In the Shadows: Part 8 - Winning Ugly

We have a fascination with true crime.  There are the network news shows, the hour-long docuseries, blogs, dozens of podcasts with legions of listeners, not to mention dedicated cable channels like Investigation Discovery.  I’m a die-hard fan of all of ‘em.  Transgression is transfixing.

But not all murders are equally interesting.  Each of us are drawn in by different aspects—the victims, the perpetrator(s), the method, motive, time, place, etc.  The Ice Box Murders do possess a morbid allure, but I’m drawn more to the man who probably committed them.  Never mind the legends conjured by conspiracy mongers tying Charles Rogers to the intelligence services and the John F. Kennedy assassination; the man is captivating enough on his own.

It helps that we have some things in common.  Countless people have had chaotic childhoods, so it goes beyond just that.  Charles was a self-directed man who succeeded on his own merits, without any substantive help from family, friends, coworkers, or mentors.  He was intensely private.  The nature of his work, particularly after he resigned from Shell, afforded him the flexibility not only to travel but also to lay low at home when he chose not to engage with the outside world.

Of course our respective life stories differ as well.  Even discounting the wilder allegations, the tale of Charles Rogers and associates has a generous dose of intrigue.  It has adventure in the wild, with the protagonists and supporting players flying themselves into remote and dangerous places.  It has stolen industrial secrets and business fraud.  It has betrayal, drug and gun smuggling, and an ignominious end in the Central American mountains.  It’s a ripping tale even without the bodies in the refrigerator.

It also has its headscratchers.  It’s hard to grasp why Charles didn’t just cut ties with his parents and leave them to their own devices.  He probably stuck it out because he was the sole living child, his older sister Betty having died while he was very young.  Our culture places far too much emphasis on family even when it’s used as a pretext to exploit.  Fred and Edwina were reprobates, deviants by nature and choice.  Charles was nothing more to them than another mark.  Family is a sucker’s bet when you’re the only one playing by the rules.

I’m speaking for myself with the previous sentence.  I finally got sick of being played and guilt-tripped by unscrupulous people using the accident of being related as an excuse for taking advantage.  But there is also a key difference or two.  Charles was only one of his father and mother’s many victims, but he was as contemptuous of social mores as they were.  My own revenge fantasies against my parents stopped short of murder.  Even if I was inclined to kill them, I don’t think I could have mustered sufficient cold bloodedness to literally butcher them afterward.  Instead, I did the prudent and rational thing and cut off my parents and siblings.  I may have been a bad son, but I have my peace of mind.

Charles Rogers is unsettling case, proof that latent savagery can lurk beneath the surface of the most ordinary people.  Guys like him aren’t supposed to lash out like that.  Then again each of us has a breaking point.  Fred and Edwina had made their son’s life a living hell.  His only respite from dysfunction were his years in the Navy, the brief interlude living alone just after the war, and his business trips.  Barricading himself in his bedroom must have become unbearable.

If you’re willing to overlook the way he went about it, Charles Rogers won his fight to be free on his own terms.  His was a case of winning ugly, if you will, and he had the good fortune to be living in a much different and less intrusive time than ours.  

It doesn’t seem like Charles looked over his shoulder much in the two decades between his parents’ deaths and his own.  This takes supreme self-assurance, and perhaps a little recklessness as well.  But let’s look at everything working in his favor.  There was a small degree of doubt as to his responsibility for the murders, and you might recall he was never charged but only identified as a material witness to the crime.  Charles spent most of his exile in northern Mexico, where the authorities might be inclined to turn a blind eye if there was some benefit in it for them.  The forensic tools available to criminologists nowadays were far in the future. 

There was one more thing.  I’ve pointed this out in other posts about old crimes, but it helps to remind ourselves we live in a significantly different world since the arrival of the internet.  This difference multiplied with the advent of smartphones and social media.  Charles Rogers didn’t leave much of a photographic record.  There are a handful of childhood pictures, a few more from his wartime service, and the Shell employee identification photo from nearly ten years before the murder.  That seems to be it. 

