Serial Killer: Richard Rogers | The First Kill | 1

00:00

This episode contains descriptions and details that some listeners might find disturbing. Listener discretion is advised. It's around 4 p.m.

On April 30, 1973. Just outside of Old Town in Maine, a couple of friends are out for a bike ride after school. The sun is warm on the teens' backs as they coast along an empty stretch of Route 116.

Pine trees stretch up on either side of them, offering pockets of shade whenever the road skirts too close to the edge of the forest.

This area has been closed the last couple of days because of flooding, and the ground on either side of the road is still wet and muddy. But the rain's gone at last, and there's a strong feeling of summer in the air.

As the girls navigate a gentle bend in the road, one of them spots something unusual, a strange shape on the ground. She applies the brakes, bringing her bike to a stop so she can get a better look.

As she does, she calls out to her friend, telling her to come back and check this out. When her friend stops and looks over her shoulder, the girl points at the thing that caught her attention. The lumpy shape is about 20 feet back from the road.

It's heavy looking, dark green fabric, or at least it's fabric wrapped around something. Something long and almost cylindrical. From this distance, neither of the girls can tell what it is, but they're sure it doesn't belong here.

They walk their bikes closer to the treeline, stepping off the road and into the slowly hardening mud. They follow a set of car tracks leading to the green bundle. When they're only a few feet away, one of the girls gasps and points.

There's something just sticking out at one end of the fabric. It's a pale peachy color, and it looks soft against the hard creases of its canvas cocoon.

The braver of the two girls edges closer, dropping her bike in the grass and crouching to get a better look. She reaches out with one tentative hand and pulls back a corner of the green canvas.

Both teens recoil and back up, unable to look away from what they've just discovered. It's a body, a young man, shirtless, bloody and unmistakably dead. From Airship and Evergreen Podcast, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

3:16

In 1991, the mutilated body of a 54-year-old man was found inside a trash can next to a Pennsylvania turnpike. Investigations showed the man was a Philadelphia local who was last seen alive in New York City.

Unfortunately, that's where the trail went cold. A little over a year later, another body is discovered in the trash, this time in New Jersey, and this man was cut to pieces. The cases seemed at least superficially similar.

The men were around the same age, they were disposed of in the trash, and they were cut up after their deaths. But as investigators in two states looked into the murders, more similarities emerged.

Both men had wives, but spent a lot of time at gay bars. Both had been on trips to New York when they vanished, and both spent their last night alive at the same Manhattan gay bar.

Suddenly, police wondered if this might have been the work of a single culprit, a serial killer who targeted gay men. When a third victim showed up, it became harder to ignore the pattern.

And once a fourth man was found dumped by the roadside, it was obvious to just about everyone that there was a killer stalking New York's gay bars. But that raised an important question. Was this an outsider infiltrating the queer community?

Or was the call coming from inside the house? This is episode one in our four-part series on the Last Call Killer, Richard Rogers.

5:00

It's early fall, 1966, in Dade County, Florida. 16-year-old Richard Rogers is standing in his family's living room, the afternoon sun bright on his face. Someone told him that the sun is a good way to get rid of pimples.

He's not sure whether he believes that, but he's willing to try anything. He wants this year to be different. Richard's never had it easy at school.

He's tall and skinny in a way that makes other kids want to torment him. Then there's the ways his ears stick out, the pitch of his voice, and the fact that he never wants to shower after gym.

He's hoping that at least if his skin is clear, maybe he'll fade into the background better. But as he stands there in front of the large window, Richard feels himself getting more and more angry about the way he's treated.

And it's not just at school. He knows he's a disappointment to his father, who thinks that his eldest son isn't manly enough. Richard Senior doesn't even think it's worth teaching him to hunt and fish.

He takes Richard's sister instead. Sweat beads on Richard's forehead, but he's not sure if it's entirely to do with the heat from the sun or if it's something else. He's definitely breathing faster.

His slim chest rising and falling, his thoughts tumble around his brain. Taunts he's been expecting to hear in the halls when school starts. The low-grade anger in his dad's eyes and everything that the world owes him that he hasn't yet received.

