Criminal - Open Case

Episode Date: April 15, 2016

Since 1965, there's been an unsolved murder in Houston, Texas. The main suspect, Charles Rogers, managed to disappear and police were never able to find him. The case is still considered open. In 1997, a couple of forensic accountants named Hugh and Martha Gardenier decided to look into the murders, and were able to uncover evidence that the police missed. And now they think they've solved the mystery.  They wrote a novel about their findings called The Ice Box Murders. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, FDA approved for over 20 years. So, talk to your specialist to see if Botox Cosmetic is right for you. For full prescribing information, including boxed warning, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. Remember to ask for Botox Cosmetic by name. To see for yourself and learn more, visit BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series

worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving

homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Fred and Edwina had been fighting for decades.

They maintained in the kitchen two separate refrigerators. One refrigerator kept Fred's food in it. The other refrigerator kept Edwina's food in it. They came up and they fought constantly. And this had been going on for decades. Fred Rogers was born in 1884, a real estate agent who also had a side career as a bookie. His wife Edwina was 15 years younger. They lived in Houston, Texas, and by all accounts

absolutely hated each other. We're hearing about them from Hugh Gardner. In June of 1965, a relative called the Houston police and said he hadn't been able to get Fred or Edwina on the phone for days. Two Houston patrol officers went to the house and knocked on the door. When no one answered, they entered the house to investigate. And the story that is told in the folklore of this story is that one of them was looking for a cold beer. So he came up, went over to the refrigerator, and he saw what he thought was the side of a hawk. And, you know, he looked at it and said, well, that's a good piece of meat that's going to waste. And he was starting to close the refrigerator.

And he looked down in the vegetable crisper. And there was Edwina Rogers' head. And she was staring right back at him. When the police and the medical examiner got to the house, and they started pulling the body parts out of the refrigerator, and they were laying them out on black plastic on top of the linoleum kitchen floor. They thought there was only one body. And it was only after they started coming up and pulling body parts out and counting them that they realized they had two victims. Edwina and her husband Fred had been murdered, cut up, and put in the refrigerator. The police found their bodies

on Wednesday, and by Thursday had focused their attention on Edwina and Fred's son, Charles Rogers. Charles was 43 years old and lived with his parents. He was described by neighbors as a, quote, complete hermit who went out of his way never to see his mother and father. The family maid told police that Edwina had not seen her son face to face in five years. Yeah, his mother would slip notes under the door and sometimes Charles was there, sometimes he wasn't. She would take a broom and with the handle would knock it against the ceiling of the room if she thought that the music or the noise from the bedroom above was too loud or if she wanted Charles' attention. After the murder of his parents,

there was a nationwide manhunt for Charles Rogers, but he was never seen or heard from again. It's still considered an open case. But back in 1997, Hugh Gardner and his wife Martha took it upon themselves to do a little more digging. It causes pretty close to heart attacks when you show up on someone's doorstep 35 years after the fact and you start asking them questions about a double homicide in June of 65, they first stare at you blankly and they say, well, I don't know anything about it. You then come up and pull out a document that has their name on it and you start going through the lineage of the document. And at that point in time, I think we were either a whole lot smarter

or a whole lot dumber than we are now because we did some pretty gutsy things in order to get information. It was especially gutsy, considering that the Gardenares have no law enforcement training whatsoever. They're accountants, a husband-and-wife accounting team running their own business, Gardner & Associates. Would you knock on the door and say, excuse me, we're accountants? Nah, nah, nah, nah. They do regular accountant stuff, taxes, audits, but they're also certified forensic accountants.

In essence, the best way to put it is when people look at numbers, they might see a number that's $15,000. That's the whole number. We come up and we tear that number apart and we determine how it was composed, what put it together, the documents that back it up, and the story. So you're like paper detectives. Exactly. We follow the paper trail. Hugh and Martha retraced every step of the original police investigation and didn't accept anything as fact without checking it out for themselves. They basically audited the police reports.

It would be things like a Saturday afternoon with my 12-year-old son going down to the neighborhood where this happened with tape measures and maps and measuring sewer openings and going down and going through the archives of the city planning department and looking where the sewer lines ran so that we knew exactly which sewers connected to the house and the ones the police said had been used to flush organs didn't even connect to the house. So that wouldn't have been possible. You come up there, there are certain things in life that become a quest.

