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