He wishes he could make it stop somehow. For whatever reason, it's seeing his neighbor that really sets Richard off. She's around his parents' age, maybe a little older, and she's just pulled into her driveway.

He watches her open the trunk and start pulling out grocery bags. Something about the sight of her infuriates Richard and he decides that she's the one who'll pay for his pain. He turns from the window and walks a few paces into the kitchen.

He opens a drawer, pulls out a steak knife and slides it into the pocket of his jeans. Then he heads out the back door and towards his neighbor's car. His dad might not have taught him how it's done, but Richard is ready to hunt.

Richard Westall Rogers Jr. was born in the summer of 1950 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. And that's where he lived the first seven or eight years of his life.

But in the late 50s, his family headed south. Until that point, Richard Sr. had made a living as a lobster trapper.

But he found a job as a machinist at a sheet metal plant in Florida, and the pay was more than enough to justify the cross-country move. So the Rogers crew, two parents and five kids, packed up and headed south.

Today, the area they moved to is known as Miami-Dade County. But back then, it was just Dade County. Richard and his four younger siblings all enrolled in local schools.

And as he got older, Richard found it harder to cope. The classes were fine. He was a straight-A student.

But the social aspect of things was far more difficult for him to navigate. Fastidiously neat at all times with a high-pitched voice and a way of walking that the other kids called girly. Richard was singled out early on.

In junior high, the problems only got worse. Not comfortable with the idea of showering around other boys, Richard opted to skip that part of gym class, which didn't do him any favors.

On at least one occasion, the other kids gathered around him and dragged him into a stall, then turned on the water while he lay, crumpled and sobbing on the tiles.

Unsurprisingly, this experience didn't make Richard eager to go out for any school sports. But he didn't skip extracurriculars all together.

His parents wanted him to do something other than study, so they insisted he choose a club to join, something outdoorsy. That's how Richard ends up going to Girl Scout meetings, much to his father's disappointment. Soon after that starts, Richard Sr.

opts to pass on his hunting and fishing knowledge to his eldest daughter instead of his son. This feels like a good time to say that I'm not telling you all of this to justify any of Richard's actions. Nothing can do that.

This is all just to give you a glimpse into a state of mind as he grew up to try and find some kind of insight into his psyche. As for what Richard's thinking when he does what comes next, I can't help you there.

Maybe he's thinking about his life at school or the way he feels he's at his father down or something else entirely. Whatever the case, he carries out what's believed to be his first violent crime while he's still in high school.

According to stories and nothing more, just stories, Richard attacks one of his neighbors one day, stabs her with a knife. There are no newspaper reports of this incident, nor are there any arrest records.

So it's possible that the whole thing is just a rumor that got out of hand. But Richard's classmates talk about how he's been sent to a mental institution. Some of them think he won't be coming back.

Just how long he's away from school, I don't know. But he eventually returns to Miami Palmetto High in plenty of time to finish his education. The rest of his time at school is as uneventful as can be.

Oh, he's in the French club, but that's about as wild as things get. Aside from being ostracized from all of his classmates, but he's been experiencing that for years. That's nothing new.

In 1968, Richard graduates along with the rest of his class and packs his bags. He's been accepted to Florida Southern in Lakeland, which is about 200 miles from his family home.

He probably spends a lot of that summer dreaming about how his life will be different once he makes it to college. It'll be a fresh start.

He won't be the kid who didn't shower after gym, and no one will be able to tease him for going to Girl Scout meetings. He might also have dreams of finding romance when he gets there.

See, Richard's gay, and he's grappling with his sexuality at a time when same-sex attraction isn't talked about in polite company. But like a lot of young people, maybe he thinks college is the place for him to finally find love.

Only Richard's fresh start isn't as revolutionary as he hoped it would be. Florida Southern is a pretty socially conservative school, and he quickly realizes that any kind of romantic relationship isn't going to happen here.

Instead, he keeps his head well and truly down. He stays safely in the closet, doesn't join a fraternity, and doesn't really exhibit any kind of personality at all. None that his classmates remember, at least.

