The Deck - Rose Burkert and Roger Atkison (9 of Diamonds, Iowa)

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

In September 1980, a Holiday Inn hotel in rural Iowa became the scene of a shocking double murder: a couple was found dead in their hotel bed, covered in lacerations. And the scene around them is one of the strangest and most puzzling I’ve ever come across in all my work. It’s one of the reasons this case has gained notoriety over time: I mean, to this day, the hotel where the couple lost their lives is still visited by true crime fanatics.Despite multiple suspects – and three agencies contributing to the investigation – no one has ever been arrested or charged in connection with Rose and Roger’s deaths.But… we have an exclusive update – something is about to happen in the Rose and Roger case that just might solve this nearly 50-year-old mystery.   If you have any information about the murders of Roger Atkison and Rose Burkert, you can call the Iowa County Sheriff’s Office at 319-642-7307. View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/rose-burkert-and-roger-atkisonLet us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcTo support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org.The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AFText Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Our card this week is Rose Burkert and Roger Ackison, the nine of diamonds from Iowa. In September 1980, a holiday in hotel in rural Iowa became the scene of a shocking double murder. A couple was found dead in their hotel bed covered in lacerations, and the scene around them is one of the strangest and most puzzling I have ever come across in all my work. It's one of the reasons that this case has gained. notoriety over time. I mean, to this day, the hotel where the couple lost their lives is still visited by true crime fanatics. Despite multiple suspects and three agencies contributing to this investigation, no one has ever been arrested or charged in connection with Rose and Rogers' deaths.

But we have an exclusive update. Something is about to happen in this case that just might solve this nearly 50-year-old mystery. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. Saturday, September 13th, 1980 was a busy one for the housekeeping staff at the Holiday Inn Amana in Iowa. Nearly every one of their 291 rooms were booked by members of a morticians convention that was in town. Housekeeping was probably up to their eyeballs in work that morning, trying to get rooms

turned over. So I imagine the supervisor Ida Block was annoyed to hear that the guests in room 260 were staying well beyond their checkout time. The Do Not Disturb sign had been on the door as early as 8 a.m. when her staff checked. But well after checkout time had passed, one of Ida's staff members tried entering the room. As soon as she cracked the door open, she noticed clothes on the floor, so she assumed that the couple were still sleeping and she left. Then, at some point, she notified Ida, who now had to go be the bad guy and kick this couple out. So at 1.15 p.m., Ida headed through the outdoor breezeway to room 260 at the very end of the hallway on the second floor. Back then, digital key cards weren't really a thing, meaning Ida had to use a physical master key to unlock the door where the do-not-disturb sign still hung.

When she opened it, she saw the same mess of clothes on the floor from before. But she continued in, planning to wake up the sleeping guests. But the second she passed the bathroom on her left, when the full view of the room came into sight, she was horrified. Two people lay in the bed side by side under a blood-soaked comforter. Here's Chief Deputy Todd Sowerbry of the Iowa County Sheriff's Office. They've been bludgeoned with a sharp object both to the back of their head. They had some defensive wounds, or what I would describe as defensive wounds to their hands, where they were probably trying to protect the back of their head.

All that was contained on the bed, they would have been killed while they were in bed. When detectives were called onto the scene, they soon found out that they were looking at a man and a woman. 32-year-old Roger Akison and 22-year-old Rose Burkert. But they had to learn that through investigative means. The couple had been attacked so viciously that they would have been unrecognizable even to those who knew them. Roger was face-down, clad only in his underwear, while Rose was on her back with her head tilted toward Roger.

