A Nurse Preys Upon Bar Patrons
(‘Touch of Evil,’ Forensic Files)
Richard Rogers not only got away with violent crimes but also did so in way that didn’t seem to hurt his reputation.
In 1973, the soft-spoken graduate student convinced a judge that he had good reason to pummel his roommate with a hammer and suffocate him. Richard was acquitted of homicide.
In those pre-internet days, his friends either didn’t hear about the incident or believed in his innocence. And his past didn’t stop him from getting a gig as a substitute teacher.
In 1988, Richard took home a man he met over cocktails, drugged him, tied him up with hospital name bands, and beat him. Fred Lero pressed charges, but Richard’s defense lawyer shamed Fred for “being a homosexual” and going to a gay bar. Richard escaped punishment again.
Richard, who was a nurse by this time, continued to work his way up at a respected New York hospital, ultimately landing a position in pediatric intensive care.
Then, when gay men started turning up dead and cut into pieces, no one suspected the demure Richard.
Not until 2001 did the law catch up with him — and it required a tri-state strike force, a civilian justice group, a phone call from a Massachusetts widow, and a forensic breakthrough from the Royal Canadian police.
For this post, I dug up some biographical information about Richard Rogers and found out where he is today. So let’s get going on the recap of “A Touch of Evil” along with extra information from internet research as well as HBO and A&E docuseries and an interview with true-crime author Elon Green:
In 1991, a work crew was collecting trash along the New Jersey Turnpike when one came across an unusually heavy bag containing a human head. (On Forensic Files, a work crew’s job generally means stumbling upon human remains, Scott Dunn, Linda Sobek).
Police found six more bags with body parts around the state. Someone had cut the victim up with surgical precision and washed the pieces before disposing of them.
A driver’s license identified the deceased as Thomas Mulcahy, 57, an executive at Bull HN Information Systems in Billerica, Massachusetts. Mulcahy was visiting New York as part of a business trip to make a presentation at the World Trade Center.
Mulcahy had been married to Margaret, a teacher with the Lincoln-Sudbury school system, for 30 years and had four grown children. Margaret told police that at some point in their marriage, he had begun having sexual relationships with men.
Still, Mulcahy was a devoted family man whose daughter Tracey O’Shea would later tell HBO’s Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York that they had fun traveling together and he always wanted his kids to have new adventures. He liked musicals and old Hollywood movies.
His last traceable transaction was a $200 withdrawal from an ATM at Sixth Avenue and 49th Street two days before he went missing.
Witnesses told police that Mulcahy had visited the Townhouse Bar on East 58th Street around that time. Unlike the gay scene downtown, this establishment attracted gentlemen who were a bit older and sometimes more discreet about their attraction to other men. In a borderline-offensive stereotype, the Boston Herald described the Townhouse as a “tony Manhattan piano bar where natty homosexual patrons revel in show tunes and chatter about antiques.”
Patrons remembered seeing Mulcahy talking to a tall brunette man. Tests showed that Mulcahy had a blood-alcohol level above the legal limit, making him vulnerable.
Police found a sticker from a Pergament hardware store in one of the body bags and traced the price tag from some latex gloves to a Staten Island CVS. But, in the days before security cameras tracked everyone’s transactions all day every day, investigators couldn’t identify who bought them.
Meanwhile, a second body of a Townhouse customer had turned up, in a barrel on May 1991 in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Peter Stickney Anderson, 54 and married to a woman, was a bowtie-wearing Mellon Bank investment broker from Philadelphia. He was last seen at the bar, intoxicated and wearing Brooks Brothers pants and a Black Dog T-shirt. His personal belongings, including a bottle of Polo cologne, turned up more than 30 miles away. “He wasn’t cut into pieces like the other victims.” Elon Green, author of Last Call, told ForensicFilesNow.com. “But his penis was cut off. I was surprised it wasn’t mentioned on Forensic Files.”
Patrons of the Townhouse began referring to the unknown murderer as the Last Call Killer.
In 1993 in Manchester Township, New Jersey, another dead man turned up. He was Puerto Rican-born Anthony Marrero, 44, a prostitute known to work in Greenwich Village and the Port Authority area in Manhattan. Interviewed by HBO, his older brother fondly remembered the way that Anthony dressed like John Travolta in his youth. The brother, however, refused to believe Anthony was gay. Like Thomas Mulcahy, Anthony had ligature marks around his ankles and wrists and had been carved into pieces in a precise way, suggesting the killer worked in medicine.
