Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer (35 page)

"The intent of the defendant in this case is
of crucial importance," continued Eglitis. "It is absolutely clear
in this case. The intent, in the presence of a subdued, naked
female, was to inflict intense physical pain. He does it by
bondage, and he does it by dominance. Is there any doubt that a
woman who is struggling, screaming, exhibiting intense pain does
not excite him? He committed the ultimate act of dominance that he
so craves. He not only bound and tortured Jenny Smith, but he
killed her as well."

By the end of the nearly two-week innocence
or guilt phase of the trial, the jury couldn't buy the premise that
Dayton had killed Jenny Smith in self-defense. On February 20,
after thirteen hours of deliberation, they convicted him of
aggravated murder. The verdict thrust the case into the penalty
phase.

For the next two weeks the same jury
considered arguments for and against imposing a death penalty. They
heard additional testimony, particularly about Dayton's past crimes
and his childhood. Under Oregon law, the jurors had to answer three
questions in deciding his fate: Was the murder deliberate? Was it
an unreasonable response to any provocation from the victim? And
would Dayton pose a continuing threat to society? Judge Gilroy
instructed the jurors that they could not consider whether escape
by or parole of the defendant was possible when making their
decision, and that a unanimous vote was required for the imposition
of a death sentence.

"No one wants Dayton Leroy Rogers released,"
Knauss had said only minutes before the jury left the courtroom to
decide his client's fate. "I don't want him released. You don't
want him released. I question whether Mr. Rogers even wants himself
released. What is needed is permanent isolation of this man. In his
fantasyland, he's become the sexual monster you've heard about from
these girls. He's developed and nurtured these feelings into a
ritual. It's a pattern you can't ignore. He's a sick man.

"But do we kill him? Do we have a death
sentence for people who are as sick and depraved as this?"
continued Knauss. "Look at the evidence. After the killing of Miss
Smith, he goes back to work and thinks about going out to a coffee
shop. The state has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he's a
sick man." But, argued Knauss, he doesn't deserve a death
sentence.

Four hours later, the twelve jurors returned
and announced that they had unanimously voted that the murder of
Jenny Smith was deliberate. They also unanimously voted that
Jenny's murder was an unreasonable response to any provocation from
the victim. However, after one juror adamantly opposed the death
penalty, all twelve agreed that Rogers would not pose a continuing
threat to society because he would be imprisoned for life. Judge
Gilroy immediately sentenced Dayton to life in prison.

Detective John Turner and his colleagues were
devastated by the sentence. The jurors apparently thought that a
life sentence meant that Dayton would never be released, but they
had been wrong. Under a life sentence he would be eligible for
parole someday, even if it was twenty or thirty years down the
road. They had inadvertently given Dayton Leroy Rogers yet another
chance to escape his just punishment, another chance to slip
through the cracks of the system.

But with the Molalla forest case looming in
the future, the prosecution had another chance to get a death
sentence for Dayton. It was the good guys' ace in the hole, and
they would play it. For the next two months, Turner and his
colleagues worked closely with the D.A.'s office and presented the
worst serial murder case in Oregon's history to a grand jury. On
May 4, 1988, Dayton was indicted on several charges of aggravated
murder under various theories of law for the deaths of Reatha
Gyles, Lisa Mock, Noni Cervantes, Cynthia DeVore, Christine Adams,
and Maureen Hodges. He was not charged in the death of the
unidentified victim, although the investigators were certain that
he had murdered her, too. As before, Dayton pleaded innocent. This
time around Christopher E. Burris, not Arthur Knauss, was hired to
represent him.

Turner and his fellow detectives spent the
next eight months rounding up additional witnesses to interview, as
well as re-interviewing many of the others. They carefully went
over the evidence, and they put their case books in order. By the
time the trial began, they knew the case frontward and
backward.

Jury selection, which began on February 6,
1989, took nearly two months to complete. Ironically, considering
the types of crimes Dayton was being charged with committing, an
all-woman panel of twelve was seated, with an additional female as
an alternate.