But unexpectedly, at least to me, when I first heard this, Rose was fully clothed in blue jeans and a halter top, but she wasn't wearing shoes or socks. Roger had seven blows to the back of his head and Rose had 12. I don't know if there's any significance on more or less to one or the other, but the lacerations were all fairly consistent. I think they were three and a half inches. I mean, they were fairly deep and long lacerations on the back of their head,

They speculated it was either a hatchet type of weapon, a machete type of weapon. We called the man of hatchet murders. Personally, I don't think it was a hatchet. I think it was probably something more like a machete or a cleaver type of weapon. Something heavy enough to do significant damage. I think an axe would have been almost too heavy. So I think it was more like a cleaver. Specifically, Chief Deputy Sowerbri believes the murder weapon was a cane knife,

a kind of blade that's used to cut down thick and fibrous sugar cane. Now, we don't know that for certain, but whatever kind of blade it was, it was solid and heavy. And while the sheer violence of this was enough to stop any investigator in their tracks back in 1980, it wasn't the part of the case that shocked them the most. What did was the strength. of everything else in the small hotel room. And that is what I believe has caused this case

to live in infamy for nearly 50 years. There was just a lot of odd things about the crime scene. We don't really know why they would have taken the time to do some of those things. Some of the bigger messes that stood out in the room weren't that odd, like the luggage bags that had been rummaged through and tossed. It was the smaller details that would leave

even a seasoned true crime investigator with goosebumps on the back of their neck, like the two chairs in the room that had been repositioned to face the victims. The chairs was an unusual thing that a lot of people spent a lot of time trying to figure out what that means. There was a small table in the back of that hotel room, and the chairs had been moved from that table and were positioned next to. to the bed. So if you're looking at the bed, Roger was on the right side of the bed

and Rose was on the left. And so on Roger's right side, the chairs were positioned so they were a couple of feet away from the bed. So almost indicating that somebody was sitting in the chairs looking at the bed. Somebody or somebody. ease. Though the two chairs were side by side, they're different in style, and the one closest

to the wall and the nightstand and therefore Rogers' head is eerily covered in a pristine white hotel towel. And at the base of that chair, on the floor, that's where investigators found a scattering of items. He had ransacked or rummaged through Rogers' wallet. I don't know where the wallet was originally, if it was in his pants on the floor or where he found the wallet, but he had gone through that wallet and removed a lot of property from it. Pictures, business cards, they're just laying on the floor randomly. And one of those things was a picture. It was a picture of an infant that was torn in half.

And there was a cashier's check. it was torn in little pieces. It was probably torn into 20 little pieces. So that was very unusual that the killer took the time to shred that check for whatever reason. And the cashier's check was, it was from Rose written, it was either written to or from her stepbrother, J.C. Halter.

So you had someone on a personal side of, that Roger knew, the torn pitcher, and then you had someone on the personal side of Rose, with the torn cashier's check. The other thing interesting on the floor was the killer had taken out the bars of soap, just the standard hotel soap that comes in the wrappers from that bathroom,

and he had crushed one of the bars of soap, kind of pulverized it, and it was just laying kind of crumbled and pulverized on the floor amongst those other items that were laying on the floor. Chief Deputy Sowerbrier used the words crumbled and pulverized when he talks about the soap pieces, but a good number of online sleuths speculate that the killer may have actually been carving the bar of soap,

letting the shavings fall to the floor as this person worked. And I'm kind of partial to that theory. Because call me crazy, but when I zoom in, I swear it's almost like you can see an outline in the soap shavings of what could be a pair of shoes. Like someone was seated, leaning over, hands on knees, as the shavings fell to their feet. Did the killer destroy the whole bar of soap?

Was there a carved piece left that they took with them? I wish I could tell you. But there isn't any mention in the case file of investigators retrieving other soap samples from the hotel to compare against. So I don't know if the pieces on the floor would account for the whole bar. I can say, though, that the bar was used for one other thing. A message left on the bathroom door. He wrote the word this on the back of the door with, it looked like it was written with that bar of soap.