He just fades into the background, likely hoping to get through school without having to endure the kinds of taunts he experienced in high school. And he gets his wish. People at Florida Southern leave Richard Rogers alone.

They pick up on the vibe that he doesn't really want to interact with anyone, so they leave him be. It does make for a pretty lonely existence for his college years, though.

Some weekends, he gets on the bus to ride around town, staring out the window and watching the world pass by. As far as anyone can tell, Richard has one close friend during his time at college, a math major he rooms with.

The two of them are inseparable for most of their four years at Florida Southern. After that, no one will ever notice Richard forming any close bonds with anyone again, at school or beyond.

Much like when he was a teenager, he studies hard, focusing on language and gets good grades. In 1970, his father dies at the age of 46. But the unexpected loss doesn't slow Richard down at all.

He graduates with a BA in French in 1972. And based on what we know about his college years, you might expect him to be ready for a change, to leave education in the past and get on with things.

But it seems that Richard leaves school with a real fondness for his time in Lakeland. He likes the place so much that he volunteers to be a class liaison for the college. Which means he'll help organize and host homecoming events in the years ahead.

With that in mind, it's not all that surprising that Richard figures he's not done learning just yet. He applies to grad school and is accepted into a program at the University of Maine.

So he packs his life up into his car and drives the 1,600 miles north to the town of Orono. And almost right away, he starts making more of an impression than he did in Florida.

Working as a teaching assistant in Foreign Language and Classics Department, he's around plenty of other like-minded students all the time. He even gets his name in the paper, not that that's anything to brag about.

In January of 1973, he's fined 10 bucks for passing a stop sign. It's the first time Richard Rogers is mentioned in the local paper. It won't be the last, but the next time will be for something much, much worse.

15:11

It's the afternoon of April 28th, 1973, about half a year after Richard Rogers started grad school in Arono, Maine. 22-year-old Richard arrives home to a large, two-story house he shares off campus with three other students.

The place is quiet when he walks through the front door and across to the staircase. As he gets to the upstairs landing, though, he can hear noises coming from just down the hall.

There are three bedrooms upstairs, one on either end and a third in the center with a bathroom next door. Richard's in the middle, and he can tell that the noises, whatever they are, are coming from his room.

Curious, he walks slowly towards his door, which is about halfway closed. As he pushes it open wide, he sees his roommate, Frederic Spencer, hunched over the dresser, clothes spilling out as he digs through Richard's belongings.

Fred freezes at the squeaking of the door's hinges. Richard asks what he thinks he's doing, but Fred doesn't answer. Instead, he grabs something from on top of the dresser and turns, raising the hammer above his head and charging.

Richard doesn't think, he just puts his arms up, closing his fingers around the tool. After a brief struggle, he pulls the hammer out of Fred's grip, then brings it crashing down onto his head.

Over and over again, he hits his roommate until Fred collapses to the ground. But Fred still grabs Richard's legs, lashing out at him with all the strength he has left, breathing heavily.

Richard looks around, spotting a plastic grocery bag that rolled out of the waste paper basket in the scuffle.

Without hesitating, he reaches down, grabs the bag and pulls it over Frederick's head, pulling it tight around his neck until he finally stops moving.

In the seconds after he straightens up, Richard's breathing evens out again and the silence in the room roars in his ears. As he stands there, he reaches out to nudge Fred with his foot, figuring he'll wake up.

But Frederic Spencer doesn't move, he's dead. Okay, the story I just told you is Richard Rogers' version of how Frederick died. And look, I'll be honest, I don't buy it.

Well, that's not fair. I buy the part about Richard hitting his roommate with a roofing hammer and putting a plastic bag over his head, but that's only because it's indisputable.

The part where Fred's the aggressor, though, about him breaking into Richard's room to go through his stuff, none of that seems right to me.

I mean, aside from anything else, Fred suffers eight blows from the hammer, all of them on the back of his head. And Richard walks away from the incident without any signs of defensive wounds.

