In the Shadows: Part 1 - Fact, Fiction, and A Few Fables

Charles Frederick Rogers got away with an almost perfect crime.   

Rogers is the main suspect in Houston’s 1965 “Ice Box Murders.”  He is believed to have killed his elderly parents, with whom he lived, dismembering their bodies and stashing the parts in the kitchen refrigerator.  Aside from a possible sighting shortly thereafter, Rogers vanished from sight.  The executors of his estate had him declared dead in 1975. 

Described as a recluse and seldom seen by his family and their acquaintances, Charles Rogers is more shadow than substance.  We can start with a few establishing facts.  He was born in Houston in 1921, the son of Fred and Edwina.  He had an older sister, Betty, who died in a 1929 car accident. 

Charles’ childhood was nothing to write home about.  By all rights, it should have been normal.  Fred hailed from a respected family of farmers and had attended college for a time.  Edwina, the daughter of sharecroppers, sought security in marriage but didn’t get it.  Fred liked to bet on the ponies and eventually became a bookie.  He was also a heavy drinker with a violent streak, and Fred and Edwina argued constantly and bitterly.  There were numerous separations after Betty’s death.  Throughout it all, Charles frequently bore the brunt of both parents’ wrath.

Edwina eventually ended up running a seedy hotel in Houston.  Fred, who had learned the ins in outs of real estate from an early apprenticeship, became an agent and lender himself.  He specialized in acquiring houses in poor African American neighborhoods by deceiving the heirs of their deceased owners by telling them that the title history was unsettled and offering them cash up front as an alternative to probate.  Houston, then as now, famously didn’t have zoning laws.  Fred would demolish the houses and sell the land for industrial use at a profit. 

Charles was bright but unathletic.  Like lots of kids in the 1930s, he was fascinated by electronics and science fiction.  He wasn’t very social, living within his own mind, and passed through high school without making much of an impression.  The Depression notwithstanding, he was able to attain a university education.

It didn’t start out well, however.  Perhaps at his father’s insistence, Charles enrolled at Texas A & M, which was then solely a military school.  Cadet life and the hazing meted out to “fish” (new students) did not agree with him, and he dropped out after a few weeks.  He went on to finish a geology degree at the University of Houston.

By then there was a war on, and the studious young man joined the Navy for the duration.  Here is where we need to take a look at his wartime service, because the page dedicated to Charles Rogers in the Online Repository of All Knowledge makes a few dubious claims about this period in his life.  The article says that Charles was a Naval aviator during the war and subsequently worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence.

The official account says differently.  Unsurprisingly, Charles served as a radio operator, first on USS Barnes and then on USS Richmond.  He was at sea for 2 ½ years and finished his service as a Radioman First Class.  He was clearly good at his job and was capable of supervising junior sailors.  An honorable, though unremarkable war record.

So why the implied cloak and dagger stuff?  It seems all conspiratorial roads in Texas lead to Dallas, and this claim concerning Charles Rogers’ service is no exception.  It’s true Charles later became a private pilot to facilitate his work as a petroleum industry geologist and that a couple of planes he once owned figure in his escape / disappearance after his parents’ murder.  However, he didn’t become a licensed pilot until the late 1950s.  The Wikipedia article mentions that Charles volunteered with the Civil Air Patrol during this time and made the acquaintance of a fellow CAP pilot from New Orleans named David Ferrie.

If the name David Ferrie rings a bell, it’s because he was posthumously a leading figure in one of the most bizarre criminal trials ever mounted in American history.  If you’ve seen the Oliver Stone film JFK, you probably are aware that Orleans Parish district attorney Jim Garrison accused New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw of masterminding the Kennedy assassination.  Shaw was acquitted at his 1969 trial and remains the only individual ever prosecuted for the John F. Kennedy assassination, but Garrison’s claims have nevertheless emboldened several generations of conspiracy nuts. 

Garrison’s theory is convoluted to say the least, but the gist was that Shaw and David Ferrie worked for the overthrow of the Castro regime in Cuba.  President Kennedy was targeted by the group for his “betrayal” of the Bay of Pigs invaders.  Lee Harvey Oswald, who may or may not have belonged to Ferrie’s CAP unit for a brief spell in the late 1950s, was supposedly a member of this cabal who was unwittingly set up as the “patsy,” to use Oswald’s own words, for Kennedy’s assassination.  Oswald’s purported pro-Castro sympathies were just a cover for his true, anticommunist sentiments say the conspiracy buffs.

Where, then, does Charles F. Rogers of Houston, Texas, fit into this scheme?  I could not find any mention of him from Garrison’s accounts or in Stone’s movie.  (The Wikipedia page cites a third source.)  However, this may be where the claim Charles was in Naval intelligence comes in.  It might have been extrapolated from a theory about Lee Oswald and subsequently conflated with the allegation Rogers associated with Ferrie.

Garrison conjectured that Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union after his hardship discharge from the Marines was really part of an intelligence gathering effort.  Why else would Oswald have studied Russian while stationed in Japan?  After coming home, Oswald kept in touch with his one-time handlers.  There’s a street scene in JFK where Garrison, played by Kevin Costner, tries to link Oswald’s alleged Fair Play for Cuba Committee office on Camp Street to the nearby federal building which housed the Office of Naval Intelligence’s New Orleans offices:

          GARRISON: Lou, you were in the Marines.  What’s that little saying they have?

           IVON: Once ONI, always ONI.

           BROUSSARD: Well, he [Oswald] likes workin’ near his old pals.

Bear with me, if you will.  Charles plays a supplemental role in the Garrison theory, in which he’s found to be in Dallas on the morning of November 22, 1963 as one of the so-called Three Tramps.  You might recall that three transients were detained by the Dallas Police near Dealey Plaza shortly before the President’s motorcade passed through.  The names of the so-called tramps, who were just that, were conclusively established a long time ago.  But this hasn’t stopped various “experts,” not to mention numerous others who have never heard of Occam’s Razor, from weighing in on who they really were. 

Consider the well-known photo of the tramps taken after they were in custody.  The tallest of the three has been claimed to be convicted murderer Charles Harrelson (actor Woody Harrelson’s father).  Harrelson later said that during a 1980 police shootout he did say he was one of the assassins, but only out of desperation to end the confrontation.  (This disavowal has not prevented attempts to connect Harrelson with Oswald’s killer Jack Ruby.)

Even without Harrelson, there's no shortage of candidates.  A fabulist named Chauncey Holt said he was a “CIA operative” sent to deliver forged Secret Service credentials and was arrested by the police with the other two as transients. Watergate figures H. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis have been fingered as part of the trio as well.  Finally, there’s my favorite of all: During the 2016 Republican primaries Donald Trump implied that the father of one of his rivals, Texas senator Ted Cruz, was one of the Three Tramps.

And Charles Rogers?  He does bear a fleeting resemblance to the shortest of the three men.  (Charles stood 5’ 5”.)  Beyond that, the connection is flimsy even if you scrunch your eyes and look at it from an angle.  But…

Let’s connect the dots.  Charles Rogers knew David Ferrie, who was Lee Harvey Oswald’s co-conspirator whom Ferrie (and probably Rogers) met through the Civil Air Patrol.  Rogers was former ONI, and so was Oswald.  Don’t you get it? 

Neither do I.  It’s pure conspiratorial garbage, but at least it’s entertaining. 

But none of this addresses the actual life trajectory of Charles Rogers, the facts of which are just as intriguing.

To be continued…

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