When the trial finally opened on March 30,
1989, this time in the courtroom of Clackamas County Circuit Judge
Raymond R. Bagley Jr., Eglitis outlined his case for the jurors,
contending that a knife identical to the one that was used to kill
Jenny Smith was found near the Molalla forest victims' bodies. He
described the torture, the grisly details of victims having their
feet sawed or cut from their bodies, and how one, Noni Cervantes,
had been eviscerated. By the time Eglitis was finished with his
presentation of what the jury would be considering, there was
little left for the imagination.

For the next five weeks, the jury heard
horrifying testimony from Tracie Baxter, Heather Brown, Deniece
Raymond, Cindy Jones, Anna Buchanan, Lydia Clark, Linda Morris,
Janine Phall, Lisa Daniels, Beth Crane, Darla Johnson, Lena
Hastings, and many others, all women whom Dayton Leroy Rogers had
violated and tortured at one time or another. Each explained in
graphic detail, often tearfully, the atrocities that Dayton had
committed against them.

One former prostitute testified about her
fifth and final date with Dayton, an encounter that lasted in
excess of six hours after he picked her up on Southeast 82nd Avenue
and drove her to the Molalla forest.

"He got out of the truck," she testified,
"and went over to the side where you could see over the forest. He
said how beautiful it was. I went back to the truck and started to
get undressed. He came up behind me and started to put the bondage
devices on. When I told him they were too tight, that they were
cutting into my wrists, he said that's what he wanted to do.

"He started biting on my breasts," she
continued. "He was biting and tearing. I told him to please stop.
'That's too rough! This isn't right!' I cried and I begged for him
to stop. And the more I pleaded and begged, the worse the abuse
got. When I screamed too loudly, he became concerned and put
something up against my neck, which I assumed was a knife. He told
me to be quiet, or else I'd really have something to cry about. I
didn't say anything, and I tried to stifle the sobs as much as I
could."

"Did you say anything to the defendant?"
asked Eglitis.

"No."

"What were you doing then?"

"Just existing."

Roy Miller also testified, telling the jurors
how he helped Dayton establish his business and then closed it down
after Dayton's arrest. He told of how he found all of the
suspicious items in the wood stove inside Dayton's shop. He burst
into tears twice during his testimony and diverted his eyes away
from Dayton most of the time he was on the witness stand.

In tears and in tones that were barely
audible, Floria Adams, the fifteen-year-old daughter of victim
Christine Adams, testified that decorative studs, star-shaped
grommets that were found in Dayton's wood stove, came from her
mother's pants. Sobbing, she told the jurors that she recognized
the studs.

Bob Thompson, the Oregon State Police
criminologist who worked closely on the case, explained how he
found the pieces of colored glass in Lisa Mock's hair and how,
although he hadn't been able to determine their source, they were
similar to the glass parts found inside Dayton's wood stove. He
also testified that hairs found inside Dayton's pickup were
macroscopically and microscopically similar to head hairs he
compared from the remains of Lisa Mock, Noni Cervantes, and Cynthia
DeVore.

"This man—" said Eglitis in his closing
argument, pointing at Dayton, "this man is obsessed, totally
consumed in a sexual way with a woman's feet and dominance. What is
the ultimate act of dominance? It is to remove that foot. We submit
that is what happened in the Molalla forest."

Eglitis also reminded the jurors about all of
the orange juice containers and miniature liquor bottles found at
the Molalla forest crime scene, insisting that they made up a part
of his "signature."

"If there is a signature to a crime, under
those circumstances you can look at the signature," said Eglitis,
"and see the identity of the killer. This evidence is the mark of
Zorro. It's the signature. The defendant, ladies of the jury, not
only committed these murders, but he might as well have written his
name on the victims' corpses."

