Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer Page 4

  When Turner finished reading Deputy Strosser's report, he found himself wondering if Heather might have been a prostitute but had deliberately avoided revealing that fact to Strosser. The incident had begun in a high vice area of Portland known for prostitution, and the circumstances under which she was picked up naturally prompted him to consider whether or not she had been soliciting. Instinct told him it was more likely than not that she had been, but from the details contained in the report there was just no way he could tell for certain.

  Nonetheless, Turner dutifully telephoned Heather and explained that he needed to meet with her in person to construct a composite of the suspect using an Identa-kit. She agreed to meet him at a Sheri's restaurant in the Oregon City Shopping Center later that day, but she didn't show up at the mutually agreed upon time. Turner waited patiently for half an hour, then returned to headquarters. With little else to go on except Heather's sketchy statement, Turner filed the report of the incident and pushed it into the back of his mind. For the time being.

  PART ONE

  The Final Kill

  Chapter 1

  It has been said that bloodlust is an aberration unique to the human animal, that when it occurs, it does so without purpose and has no reverence for the normal needs intrinsic to humankind survival. The aberration—for that is what it really is—is clearly sexual and all evil, and it rears its diabolic head when its host fails to achieve sexual gratification in any other way. As a result, many—particularly women and children—who unwittingly come into contact with such an individual die needlessly and without mercy at his hands.

  Dayton Leroy Rogers, thirty-three, fearsomely known to many of Portland's prostitutes as "Steve the gambler," has been afflicted by bloodlust since his late teens, perhaps longer. It usually materialized in the form of a headache, inflicting on him a splitting, blinding white pain, and perhaps he was always subconsciously aware that only the sight of another's pain, the sounds of her anguish, or, ultimately, the spilling of her blood would relieve his own suffering. When the headaches began, the only way to make them go away was to let his dark side fully emerge.

  Dayton seemed personable enough on the surface, as long as he wasn't in the midst of one of his mood swings. He was well known in the small communities of Woodburn and Canby, and people seemed to like him. A mechanic by trade, a skill he had learned in prison, Dayton ran a small successful engine repair business, was married, and had an eighteen-month-old boy who was a mirror image of him. Few people saw the evil that lay beneath the thin veneer, and many of those who were unlucky enough to witness his dark side firsthand did not live to talk about it.

  Dayton's headaches seemed to worsen during the summer of 1987 and for that reason he was away from home much of the time. He claimed that he was working at his shop during his absences, which ranged from a few hours to all night, and his wife, Sherry, saw little reason, at first, to doubt him. When she would call to check up on him in the early evening, he usually answered the telephone. On the occasions that he didn't, he always had an excuse. He would explain that he had been in the middle of a project and hadn't wanted to leave it to pick up the phone. Or, more commonly, he would tell Sherry that he had gone out to get coffee, perhaps a bite to eat, anything that would convince her he was only taking a break to get away from the shop for a while. Often, however, he waited until it was very late, until he was certain that Sherry was in bed and fast asleep, before beginning the prowl. Soon his working late became routine, a way of life, and Sherry's phone calls became less frequent. Although she began to hear stories about him frequenting the local taverns and bars, she tried very hard to maintain the faith she had always had in him. She might have become suspicious of his activities sooner if only she had taken the trouble to check the mileage on his pickup. But she hadn't, and he put more miles on the truck in a single week than most people drive in a month.

  August 6, a Thursday, started out for the Rogers family like most other days. Dayton got up early, showered and shaved, had a light breakfast, and drove to his small engine repair shop in Woodburn before 8 A.M. Outwardly, he seemed happy. Business had picked up during the summer to the point where he had to hire a man to help him, and several new repair orders were coming in every day. Soon, however, he began to feel the pressures of the backlog despite the new help, and his headaches became more frequent, as did his nocturnal outings. At times Sherry found herself wondering what had come over him, seeing him sitting quietly and staring into space, but she never said anything. Even though she had heard rumors about him carousing the night spots and secretly feared that he may have been seeing other women, she somehow convinced herself that the pressures from his business had become too great, and she didn't want to do or say anything that might add to his troubles.