So I don't know why he did that either. This. This what? This door, this bathroom? What did this clue mean? In comparison to the rest of the hotel room, the bathroom was pretty tidy, devoid of any personal items belonging to Rose and Roger,

except... The only thing in that bathroom was, was a tuba toothpaste that was, the toothpaste had been squirted into the tub. In investigators' photos of the tub, you can clearly see globs of turquoise-crest toothpaste all over the dry floor of the tub, along with a small crumpled hand towel near the drain. That was the only thing in that bathroom, other than there was towels in that bathroom that the killer had used to clean himself up with. One was on the sink, one was on the floor, floor. There was another small hand towel in the tub next to that toothpaste. But there was no

personal items in that bathroom. So I don't have any doubt that the killer took the time to remove the tube of toothpaste from the luggage and place it in the bathroom because it was the only item in there. I agree. There was no toothbrush with him. The rest of Roger and Rose's toiletries were in their bags, or at least scattered near their bags, in the bedroom area. So the killer went and got the toothpaste, brought it back to the bathroom intentionally to squeeze it out in the tub. But why? Why the toothpaste? Why the soap shavings and message and torn items? Why this, right? It had to have some kind of meaning. It had to be personal. So who was this couple? What brought them to this hotel? hell. Well, as it turns out, Rose and Roger had a secret, one that might drive someone to kill.

Room 260 at the Holiday Inn Amanah was not registered to either of its now deceased occupants, or at least it wasn't registered to either of them in their legal name. Instead, Room 260 was booked for Saturday, September 13th, 1980, using the name Roger Berkert, a combination of Roger's first name and Rose's last, as if Roger was trying to hide his identity. And that might have been for good reason. Because when investigators went looking for Roger's next of kin over 200 miles away at his home in St. Joseph, Missouri, it was his wife that they had to notify. I found out the two men that were there in suits were detectives, and they started asking me, like, where's Roger at?

And I said he's on a two-week job in Calca, Missouri. That was Roger's then-wife, Marcella. We reached her by a slightly fuzzy phone line, as you can hear. But she told us that when two detectives showed up at her door, she couldn't believe what she was hearing. They said, well, we found a body with his ID on it in Iowa, in a motel. And I said, no, no, he's not in Iowa. He's in Missouri, Coca, Missouri.

I said, it's got to be a mistaken identity. somebody must have stolen his ID and they've got it on him and it's them. It can't be him. He'll be calling me any time to say this has been a big mistake. So I was convinced of that. And they go, well, we don't think so. We think, you know, it's him. You know, it appears to be him.

And there wasn't a whole lot of time that went by until they said, do you know a Rose Berger? And I said, no, who's Rose Berger? And they go, well, that's the woman that was killed with him. Marcella insists she'd never heard of Rose until that very moment. The idea that her husband of seven years was having an affair was shocking. I mean, after all, Marcella and Roger were devout Christians. They had met at church. And now she was learning that her husband had been murdered while on a secret trip with another woman.

Just one week, by the way, after their wedding anniversary. Now, Roger's trip hadn't been a total lie. He did have a work trip that September. Roger worked for a telephone company. I think it was GT telephone company. And he was a telephone repair man. And he was assigned a two-week job up in northern Missouri. So he was in Cahoga, Missouri is where he was stationed for a two-week period.

Cahoga, Missouri is less than two hours from the Holiday Inn Amana. And what investigators discovered is that partway through Roger's work trip, Rose had driven up from Missouri. to meet him. And when he got off work, Friday, September 12th, the couple took Rose's car and drove to the holiday in Amanda, which was this popular tourist spot. That's where they were going to have their little rendezvous. They checked in at 7.40 p.m. It was just kind of by luck that they actually got a room at the hotel. There was a convention going on that weekend, and the hotel had been booked, but there was a last-minute cancellation, so they were able to get a room. The arbitrary nature of the couple's hotel choice stood out to investigators. Because Rose and Roger hadn't planned their

reservation in advance, it made it very unlikely that someone would have known their intended destination. So either this was a random attack or possibly their killer had followed them there. When the hotel staff were questioned about the couple's arrival that night, none of them could remember anything significant about Rose and Roger. Several of them even, even went under hypnosis at the request of investigators to see if they could recall anything that might be a clue, but nothing came up. Investigators were certain, though, that at 8 p.m. at least, Rose was in her hotel room, and they knew that because Rose placed a phone call at that time to her daughter's babysitter

from the room. The babysitter didn't pick up, so Rose just left a message and asked the babysitter to call her back. She left the hotel's phone number, said she was at the Amanas. Now, investigators were able to confirm with the hotel that Rose didn't. get a call back at 831. This was the babysitter's husband phoning and the call was transferred to the room, but this time no one picked up. Now, another call gets transferred from hotel staff to room 260 at 9 p.m. Police records note that it was a man that called the main hotel line asking for Rose specifically. The staff member who picked up the phone described the caller as white and middle-aged, but sounding different than the babysitter's husband who had phoned at

