Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer (28 page)

"When he pinched my clit, he said, 'Does this
hurt? Do you like it? I thought you told me you liked it.' Then he
started slapping me and said, 'Do you like the sight of knives?
Smile for me, bitch.' I smiled for him, but I wasn't happy about
it. Finally I told him to just do whatever the fuck he wanted to
do.

"I was in so much pain," Lena continued, "I
finally decided that if this guy was going to kill me, I'd just
rather try and make a break for it than sit there and be tortured.
I reached for the doorknob, and he thrust the machete up toward my
vagina. It didn't go in, but it cut my leg. I heard a car coming up
the hill, so I jumped out and screamed at the top of my lungs. He
drove off real quick. Three guys in another truck stopped, and here
I am, naked and bleeding, and my clothes were all cut up. They gave
me a ride back to town."

"Did he do anything else to your feet?" asked
Machado.

"He tried to fuck 'em" said Lena, laughing.
"He was a real sicko. And the whole time that he did this, he had
the machete at my throat."

When Turner and Machado returned to the
Clackamas County Sheriff's Office headquarters in Oregon City, they
were promptly informed that the medical examiner's office had
reported that they had positively identified Body #7 as that of
Maureen Ann Hodges from dental charts provided by Hodges's
dentist.

Chapter 19

By Monday, September 14, Machado had made
considerable headway in narrowing down possible identifications of
the remaining Molalla forest victims using a list of missing
females he had obtained from Deputy Dave Broomfield. He focused on
the women who had been missing from the Portland metropolitan area
from January through August 1987, and ordered dental charts on all
of those who had records available. Because Christine Lotus Adams's
name surfaced as a missing person during the course of the Molalla
forest investigation and because she was a known prostitute,
obtaining her chart would become his top priority, for the time
being.

In the meantime, Turner and Machado met with
Irene James, Maureen Hodges's mother, to make the next-of-kin
notification and to cull as much background on Maureen as possible,
which they hoped would generate additional names and leads.

"I had not heard from Maureen, and neither
had any of her friends, since mid-July," said James. Maureen was a
heroin addict, she said, and had made several attempts to conquer
her addiction.

"I know now that she started on drugs when
she was in high school, at the age of about fourteen or fifteen,"
said James. "We didn't know at first it was heroin. We thought it
was pills or marijuana. I wasn't even aware of Maureen's drug
problem until she was twenty."

Despite having been a good student in
elementary school, Maureen dropped out of high school during her
freshman year. She took to the streets and worked on and off at
area nursing homes and motels as a housekeeper. After giving birth
to a child that she put up for adoption, Maureen became a
prostitute to support her drug habit.

"She talked about getting into drug treatment
all the time," said James. "When she was missing, I guess I had
this dream that she was off at a treatment center somewhere. I know
they keep that sort of thing confidential. That was my hope."

The last communication that James had with
Maureen was a letter that Maureen had left hanging on her front
door just before Thanksgiving, some ten months earlier. The note
read:

"I'm safe, and warm and alright. I'm starting
to get it together. I have good friends that are helping me, not
junkies. I'm not saying this just to make you feel better. It's for
real. I'll call you sometime soon. I do love you. Maureen.

p.s. A lot has happened, but I'm OK and now
out of trouble."

Seeing that Mrs. James was becoming upset
over the news of her daughter's death, Turner and Machado decided
it was best that they conclude their interview with her. She needed
the time alone to try to make some sense out of what had happened
to Maureen, and to grieve her loss. Before they left, however,
James told the detectives that there were only two people that she
was aware of who could provide additional information about
Maureen. One was Maureen's ex-husband, Albert Black,* and the other
was Tim Wilson, Maureen's last known boyfriend. She provided them
with telephone numbers and addresses.

At 1:40 P.M. that same day, Turner and
Machado met with Tim Wilson, Maureen's last known live-in
boyfriend, at his room at the Fairfield Hotel in downtown Portland.
Wilson told them how he and "Mo" had met at a bar, and how she had
moved in with him shortly afterward. He also explained about their
fight and how Mo had walked out, never to return.

