Wednesday, November 21, 2012
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Goldman Lawyer Casts Doubt on Claims in Documentary
From Staff and Wire Service Reports
A cable television documentary scheduled to air tonight is way off-target in suggesting that a serial killer on Florida’s death row may have committed the murders for which O.J. Simpson was tried and acquitted, an attorney for the father of one of the victims said yesterday.
The Investigation Discovery show, “My Brother the Serial Killer,” looks at Glen Rogers, a carnival worker whom Florida jurors convicted in 1997 of killing a woman in a motel room. He was also convicted in Los Angeles Superior Court of murdering a San Fernando Valley woman and is a suspect in homicides in Mississippi, Louisiana and Kentucky — and possibly several other states.
Much of the film is narrated by Rogers’ brother, Clay Rogers, who used to rob homes with Glen Rogers as a teen but in 1993 called police on his brother after finding a body at the family’s Kentucky cabin.
Clay Rogers said that in 1994, weeks before the infamous murders, his brother told him about meeting Nicole Brown Simpson.
“They’ve got money, they’re well off and I’m taking her down,” Clay Rogers recalls Glen Rogers saying.
But San Francisco lawyer David J. Cook, who represents Fred Goldman—father of Nicole Simpson’s murdered friend Ronald Goldman—said in an email:
“The overwhelming evidence at the criminal trial pointed out one and only one person who committed the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. That person is O.J. SIMPSON. The fact that he was acquitted was a travesty of justice that tarnished the criminal justice system. Every guilty person prays to the altar of O.J. Simpson for deliverance from for their crimes.”
“You could pack a football stadium with 100,000 Glen Rogerses, and nothing would change the fact that OJ Simpson murdered these people in cold blood.”
Rogers, who is now 50, was arrested in November 1995 in Kentucky after a nationwide manhunt for the so-called “Cross-Country Killer.” He was later returned to California and convicted of a crime committed two months before his arrest, the murder of Sandra Gallagher.
Prosecutors said Rogers met Gallagher in a Van Nuys bar, persuaded her to give him a ride home, then raped and strangled her and set her on fire in her truck.
Rogers met Nicole Brown Simpson in 1994 when he was living in California, his family says in the documentary.
A criminal profiler in the film says he received paintings by Rogers with clues possibly linking him to the 1994 murders of Simpson and her friend, Ronald Goldman. The profiler says Rogers sent him a painting of the murder weapon used in the slayings.
“I believe that Glen believes he killed them,” said Anthony Meoli, who has received more than 1,000 letters from Rogers and has interviewed him in prison.
Simpson, a former professional football star, was accused in those killings, but the trial in Los Angeles ended with his acquittal in 1995.
Simpson never testified at the criminal trial, but he testified at length in a wrongful death trial that led a Los Angeles civil court jury in 1997 to find him liable for damages. Simpson is serving a prison sentence in Nevada after being convicted in 2008 of leading five men in a September 2007 confrontation with two sports memorabilia dealers and a middleman at a Las Vegas casino-hotel.
Other family members also said Glen Rogers talked about meeting Simpson’s ex-wife.
Meoli said Rogers told him that OJ Simpson paid him to break into Nicole Brown Simpson’s house to steal a pair of $20,000 earrings.
Rogers’ family also said he sent his mother a gold angel pin with a diamond; Rogers later wrote to Meoli that he had sent it to his mother the day after the Simpson murders and implied that he stole it from Nicole Brown Simpson. “It’s something everyone missed,” Rogers wrote. Rogers’ mother wore the pin at his Florida murder trial.
“All those things put together a plausible alternative theory,” said Meoli.
The film’s director, David Monaghan, said Tuesday that he feels investigators should look into Rogers’ claims of killing Simpson and Goldman — and the inmate should be held accountable for several other murders around the country.
“I considered very closely on whether I was part of a con game by Glen Rogers,” said Monaghan. “I met many of his victims’ families and I met families who have no closure, because Glen has not faced trial in those states. I believe he should not face the death penalty until all those crimes have been investigated.”
But at least one detective who interviewed Rogers said the he is lying in a misguided effort to get off death row.
Dan Frazee, a retired sheriff’s deputy from Ohio, questioned Rogers about a 1992 unsolved homicide while Rogers was in prison. Rogers tried to make Frazee believe he had knowledge of the case when he really didn’t, in hopes of going to Ohio, Frazee said.
“He’s got nothing to do in prison right now but sit there and play games,” Frazee said, adding that Rogers talked incessantly about death and murder and was “the most evil person I’ve ever talked to.”
Copyright 2012, Metropolitan News Company