831. And according to the police records, that call was believed to have gone through. At no time after the couple checked in did anyone hear anything out of the ordinary. No shouting, no screaming, nothing. And this was a full hotel, mind you. I mean, the one room next to 260 and the one across from it were both occupied the night of the 12th. But somehow those neighbors heard very little. All we know is that at 915, this is 15 minutes after that final call was transferred to the room. The guests who were staying across the hall heard a woman's voice say room service. Now what's lacking in the case file is any canvassing report stating whether or not police confirmed that the hotel even offered room service. And if they did, which

room in the general vicinity may have ordered any. Chief Deputy Sowerby didn't come on to this case until 2015, so the original investigators were long gone. But he's pretty sure that if someone got room service. It wasn't Rose and Roger. There was nothing in their hotel room that suggested they had gotten any food. There was two kind of styrofoam, almost like you went to Dairy Queen

back in 1980 and got like a malt or something. So was that room service announcement for another guest? Or was it a ruse that someone used to get inside room 260? At around the same time, Those same guests across the hall heard a loud thud coming from the direction of Rose and Rogers' room. But nothing else that indicated anything worrisome. At 10.30 p.m., a woman in room 262, this is the one that shared a wall with 260.

She heard a voice coming from the quote-unquote outside say, I don't believe it. Where's Randy? From that point onwards, though, no guests reported anything. And by 8 a.m. the next morning, the do not disturb sign was hung on Rosenrodgers' door. If the killer hadn't used a ruse to get into room 260, investigators were unsure how the assailant made entry. Like I mentioned before, you need a physical old-school key that went inside a lock. The hotel staff said the master key was kept behind the front desk,

and there were no signs that it had been removed or gone missing at any point. I found myself wondering if perhaps someone didn't come in behind Rose. I mean, I find it odd that she's fully clothed while Roger was only in his underwear. And something I haven't even mentioned yet is next to Rose on the bed were a small pile of random things, glasses, her wallet, keys, and a deck of cards. So had Rose maybe gone out to her car or somewhere else on the hotel property and then been followed back to her room? But again, why? Was this a personal attack?

Could it have been connected to their affair? Or was it a random assault and they had just been horribly unlucky? I mean, that seemed kind of far-fetched, especially considering all those strange details at the crime scene, like that toothpaste in the bathtub. But as police were about to learn, that might not be as unique as one would think. Roughly three months before Rose and Roger were brutally murdered

in their Iowa hotel room, a man named William Kyle had been killed a two-hour drive away, and his murder bore a striking resemblance to the scene in a manna. On June 24, 1980, William, a traveling salesman was found dead in his Sheraton Inn hotel room in Galesburg, Illinois. So the similarities are no force entry into either room. Robbery apparent prior to the homicide in Galesburg, Illinois. apparent robbery or ransacking prior to the homicides in Little Manna. Injuries are blows to the back of the head in Galesburg.

In Little Manna's injuries to the back of the victim's heads. In both, the wounds are approximately three and a half inches apart. In both, the weaponists believe to be a hatchet-type instrument. In both, the personal effects and belongings have been gone through. both male victims are face down in the bed. The male victims are only in their shorts. Both victims were found by the maid so that they weren't found until the next day.