In May, Maureen was raped on Union Avenue,
according to Wilson, but the rape had not been reported to the
police. Although having been raped had affected her adversely,
Maureen was a tough woman and she just brushed it off as one of the
risks of her profession.

On one occasion, Wilson said he jokingly
commented about Maureen's feet and how attractive they would be to
a foot fetishist. She had responded angrily and told him to knock
it off. Wilson said he never understood why she had reacted that
way, but he never talked about her feet to her again. Neither
Turner nor Machado had brought up the subject.

At 3:20 P.M., Turner and Machado met with
Mo's ex-husband, Albert Black, at a north Portland restaurant.
Black said that Mo was heavily into drugs and that she would do
just about anything to get them. When asked about possible men that
she had dated, particularly any that stood out as unusual, Black
said he remembered that Mo had talked about a guy who liked to take
girls up into the woods, tie them up, and do things to their feet.
Black didn't know the guy's name, but he did know that Mo was
terrified of him. Mo had told him that the guy liked to "screw" her
feet, and apparently was carrying out his foot fetish with a number
of girls. One of those girls, Tracie Baxter, had gotten her feet
carved up by this guy, said Black.

After locating Tracie Baxter, sixteen, Turner
and Machado had her brought in to the task force offices for
questioning. When she was told that Mo had been identified as one
of the Molalla forest victims, Tracie began to cry. She told Turner
and Machado how she had been taken up into the forest and how her
date had hog-tied her and cut her foot, after torturing her for
hours and threatening to kill her.

"Did he bite you severely?" asked Turner.

"He drew blood," she said. "He drew blood on
my tits and on my feet." She reflected about the incident for a
moment. "The strange part about it is, he only screwed me for maybe
a second. That's it. I mean, he was jacking off the rest of the
time, from seven o'clock at night until he dropped me off in
Portland at one o'clock in the morning."

"Did he talk about anyone else during this
ordeal?"

"He said he was raped once, when he was
younger. I figured that's why he did what he did to me. It was like
revenge."

"Did he mention who raped him when he was
younger?"

"Just a bunch of girls, that's all he
said."

When asked if there was anything unusual that
stood out about the man and his truck, Tracie recalled that she had
been intrigued by his key ring. It had some sort of swivel hook on
it, and she remembered watching it as it dangled back and forth
from the pickup's ignition.

Turner excused himself for a moment and left
the room. When he returned a few minutes later, he had three key
rings, each different and each holding several keys. One of the key
rings was his own, another was Detective Lynda Estes's, and the
third one he had obtained from the property room. When he laid them
out on the table in front of Tracie, he asked her if the key ring
she remembered seeing was among them. Without hesitation she picked
the third set, the one that held a black plastic swivel hook. The
key ring she chose belonged to Dayton Leroy Rogers. Likewise, when
she was shown the photo montage of possible suspects, Tracie picked
out Dayton's photo.

"That looks like the guy. Yeah. That's
him—the one with the sad-looking eyes and the funny-looking
nose!"

On Monday, September 21, Turner got the call
from the medical examiner's office. Body #5 had been positively
identified as Christine Lotus Adams, thirty-five. Shortly after the
identification was made public, Darla Johnson, the prostitute who
had initially informed Turner and Machado about Christine's
disappearance, contacted the task force.

"We were a team," said Darla. "No one
realizes what life is like out there on the street. You find
someone good, and you hold on to them. That was me and Christine.
We hung on to each other. We shared the same corner. Christine was
fun-loving and a little crazy at times. She was like all of us out
there. She worried about her weight and dreamed about meeting a
nice man and getting married someday. But they were just dreams. We
did what we did so we could survive. Neither of us had any skills
to get a good job. We worked the streets to pay the bills and to
get things for our kids."

Christine, said Darla, was born and raised in
Portland, the third child of five. She dropped out of high school
in the tenth grade at age sixteen, got married and pregnant, and
became a mother. She went through two more marriages and as many
children, and had an arrest record for prostitution offenses
despite having worked as a checker at a grocery store. She
sometimes used drugs, mostly cocaine, but was not a heroin addict.
She began prostituting herself when she was twenty so that she
could support her children.