So the idea that this was some life or death struggle for Richard is harder to swallow. Unfortunately, it's the only account of Fred's death that exists.

No one else is home when it happens, and Richard doesn't immediately call the police to tell them that he was attacked and had to defend himself to survive. Instead, he stays in his bedroom with Fred's body for hours trying to decide what to do.

Maybe he already knows what he's gonna do. Maybe he knew before he had the hammer in his hand, and he's just waiting for it to get dark outside. It's around 10.30 when he finally emerges from his room with a basic plan in mind.

He's already decided on a place to dump the body. He just needs to get it there without anyone seeing. To do that, he goes into Fred's bedroom at the end of the hall and grabs the tent from the closet.

Fred was a passionate boy scout and loved to spend time in the outdoors. Now his canvas tent becomes his shroud. Once Richard's wrapped the body, he picks it up and walks it slowly downstairs.

Despite his skinny frame, he's surprisingly strong and manages to get Fred's 5'6 form outside to his car without that much trouble.

Richard loads the body into the trunk, then slides behind the wheel and starts driving, waiting until he's a few streets away before he turns his headlights on.

He heads about 15 miles north, driving away from Orono and into the tiny city of Old Town. After making a couple of turns down dark streets, he eventually stops at a deserted stretch of Route 116, near Birch Stream.

As someone who's never been much for the great outdoors, the spot feels like it's in the middle of nowhere to Richard, a place that no one will come for weeks, maybe even months.

He pulls Fred's body out of the trunk and drops it right there beside the road, at the edge of the forest. As he gets back into the driver's seat, a wave of exhaustion washes over Richard. All he wants to do is sleep, so he heads back home.

His room is a mess, but he doesn't have the energy to clean it up. He just showers and climbs into bed, figuring he'll deal with the cleanup later.

20:32

Richard's grand plan to dump the evidence of his crime in a place no one will find it turns out to be not so grand.

Less than 48 hours later, a couple of teenagers are riding their bikes along Route 116 when one of them spots the strange bundle of canvas and rope lying at the foot of some pine trees.

They stop to inspect the strange site and can very quickly see that it's a body. It takes them a little while to get to a phone and call the police, but investigators are on the scene within a couple of hours.

The state police take charge of the crime scene, taking photos of the area and making note of several key details.

First up are Fred's injuries, the plastic bag over his face and the bloody wounds on the back of his head, and then there's the more curious aspects of the crime.

For example, Fred's not wearing his shirt, and I'm going to go ahead and tell you right now that we'll never find out why. One other thing is missing, identification.

When the documentation of the crime scene is finished, detectives check Fred's pockets for a wallet, but the only thing they find is a single key.

One of the cops recognizes the key as belonging to a post office box in town, so they follow that lead to Fred's name and home address. Still, they can't yet be sure that this body is Frederic Allen Spencer.

To do that, they head to the share house on Main Street and knock on the door. It's Tuesday morning by this stage and Richard's on campus, supervising the language lab. So one of his roommates, William Mazzaroll, answers.

When the cops ask, William tells them that he hasn't seen Fred for a couple of days. While detectives wait on the doorstep, he goes upstairs and knocks on Fred's door, calling out to him. An eerie silence is the only response.

When William gets back to the cops, they show him a couple of polaroids of Fred's bruised face, and he confirms that that's his roommate, all right. After that, he willingly goes to the local state police barracks to answer more questions.

He tells the detectives about his roommates, about their schedules and how they all got along. According to William, there's always been a little friction between Fred and Richard.

They never come to blows or anything, but Will gets the sense that Fred found Richard unintentionally funny. The obsessive neatness, decidedly unmasculine nature, and other behavioral tics seem to amuse Fred.

But there was never any hint of violence or even outright arguments. William saves the most important information for last. Over the weekend, he noticed some dark stains on the carpet that lines their stairs.

Fred likes to work on his car, so William figured that the marks were probably grease or something. But now he's not so sure. After grabbing pizza for lunch, the police bring Will home so he can show them the stains.

The carpet's red, so it's easy to see why William didn't notice it first. But upon closer inspection, it's unmistakably blood. And it's not just on the stairs.