The do not disturb sign is on both doors. Probably most significantly is the toothpaste. The toothpaste is squirted at both crying scenes. Detectives in Iowa started working with the Galesburg investigators who were trying to solve William Kyle's case. I mean, they wanted to know if they'd identified any suspects that might be connected to Rose and Roger. And that's how they came across the name,

Reimundo Esparsa. Raimundo was a steel worker who grew up in Los Angeles, but at the time of Rose and Roger's murder, he was living just over an hour from the Holiday in Amanda. Now, the sheer fact that he was considered a suspect in the Galesburg murder made the Iowa investigators consider him a suspect on their case, too. Although how Raimundo became a suspect in Galesburg

is worth talking about it. Our reporter Laura Freider talked with former Galesburg Sergeant William Horton about this, and I'll give you the short version, mostly because there isn't a long one. Raimundo was seen at the Sheraton Hotel when William was killed. That's it. Now, why he was the only person police zeroed in on is a question that no one has been able to answer. And while there were a few pieces of evidence from the crime scene like fingerprints and a pair of nail clippers, testing never connected them to Reimundo,

which is why he was never charged with the murder at the Sheraton Inn. Still, they passed his name off to investigators in Iowa. And listen, they were hard up for leads, and at that moment he was the only one they had. And, if you can believe it, the only name that came up in the only other murder they knew of that involved a squeezed out tube of toothpaste. So it fueled Iowa investigators' interest in Reimundo,

especially when the Iowa team learned that there was another hotel murder in Mississippi that also had unusual toothpaste globs squirted in the bathroom. That bathroom was at the Travel Inn in Meridian, Mississippi. The victim was 23-year-old Jack McDonald, also a traveling salesman like William. Sergeant Horton remembered seeing the picture of that crime scene too and said that if you looked at them side by side with the Sheridan in crime scene, quote, you could not tell which crime scene was which. Now, we asked the Meridian Police Department for access to the photos, but they never responded to our request.

I did, though, catch a glimpse of them after Chief Deputy Sowerbide dug around in the Rose and Roger file, because at some point the Iowa investigators got copies. And holy cow, it is no joke. In the Illinois and Mississippi cases, each man is knelt on the ground, clad only in shorts with their bludgeoned heads face down in the bed. And this is a noticeable difference to Roger, who was lying fully in bed under the covers and next to a second victim, Rose. But I get why they were looking at all three of these together.

What I still don't get, though, is why anyone was talking about Raimundo. As far as we can tell, investigators could never place him at the Travel Inn, and so he was never charged with that case or the Sheridan, in murder. And even after police identified a partial fingerprint on the cashier's check found ripped on the floor of Rose and Rogers' room, and that print didn't match Reimundo, he remained the main suspect in Rose and Rogers' case. On December 10, 1980, a few months after Rose and Roger were killed, investigators executed a search warrant on Reimundo's apartment. The police records state that Reimundo wasn't home at the time and some towels were collected during the search.

But what happened to those towels isn't noted. And investigators don't appear to have seen anything else of significance. Two days after that, a whole host of investigators from different agencies finally interviewed, Raimundo. The team from Iowa wanted to know about Rose and Roger, the Illinois team wanted to know about William, but they all got nothing. While no one appeared to ask him explicitly where he was the night of the murders, Ramundo told them that he had never been to the area where the Holiday Inn Amana was located,

the Amanda Colonies. I mean, in fact, Reimundo called it the Amanda colonies. In 1983, roughly three years after Rose and Roger were murdered, Reimundo died without being charged for any murder, but without being cleared either. So he just kind of hung over this case like a cloud while investigators ran down as many other leads as they could. Investigators had tracked down almost all of the hotel guests

and the staff along with all of the obvious. suspects, like Rose's ex-boyfriend, for example, and the father of her child. But even the ones with more motive than Reimundo couldn't be definitively linked to the crime. Even the serial killer in Rogers' family was looked into. And you heard me right. It wasn't technically Roger's sight of the family. It was his wife, Marcellus. It was her uncle, Charles Hatcher. But he became a bona fide, convicted predator who had killed multiple children. And he was one of the topics that our reporter Laura discussed with Marcella when they spoke on the phone. Did you ever meet him or have any kind of relationship with him?