Which brings me to another thing your author has in common with his subject.  You may not believe this, but I just might be one of the least photographed people of the digital age.  I’ve always been camera shy, and I’ve done my best to ensure my life, past and present, remains visually undocumented.  After my parents split when I was a kid, my mother’s disorganized lifestyle and our frequent moves guaranteed the loss of family albums with their studio photos and snapshots.  Being fairly tall, I was often put in the back row for group photos and I would always try to hide as much of myself as I could so as to be less likely to be recognized later.  I avoided having my picture taken for the high school yearbook. 

My mother died years ago; she was so debt ridden her house was foreclosed.  Mom’s habits were as squalid as Fred and Edwina’s and she was as much of a packrat, and I’m told the new owners had to bring in a specialized cleaning service to haul away the house’s contents to the landfill.  It’s pretty unlikely any childhood pictures of me exist aside from class photos.

Most photographs of me as an adult are on ID cards, passports, driver’s licenses, and the random snap in someone else’s hands.  I’m not on social media.  I don’t think anyone has ever pointed their phone at me with the intent of taking a picture of me.  (Most of my social circle, such as it is, are over forty so that might explain that.)  I restrict recording in my classrooms as a matter of policy.  You just won’t see me unless it’s in person.

That leaves us one last contemporary bar to anonymity—public surveillance.  In 1965, all you had were public sightings.  And Charles made as sure as one could be that he would be undetected as he left the Driscoll Street house and made his escape from Houston.  Even though he was forced to improvise after accomplice Anthony Pitts bailed on him, he was recognized only in retrospect by the Fluor employee who spoke with him briefly as he got the keys to his escape car from his girlfriend Jean.  That’s impressive.

Hiding in plain sight just isn’t an option anymore, sad to say.  I am impressed by the way Charles’ associates kept mostly quiet in the days, months, and years after the Ice Box Murders.  Dan O’Connor seems to have been a man who knew how to lay low and would have been sufficiently intimidating to anyone who was stupid enough to try to threaten or blackmail him.  Like Charles, Anthony Pitts lived at the edges of the law and while he could be flamboyant after a few drinks, he was always a step or two ahead of everyone else.  John Mackie was a drunk and a braggart whom no one took seriously. 

I use the past tense because of course Charles and Pitts died premature deaths and Mackie and O’Connor would be near-centenarians if alive.  That leaves the enigma of Charles’ girlfriend, the woman identified simply as Jean by the Gardeniers.  She was a few years younger than Charles and may still be around.  An actual identification would be difficult, however.  I suspect the Gardeniers gave her a pseudonym.  Even though the statute of limitations on any applicable offenses had passed by the time she was found, Jean appears to be someone who guarded her privacy as much as Charles.   It would be reasonable to assume that if she is still living, she is the last link to the strange saga of Charles Rogers.

One final question concerns the inaction of law enforcement.  After media attention faded, the Houston police did little to find or pursue leads.  The U.S. State Department, FBI, and other federal agencies did not attempt to track Charles; surely the possibility he left the country or at least had left Texas should have brought them into the mix.  Charles’ freedom of movement was in no way hindered for the better part of two decades other than his brief detention in a Mexican jail. 

It could be, as the Gardeniers suggest, that the possibility Charles had his father’s betting records might have led Houston authorities to hold back.  Fred Rogers, save for an arrest in the 1950s, had operated on the wrong side of the law with near-impunity for years.  His demise, however grisly, was welcomed as he knew things city officials would prefer not to have made public.  If they left Charles alone their reputations and careers would be safe.  

The passage of time made any prosecution unlikely, even as the official corruption of 1960s Houston gave way to clean government.  Memories faded.  People moved on and passed on.  Other, more recent cases with better evidence needed clearing.  Until Hugh and Martha Gardenier began their detailed investigation into Charles Rogers’ life there were personal and business relationships of Charles’ which never came up in the rather cursory police investigation.  Of course, Charles was many years dead by the time the couple published their book in 2003 rendering any reopening of the police investigation moot.