In the hallway, they spot small stains on the wall next to Richard's room, as well as bloody fingerprints on a door nearby. Outside the bathroom, a bloody shoe print.

After all that, the police secure a warrant to check inside Richard's room for more evidence about what happened to Fred. And they find it right there on the floor, a bloody hammer.

Mind you, by this stage, the state police already have Richard Rogers in custody. At about 10:45, around the time that William was talking to police at the barracks, some of their colleagues showed up to Richard's class to ask him for a word.

Both Richard and Will were talking to investigators at the same time, at one point in different rooms in the same building. Except while William was eating pizza and helping the cops find clues, Richard was confessing to everything.

He gave them his version of the story that Fred was going through his stuff, and that he tried to attack Richard with the hammer. When he's asked why he didn't call the police, Richard shrugs and says he was too afraid. By 2:30 p.m.

On May 1st, Richard's placed under arrest and formally charged with the murder of Frederic Spencer. At this point, his explanation for the crime is a non-issue. That's a matter for the courts to deal with.

That same afternoon, Richard gets to make at least one phone call. For some reason, he calls a fellow grad student. One who was teaching with him earlier this morning.

He asks this guy who he barely knows to come see him at the state police barracks. The guy gets there and is escorted into an interrogation room to speak with Richard, who tells him what happened, what he's been charged with.

But Richard asks his buddy not to say anything to anyone at school. He doesn't want them to know. He's just going to clear this up and he'll be back on campus in a day or two.

There's nothing to it, he says. And you know what? He's almost right.

26:07

It's a Saturday morning in the summer of 1973 in Bangor, Maine. A few months ago, 23-year-old Richard Rogers bludgeoned Frederic Spencer to death with a roofing hammer, then dumped his body by the side of the highway.

Now, Richard sits in the visitation room at the county jail. Across the table from him is a young woman named Roxanne, a fellow University of Maine student who sings with Richard in the Newman Center Church Folk Group.

Roxanne has made it a point of visiting Richard a few times each month since his arrest. She doesn't know what happened the night Fred died, but she believes it's the right thing to do, to visit a lonely acquaintance in prison.

Despite Roxanne's good intentions, her visits with Richard always feel awkward. Sure, they sing together on weekends, but they don't really know one another beyond that.

And they're not allowed to talk about Richard's case, which means the fact that he killed the man is just a giant elephant in the room that they literally can't acknowledge. Instead, Roxanne tells Richard about movies she's seen lately.

Ones she thinks he might like to see when he gets out, or books she's read, classes she's going to take in the fall. In return, Richard tells Roxanne that he's looking forward to getting out soon. His trial date has just been set, he says.

It starts in October, so he should be home for Christmas. After a half-hour of the same boring small talk, Roxanne makes her usual excuse about needing to do her laundry, tells Richard she'll see him again soon.

As she stands to go, she marvels at how upbeat he seems. In the whole time he's been locked up, he's never seemed scared about the trial, or doubted that he'll beat the charges. He must be innocent, she thinks.

No one guilty of cold-blooded murder could act that way. Could they? Following his arrest and arraignment in early May, Richard was fingerprinted and then sent to the county jail to await trial.

Initially, he predicted he'd be back in class within a couple of days, but obviously that was wishful thinking. He's held without bail and ends up cooling his heels for about six months.

His mother came to visit him with her new husband and some of Richard's classmates stop by when they can, but otherwise time passes without event. As the trial approaches, though, things start to get more interesting for Richard.

See Justice David Roberts calls both the Assistant Attorney General and Richard's defense counsel to his chambers. He wants them to hash out some kind of plea agreement to save the matter going to trial.

After all, Richard did confess to the murder and gave at least a somewhat believable version of what happened. But Richard's lawyer, Errol Payne, refuses to discuss a plea, or his client instructs him to refuse.

It's not really clear who's in the driving seat here. Either way, there's nothing that Richard will plead guilty to, he says, so there's no point even thinking about a deal.

With that settled, the trial gets underway in late October, with the jury of six men and six women first hearing from the medical examiner who performed Fred's autopsie.

