Fred
and Edwina Rogers did not do a whole lot of socializing, nor were they close to
the rest of their family. This didn’t
necessarily mean they would not be missed, however.
Edwina
was a distributor for Stanley Home Products, a multilevel marketing
scheme. This meant touching bases on
occasion with her sales manager. When
the manager hadn’t heard from Edwina for several days after missing a scheduled
sales meeting and there was no answer when she called the Rogers home, she
decided to track Edwina down. After all,
Mrs. Rogers owed her money.
The
search led to Edwina’s nephew, an upright Christian gentleman living in nearby
Channelview alliteratively named Marvin Martin.
Marvin wasn’t terribly concerned at first. But after a number of unanswered phone calls,
he then got in touch with Edwina’s occasional handyman.
The handyman said it had been more than a week since he had heard from
Edwina.
Alarmed,
Marvin drove out to 1815 Driscoll Street to check on his Aunt Ebbie. There was no answer at the front door. Marvin walked around the house, which was
dark and quiet. Several days’ worth of
mail and newspapers had accumulated. After
deciding it was risky to be caught trying to break into the house, he found a
nearby pay phone and called the Houston police.
Two
officers arrived in a patrol car. They made
their way into the Rogers house. The
house was unkempt; Fred and Edwina were indifferent housekeepers. Perhaps looking for a bottle of soda or beer
to cool off on a warm summer evening, perhaps out of idle curiosity, one of the
officers opened the kitchen refrigerator.
If it was liquid refreshment he was looking for, he was
disappointed. What he saw at first was a
refrigerator tightly packed with what looked like newly butchered meat (hog
meat as he would later describe it).
About to shut the door, he looked down at the clear glass vegetable
crisper. That is when he saw the severed head of Edwina Rogers.
The
coroner would find that Edwina had been shot, and Fred had been beaten about
the head with a claw hammer. The
murderer had cut both victims into pieces, disarticulating their limbs like an
expert butcher. It was a tight fit as
the refrigerator was an older model. Fred
had been singled out for further mutilation; his eyes, penis, and scrotum had
been cut out. Strangely, the viscera
from both victims was missing.
Marvin
Martin informed detectives that Fred and Edwina shared the house with their
adult son, Charles Rogers. Charles
wasn’t there. At first, detectives were confused
by the information they got from Marvin and others they talked to on the street. Charles was loner who never left the
house. Charles was never home. No one was sure just what Charles did for
work, or if he worked at all.
The
house was a troublesome crime scene.
Fred and Edwina’s living habits weren’t just slovenly; the house was
filthy and poorly maintained, the yard overgrown and trash strewn. The family cars, a 1953 Oldsmobile missing an
engine and a similarly inoperable 1954 Cadillac, were on blocks in the driveway. Charles’ cramped bedroom offered few clues
to his whereabouts. There was plenty of
evidence of slaughter in the house, even though the crime scene had been painstakingly
cleaned.
These
days, thanks to true crime shows and dramas such as CSI, the public
assumes murderers are readily identified from physical evidence left at the
scene. It’s not so simple even today,
and 1965 was well before DNA testing was available. Fingerprint and hair evidence and blood
typing were as good as it got. Meanwhile, there were more horrors to be discovered. A few blocks from 1815 Driscoll, folks on the
corner of Vermont and Woodhead Streets noticed a foul odor hanging in the humid
summer air; an examination of a nearby manhole turned up the dead couple’s
discarded innards.
The
police were frustrated by sparse information.
The Rogers’ low-profile lifestyle had a lot to do with it. Detectives were able to trace Edwina’s
whereabouts the last day she was seen alive, Saturday, June 13th. Since her car wasn’t running, she prevailed
upon her part-time maid to drive her around as she ran errands. The maid offered a troublesome tidbit about
the afternoon. One of Edwina’s stops was
to speak to a mechanic about fixing her car; she told the maid she had $300
cash with her—about $2400 in today’s terms—for that purpose. However, the maid never saw the cash, nor did
she see or hear from Edwina again after leaving her at a bus stop that evening.
Questioning
the neighbors didn’t glean much, either.
Neither did grilling the yardman, who hadn’t been by in a while as it
was. (It’s puzzling that despite
employing a maid, a handyman, and a landscaper, the Rogers residence was
a sty.) There was a small clue, though
not much to go on. Another Stanley Home
Products distributor had phoned the Rogers house the morning before the bodies
were found. A man answered. He curtly told the caller Edwina wasn’t home
and hung up. The woman told police that while she had never met Edwina’s son,
she had spoken briefly with a young man on a few calls in the past and the
voice was the same.
It did not look as if any promising leads
were forthcoming any time soon, and the Houston Police did the only thing they could do at this point. They obtained a material witness warrant for
Charles Frederick Rogers.
Following
an autopsy which established their respective causes of death, Fred and Edwina’s
remains were placed in a single casket and buried at Hollywood Cemetery in
Houston. There was a brief graveside
service. Few attended. For all intents and purposes, the Rogers
murder investigation was at a standstill.
As the long, hot summer of ’65 faded into fall, no new revelations came
to light and public interest in the Ice Box Murders cooled.
To be continued…
© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar
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