Let’s suppose law enforcement was successful and got their man.  If I was taking bets on the outcome, Charles’ story would end with him dying of old age as a free man. 

Surprised?  Here’s why I believe this would have been the ending.  Charles would inevitably be prosecuted for first degree murder.  If convicted, the death penalty would be the probable punishment.  The reason I propose Charles would have been set loose eventually is that criminal justice in that era, even in Texas, was much different than today.  The death penalty in Texas, as unbelievable as it sounds now, was on its way out in the 1960s.  Across the country death sentences were carried out less frequently as public debate over capital punishment’s suitability intensified. 

If he’d been caught soon after the murders, the ensuing media attention would probably delay the trial’s progress.  Let’s suppose the trial verdict and sentencing would occur sometime in 1967.  Texas hadn’t executed anyone since 1964, and the state would never send another condemned prisoner to the electric chair before the U.S. Supreme Court negated all existing death sentences with its 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia.  Charles Rogers would never have paid the ultimate penalty.  Following the resumption of capital punishment after Gregg v. Georgia in 1976, Texas would go on to execute hundreds of prisoners but Charles would not have been one of them with his sentence having been reduced to life imprisonment because of Furman.  Moreover, since life sentences without parole were uncommon then there would be the possibility of freedom down the road no matter how notorious the crime.

Granted, making parole would have been tricky given his was a notorious crime.  Charles would first become eligible sometime in the mid- to late 1970s.  But the chances of him committing another violent crime would have been slim and the public’s memory of the Ice Box Murders would have dimmed, so I see our hero walking out of prison on his first or second attempt.  Charles Rogers would be free to resume his life free of Fred and Edwina.  Not such a bad fate, though the one he made for himself wasn’t so bad if you don’t count the way he’s said to have met his end.

And there we have it.  The tale of the Ice Box Murders and the unlikely escape of Charles Rogers will continue to engage generations of true crime aficionados.  We’ll never see its likes again because it could never again be duplicated.  As with other vintage crimes, it’s a time capsule mirroring the customs and preoccupations of its place and people.  The fact that someone could carry out such brutal killings—of one’s own parents, no less—and dodge the penalties was exceptional.  Such an escape today, with all the tools available to authorities to track even those of us with a minimal digital and public presence, would be nigh short of miraculous.  The mystique of this crime lives on.

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar

In the Shadows: Part 7 - Gone

And, so it would appear, Charles F. Rogers got away with it.  He was finally free of his detested parents, and he was someplace where it would be difficult for American law enforcement to track him down or even have him extradited.

The evidence against him was flimsy and circumstantial, anyway.  Most of Charles’ extended family hadn’t seen him for months, even years.  The neighbors didn’t know him at all, and rarely saw him.  Except for the Fluor hiring manager who spoke briefly with the man calling himself Anthony Pitts, there was no one among the public who could conclusively say they had seen Charles in Houston after Fred and Edwina Rogers’ murder.  (There was also the bartender at the Morningside Club, but he may only have mentioned this to the Gardeniers years later.)

Charles had cleaned the house sufficiently as to preclude trace evidence linking him to the deaths.  There would be numerous fingerprints of his around the house, but of course he lived there.  The open back bedroom window from which he’d escaped raised the possibility of someone having broken in.  The .22 Colt used to shoot Edwina had been obtained from a cousin with a lengthy criminal record.  (The gun jammed afterwards, forcing him to improvise and bludgeon Fred to death with a claw hammer.)

Charles spent his first few months in exile living in Chihuahua, an already familiar place from his travels.  There was a minor crisis as 1965 gave way to 1966, when the ’59 Cadillac's regiatration was due to expire.  The car was still registered in garage owner Al Jarvis’ name since Charles drove into Mexico hours after his girlfriend Jean had hastily purchased it in a cash transaction.  Wanting to avoid suspicion from the Mexican authorities, he arranged to have the Cadillac returned to Texas. 

