Seriel Killer Suspected of Killing a Man in Beattyville Set to be Executed in Florida

Convicted seriel killer, Glen Edward Rogers, of Hamilton, Ohio, who was convicted of murder in Florida and California, also suspected in killings in Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Louisiana, is set to be put to death by lethal injection on May 15th at Florida State Prison.

Rogers once claimed to have committed more than 70 murders, but he later recanted that claim, saying it was a joke and he never killed anyone. 

Years later, his brother claimed that Rogers said he was even responsible for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. The Los Angeles Police Department dismissed that claim.

It is suspected that in 1993, death of Rogers' 72-year-old roommate's body was left in an abandoned cabin by Rogers that Rogers’ family owned in the Old Landing area of Lee County, Kentucky, near Beattyville.

In 1995, Rogers was captured near Richmond, Kentucky after leading police on a high-speed chase in a car that belonged to a Florida woman believed to be the third victim in a vicious, cross-country killing spree that began in Van Nuys seven weeks earlier from his capture. Rogers had been the subject of a nationwide manhunt, and had visited the old cabin in Lee County earlier that day. 

After taking a long swig of beer, Rogers threw an empty can at the police cruiser and sped off, reaching 100 m.p.h., and at one point driving between two other patrol cars serving as a roadblock. He, then, was run off the road after a 15-mile chase, then quickly taken into custody, smelling of alcohol and looking dazed, authorities said. Police said they fired a single shot during the pursuit, but no one was injured, according to authorities

At that time, Rogers denied to a TV reporter, who was at the scene, that he killed anyone. Authorities had linked Rogers to four recent slayings of women in California, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana.

As news of the Glen Rogers arrest spread, friends and relatives of Rogers’ alleged victims responded with full-throttle joy, and few thoughts of mercy.

Rogers had a reportedly unremarkable childhood, but as a teen-ager he began building a name as a troublemaker with a hair-trigger temper. By the time he was 16, he was expelled from Wilson Junior High School. Within months of his expulsion, Rogers got his childhood sweetheart, Deborah Ann Nix, pregnant. The teen-agers married and moved to Southern California, where Rogers got a job at the Highland Press printing company in Pasadena. They proceeded to have two children.

It was a predatory talent that would serve him well as a killer, according to police, who say Rogers pursued the four recent slaying victims in local bars and at a state fair before strangling or stabbing them.

He returned to Ohio, but left again in 1993, the same year that his roommate, Mark Peters, disappeared. At the time, friends and acquaintances thought little of his departure because Rogers had often left Hamilton for weeks or even months at a time, always returning but never saying much about what he had done.

Then, in January, 1994, Mark Peters’ badly decomposed body was found bound and hidden in the Lee County cabin owned by Rogers’ family. Rogers was sought for questioning, but had already returned to Los Angeles.

He lived in Hollywood and Van Nuys, repeating behavior by then well-known to his friends back home. Rogers was accused of routinely beating his most recent girlfriend and of setting clothes in her closet on fire during one fight, but was never convicted because she refused to testify against him. The woman was so frightened of Rogers, according to friends and relatives, that she fled to her native Hungary in late summer, returning in the Fall to learn Rogers' was suspected of murder while she was gone, and that is when authorities alleged Rogers began the string of slayings that led to his arrest.

A jury sentenced Rogers, 62, to death back in 1997 after convicting him of first-degree murder, armed robbery and grand theft of a motor vehicle.

Despite his claims, Rogers was only convicted in two murder cases, the second after a 1999 trial in the state of California, and ended with the jury sentencing him to death, but he remained incarcerated in Florida.

In 2012, an Australian film crew visited Hamilton, Ohio for the documentary “My Brother the Serial Killer.”

According to court records, lawyers for both sides only had until April 19th to wrap up any and all lingering legal proceedings until Rogers' execution on May 15th.