Well, my mom said when I was little that he used to babysit me. Oh, really? Well, I mean, I don't know for long periods of time, but, you know, he'd look after me. And I don't remember. I don't remember him. The only thing I remember is at my grandma's funeral, I was probably 10 or 12. I don't remember for sure. But at the funeral, he was shackled and handcuffed. And I thought, how sad that he comes to my grandma's funeral and it's his mother and he shackled and handcuffed.

I just thought that would be so humiliating. While Charles Hatcher seemed like a good lead, investigators found time cards from his job as a dishwasher in Lincoln, Nebraska. That's four hours away from the Holiday Inn. And those were dated around the time of Rose and Rogers' murder. Now, there was a gap in those time cards, though, one that would make it possibly. for him to have driven to Iowa and back, but the police file state that Charles hadn't seen anyone in the family since 1960.

Why then would he have gone after Roger? And how would he even have known where Roger was staying that night? Also, Charles was known for killing kids, not grown adult family members. Trying to find a motive for Charles eventually became so outlandish that investigators wrote him off completely. They were more satisfied that the guy who had been seen at the same hotel as another,

victim was the more likely suspect. But still unable to make a case against Riemundo, investigators dug into the angle, I venture to bet you have been screaming about since the start of this episode. Roger was found dead in bed with a woman who was not his wife. Sure, yeah, that could be random. But this also could be very, very targeted. And as we have come to learn,

while Marcella holds firm that she hadn't known, about her husband's affair, it wasn't exactly the area's best kept secret. Supposedly, Dad had seen Rose and Roger out somewhere having dinner when he went out to eat dinner. And I think he was with his girlfriend, so, you know, Roger with his girlfriend, dad's with his girlfriend. Dad is Floyd Hatcher, Marcella's father, who was still married to her mother at this point, by the way. So it seems that Floyd may have known that Roger was being unfaithful to his daughter, and that could have given him something of a motive. A hypocritical one, but a motive nonetheless.

Plus, investigators learned from another one of Floyd's girlfriends that he'd made some incriminating comments to her one day in 1993. According to the police files, Floyd said to her, Do you know what I did to Roger? To which she responded, What did you do to Roger? and Floyd only replied with a grin. That wasn't a confession, but it was a troubling account.

The other troubling thing about Floyd was his alibi. Where was he when Roger was killed? Well, Mom said he was with her, and his girlfriend said he was with her, so I don't know where he was at. In other words, no one knew for sure where Floyd was when Roger was murdered. which Chief Deputy Sowerbri confirmed.

Investigators did try and get a DNA swab from Floyd since technology was rapidly advancing. But by the time they knew that they wanted one, Floyd was in a nursing home, and they never got consent to get a swab from him. Marcella, on the other hand, held out hope that her father might reveal something about Rose and Roger's deaths in his final days.

I mean, his lack of an alibi clearly weighed on her. I said to the nursing staff or somebody or to the chance, or somebody, I said, if he ever talks like he needs to get something off of his mind, you know, like some kind of confession, I said, please be aware that, you know, my husband had been killed and dad was a suspect. And I said, if he ever talks like he wants to confess to something, please, listen, you know, don't just love it off. But there never was anything that was ever said. Floyd died in 2017. But even though he was never charged with any crimes relating to the deaths of Rose and Roger, suspicions about his involvement didn't die with him. And they've continued to haunt

some of his surviving family members who have been accused of being an accomplice. After all, there were two chairs pulled up alongside the hotel bed. For many years, those two chairs pulled up alongside the bed in room 260 made many people speculate that two people were in the room and Roger died. And for years, Marcella faced painful scrutiny from Rogers' family that she could have been one of those people. Here's Roger's brother, Larry. The other strange thing, there were two chairs beside the bed there in the room, and this was

revealed to us later. We couldn't see that there at that time, but that was revealed later. And whether Marcy was there or not, I don't know. I envisioned because she was a Bible thumper. Because Roger had asked her several times for a divorce, and she would get her Bible out and talk him down out of it. Yeah, I just pictured in my mind.