This time Anthony Pitts came through for his longtime friend. Fortunately, this was at a time when you could cross on foot or by car into Mexico and return without a passport.  Since there would be no record of the crossing, there would be nothing to arouse suspicion.  At any rate, Pitts met Charles at the border and the Cadillac was driven to Kerrville.  Pitts later sold the car to a friend. 

Hugh and Martha Gardenier, who extensively researched the Rogers case, were able to tease out a narrative for Charles’ life after Houston but concede that some of what they found might be “innuendo and half-wild speculation.”  Notwithstanding, their research dredged up otherwise obscure connections that reporters and detectives missed in the 1960s which might have led to his eventual arrest.  The nexus between Charles Rogers and his business cronies was, predictably, airplanes.

Even before he had earned his pilot’s license, Charles had purchased his first plane, a 1948 Cessna 140 with the registration number N3745V.  (Remarkably, this aircraft is still in service with a private owner in Northern California.)  The plane didn’t have the range to meet Charles’ travel requirements, so he sold the Cessna to his new friend Anthony Pitts.  (Anthony, himself needing a longer-range aircraft, later traded up to a Texas-built Mooney M-20.)   This transaction became the start of the trail which led the Gardeniers to flesh out the rest of Charles Rogers’ story.

Neither the police nor the news media picked up on the possibility of collusion, or failed to pursue it sufficiently because of their misreading of the suspect.  They assumed that since Charles’ habits were solitary, he didn’t have any friends or associates when in fact he had a sufficiently sizeable coterie who were willing to help out of a jam.  In fairness, even the Gardeniers happened upon the pertinent records only after years of diligent research.

The subsequent activities of Charles Rogers and associates are obscure, though the broad brushstrokes are discernible.  Charles naturally feared detection.  There was a scare sometime in the early 1970s when a Mexican police official, either suspecting Charles of the Ice Box Murders or merely wanting to squeeze a mordida from a gringo businessman, had Charles jailed for a few days.  Charles was rescued by Dan O’Connor, the most mysterious of Charles’ sketchy friends. 

O’Connor had lost track of Charles over the years, but found the dissolute and perpetually broke John Mackie a good source of leads through his own contacts south of the border.  It probably helped that O’Connor still held a grudge over Mackie’s larceny of O’Connor’s mining dredge during the Mexus venture and was suitably threatening toward his ex-partner.

O’Connor naturally expected a return favor from Charles for his help getting him sprung.  (The Gardeniers suggest O’Connor set up Charles to ensure his cooperation.)  The alleged former CIA man had an interest in a potential oil field in Nuevo Leon, and Charles Rogers could be quite useful in realizing that potential.  There turned out to be a large natural gas deposit, and even after the state oil company got its legally mandated cut the discovery was quite lucrative for the two men and their partners

Time passed.  In Houston, detectives remained blocked by an absence of leads.  Unbeknownst to them, Charles prospered.  He hadn’t lost his dreams of wealth, though.  Neither had John Mackie.  In the early 1980s, Mackie obtained a gold mining concession in the mountains of Honduras.  Charles was to supervise the mine’s development. 

The 1980s were a dangerous time in Central America.  El Salvador was wracked by civil war.  Nicaragua’s revolutionary government was under attack by the U.S.-backed Contra insurgency.  Belize was considered safe, but there are hazards sociopolitical conditions have nothing to do with: In March 1984, Anthony Pitts would die there in a plane crash while on a drug run. 

Honduras was also comparatively quiet, but it was an impoverished country with a large gap between rich and poor.  The workforce for Mackie’s remote gold mine were campesinos eking out a bare living. 

It’s hard to say why they took the life of the American geologist.  Perhaps the seemingly mild-mannered Charles Rogers was a harsh taskmaster.  Maybe he withheld or shorted their pay.  Maybe it was opportunistic, a robbery gone wrong when Charles fought back.  The end result was the same.  Sometime in late 1983 or early 1984 Charles’ decomposed remains were found in a remote river bed.   

