do things with Dayton like a lot of fathers do. But
he just wasn't a pal with Dayton like I wished." Instead, as the
years passed, the father and son became even more distant. As the
poor father-son relationship grew worse, the history of abuse,
social isolation, and unstable home life did likewise. Eventually
Dayton grew to hate his father and began rejecting everything he
stood for, and resentment toward his mother soon turned to hatred
because she would not take a stand against what he perceived as his
father's unreasonable actions. In time he would get even with them,
no matter what the cost.

Shortly after the incident with the BB gun in
1969, Dayton's parents sent him away to Upper Columbia Academy, a
church-run boarding school in Spangle, Washington, near Spokane, to
which Dayton also took exception. As a result his grades suffered
even more than before. He received mostly Cs and Ds, but he wasn't
at the boarding school very long. His parents soon moved to
Pleasant Hill, Oregon, where he attended Emerald Junior Academy the
following year. He also worked part-time as a cabinetmaker, but
soon left the job. Dayton's anger and resentment toward his parents
grew again that year and his grades fell far below average,
according to school records. Finally, at age sixteen, he dropped
out of the academy in the middle of his sophomore year against his
parents' wishes and moved to Corvallis, Oregon, where he obtained a
job as a house painter earning $2.35 an hour. His life relatively
uneventful, Dayton moved south to Eugene two years later, in July
1972, where he was again employed as a house painter, this time for
a relative on his mother's side of the family. While in Eugene he
began dating a sixteen-year-old girl named Julie who he soon
married, against his parents' wishes. His young bride was of a
different faith, a Lutheran, and she purportedly had had problems
with drugs and alcohol that required her to be institutionalized at
one point. To Dayton's family, his marriage to the girl was an
utter disgrace. They just couldn't understand how he could marry
outside his faith, especially a Lutheran.

Less than thirty days after his marriage he
had his first scrape with the law as an adult when he, without
prior warning, attacked a fifteen-year-old Eugene girl with a
knife. His actions cost him what little contact he had left with
his family, and he would later tell psychiatrists that his family
considered him the black sheep of the family from that point
on.

August 25, 1972, had been a sultry Friday
evening in the city of Eugene, located 110 miles south of Portland,
the state's largest city, in the heart of the Willamette Valley,
when case number 72-14342 began. At that time Eugene's population
was nearing the 100,000 mark, and at least 15,000 more people could
be temporarily added when the University of Oregon opened its doors
for students every fall. Eugene Patrolman D.A. Norenberg, badge
number 175, didn't particularly relish the idea that another year
of college dorm and fraternity house parties, fights, and other
disturbances was close at hand, but he was a realist and he knew
that college carousing was a fact of life for him and the other
patrolmen of the Eugene Police Department. He was also aware that
the heat on this particular evening was oppressive, the mercury
nearing a hundred, and that such high temperatures, not to mention
Friday nights, always seemed to bring out the worst in people. It
wasn't long before he was proven correct.

Norenberg was about halfway through his shift
when he received the dispatch at 8 P.M. to report to Eugene's
Sacred Heart General Hospital regarding an injured person report
called in by Dr. Wesley White. When Norenberg arrived, Dr. White
explained that a young girl, fifteen-year-old Deniece Raymond,* had
been brought into the hospital's emergency department at 6:20 P.M.
with a stab wound to her lower abdomen. The wound had been quite
deep, almost fatal because it had barely missed vital organs and
arteries. After performing preliminary first aid and stabilizing
the girl's condition, Dr. White said he spoke to her in an attempt
to learn what had happened. When brought into the hospital, he
said, she was wearing a multi-colored pullover zippered blouse, a
pair of purple girls button-front slacks, and a white hand towel
that she had pressed tightly against her wound. Norenberg seized
all of the items as evidence.

Deniece had explained that she had stabbed
herself with a hunting knife, but due to the severity of her
wounds, Dr. White could not believe that the wound was
self-inflicted, which is why he notified the police so promptly.
When Norenberg asked to see her, he was advised that she had been
moved to intensive care and would not be available for questioning
for at least a couple of days. Dr. White added that Deniece was
brought to the hospital by a man who said his name was Dayton Leroy
Rogers, who had explained that he had discovered the girl walking
along the 300 block of Figueroa Street bleeding profusely and in
intense pain.