The N.J. state police, who by now were working with New York and Pennsylvania authorities, asked the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project for help.
The killer was still at work at what the New York Times called “meticulous, unobserved affairs hatched in the boozy haze of New York’s upscale gay bars.” Twelve miles from NYC, near Haverstraw Bay, a foodtruck owner described on camera how he looked into a trash can and saw body parts folded up neatly.
They belonged to Mike Sakara, a typesetter at the New York Law Journal. Mike, 56, often spent time at the Five Oaks, a Manhattan piano bar that catered to the gay community. Mike was described as a tall, friendly, regal-looking man. He would sit on his barstool until closing time, according to bartender Lisa Hall, who appeared on A&E and HBO. Toward the end of the evening, he liked to sing “I’ll Be Seeing You.”
Lisa Hall remembered that a white male sat right next to Mike at the bar at around 3 a.m. on the evening he went missing, and the two men chatted in a familiar way. Mike introduced the man, who was drinking Scotch and water, to Lisa as a nurse at Saint Vincent’s Hospital. Later, Mike was seen accepting a ride from him.
Investigators at first thought they had a good suspect in Mark Slayton, a nurse at Saint Vincent’s, but his fingerprints didn’t match those at the murder scene. And police would later determine that the killer never worked at that hospital.
New York City police chief Ray Kelly was accused of failure to take the murders seriously because of the victims’ sexual orientation. Matt Foreman, a leader of the NYC Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, pointed out that Kelly assigned four staff members to work on the murder cases, compared with 312 officers tasked with protecting St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Gay Pride Day.
The Five Oaks bar went out of business because people were afraid to visit, according to Lisa Hall.
The Last Call Killer case stood still for eight years.
Then, widow Margaret Mulcahy dialed up the New Jersey police to request an update on the investigation. “I envision Margaret as the hero of the book,” said Green, “because without Margaret, I don’t think the police would have dusted off the cold case.”
By April 2000, the New Jersey police were offering a $45,000 reward for information resulting in the conviction of the murderer. The funding came from the NYC Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, the Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and some of the victims’ family members.
Investigators found out about a new fingerprint ID method invented by the Royal Canadian police. Investigators drove to Toronto to hand over the plastic bags found with the victims’ bodies. Forensic scientists there used vacuum metal deposition to lift prints from the nonporous material. New partial prints appeared, but they didn’t match any of those in the Automated Fingerprint Identification System.
Next up, New York investigators sent copies of the prints to police departments in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, hoping that an examiner would compare them with prints not yet entered in AFIS. Kimberly Stevens, a Maine forensic scientist, found a match to a nurse named Richard Rogers. His prints were still on file from 1973, when he was accused and then acquitted of murdering roommate Frederic Spencer.
“We were exuberant,” former Ocean County detective Mike Mohel told HBO. “We finally had our suspect after eight years.”
“It was like a bolt of lightning,” said Matt Foreman.
So who was this alleged serial killer?
Richard Westall Rogers Jr. was born on June 16, 1950 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. According to the New York Daily News, his mother had a telephone company job and his father was a lobster trapper. He taught Richard Jr. how to hunt and fish. The eldest of five children, Richard Jr. moved with his family to Florida after his father found a position as a machinist.
Richard Jr. grew to 6-foot 1-inch tall and had brown hair and blue eyes. As a young adult, he weighed 140 pounds.
In 1972, he graduated from Florida Southern College with a degree in French. A college friend who gave her name as Linda B., told HBO that she knew that he was gay but—times being what they were then — he didn’t come out.
The aforementioned killing of roommate Frederic Spencer, 22, came to light when a bicyclist discovered some tarpaulin near the road.
Accounts vary on what started the dispute between Frederic and Richard and which version of events Richard claimed in court. A&E says that Richard became angry when he found Frederic going through his possessions. According to another source, Richard said Frederic suddenly attacked him with a hammer. But the claim that Frederic made an unwelcome pass at Richard allowed for what LGBT advocates labeled the “gay panic defense” — the idea that it’s natural for a man to go berserk and kill another man who makes a sexual advance toward him.
As noted, Richard received no punishment for his role in Frederic’s death.