  It wasn't until later that afternoon that the pounding inside Dayton's head became more than he could bear. He had to do something to stop the headache. He left his assistant in charge of the shop and drove to the liquor store at the North Park Plaza in Woodburn, where he purchased a ten-pack of Smirnoff vodka miniatures to replace the depleted stock he normally kept behind the seat of his pickup. He also purchased a couple of bottles of orange juice, the type in the disposable plastic bottles that he liked so well. He drank one of his crudely mixed screwdrivers quickly, and the headache subsided a little. Afterward, he returned to his shop and waited, thinking and planning the rest of the evening. He needed something more effective than the alcohol for his headache. The remedies were there, he knew, out in numbers on Portland's streets, his for the asking and a $50 bill. It had all been so easy with all of the others that there was no stopping him now.

  At 8:30 P.M. Dayton drove home, where he had dinner with Sherry and his son. He explained that he had to return to the shop and work very late, perhaps into the early morning hours, to catch up on some of the overdue work. Sherry, an attractive curly-haired silver brunette at five feet four inches tall, 120 pounds, and three years younger than Dayton, didn't protest. She never did. Devoutly religious and somewhat naive, she always trusted her husband and rarely questioned his activities.

  Half an hour later Dayton was gone. He stopped off at his shop, had a couple more drinks, and tinkered with some of the easier repair projects to kill time. Shortly after midnight he changed into his stepping-out clothes that he kept inside his special closet, and waited inside the shop a little longer until he was certain that Sherry had gone to bed. By 12:30 A.M. he was heading toward Portland.

  Instead of going to 82nd Avenue on the City of Roses' southeast side, Dayton drove north on Highway 99E, which decades earlier had been the main north-south highway between Portland and the Willamette Valley before Interstate 5, the "super slab," came into being. Highway 99E northbound eventually turned into McLoughlin Boulevard near the suburb of Milwaukie, and then changed again into Grand Avenue near the city's boundaries. Approaching the northeast side, 99E transformed once more where Grand Avenue merges into Union Avenue, Portland's "Prostitute Row." In short, the old highway was a straight shot between Wood burn and Dayton's destination in Portland and often, though not on this particular night, offered up more female hitchhikers than the other routes.

  A recognized ghetto replete with burned-out buildings, boarded-up storefronts, and barred windows, Union Avenue is not a pretty part of the City of Roses, a sprawling metropolis with a population of nearly half a million that was once, but no longer, touted for its livability. On any given night the avenue is dominated by street whores, vulgarly on display for the drive-by johns. An open-air market for sex, it is without question a high-crime area that stretches from the city's northeast side to its southeast. Most respectable citizens stay off the avenue at night, and those who are forced to journey up or down it do so with nervous unease because of the shootings, stabbings, and street fights.

  But Dayton paid little heed to the avenue's reputation. Having traversed it many times before, he was aware of the risks and was not afraid. He knew how to quickly find what he wanted and
then get out of there.

  It was a sultry night, and the working girls were out in record numbers. Dayton normally made a couple of passes up and down Union before making his selection, sometimes driving all the way to Northeast Lombard Street, the point where the number of hookers standing on street corners begins to dwindle, before turning around and heading south again. He passed up several girls that evening along his well-thought-out route, one of his favorite trolling areas. Some were too old, others too rough-looking. Some he dismissed because they had made it clear to him on more than one occasion that they wanted nothing further to do with him because of the maltreatment he had shown them on previous dates in the Molalla forest, and he feared that some of the girls might even report him to the police if he attempted further contact with them. But that evening he found what he wanted on the first drive-by, well before he reached Lombard Street.