"Every night we went out there we would be
afraid," said Darla. "Both of us have been raped and beaten by
johns. But it was all we knew, so we kept working the corner. It
wasn't unusual for one of us to take off for a while, so I figured
she was out of town. But then the months went by, and I never heard
from her. She never got in touch with her kids or with me, and then
I started to worry. When those bodies were found, I really started
to worry. I prepared myself for the fact that she could be dead,
but when I learned she was gone, I felt like someone had hit me in
the chest."

Over several days, Turner, Machado and
Detective Lynda Estes rounded up a number of prostitutes they had
interviewed to determine if they could retrace the routes they had
taken on their dates with Dayton Rogers. Each witness was driven
separately from the location where they were picked up by Dayton,
and each was asked to tell the detectives which roads to take and
where to turn. Several of the victims were able to direct the
investigators out toward Molalla Forest Road 75 and the Glen Avon
Bridge area, and several others came close to getting to the site
where the seven bodies were found. Two of the women directed the
detectives to the clearing or turnaround area on Molalla Forest
Road 75 where the first five bodies were discovered.

Lydia Clark,* thirty-three, one of those two
women, had initially contacted Detective Joe Goodall of the
Portland Police Bureau after she recognized Dayton Rogers's photo
in the
Ore-gonian
. She had known the man only as Steve until
she saw Dayton's picture, despite the fact that she had dated him a
number of times over a period of about three and a half years.

She had been hitchhiking the first time she'd
had any contact with Dayton. He had been driving a small white
foreign car that Lydia thought might have been a Honda. Dayton,
calling himself Steve, approached her and negotiated a $50 date. He
told her that he didn't want to stay around Portland because there
were too many police, but instead wanted to go to a rest stop along
the freeway, away from the city. Feeling uncomfortable about the
proposition, Lydia suggested they go to a hotel instead. But Dayton
had declined, and Lydia, feeling more uncomfortable, turned down
his date and returned the money.

A few weeks later he approached her again.
That time, he was driving a brown pickup truck. It had been
sometime in 1984, but Lydia could not be more specific about the
date.

He said he wanted to party with Lydia. He
wanted her to spend several hours with him, and he wanted to drink.
He brought with him several miniature bottles of alcohol that
included Smirnoff vodka, Baccardi Rum, and Jack Daniels. He kept
the booze in the glove compartment. Lydia decided to go with him,
which constituted their first date.

They drove to a senior citizens retirement
building in Portland's Eastmoreland area, just off McLoughlin
Boulevard. After driving into a dark area of the parking lot, he
told her that he liked bondage and liked to tie up women. Lydia was
adamant that she wasn't going to allow him to tie her up, but she
told him she would simulate bondage with him. Dayton agreed, and
Lydia got undressed. She held her hands behind her back and placed
her feet, crossed at the ankles, up next to her hands. Lying on her
stomach on the passenger side, she felt more at ease. Dayton
masturbated as he glared at her naked body.

There were other dates after that, all
similar to the first one. The first thing he always wanted her to
do was to take off her shoes. If her feet happened to be dirty,
Dayton would stop someplace so she could wash them. He eventually
began playing with her feet, then nibbling and biting them.

There wasn't any particular time of the day
or night when they went on their dates. Sometimes she would see
Dayton at noon, other times at 2 in the afternoon. It wasn't
unusual for him to show up at 8 in the evening, midnight, or 2 in
the morning. Sometimes she would see him cruising the streets as
late as 4 A.M. He didn't seem to have any preference regarding
time.

They began going out of town, parking at rest
stops along Interstate 5, usually twenty to thirty miles south of
Portland. Since he hadn't harmed her physically, more and more
trust was gradually built into the relationship. Eventually they
began going to a secluded area near Molalla. Lydia said she must
have gone there with him at least fifteen or sixteen times and
would have little trouble directing the detectives to the
location.