“To think that had his killer been convicted in 1973, so many other men might not have suffered the same fate,” Frederic’s former high school girlfriend Jenny Riley told HBO.
In the mid-1970s, Richard headed to the University of Maine to do graduate work in languages.
Although Richard was described as “wound tight,” people who knew him liked him. Roommate Don Cubberley would later tell A&E that the Richard Rogers he knew wouldn’t hurt anyone.
After his work as substitute teacher in Spanish and French, Richard moved to New York and got a nursing degree at Pace University. At the time of the murders, Richard was employed at Mount Sinai hospital in Manhattan, caring for children with heart ailments in the intensive care unit, according to the Daily News. Co-workers knew him as hardworking and dependable.
His fellow Florida Southern alum Linda B. told HBO that she and her teenage daughter stayed with Richard in Staten Island so that they could look at nearby colleges. “He couldn’t have been a better host,” Linda said.
Now that investigators finally had a solid suspect, the New Jersey police began following Richard, hoping he would travel to whatever “murder factory” he was using to attack and dismember men.
But 122nd-precinct New York City police abruptly decided to arrest Richards in May 2002, possibly because Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s mother was hospitalized at Mount Sinai then, the HBO documentary suggests.
As astonished colleagues looked on, authorities entered the intensive care unit and took Richard away in handcuffs. Co-workers had known him only as a quiet and well-adjusted man.
Neighbors variously described Richard as friendly and helpful or reserved and orderly. He listened to show tunes at home. No one perceived him as a troublemaker or deviant.
“We are pleased an arrest has been made,” said Margaret Mulcahy.
Authorities held him in Rikers Island in lieu of $1 million bail, with no option to post 10 percent, according to the Asbury Park Press.
Finally, law enforcement was giving the Last Call Killer its full attention.
Richard admitted to knowing Mike Sakara from the Five Oaks but denied recognizing photos of the other murdered men. Presented with forensic evidence linking him to the homicides, Richard clammed up and got a lawyer.
Linda B. told HBO that Richard sent her a letter blaming his arrest on faulty forensic testing.
“We never saw anything but a normal and thoughtful person with goals in his life, good habits, and a good social life,” Richard’s cousin John Fillebrown told the Daily News.
Rick Unterburg, a piano player at the Townhouse Bar, said he remembered Richard as an unremarkable-looking customer who frequented the bar on Sundays, tended to hang around the piano, wore sweaters, and ordered Scotch.
Once under way, the case progressed quickly. The estimated times of the murders coincided with periods when Richard wasn’t working at the hospital. Bartender Lisa Hall picked Richard from a photo lineup as the man she saw talking to Mike Sakara around the time he disappeared.
Richard lived close to the Staten Island CVS where the killer had bought the garbage bags and latex gloves. Inside his immaculately clean and organized home, police found a syringe and a vial of the date rape drug Versed (Candice Fonagy). He had a Bible marked with passages referring to beheadings and dismemberments. And in Richard’s drawer, they discovered Polaroids of shirtless male construction workers he probably saw through his window. He had marked stab wounds on the pictures.
His collection of VHS tapes included Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte and dozens of Golden Girls episodes.
Investigators believe Richard targeted men who were inebriated and he used a drug to make them pass out. Or he might have simply invited them to his townhome at 62 Bridge Court in Staten Island, crept up on them when they were distracted, and stabbed them to death. Then he dismembered them.
In October 2005, the trial commenced for the murders of only Marrero and Mulcahy. Prosecutors felt they didn’t have enough evidence to try Richard for the deaths of Sakara and Peter Anderson — and possibly other men.
Richard Rogers didn’t testify at the trial.
In November 2005, he was convicted on all charges.
“We find it very satisfying that it’s nearing the end,” Margaret Mulcahy told the New York Times.
Richard received two consecutive life sentences plus 65 years. He is incarcerated at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton and will be eligible for parole in 2066 when he’s 116 years old.
With Richard put away, there’s still something missing from the story—his motives. The bodies of his victims had no signs of forced intercourse. Richard didn’t steal money from the men. There’s no evidence that he suffered abuse as a child or had any other reason for violent rage.
Plus, Richard had other lovers whom he didn’t harm.
“I talked to some people who went home with him,” Green said. “He was pretty normal except when he wasn’t.”
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
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