  Jenny Smith, twenty-six, a buxom, brown-eyed blonde, had just garishly poised herself on her turf near the intersection of Union Avenue and Wygant Street for the fifth or sixth time that evening. Wearing a charcoal gray-and-white-striped pullover Nike sweatshirt, skin-tight Levi's jeans that left little to the imagination, hot-pink socks, and tennis shoes, Jenny hoped she wouldn't have to wait long for another customer to come along. Her feet hurt like hell, and she had been nearly ready to call it a night when she saw Dayton pull up. She manufactured a smile when she recognized him as a former customer.

  She had gone out with him during Portland's annual Rose Festival in June, when the Navy comes into port and turns the city into a week-long party, and on another occasion earlier in the spring. She held no hatred or animosity toward him, at least not yet. He had always paid her well and had always been friendly. When he stopped on her corner early on the morning of August 7 and invited her to go with him, she never hesitated. She eagerly climbed inside his truck and waved goodbye to a female friend, another hooker, who waited nearby in a parked car, serving as Jenny's lookout and driver that evening.

  Jenny was a big woman, but she knew how to dress and held her weight well. Although neither particularly attractive nor completely unattractive, she did have very large breasts, which Dayton liked in his women, and her clothing highlighted her most positive features to the extreme. Dayton also liked her because she hadn't rejected his sexual fetishes on their previous dates. She hadn't minded being tied up while he played with her feet and masturbated. But then, he hadn't been rough with her, either. Now, certain he had won her confidence, that was going to change.

  No doubt the date proceeded like most of the others, with Dayton starting things off by drinking vodka and orange juice to put himself in the mood and to deaden his date's mental faculties. They also likely drove around town as a prelude to leaving the city. But for some reason, Dayton didn't take Jenny to the Molalla forest.

  She might have persuaded him not to go there because of the extra time it would take. To Jenny, time was money. Or maybe Dayton hadn't yet worked up to the point of telling her about his forest hideaway, his torture chamber in a natural setting. It was even possible that he had done something to make her feel ill at ease and that she somehow convinced him she would do whatever he wanted as long as they remained in town. Whatever the reason was that they didn't go to Molalla, Jenny Smith, unlike some of the other women who had lived to talk about their experiences with Dayton, would not survive the night. Jenny would join the others, the ranks of the dead, on whom he had so fiendishly acted out his fantasies, victims that even the police didn't know about yet.

  Exactly where they went and what they did during the first hour and half of their date was never firmly established. No one, except for Dayton and Jenny, knew the precise details of what happened between them from 1:30 to 3 A.M. Since he won't talk and the dead tell no tales, those facts may never be known. What is known is how Dayton Leroy Rogers violently murdered Jenny Smith early that summer morning.

  It was only minutes before 3 A.M. when they pulled into the parking lot of a small business complex at 16239 Southeast McLoughlin Boulevard in Oak Grove, a Clackamas County suburb of Portland. Safeco Insurance and a recently vacated building sat on one side of the tree-lined parking lot, and the Portland branch of the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) and a Denny's restaurant occupied the other side.

  Dayton parked near the front of the GMAC building, which was close to the rear of the parking lot. He had been to that location many times before and knew that it was the darkest area of the parking lot. He would have his privacy there, at least until Jenny began to scream.

  Dayton promptly convinced Jenny that it was time to get started. In apparent agreement, she slipped off all of her clothes. Unable to find any bindings of his own, Dayton bound her hands together with a restraint he fashioned out of the laces of Jenny's tennis shoes, leaving her legs free. It wasn't the way he liked it, but it would have to do. Kneeling on the floor of the pickup's cab, with her upper torso resting on the seat, she waited there, nude, for his next move. She was nearly helpless, his alone to do with what he pleased.

