Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer (31 page)

As Turner continued to build his cases
against Dayton, he contacted a number of people who knew the murder
suspect. Kenneth Wertz, a former employee of Dayton's, told Turner
about an occasion when he picked up burnable refuse from inside the
shop at Small Engine Repair Unlimited and asked Dayton if he wanted
him to dispose of it in the wood stove. Dayton took the trash from
him and told him he would rather do it himself, which Wertz
considered odd. On another occasion, Wertz said he found a woman's
high-heel shoe next to the wood stove. It was another oddity that
he couldn't get out of his mind after the Molalla forest killings
had come to light.

Once, when he and Dayton were discussing
family life, Wertz said that Dayton told him that he resented his
parents and indicated that religion had been forced on him as a
child. During a discussion about Dayton's wife and
eighteen-month-old son, Dayton made the comment to Wertz that
"having a family cuts down on your sex life." There was nothing
else that he considered unusual about Dayton or his habits and
lifestyle that he could think of.

Lynn B. Johnson, who worked as a tool
salesman and was a business acquaintance of Dayton's, explained to
Turner that he had frequently taken air and power tools to Dayton's
shop in Woodburn to be repaired. He said that Dayton had always
done excellent work and took only a few days at most to finish each
job. However, by April or May 1987, Johnson noticed that Dayton's
work began to slip. Dayton appeared exhausted during this period
and looked like he had been going without sleep for long periods.
He became months behind in the work that Johnson brought to him,
and eventually Johnson seldom saw him at his shop. Johnson didn't
know what had happened to Dayton, but he felt that something very
wrong was going on in his personal life.

In response to a message left at the task
force offices, Turner contacted Roberto Ancisco, forty-five, who
had worked as the floor manager of the Coast to Coast store in
Woodburn when Dayton still worked there at the store's small-engine
repair shop, prior to opening his own shop. Ancisco had worked with
Dayton for nearly two years, and although they had gotten off to a
bad start with each other, eventually the two became friends.

"What did you think about Dayton?" asked
Turner.

"I thought he was a nice guy," said Ancisco.
"I never imagined that he would do something like what's being
reported. Sometimes he was temperamental, sometimes he was a little
weird. Even though I always took it with a grain of salt, Dayton
sometimes talked about coming to Portland, going out with different
girls, stuff like that."

Ancisco explained that Dayton often came to
work early, sometimes an hour or so before anyone else. Sometimes
he would be carrying paper grocery bags, but Ancisco did not know
what was inside them.

"Sometimes I'd watch him and he would take a
sack, a brown sack, to and from the shop. I always suspected that
he was stealing tools. He would take stuff to and from the truck
really early in the morning and then he'd take off."

"Were they small bags or large ones? Heavy or
light?" asked Turner.

"It looked like they were light, because he
wasn't putting a lot of strength into holding them. He could fit
them underneath the seat of his truck. I just kept it under my hat,
because my boss always defended him."

"What do you mean? Defend him how?"

"Every time I'd complain about Dayton the
boss would say, 'Leave him alone. I'll take care of it.' You know,
that kind of shit."

It wasn't uncommon for Dayton to change
clothes, either, upon his arrival at work, and he frequently
carried a change of clean clothes in the back of his pickup.

"I'd sometimes ask him, 'Dayton, why do you
have clean clothes in the back of your truck?' He would say, 'Well,
I'm going to Portland after work.' And he would change into them in
our bathroom at the store. He would wash up, shave, put cologne on,
and take off like he was a different man."

"Did you ever see him throw away any
clothes?" asked Turner.

"No. He always kept the clothes, even the
dirty ones, there in his truck. He sometimes had a coat hanger or
two hanging on the hook inside the truck."

There were those damn coat hangers again. How
many times had people linked Dayton with coat hangers since Turner
began the investigation? Turner couldn't even begin to recount the
instances, but each time the hangers were mentioned, their
significance reached out and hit Turner like a bolt of
lightning.

There were instances, said Ancisco, when
Dayton would leave the store and head off to Portland during
business hours. Dayton made the trips when the hardware store's
owner was gone on business and as time went on, the runs to
Portland became more frequent.

