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
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