She'd probably sit in one of those chairs along with her dad or whatever and really giving him the devil out of the Bible. But that's just my imagination. There was no Bible found at the scene. And remember, Marcella had an alibi. she was babysitting four hours away from the hotel when Rose and Roger were killed. Regardless, it was clear from a letter kept in the case file written by Marcella to Rogers' family that there was a lot of tension between them in the aftermath of Roger's death.

In the letter, Marcella speaks of her deep grief and losing her husband while acknowledging that neither she nor Roger were perfect people. Now, Marcella wasn't the only person that Roger's family was suspicious of. Larry told our reporter that he was troubled by the behavior of Roger's colleague and brother-in-law. We're going to call him Mike H. at the request of investigators. On the day Roger was found, Mike drove Larry to the hotel. But as they approached it, Larry told our reporter Laura that Mike allegedly said he needed to throw some stuff out of his car in the off chance that investigators wanted to look inside it.

We drove to the back of the hotel and, uh, Before we parked in the parking lot, Mike pulled up beside a container, a big trash container. And he said he had to throw some stuff out of his trunk of his car in case the detectives wanted to look into it, which was odd at that time. Do you remember what Mike threw in the dumpster? He told me he had an old rotten watermelon. Chief Deputy Sowerbry said that Mike was an obvious person for investigators to look at as a suspect. After all, he worked with Roger. The pair were close.

They were family. And Mike might have known that Roger was having an affair. But Mike provided investigators with an alibi, though albeit more than a decade after Rose and Roger were found. But he said he was with his wife. In talking to her, she recalled that he was home with her that night. So that's, again, this is 13 years after the fact as far as an alibi of remembering, you know, where your husband was 13 years later. So we don't have any strong indication, you know, or a way to discount that as not being true. Investigators can ask suspects as many times as they want where they were the night of a crime.

But if you want to physically place someone at a crime scene, you are going to need DNA. Back in 2015, Chief Deputy Sowerbide decided to investigate Rose and Rogers case. And by that point, DNA testing had advanced a ton. And he wondered if it could finally reveal the identity of Rose and Rogers' killer. We really just first to just kind of get an understanding of that case and looking at all the evidence. Because really by 2015, the only way we're going to solve this is if maybe we get some DNA. So we spent about a day just getting everything out of our evidence room and laying it out on a table and just going through everything, trying to determine what we have that might be suitable for DNA testing. At that point, nothing had ever been tested from Rose and Rogers crime scene.

So Chief Deputy Sauerbride started a list of what they had and what could be tested, including that bloody towel from the hotel bathroom. And in 2017, Chief Deputy Sowerbri finally got some results from that towel. It's an unknown male DNA profile. It's a pretty good profile, all things considered. That towel had a mixture of DNA. It had Rogers' DNA. It had Rosa's DNA, and it had this unknown male profile. Even though they hadn't tested anything by 2015,

in the years leading up to it, they clearly had DNA testing on their minds, because investigators collected more than 30 DNA samples from folks pertaining to the investigation, a mixture of family, hotel workers, and Rogers' colleagues. And this even included an ex-boyfriend of Roses, along with a man who had bartended at the Holiday Inn. It even included a man who had just been 13 at the time of the murders. And he'd always been considered a person of interest because his fingerprint had been found on Rose's car in the parking lot. But all of those folks were ruled out because they're deep. didn't match the male profile found on the towel.

And it's worth noting that none of those people had fingerprints that matched the one found on the ripped-up cashier's check either. There was still one suspect, however, that Chief Deputy Sowerby wanted DNA from. And that was Riemundo. No one had ever gotten a DNA sample from him when he was alive. But Chief Deputy Sowerbri reached out to the Galesburg Police in 2019, just in case they had a swab that he didn't know about. Now, he knew Raimundo had died in a veterans hospital in Iowa back in 83. Had anyone been able to get a DNA sample from him after that?