And you come up and you get involved with it and it's like you're unraveling a string, okay, from a giant knotted ball. And you keep working with it and working with it and working with it. And I would say this, that during the years we worked on this, it was a singular challenge because you came up and said, I know the answer is out there. In our minds, we were and are satisfied that we unraveled the mystery and we were able to document it. They estimate they put more than 5,000 hours into this, interviewing more than 100 people. And they think they've solved not only the mystery of why Charles Rogers killed his parents, but how he managed to disappear. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

His childhood was pretty grim by most acceptable standards. You know, it was a life of alcohol and physical abuse and emotional abuse. And it was very tough for him. He was small for his age. So, you know, there was a lot of bullying from other kids. And he basically became a loner. but he was a brilliant person. Charles Rogers had gone to the University of Houston. He was in the Navy in World War II and ended up becoming a geophysicist, first for Shell Oil Company and later on his own. He's the guy who'd tell you where to dig for minerals, oil, and gas on your land. While newspapers in the 60s described him as a bizarre shut-in, Hugh and Martha discovered that wasn't the whole story. He had a long-term girlfriend. He communicated with people all over

the world on a ham radio and owned property, including the home where his parents were murdered. He'd had a pilot's license and flew himself around the Sierra Madres in Mexico looking for gold and silver. We very quickly determined with this case that this was not a typical violent crime, okay, with the perpetrator or suspect acting in the manner of a violent criminal. It was like a white-collar crime. What do you mean? I mean, what does that mean exactly? Well, what it means is this, is it was money-motivated. Charles' parents had defrauded him. They had come up and forged his signature with respect to deeds on land that he owned. His mother had come up and

leaned the house, which he owned the house. She had told everyone that they owned the house, not Charles. And so it was a matter of she had taken out loans against the house and pocketed the money. This was one of the things that was missed with the police investigation. They never had the time or the resources to put together the paper trail and to look at it from a standpoint of what were the financial transactions that led up to the murders. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Thank you. series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple

Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson,

the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Hugh and Martha say Charles had been abused by his parents well into adulthood, and that he planned their murders meticulously. He approached it as a kind of engineering problem, first developing a course of action, and then making backup plans, and backup backup plans. Finally, on Father's Day in 1965, Charles asked his mother to come up to his room. And he put a bullet in her head. He then went downstairs.

He got a claw hammer out of a toolbox that belonged to a handyman that they had that would work on the house. He went in, dragged his father, Fred Rogers. He was 81 years old. He dragged him out of the bed, and then he proceeded to beat him to death with a hammer. Then after that, he dragged their bodies to the master bathroom on the first floor and proceeded to dissect their bodies, drain the blood, and come up and put the bodies in the kitchen refrigerator. Charles didn't leave his house for three days. He was patient and careful, making sure there was no

trace of what he had done. He even staged parts of the house to make it look like a robbery. He left the gun on the nightstand in his bedroom, slipped out a back window, and disappeared. Back in 1968, a few years after the murders, a small item ran in the Houston Chronicle with information that the police had initially withheld from the public. The day after police had found the bodies of Edwina and Fred Rogers, a man who looked exactly like Charles Rogers had walked into an office building. Employees reported that the man seemed nervous and said he was a welder and wanted to apply for a job overseas.

When they asked his name, he said it was Anthony Pitts. That's all the newspaper items said. But Hugh and Martha figured out that Charles Rogers' girlfriend worked in that office and that she was expecting Charles. She was going to sneak him the keys to a getaway car. It was all part of the plan. Well, the secretary, Gene, provided him with a 1959 Cadillac. He came up, and this was Charles. Charles drove the 1959 Cadillac down to Mexico. He crossed the border at Presidio, and then he headed on to Chihuahua. The police never made that connection.

All they knew was that Charles Rogers had pretended to need a job and given a fake name, Anthony Pitts. But this small news item became even more meaningful to Hugh and Martha when they were digging around and remembered that Charles had a pilot's license. We knew so much about his personality that we went, you know, I bet he used his own plane when he got his pilot's license. So we were in a situation where we looked at the pilot's license. we could not make the end number out completely. But we had it down to a range of numbers. We went up to the Texas A&M library and started pulling out old registration information from the FAA. We got it down to a list, a sequence of possibly 10 numbers. We then ordered microfiche on all of those aircraft registration numbers from the FAA in Oklahoma City. When we got the microfiche in, we went through bingo.

One of the planes was Charles Rogers played. They followed the sales records of the airplane, a Cessna 140, and found that Charles sold it to a man named Pop Fullwood, who went on to sell it to a man named Anthony Pitts. And we went, wait a second, Pitts, where does Pitts fall in this? We then come up and look into the newspaper article in 1968 that describes somebody by the name of Pitts who is a welder for a supposed job interview. We started pulling records from the Department of Public Safety in Texas and the DEA. And we managed to get a goldmine of information that in turn started leading to Charles Associates. But it all opened up with that pilot's license and that Cessna 140. This was their first major breakthrough. Anthony Pitts was a real person. He'd worked with Charles Rogers in

Central America before the murders. Now they needed proof that the two men continued to work together afterwards. And they found that proof by following a name that kept appearing in Charles Rogers' business records, John Mackey. They tracked down Mackey's lawyer, who put them in touch with Mackey's widow. She knew exactly who Charles Rogers was. Widows will talk after their, quite frankly, philandering husbands are dead. It's amazing the information you can get out. John Mackey was running mining businesses in Mexico and Honduras for investors back in Texas. He needed a solid geophysicist to assure these investors that they'd be digging in the right place. Charles Rogers.