Charles had been pickaxed to death, an eerie echo of how he had murdered his father.  The Honduran police went with the wage dispute theory as motive.  They contacted John Mackie.  Mackie denied knowing the victim.

To be continued…

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar

In the Shadows: Part 6 - Where in the World Is Charles Rogers?

As the media furor over the Ice Box Murders subsided, the consensus was that while Charles Rogers was missing, he wasn’t necessarily lost.

Frustrated homicide detectives, not being able to identify any other suspects or come up with any other motive, defaulted to looking at Charles as nothing more than a murderous psycho as public attention waned and the trail went cold.  Scarcely a hint of his existence could be detected, and yet there was an uneasy sense that he was just beyond their grasp. 

There wasn’t a lot to help them.  The Rogers home contained no recent photos of Charles.  Most of the ones they found were of Charles as a child or of him as a sailor on home leave during World War 2.  The picture which ran in the newspapers and appeared on the evening newscasts was nearly a decade old.  It was from his last employee ID with Shell Oil.  It showed a thin-faced man with an inscrutable expression and a slightly receding hairline.  Hardly anyone knew for sure what he looked like now.

This ambiguity worked to Charles’ advantage.  No one noticed him on the street in hours after he drove away from 1815 Driscoll.  Charles was seen by a bartender that evening at the Morningside Club, a private club frequented by petroleum industry professionals.  Charles was having a quiet dinner and drinks with his sometime girlfriend Jean.  Jean seemed visibly upset, even tearful, to the bartender who served them.  The bartender, who respected his patrons’ privacy, had never learned the couple’s names even though they were familiar faces at the Morningside Club.

Charles probably spent that night at Jean’s apartment.  The murders had made the evening news and now Charles was a wanted man.  She was doubtlessly shocked at what Charles had done, but she was also well aware of the lifetime of abuse he had suffered from his parents.  Through the night they hammered out a plan.  It had its risks, but as long as Charles kept a low profile it would work.  However, his hastily revised escape plan required at least one last semi-conspicuous public appearance. 

Charles decided that since the authorities expected him to flee by plane, he would have to obtain a car.  Knowing the popularity of American luxury cars in Mexico, Charles and Jean thought a late-model Cadillac would be a quite suitable vehicle that could be sold or bartered away if anything went awry. 

Charles' choice of an escape vehicle would puzzle a lot of people today.  The Cadillac marque has lost much of its luster over the years, though automotive journalists have periodically touted its resurgence.  High-end European and Japanese makes are more appealing to the contemporary driver.  At one time, however, Cadillac was what every upwardly mobile American family aspired to.  In 1965, Cadillac was the self-proclaimed “Standard of the World.”  Corporate debacles such as the 8-6-4 engine, the Cimarron (basically an overpriced, gussied-up Chevy Cavalier), the Allanté, and the Catera were all in the future.  In 1965, a Cadillac was still the car to own.   

Charles had money to make the purchase, but even if he used an alias there was a huge risk of being recognized if he went to an authorized dealer.  Jean could make the buy, but she would also face raised eyebrows.  She was a single woman at a time when most single women (and women generally) were relegated to low-paid work and thus would be an unlikely Cadillac customer on her own.  If she said she was married, the salesman would insist upon speaking with her husband before making a sale. 

Fortunately, several things were working in Charles’ favor.  Through the ever-shady Anthony Pitts, Charles knew an auto shop owner who refurbished used Cadillacs.  Even more fortuitously this garage was within walking distance of Jean’s office at the Fluor Corporation.  If a buyer had the cash, the owner, a man named Al Jarvis, wouldn’t be finicky about who that buyer was.

Jean was to make the purchase the following day.  She would then drive the car back to Fluor and park it in the employee’s lot.  Charles would stop by the office under a pretext, pick up the keys from Jean, and drive off to freedom.

Charles would need to disguise himself, though.  Not so much as to be obvious, but just enough of a change to his everyday appearance so as to not arouse suspicion.  He had grown a scraggly mustache over the past few days, but it hadn’t filled in yet.  Jean would apply light makeup to his face, experimenting through the night until she was sure he wouldn’t be recognized right off.

