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
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