"Dayton would come up to me about nine
o'clock in the morning to tell me had to go to Portland. When I'd
ask him what for, he always said he had to go to Black & Decker
or to Homelight Chainsaws, companies we did business with. I'd look
at my watch and say, 'Okay. What time you gonna be back?' He
usually said, 'I'll be back around one o'clock.' He always told me
that he was going to take his lunch, too, before coming back to
work. But then he wouldn't show up when he said he would."

"He wouldn't come back anytime?" Turner
pressed.

"Not until three or four o'clock in the
afternoon. And then I'd say, 'Dayton? Where the hell have you
been?' And he'd say that he got tied up in traffic. When he could
see that I didn't believe him and that I was mad, he'd say he was
over on Union. 'You should have seen the girls up there,' he'd say.
I'd say, 'What the hell were you doing over on Union when Black
& Decker was on the other side of the Willamette River?' He'd
just shrug it off and say that he had some business to take care of
over there."

"Did you ever see him throw anything away
after he returned from one of these trips?" Turner wanted to
know.

"No. He just carried those brown bags to and
from the shop and kept them underneath the seat of the truck."

On one occasion, said Ancisco, he and Dayton
were chatting at the store sometime in July 1985, when the subject
of their discussion eventually turned toward women. Ancisco, who
was divorced, said Dayton encouraged him to go out and "pick up
women." Dayton also talked about a young blond woman, the daughter
of one of Ancisco's friends. Dayton wanted Ancisco to introduce him
to the woman.

"'Why don't you introduce me to her?'"
Ancisco quoted Dayton as having asked. "'I'd sure like to go out
with her.' I said, 'Why don't you just leave her alone? You know
she's married and so are you.' He'd always shake his head, lick his
lips, and say, 'I'd sure like to go out with her.' "

"Was there anything else that struck you as
strange about Dayton?"

"One time he told me he picked up two girls
during one of his trips to Portland, and these girls supposedly
took him to their homes, where he said he'd had a wild time with
them," said Ancisco. "But I never believed him, to tell you the
truth. Talk is cheap, and he had a beautiful wife, a very nice
lady, and a brand-new son. I just never took it serious."

Occasionally, when they went out together to
a restaurant or a bar, Dayton frequently attempted to hustle the
waitresses.

"He'd tell them dirty jokes and make obscene
gestures at them. When I told him I didn't know how he could do
that to those girls, he just shrugged and said, 'Aw, they love it,
you know.' I'd shake my head and tell him he was crazy, and then
he'd just look at me and laugh that silly laugh of his and say,
'Bobby. You just don't know me.' "

"Did you ever notice him going through mood
swings?"

"Oh, yeah. At times he was a real nice guy.
Other times he'd lose his temper. There was one occasion when he
and I got into it over the way he treated a customer. He took a
hammer and he slapped it and pounded it on the bench like he wanted
to hit me with it. I said, 'Just cool off, Dayton. You don't treat
customers like that.' Then he'd back off. He seemed like he had two
sides to him. Sometimes it was like he wasn't even there, that his
mind was away, thinking about something else."

Ancisco explained that Dayton once asked him
if he'd ever had kinky sex or torture sex. Although it had shocked
him, Ancisco brushed off the remarks by thinking that Dayton must
have been joking or was crazy.

"He said, 'Have you ever had kinky sex?' And
I said, 'No. What do you mean by kinky sex?' He clarified it by
saying, 'Torture sex.' "

On one occasion when he went to lunch with
Dayton and rode in Dayton's truck, Ancisco said he pushed the
button on the glove compartment and a kitchen knife tumbled out.
When Ancisco picked it up, Dayton looked at him icily, then took
the knife out of his hand and placed it back inside the glove
compartment.

"He talked to me about violence and women,"
said Ancisco, clarifying that Dayton never mentioned anyone by name
that he'd been violent with. "I said, 'You know, Dayton. If
somebody ever hurt my daughters, I would find the man and I would
get even with him.' He'd just laugh and say, 'Sure, Bobby. If you
only knew things about me.' "

When they would discuss acts of violence they
had read about in the newspapers, things such as rape and murder,
Dayton always laughed about it. It seemed to Ancisco that Dayton
thought violence against women was a joke.