When I talked to the Galesburg detective in 2019, talking to him and sharing his list evidence and my list evidence, I learned that they had collected those tissue samples from the VA hospital in 1983. I don't know when they collected them, which was a pretty huge break in our case. Or at least I hoped it was going to be. It was a potential turning point in a decades-long cold case. But much to Chief Deputy Sauerbride's disappointment, but maybe not to anyone's surprise, Reimundo's DNA did not match the male DNA profile found on the bathroom towel. That left Floyd Hatcher.

They wanted to get a DNA sample from him before he died, right? but by the time they went knocking, he was in a nursing home, remember, and they couldn't get consent for a swab. Fortunately, though, Marcella and her half-brother were willing to work with investigators, and even Floyd was ruled out through familial DNA testing, which left no other clear suspects. That male DNA profile found on the towel was put into CODIS,

and that unidentified partial print from the check was put into APIS, but there have never been a match on either. We asked Chief Deputy Sowerbri if it's possible that the DNA profile is a red herring. I mean, after all, we're talking about a towel from a hotel who knows how many people touched it and who knows how clean the towel was to begin with. I just have a hard time believing the very first time we tested that on whatever was, sample number seven. on a, I mean, it's just a little teeny tiny piece of cloth

that we found that partial DNA profile and that doesn't belong to our killer. But we have to consider that idea. When our team met with Chief Deputy Sowerbri in November 2025, he told them that he has plans to get that towel retested for DNA. He's convinced that maybe a better profile of that unknown male can be found.

Or who knows? Maybe there's other foreign DNA on it that the labs just haven't located yet. He also revealed that there is one more piece of evidence that needs to be tested for DNA, something that needs to be tested for the very first time. There is one item that I've never tested, and I'm just waiting for the right time to do that. It's kind of a mistake of my end or just things got mixed up over the years. Chief Deputy Sowerby was certain that Rogers' wallet had been tested. But it turns out it was actually roses that had undergone testing.

So now he's looking to get Roger's wallet tested for the first time. He also shared with us that he wants to get that infamous tube of toothpaste tested again too. He hopes that maybe a new technology called MVAC will produce results. There's a solution they can put on an object, say it's a towel or this wallet, and they're basically just a miniature vacuum in simple terms. you're sucking all the DNA material off whatever that object is. So who knows? Maybe this new method of testing for DNA will finally close Rose and Rogers case. Maybe there's an unknown profile on the evidence that will lead Chief Deputy Sowerbide to someone new,

or someone who is already mentioned in that police file. I just can't help but believe that the truth is in the pages of the case file somewhere. A tiny piece of information that's. slipped through the crack or lacked meaning without more context. I keep thinking about that phone call from the unknown man who called asking for Rose the night that she and Roger checked in. Someone knew they were at that hotel. Who was that man?

And why has his story never been told? He may very well hold the key to solving this whole case. Marcella told our reporter Laura that she believes that Rose and Rogers' murder wasn't random. I think it was personal because they were, it was overkill. You don't just, I mean, you know, they didn't just kill somebody. They overkill them. And so I think it was personal. And I still don't, I don't know that Roger ever had any enemies or people, you know,

he was always friendly to everybody, always kind to him. And like I said, like a puppy dog. So I don't, I don't think it was on our side, but I don't know, you know, I don't know for sure because I don't know her side enough to know to be able to try to lead out or to confirm that it was maybe her that they were after and he just happened to be there. Whether it was personal or not, Rose and Rogers suffered deeply in room 260. And while their relationship was an act of betrayal for Roger's wife,

she says she's more concerned with justice. She eventually went on to remarry, and she and her husband, Vernie, adopted a 13-day-old baby girl named Quarge. in 1985. Marcella and Verney shared 43 years of marriage, and he passed away in 2025. Marcella still hopes Rose and Rogers case will be solved in her lifetime. So if you have any information about the murders of Roger Ackison and Rose Berkert, you can call the Iowa County Sheriff's Office at 319-642-7307.

The Deck is an audio truck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck in our advocacy work, visit the deckpodcast.com. I think Chuck would approve.