That's followed up by testimony from Thomas Lipnicki, the grad student Richard called the day he was arrested. State and campus police take the stand, as does at least one professor who talks about Fred Spencer's strength of character.

At no point during the investigation did detectives meet anyone with a bad word to say about the guy. Eventually, Richard himself sits in the witness chair and once more repeats his story of how and why he killed Fred.

It was simple self-defense, he and his lawyer argue.

Reporting on the trial itself is surprisingly minimal, but according to people who are in the room, Richard gives a solid performance on the stand, although he skates right over the part where he put a plastic bag over his roommate's head to makesure he stopped breathing. He only did that to, quote unquote, knock him out. At the end of the second day of testimony, Errol Payne makes a motion to reduce the charges against his client.

Justice Roberts grants the motion, stating that the prosecution's evidence has failed to justify a charge of murder. Namely, they haven't proved there was malice. Instead, he says, it proves that Richard was provoked and acted in passion.

That passion is something I want to talk about for a sec here, because it leads us into a bit of a murky area. The transcript of Richard's trial will be lost or destroyed, so there's no official record of everything that's said in the courtroom.

But some locals will remember that Richard employed something called the Gay Panic Defense. The Gay Panic Defense isn't an outright defense against criminal liability. It's just more of a tactic that's used to support other arguments.

In this case, self-defense. People employing the Gay Panic Defense argue that any violent actions they may have taken are explained and excused by the real or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression of their victim.

Put it another way, it's when someone argues that they were so completely freaked out by the presence of a queer person or the abledged romantic overtures of that person that they had no choice but to strike out in their own defense.

For some context, this kind of argument is now banned in 20 states and the District of Columbia. At the time of recording, 11 other states have rejected legislation that would outlaw the Gay Panic Defense.

Now bear in mind, there's no evidence that Frederic Spencer was anything other than straight. We also can't confirm that Richard's attorney actually makes this argument in the courtroom. Then again, maybe he doesn't need to.

Maybe the idea that this was an act of self-defense against a crazed man wielding a hammer is just that believable. On November 2nd, 1973, the third day of testimony, the jury retires to deliberate.

They return after just three hours, sending the signal that whatever their verdict, it was made decisively with very little disagreement. And honestly, Richard's nervous.

Despite his earlier bravado and his insistence that he's innocent, he has no idea which way this is gonna go. Interestingly, Richard's mother and stepfather haven't been in the courtroom for any of the trial.

They're sitting at home waiting to hear the news whenever it comes. When the foreperson announces the verdict, not guilty, Richard's legs nearly give out beneath him. He's so relieved.

Turning to his attorney, he repeatedly thanks him, struggling to find the words to express his gratitude. As the jurors leave the courtroom, Richard calls out to them, I assure you that you did the right thing.

33:33

Later, as he's being escorted out of the building, Richard stops to answer questions from a couple of local reporters.

He tells them that he's looking forward to going home, and promises that he's going to stop taking a lot of things for granted from now on. Just what those things are, he doesn't say.

But I'd argue that a clean record and a new lease on life aren't the only things Richard Rogers walks away from this episode with. He's learned that he's capable of killing a man.

Not only that, he's discovered that he can blame his own victim for his actions, and escape all punishment. It's a powerful lesson, one Richard will carry with him for the next 25 years.

From Airship and Evergreen Podcasts, this is episode one in our series on The Last Call Killer. On the next episode, Richard makes a fresh start in a new city, and eventually kills again. We use many different sources while preparing this episode.

We can particularly recommend Last Call by Elon Green, and we found reporting in the Bangor Daily News very helpful. This episode may contain reenactments or dramatized details.

And while in some cases, we can't know exactly what happened, all our dramatizations are based on historical research. American Criminal is a co-production of Airship and Evergreen Podcasts.

It's hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz. Audio editing and sound design by Sean Ruhl Hoffman. Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Joel Callen. Managing producers are Emily Burke and Sarah Wilgrube. Executive producers are Joel Callen and Lindsey Graham.