"I said, 'Dayton. To me it's not a joke,
because I've got two daughters, teenagers, and if anybody ever hurt
them I would take care of the guy who did it. I really would,
Dayton, because they are my flesh and blood.'

"I would not let anybody get away with
something like that," he continued. "That's why I called you,
Detective Turner. Because if he killed this Jennifer and those
girls up in the Molalla forest—well, no matter what they were,
they're still human beings and nobody has the right to ..."

Ancisco's voice trailed off, leaving the
sentence unfinished. But Turner knew what he meant.

"You look at it the same way I do," responded
Turner. "That's the only way I can look at it anymore—I just do my
job, and I could care less what kind of backgrounds these girls
had. They had the right to live, and somebody took that right,
along with their lives, away from them."

Turner learned from the Oregon Liquor Control
Commission that Hublein Corporation bottled Smirnoff vodka. He then
telephoned Thomas D'Zialo, product manager for Hublein, to inquire
about the Smirnoff miniatures, the fifty-milliliter containers used
by airlines. Turner read off the product code numbers from the
bottles that were found at the Molalla crime scene to D'Zialo, who,
after checking his company's records, determined that those bottles
had been filled in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 18, 1987. D'Zialo
further explained that Hublein's records showed that part of the
miniature bottle production from that day was shipped to the Oregon
Liquor Control Commission for distribution to Oregon liquor stores
about ten days later. Turner subsequently learned from an Oregon
Liquor Control Commission official that a shipment of Smirnoff
miniatures had been sent to the Woodburn liquor store on June 18th
and another on July 1.

The Smirnoff miniatures bearing the code
numbers in question were available for purchase prior to when the
Molalla victims began disappearing. They were in place on store
shelves, ready for sale, at the Woodburn liquor store at the times
when Dayton had made his purchases.

When Turner got off the phone, he was handed
a report from Elizabeth A. Carpenter, a criminologist with the
Oregon State Police Crime Laboratory. Carpenter's report showed
that the Regency-Sheffield knife found at the Molalla forest crime
scene contained a small bit of human tissue, roughly about the size
of a grain of rice. Although she indicated that it was of human
origin, she said she was unable to match the tissue fragment to any
blood type or other type of classification.

Turner also read a report from Special Agent
John L. Quill, an FBI fiber expert. The good news was that Quill
stated that two deteriorated sections of shoelaces found at the
Molalla forest crime scene had been tied with two half hitches at
each end and a granny knot in the middle. It was the same
combination of knots that had been found at the scene of Jenny
Smith's murder. The bad news was that granny knots and two half
hitches are knots commonly used by any number of the public at
large and require no special expertise to tie. With regard to
Turner's question of whether the knots had been tied by a right-or
left-handed person, Quill could not say.

On October 7, 1987, a Clackamas County grand
jury indicted Dayton Leroy Rogers on charges of aggravated murder
in connection with Jenny Smith's death. The indictment alleged that
Dayton murdered Jenny during the course of rape, kidnapping, sexual
abuse, and torture. It also alleged that Dayton murdered her to
cover up the other crimes. A conviction on any one of the theories
of aggravated murder could get Dayton a sentence of death or a life
prison term.

Dayton pleaded not guilty to the charges and
retained Oregon City attorney Arthur B. Knauss to defend him.
Surprisingly, Knauss revealed that Dayton would claim self-defense
in Jenny Smith's death. Many felt that, had the case not been so
tragic, such a defense would have been laughable, particularly with
all of the evidence that pointed to Dayton's guilt. Dayton was
continued held in the Clackamas County Jail without bail.

Because of the magnitude of the Jenny Smith
case and the Molalla forest murders, it came as no surprise to
anyone when Clackamas County District Attorney James O'Leary
announced that he had assigned his chief deputy, Andrejs "Andy"
Eglitis to prosecute both cases. Eglitis was known as a tough
prosecutor, highly intelligent, articulate, and respected, and he
had been in on both cases from the beginning. Even though he had
lost a couple of well-publicized cases over the years, his wins far
outnumbered his losses. If they were going to get Dayton Rogers the
death sentence, which O'Leary wanted, Eglitis was the right man for
the job.