In a time where we need picture ID for everything it’s hard to imagine another element working in Charles’ favor.  Most states issued driver licenses without photos in the mid-1960s, Texas among them.  California had started issuing photo licenses a few years earlier but it was an exception.  It would be another decade before Texas drivers carried licenses with their pictures on them.  Even as late as the 1990s, some states still issued laminated licenses which were ridiculously easy for even an amateur to alter. 

It so happened Charles was not bearing Charles Rogers’ identification when he left his house for good.  He was Anthony Pitts of Kerrville, Texas.  Charles fit Pitts’ written description on the license.  They were years apart in age, but that didn’t matter much as the middle-aged Charles was still quite boyish looking.  He could pass.

As planned, Jean visited the Jarvis garage in the morning.  Al in fact did have a suitable chariot on hand.   It was a cream colored 1959 model.  Jean, a methodical sort, inspected the car to make sure it ran well and had nothing to arouse a traffic cop’s suspicion like a faulty taillight or broken turn signal.  She closed the deal and drove off, but not until after Al Jarvis had thrown in a five gallon can of gas for good measure.

Sometime in the early afternoon, a slightly built man calling himself Anthony Pitts dropped by Fluor asking about job opportunities for welders.  Jean politely handed him an employment application and was about to send him on his way when her boss, the HR manager, unexpectedly walked in.  A sociable guy, he struck up a conversation with Pitts.  Pitts kept his cool and disengaged himself as soon as he could without arousing suspicion.

“Pitts” made his way through the parking lot as nonchalantly as he dared to the 1959 Cadillac.  Charles Rogers would make good his escape.  The next afternoon he crossed into Mexico and eluded the long arm of the law for good.

To be continued…

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar

In the Shadows: Part 5 - Fallback

Fred and Edwina Rogers had been brutally slaughtered in the sanctity of their own home.  That much was known by the good citizens of Houston in late June 1965.  There was also the matter of the Rogers’ absent son Charles, the truth of which was unclear.

Forensic accountants Hugh and Martha Gardenier have constructed a convincing scenario of how Charles made his escape and managed to live a fairly prosperous life on the run for twenty years afterward.  The story is improbable, but it fits the evidence.  Tellingly, Charles would never have been able to pull it off had it not been for the aid and abetment of his closest business associates and his one true love.

Once they had discovered Charles was nowhere to be found after the discovery of Fred and Edwina’s dismembered bodies, the Houston Police at first thought Charles would escape by plane.  It stood to reason.  His description was sent to local general aviation airports and the registration number of his aircraft.  They also did not discount an escape by sea, and officers scoured the Port of Houston to find out if Charles had maybe shipped out on an outbound vessel.

Actually, he made a run for the border.  On the open road.  It was an audacious move for such a low-profile guy.  But it was a move he would not have chosen under better circumstances.  Escaping by car was Plan B.

Charles had spent nearly a week at 1815 Driscoll Street after the murders, dismembering his father’s and mother’s bodies, meticulously cleaning up the crime scene so as to prevent the police from obtaining conclusive proof of his guilt, and venturing out only in the dead of night to dispose of Fred’s and Edwina’s internal organs and other physical evidence.  He kept the lights off at night.  If there were any callers, he did not answer the door.  He answered the telephone but once, expecting someone else on the other end.

That call should have come from Anthony Pitts as the next step in Charles’ escape plan.  It was one of Edwina’s acquaintances from Stanley Home Products instead.  The clock was running out on Charles Rogers. 

If Pitts couldn’t be counted on, there was one person Charles could still turn to.  He lifted the receiver and phoned his girlfriend, the woman identified as Jean by the Gardeniers.  Soon after the short exchange with Edwina’s friend, he called Jean at her office.  Jean had left Shell a while back and now worked across town at Fluor Corporation.  (Fluor is a petroleum exploration firm with a sideline as a logistics contractor for the military.  Think of it as Halliburton’s kid brother.)   Jean agreed to meet Charles later in the day.