Whether or not the Texans recognized Rogers from the newspapers honestly didn't seem to matter. He was really good at his job. Charles literally had an employer in Houston. The owner of the company could have come forward. He could have said, hey, I know this man. I know where he is. I know what his habits are, his pattern. No, the gentleman wouldn't. And a lot of the reason that people didn't come forward that knew things is they had either made money from Charles Rogers or they were making money from Charles Rogers. He, in essence, was the golden goose. Do you think he's still alive? No i mean it's it's a situation if charles were still alive

he would be one old codger now because he was born in 1921 no the story we get and and this And this is through John Mackey's widow in Honduras and also through an attorney that put together the papers down in Honduras and some other people down there, was that he was murdered by the Campesino miners and that his body was thrown into the river. The Honduran National Police came to Mackey's home and said an American geologist had been pickaxed to death over a wage dispute. His body had been dumped in the river and been found downstream.

Between the heat and the fish, the body was badly decayed and difficult to identify. John Mackey told the officers he had no idea who it could be. I just, this might be personal, but I'm interested. You two were married in 2001, but you were working together before you were married or maybe became a couple. In any way, do you think this investigation brought you together? It was sort of a strange courtship. Why are you laughing? Well, I mean, when your Saturday night date consists of, oh, looking for murderers, it's kind of an odd courtship. I don't know that it, well, that's hard to say, you know?

I think it did maybe bring us a little bit closer, but... The two of us are research adrenaline junkies. That's true. Okay. And when we get involved in endeavors like this, we dig and dig and dig. And we essentially feed off of each other. It's very easy to corrupt each other. Yeah.

You know. I don't know that it actually played a part in us eventually getting married. But, you know, I do believe it brought us closer together because we just synced with it. Yeah. They published all of their findings in a book. They'd expected it to be a nonfiction book. But in 2003, The Icebox Murders was published as a novel. 85% of it is straight fact.

And it was a matter of Martha and I arm wrestled over the other 15%. I mean, we just literally rolled around. Because my first intent was this growling, gritting of my teeth and going, by golly, this will never be written as a novel. And, you know, there are going to be footnotes everywhere and so forth. And we're going to reference to the specific documents. But most true crime is about stories or cases that have actually been solved and gone to trial. And that's a big part of it, is that there is a closure to the case. But in this case, where it's still considered

to be an open case, it's much more difficult to say, okay, this is nonfiction. It's an incredibly dense novel, moving back and forth through time and going down these long paths with side characters. Just the sheer amount of detail that they put into this book makes you understand the level of research. And really, it's rather violent in parts. You know, some parts of this, I've got to admit in getting ready for this, we were going through and we were rereading the book. And I came up with, oh, my God, I wrote this stuff. I mean, it's a situation.

My Lord, Martha, I'm absolutely amazed that you ever married me. That's true. I think that's true, too too because I read a couple of those pages and thought, wow. The house where Edwina and Fred Rogers were killed was bulldozed by the city of Houston in 1972 with all the furniture

inside. Hugh went out there with a metal detector once, and found parts from Charles Rogers' ham radio. It was just an empty lot for a long time, until 2000, when developers put condos on it. Hugh and Martha haven't taken on any other cases. They're very proud of the work they did, and it's been hard to let go. They're keeping their eyes out for a new paper trail to follow, but nothing seemed right yet. Hugh says maybe he's a one-case guy. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers and Johnny Vince Evans. Special thanks to Alice Wilder and

Will Pierce. Julianne Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the 13 best shows around. Shows like Radio Diaries. This month, Radio Diaries is celebrating its 20th birthday. You can hear their first teenage diary from 17-year-old Amanda Brand. Amanda knew she was gay, but her parents kept insisting she'd grow out of it. I wear, like, a cross between skater clothes

and like industrial gothic. My parents think I should dress more feminine, but what do they know, right? They grew up back in ancient times. Go listen. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. I'm Phoebe Dredge. This is Criminal.

Radiotopia. From PRX. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing speaking breathing eye problems or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk don't receive botox cosmetic if you have a skin infection side effects may include allergic reactions injection site pain headache eyebrow

and eyelid drooping and eyelid swelling allergic reactions can include rash welts asthma symptoms and dizziness tell your doctor about medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton syndrome in medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. For full safety information, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. See for yourself at BotoxCosmetic.com. Your own weight loss journey is personal. Everyone's diet is different. Everyone's bodies are different. And according to Noom, there is no one size fits all approach. Noom wants to help you stay focused on what's important to

you with their psychology and biology based approach. This program helps you understand the science behind your eating choices and helps you build new habits for a healthier lifestyle. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your free trial today at Noom.com.