When Officer Norenberg contacted Dayton later
that night, Dayton calmly explained that he barely knew the girl
and said that he had met her only two days earlier when he saw her
hitchhiking in Eugene and gave her a ride to her home. Having been
attracted to her, Dayton said he attempted to contact her again
over the two days since he met her, but he was always told by her
relatives that she had not returned home. Finally he began driving
around and looking for her in her neighborhood. When he found her
walking and bleeding on Figueroa Street, he said he helped her into
his car and rushed her to the hospital. He explained that Deniece
had not talked to him about the incident while en route to the
hospital, and he said he had not spoken to her since her
hospitalization. Norenberg never really believed Dayton's story,
but without anything more substantial to go on all he could do was
write up the report.

The next day, Saturday, August 26, 1972,
Deniece's mother contacted Officer Norenberg after having spent
several hours talking with her daughter about the stabbing
incident. According to the story her daughter had related to her,
the incident had occurred inside a car, an older model Volkswagen
bug, red in color, somewhere in the hills around Eugene.

Deniece had told her mother that while she
and Dayton were driving along 28th Avenue, she suddenly felt an
excruciating pain in the area of her stomach. When she looked down,
she saw a large hunting knife protruding from her abdomen. She told
her mother that she pulled the knife out of her stomach and threw
it out the window. Her mother, still doubting the accuracy of the
story, pressed Deniece for more details but the girl declined.
Instead, she became fearful and stated, "I'm afraid of what
he'll..." She left the sentence hanging. Norenberg returned to City
Hall and turned over his reports to the Detective Division.

The following Monday, August 28, 1972, the
case was assigned to Detective Clifford Miller and Youth Officer
Glynn Michael for further investigation. They contacted Deniece
Raymond, who appeared nervous and frightened. At first she didn't
want to talk to either of them, but after assuring her that they
wouldn't let her assailant "finish her off," she named Dayton as
her attacker. The statement she gave them was markedly different
from what she had said upon her arrival at the hospital.

Deniece explained that she had met Dayton the
day before the attack and had driven with him to a wooded area on
the outskirts of town. At first they kissed and fondled each other,
but one thing led to another and they soon engaged in sexual
intercourse. Afterward he drove her home and asked if he could see
her again. She agreed, and he had picked her up at her home the
next day, August 25, and promised to take her to the woods, where
they could make whistles out of wood for neighborhood children.
Instead of making whistles, however, they became impassioned once
again.

"We were holding hands and swinging around,"
she said. "Then we sat down. He was tickling my legs and said to
close my eyes, and we lay down on the ground. Then I felt the
plunge. I thought at first that a rattlesnake or some kind of snake
had bitten me. Then I thought it felt like a horse had kicked me. I
looked down, and there was the hunting knife. Dayton said, 'I just
couldn't trust you anymore.' I pulled it out with my left hand. I
was bleeding. I said, 'Dayton, I love you.' And he said, 'Oh, my
God! What did I do?' "

Out of the blue Dayton proposed marriage to
the girl, despite the fact that he was already married, while
Deniece pleaded with him to take her to a hospital for treatment.
Finally he agreed to drive her to Sacred Heart Hospital, but only
if she promised that she would tell the doctors that she had
stabbed herself.

Following their interview with Deniece
Raymond, the detectives contacted Dayton's wife, Julie. After
explaining to her the reason for their visit, they asked her about
her husband's activities the day of the stabbing. She responded
that she had been baby-sitting at her home and that Dayton had come
home late.

"I was taking the kids swimming at a friend's
house, and he said he had to go to the hospital because one of his
friends had gotten hurt. When I pressed him for details, he told me
that she was an old girlfriend. I told him I didn't think it was
right for him to be going to the hospital to see an old
girlfriend." Julie explained that she accompanied her husband to
see the girl, primarily out of curiosity.

"It was strange. She had blond hair, blue
eyes, and looked exactly like me. It really scared me. Before that
night, every time he'd seen a blond-haired girl he would say,
'There's Julie.' He was just, I don't know, kind of strange."