Time was short.  Charles knew that having added to the suspicions of Edwina’s small circle of acquaintances, family and then the police would soon converge on the Rogers house.  Charles had already tidied up, save for some blood in his bedroom where he had first beaten then shot his mother.  He also left a bloodstained keyhole saw used in the dismemberment, together with a few cryptic clues left around the house to puzzle and taunt the cops.

Charles slipped out a window in the back, leaving it open.  In the garage there was Charles’ only vehicle, a lovingly preserved Harley-Davidson he seldom rode.  The Gardeniers write that Charles may have taken some insurance with him when he rode away.  Fred Rogers had kept detailed records over his many years as a bookie.  The Houston Police, like many police departments in that era, struggled with a reputation for corruption.  Fred was arrested on occasion, with no real consequences.  It’s not much of an inferential leap to conclude Fred had considerable dirt on numerous prominent Houstonians.  Police never found any trace of Fred’s journals after his murder, though they must have suspected their existence and would have liked to have gotten their hands on them.

Charles may have taken other useful papers with him that June morning.  Years after leaving Shell, he was still resentful of his treatment there.  Apparently Jean, before she herself left the company, had funneled closely held, financially valuable geological data to Charles.  But Charles needed ready cash.  Now.

Given what happened next, it’s clear he either had it to begin with or somehow got it within hours.  The Gardeniers reference, then dismiss, a rumor circulating at the time that Charles had maybe taken the money from the safe at a private club for geologists he’s said to have frequented.  If there had been a theft, it was never reported.

It’s most likely Charles had accumulated the money ahead of time.  He owned a number of rental properties in his own name, which was probably his largest single source of income.  Like his parents, Charles was known to skirt the law now and then.  Maybe he had owned additional properties under aliases.  If these were residences in poorer neighborhoods, the rents were probably paid in cash which Charles carefully husbanded.  If it sounds unlikely that having that much cash wouldn’t have been noticed, we have to keep in mind how much banking has changed since 1965.

The economy half a century ago was much more cash based than it is now.  There was no online banking, no ATMs, no depositing the few paper checks we do receive via smartphone.  Such electronic money transfers as there were took place between banks and large corporations.

So that left good old American greenbacks for the most part.  If you needed cash, you’d have to go to a brick and mortar bank during banking hours and either cash a check made out to you or make a withdrawal from your own account.  Or, you could write a check for over the amount of purchase at a store and pocket the difference.  If you needed cash after business hours, you were out of luck until tomorrow.  It wouldn’t do to be caught short if you were in a desperate fix.

But Charles had resources, and he had someone close who would help.  It was time to give Houston the slip.

 

To be continued…

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar

In the Shadows: Part 4 - What a Tangled Web

Fred and Edwina Rogers were dead and buried and their son Charles was either a fugitive from justice or a victim himself.  The thankless task of settling the Rogers estate fell upon the narrow shoulders of Edwina’s nephew Marvin Martin.  

Marvin was in way over his head.  Most people would have been. The family finances were a hopeless tangle.  The couple hadn’t left a will, nor had their son.  They were far from destitute, it became clear, but Fred and Edwina’s financial shenanigans, which they kept hidden from each other and from their son, spanned several decades of fraud and deceit.  An estate administrator was eventually brought in to sort things; it would take up the balance of his career.

Fred had parlayed a loansharking sideline to his betting activities into real estate and a small loan company which he was able to sell at a modest profit in the early 1940s.  He saw the value in land and more importantly what lay beneath it.  He purchased a number of undeveloped parcels in and around Houston, as well as lucrative oil and gas leases.  

But Fred feared the taxman.  Or more precisely, Fred loathed the prospect of paying him.  Consequently, Fred Rogers didn’t own most of Fred Rogers’ real estate, at least not exactly in Fred Rogers’ name.  He would use various spellings and initials to obscure his identity.  Some of the property was in Edwina’s name.  He also began using Charles’ name without Charles’ knowledge for some of his acquisitions to further confuse the trail.  Advancing alcoholism did little to dull Fred’s facility for sniffing out a profitable deal or keeping the threads of deceit apart in his head.