As in the Jenny Smith case, there had been
little doubt at the trial's outset that Dayton would be convicted
of the Molalla forest murders, which is precisely what happened on
May 4. After barely six hours of deliberation, the jury found
Dayton guilty of aggravated murder on all counts. For the first
time in public, Dayton, dressed in a conservative dark-blue suit,
displayed emotion by covering his head with his hands. Shaking his
head, he could be heard saying "No" repeatedly.

Only the question of his sentence remained.
Much of the testimony the jury would hear to decide his fate
centered on Dayton's character, his worthiness to remain alive, and
psychological arguments about his past violence.

James B. Hupy, a vocational instructor at the
Oregon State Correctional Institution, explained how he had taught
Dayton the skills he needed to become a mechanic when Dayton was in
prison for the 1976 attack on Linda Morris and Janine Phall, the
two Keizer, Oregon, high school girls he had picked up when the
girls skipped school. Dayton learned fast, said Hupy. In barely two
years he went from being a person with little or no mechanical
skills to someone with high skills. Hupy said he selected Dayton to
be his apprentice a few months before Dayton was due to be released
from prison.

James E. Miller, another vocational
instructor at the prison, testified that he knew Dayton before he
was arrested for the 1976 offenses. The two of them, he said,
played table tennis together at Seventh-Day Adventist social
gatherings. Miller explained that he was surprised when he ran into
Dayton in prison, but despite his offenses, he was determined to
help him. In fact, Dayton helped organize Adventist church services
at the prison, which attracted about a dozen inmates. Dayton always
played guitar at the services and seemed sincere in his religious
convictions.

When the psychological testimony was
presented, psychologist James R. Adams explained that Dayton
committed violent acts only under particular circumstances, such as
when he was intoxicated and sexually aroused in a scenario that
included bondage and foot fetishism. For him to become violent he
also must possess a feeling that he had been cheated, either
emotionally or sexually, and he must always have a helpless woman
as his victim. He also needed to maintain a reasonable certainty
that he wouldn't be caught for his crimes, and his victim must be
someone he can dehumanize, such as a prostitute. Adams's contention
was that Dayton needed all of these factors present for him to
become violent. In prison, said Adams, those factors would not be
available to him, and he would not be a threat to men.

On the other hand, said John B. Cochran,
senior forensic psychologist at the Oregon State Hospital, Dayton
would in fact pose a continuing threat even in prison. Cochran
detailed Dayton's ongoing homosexual relationship with Tommy Parker
and contended that, without availability of women as victims, it
would only be a matter of time before he began selecting male
victims.

Cochran, who has studied many serial killers
over the course of his career and has served as a consultant to the
Green River Task Force, explained that the very act of murder can
be very pleasurable for sexually sadistic serial killers such as
Dayton.

"If you compare it with normal, everyday
sexual experiences," he said, "there just is no comparison."

Cochran elaborated by explaining that most
serial killers fantasize about murder so frequently that killing
becomes second nature to them. Some even develop a sexual bond to
the murder weapon they use.

In arguing that Dayton's life be spared,
Christopher Burris said that his client was a sick man who should
be locked away forever, not put to death. He cited Dayton's good
prison record, that he was a model prisoner who helped establish
church services and had experienced no conflicts with other
inmates. Burris suggested that the murders and other crimes Dayton
committed were not carried out in a deliberate state of mind.

Eglitis, on the other hand, characterized
Dayton as a walking time bomb. He said it was only a matter of time
before he began his pattern of deceit all over again. He described
Dayton as clever, one who was capable not only of luring and then
deceiving his victims but of deceiving and manipulating the
psychologists who had examined him. He had done it time and time
again and would continue in the same pattern if given the
opportunity.

"He can in every respect," said Eglitis,
addressing the jury in his bid for the death penalty, "including
his appearance, walk among you without giving any indication of the
horrors that are within him. Dayton Leroy Rogers is a walking time
bomb. He is an act of criminal violence looking for a place to
happen. He's capable of fooling psychologists. He's capable of
fooling psychiatrists. I hope to God he's not capable of fooling
you."