  With little or no warning, Dayton, unable to control himself any longer, reached over and removed a kitchen knife from the glove compartment. Jenny, curious, struggled to position her head where she could see what he was doing. When she saw the knife and the viciousness in his eyes, she began to scream. His mask was off, his dark side no longer suppressed. He was poised there, momentarily still, like a black mamba ready to strike again and again until its victim succumbed to its fervent attack.

  He enjoyed her wild display of fear, and it quickly elevated his bloodlust to near fever pitch. Jenny's screams were barely audible outside the pickup at first, because he had closed the windows as a precautionary measure before tying her up. Still, he had to move fast, then get out of there. The parking lot wasn't like the Molalla forest. People would soon respond to Jenny's screams.

  At first Dayton maintained a calculated level of control over his actions. He made an incision on Jenny's back; then, after she wrenched her body around, he made a deeper cut on the nipple of one of her breasts. Jenny threw her head back and screamed a guttural cry of terror and pain. Dayton knew there would be no masturbating this time. Jenny was making too much noise, and he couldn't take his time like he could in the forest. Instead, he entered her fiercely, not with his penis but with the knife. His body rigid, his fists clenched, Dayton came to life in the flesh-and-blood nightmare he had created for Jenny. Jenny's pain was tremendous, and her blood soon began to flow freely. The more she struggled, the wilder and less controlled he became. She squirmed and twisted with each slash, and the shoelaces binding her nearly cut into her wrists. Jenny became hysterical, and would soon welcome death as her only release from this monster's madness.

  Elated and delirious, Dayton plunged the blade into her body again. He withdrew it slowly, deriving intense pleasure from prolonging Jenny's agony. He began to shriek with ecstasy as she continued to squirm and kick wildly, pleading for her life, her screams somehow seeming eternal. The sight of her blood brought on an erection, the most firm he'd ever had. God, how he desperately wanted to masturbate, but there just wasn't enough time. At any moment someone could come running to her rescue. Laughing maniacally, he rammed the knife into her torso again, pulled it out only to push it in again. It felt wonderful to him as the steel blade passed through Jenny's flesh and sinewy tissue, occasionally striking vital organs and bone. He repeated the process over and over, in his mind erotically, until he felt as if his penis would explode.

  Suddenly the laces gave way to the tremendous force of her struggling and Jenny felt a brief moment of freedom. Dayton, realizing that her bindings had come undone, lost what little control he had left and began stabbing her more savagely, if that was possible. He wouldn't let her get away; he couldn't, not now. He had hurt her too badly, and to let her go would most certainly place his freedom in jeopardy. He had to finish her off. There was just no other solution. Besides, the bitch, through her attempt at escape, had reject
ed him and she deserved to die. He hated her now, just as he hated all women, almost as much as he hated his own mother. Jenny was no different from any of the others. He had been a fool to think that she had been.

  As Dayton shivered with angry ecstasy, Jenny continued to try and fend off the knife. Despite the severity of her wounds she managed somehow to reach over with one hand and open the passenger door. She fell out onto the pavement.

  Bleeding profusely from her wounds, she began to run in a feeble attempt to escape the madman, to find someone, anyone, who could help her. However, after she gained only a few yards, Dayton, close behind, lunged at her and grabbed her by the neck. Her arms flailing wildly, he brought her down to the asphalt. Jenny continued to scream because that was all that she could do, and her shrieks were no longer muffled. Dayton, hovering over her, raised the knife, its shiny blade reflecting the brilliance of the parking lot's overhead lights. Jenny tried to fight with her hands as he brought the blade down again and again. But it was no use. She was too weak to fight him off. Her attempts to fend off the knife became more automatic, instinctive, no longer a cognizant effort to survive. She slipped into unconsciousness, and her body fell limp.

  Although Dayton had chosen the darkest area of the parking lot, it was adjacent to an all-night establishment, the Denny's restaurant. The taverns and bars had just closed half an hour earlier, and the Denny's business was brisk. It was the only restaurant open in the area at that time of the morning, and customers came and went almost nonstop.