And it wasn’t just Fred using his son’s good name.  Edwina had drawing rights on one of Charles’ bank accounts, though it’s possible Charles set up the account for her benefit.  Apparently, that wasn’t enough.  A year before her death, Edwina took out a $1,350 FHA home improvement loan in Charles’ name.  (The amount would equal around $11,000 in today’s money.)  Charles happened to be away at the time; Marvin would later discover his Aunt Ebbie had duped him into notarizing her forgery of Charles’ signature.  Although the handyman had done some work on the garage around this time, the money (or most of it) went into Edwina’s pocket.  The loan wound up being charged off in the end.

Edwina, always at loggerheads with her husband, invented aliases, got around Texas’ community property laws by claiming to be a widow, and resorted to other subterfuges to secure loans or dodge debt collectors.  In the final weeks of her life, she even tried to deceive Stanley Home Products by inventing fictitious customers to prop up her sales numbers.

The couple’s avarice was in vain, the outcome zero sum.  The properties were mostly lost to tax liens, in some cases because the administrator hadn’t traced them in time.  Their joint savings paid for their burial, while various small claims against the estate went mostly unsettled.  Whatever household goods had any worth were sold or taken by extended family.  The handyman bought the two cars in the driveway and had them towed off; he junked the engineless Olds and eventually decided the Cadillac was beyond restoration and got rid of it too.

That left the house itself, together with sundry other undisposed properties.  Already the neighborhood eyesore, it now became an attractive nuisance as the City of Houston and its police and prosecutors dithered over its fate.  Its notoriety made it a magnet for mischievous kids and vandals. 

The estate’s court-appointed administrator was finally able to get the city to bulldoze the place, contents and all, in 1973, though the empty lot wouldn’t be sold off until 1994. 

To digress a moment, there is a peculiar stigma surrounding houses and other buildings tied to high profile crimes.  Laura Tillman, who wrote a book covering another notorious Texas crime, the 2003 murder of three small children in Brownsville, mused over the public urge to raze “evil” buildings.  Sometimes a building is torn down very soon after a tragedy, as in the case of Adam Lanza’s house after the Sandy Hook shootings.  The Cleveland house where Ariel Castro imprisoned three young women was demolished following his guilty plea (and shortly before his prison cell suicide).

In other instances, many years pass before the offending structure is demolished; the house where Sharon Tate and four others were murdered in 1969 wasn’t knocked down until 1994.  The house had been continuously occupied the whole time.  Its final tenant was Trent Reznor, who set up a recording studio there.  The Jeffrey MacDonald family quarters at Fort Bragg, largely for evidentiary reasons related to the protracted investigation of the murders which took place there, stayed standing for many years as well.

Other buildings are left alone.  Many notorious murder houses from Lizzie Borden’s to the Amityville Horror house to Nicole Brown Simpson’s remain standing and in use.  The Dorothea Puente boarding house in Sacramento, where the proprietor killed her elderly tenants for their benefit checks and buried the bodies in the yard, is now a private residence.  I once dined at a Chinatown restaurant in San Francisco only to learn later that it was the site of the notorious Golden Dragon massacre.  I haven’t been back since though its infamy wouldn’t stop me from eating there again.  I don’t know why this particular structure wasn’t replaced when so many others like it have been, but it doesn’t bother me that it’s still there. 

My thoughts on this are similar to Tillman’s.  The intrinsic value of a building is unrelated to the malice or victimization of people associated with it.  I do not believe in ghosts or evil spirits.  But ours is a persistently superstitious culture, and it’s hardly astounding the Ice Box Murder house had to go eventually.  At least its removal was one less vexation in the Rogers family drama.

The Rogers estate was finally wound up sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s, more than seventy years after Fred Rogers began amassing real estate and over one-third of a century following his and his wife’s grisly demise.

This left just one final loose strand in the tangled web.  Whatever became of Charles Rogers?

To be continued…

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar