HOUSTON, TEXAS -  Ice Box Murders Mark 35th Anniversary (Excerpts from "The Ice Box Murders" (c)2000 Hugh E. Gardenier, III and Martha Leonard Hughes)

Father's Day, June 20, 1965, was a day of celebration for many residents of the Hyde Park Addition in Houston, Texas. An older neighborhood, dating back to the 1920's, it wasn't a likely location for Houston's most grisly double homicide. But on that date, two elderly residents of 1815 Driscoll Street, Fred C. Rogers (81), and his wife, Edwina H. Rogers (72), were murdered. Three nights later their mutilated, dissected bodies were found in the kitchen refrigerator of their home by two Houston police officers. Thirty-five years later no arrest has been made in the case.

Another bad case, in a year of bad cases

Detectives James P. Paulk and C.E. Smith of the Houston Police homicide division drew the assignment at 9:10 PM on Wednesday night, June 23, 1965. They were seasoned homicide detectives, with hundreds of closed cases between them, but none of their experience prepared them for the Rogers' double homicide. It was the apex of violence in a year that was exploding with murders.

Houston would record over 200 murders during 1965. A record pace that was almost unmanageable by the small homicide division. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the Houston Police Department, headed by Chief Herman Short at the time, would not pursue federal grants because of reservations about integration. Coupled with a revolving door for decades in the police chief's position, the department was chronically understaffed, underfunded, and ill equipped for the evolving face of crime. This made the department susceptible to outside influence, and repeatedly snared police chiefs and rank-in-file officers in charges of corruption. This political backdrop became a signpost for the Rogers' murders.

Paulk and Smith were far removed from departmental problems as they turned on to Driscoll Street. The narrow street in the now dark evening began to light up. A couple of uniformed officers were trying to get cars off the street, and the red glow of taillights in the driveways and in the next block indicated their progress. A police cruiser was parked in the middle of the intersection of Driscoll and Vermont. The staccato pattern of its red emergency light bathed the houses on the four corners of Vermont and Driscoll, and signified that this was cop business. A block further north, another unit blocked the intersection of Driscoll and Haddon. Small crowds of residents began to form along the sidewalks. The detectives met two patrol officers, C.A. Bullock and L.M. Barta, and a thin, balding, middle-aged man, Marvin Martin, at the front door of the residence. Martin was the nephew of the dead woman.

Bodies in refrigerator

Bullock related that they were the nearest car in the vicinity when the call from the dispatcher came in. It was about 8:45 PM when they received the radio call. From the dispatcher's information it was a routine call, an old couple were not answering the telephone, and a concerned relative had come to the house to check. It was an everyday occurrence.

Minutes later the two officers met Marvin Martin at the house. Failing to get a response at the front door, they attempted to force a kitchen entryway door, and then a door to the master bedroom in the back of the house. The bedroom door immediately gave when force was applied. Inspection of the door revealed that the lock was broken, a turned over flower pot was testimony to what kept it closed. Bullock and Barta cautiously, but rapidly, advanced through each room on the first floor. When they entered the house they didn't note anything that indicated it was a death scene. The air was hot and heavy, yet there appeared to be some air circulation by the movement of one set of venetian blinds in the master bedroom, and aside from some staleness, there wasn't the smell of a rotting body in the air. The officers announced their presence several times as they moved from room to room, half expecting a feeble reply from an old person who had fallen and broken a hip.

They made two passes through the first floor. The kitchen was a mess, but beyond the disorder there was nothing that said it was anything other than the kitchen of an old couple who probably were in ill health, and couldn't keep a house up. Bullock tried to explain his next actions.

"We came in the kitchen and it just didn't feel right. I don't know why I looked in the refrigerator. For some reason I just opened it. The first thing I saw were hog ribs. I wondered why they were left in the refrigerator to spoil; no, maybe I said, this is a shame, someone is letting a whole bunch of good meat go to waste. I started to close the door, and then I looked down, and I saw her head staring up at me. I froze. Then I must have blinked. And she was still there when I looked again. I just slammed the door shut and held it closed for a couple of seconds. It could have been a minute that I stood there, and just tried to get my breath. I couldn't believe it. Barta was in the next room and I yelled to him. He came and looked, and he didn't believe it either. Then we both went out the front door pretty fast."

Dissection of bodies

Paulk didn't want to open it, but since Bullock had the previous misfortune, and Barta had obviously looked inside later, he figured the duty now fell to him. The refrigerator was probably an early 1950's model, a Coldspot, and it had experienced some hard wear based upon the dents and scratches which were apparent on the white surface. It was a single door model which opened to the right. Paulk grasped the handle with his right hand, braced himself and started the slow swing back.

The four police officers filling the kitchen first noticed the escaping light from the single bulb in the refrigerator, then the slightly pungent odor of meat that was beginning to go bad. As the door swung all the way open, the enormity of the situation came into full focus. A decapitated head was lodged in the vegetable keeper. A woman's head, her lifeless eyes staring, paralyzed in the last instant of death. Her face, contorted, bruised, maybe mangled, matted with white-gray hair. A torso, split along the backbone, stuffed between shelves. Feet severed at the ankles. Legs cut at the knees. Thighs detached at the hips. And it went on. A jar of Gerber's baby food sat on a shelf too small for a body part. Another jar of jelly was jammed against an arm. Peanut butter rested next to one of the legs. And in the middle a partially eaten raw onion sat. Paulk didn't open the freezer compartment. There seemed to be no reason.

The detectives may have seen collectively over a thousand stiffs by that time in their careers. But nothing prepared them for the woman in the refrigerator. No shotgun, pistol, knife, or club had ever done a job like that. As Paulk shut the refrigerator door, the next words were undoubtedly expletives, but no one could remember later who said what. In fact, for the briefest of moments no one could remember anything....anything, but the eyes.

Second body

Deputy Medical Examiner Robert Bucklin, and the medical examiner's investigator, Henry Ismonde, stretched a large piece of black plastic on the kitchen floor so the body parts could be taken out of the refrigerator and assembled. Paulk remarked that he was glad he didn't have to unload the refrigerator. That job fell to the medical examiner's assistant, J.L. Turner, who started the body removal at 11:30 PM. Minutes later Turner discovered the second major surprise of the evening. There were two bodies in the refrigerator!

Edwina Rogers' dissected body was so tightly packed in the refrigerator that it obscured her husband Fred's body. The compression was only possible because both bodies had been drained of blood, and all internal organs had been removed. The unloading of the body parts and their grouping on the plastic sheet made the magnitude and personal nature of the homicide horrifically apparent. They were no longer "the victims," or Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, they became Fred and Edwina. Paulk and Smith watched the unloading from a corner of the kitchen. The usual cop chatter that accompanies most homicide scenes peaked quickly when Turner started the transfer to the plastic sheet. It was unnerving and nauseating to see the old couple like this. It reached for the throat and choked off the air. The brain ached from the need to block the scene. Collectively throats dried, and a half dozen voices silently cried.

Fred's eyes were crudely gouged out, exposing the empty sockets, and giving his decapitated head the look of yesterday's jack-o-lantern. It was more unnerving than if his lifeless eyes were still there, caught in death's stare. From the condition of his skull, it was apparent that Fred died from blunt force trauma. There were numerous wounds to the scalp and head, and a one-inch by two-inch hole in the skull. The fact that he had been hit with tremendous force was apparent from a broken hammer found in a tool chest near the stairway. The handle of the hammer was cracked. A small portion of flesh and hair still adhered to the hammer head, confirming that it was the killer's weapon. Dissection of Fred was thorough with saw cuts at the neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, and ankles. The final personal touch was the absence of his penis and testicles, which were not found. Fred had been emasculated.

Focus on son

Attention immediately focused on the son, Charles Frederick Rogers (43), who lived upstairs. Martin told detectives that Charles was some kind of engineer, and that he was sort of a hermit. According to Martin, Charles was never around, and sometimes months would go by without anyone from the family seeing him. His room was a curiosity. A big, deadbolt lock was on the door. Inside the room there was an electric organ, an assortment of musical instruments, an oscilloscope, a bed, a chest of drawers, cooking utensils, a coffee pot, a hot plate, and a couple of toasters.

On the bottom shelf of a night stand was a .22 caliber semi-automatic, Colt Huntsman pistol. The gun appeared to have been recently fired and a shell casing was lodged in the chamber. Amazingly, the gun sat there, partially covered by a soft cloth. For a short time it appeared to be a ripe apple waiting to be picked, and the fingerprints team tried to locate and lift a print in every way imaginable. They threw snake-eyes a dozen times before giving up.

As the night bore on, a pattern began to evolve. The killer was testing the detectives and every time there appeared to be a clear slip-up, it turned into a false lead. True, there was a bloody, partial palm print on one of the upper treads of the stairs, but being able to match it with a suspect was highly doubtful. The fingerprint crew was having a very bad night. Like the gun, the tools of dissection, which appeared to be a keyhole saw and a straight razor, were completely clean. The absence of prints extended to anything that was even remotely connected to the crime scene.

Luminol revealed blood stain evidence on the oak floor of the son's bedroom. This information coupled with everything else that had been found in the house that night, resulted in a pickup order as a material witness being issued for the son, Charles Frederick Rogers, at 1:37 AM Thursday morning, June 24. Thirty-five years later he is still being sought.

Current time

Interviewed by KHOU television reporter, Dave Fehling, in April 2000, two Houston area CPAs turned sleuths, Hugh Gardenier and Martha Hughes, have come forward with new evidence to support the motives for the macabre double murder, and the subsequent disappearance of the son. Bolstered by over 5,000 man-hours of research; interviews with new witnesses; corporate records, deed records, and other legal documents; records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act; and never released pictures from newspaper archives, Gardenier and Hughes have extended their research far beyond the boundaries of the police investigation in 1965.

According to Gardenier, "we've tracked Charles Rogers like a white collar criminal. We understand forensic auditing very well, and we've applied that to this case. When you take all of the documents as a whole you get a pattern, a motive, accomplices, and an escape plan. Its not an easy path to follow, but we know where Charles went, and even at age 78 we hope to see him brought to justice yet."

When questioned by Fehling about a 1992 book that is based on the premise that Charles Rogers was a CIA employed assassin of President Kennedy, Hughes was asked whether she feels that Rogers was involved in the 1963 assassination. Her response was immediate, "No, not at all."

Hughes, a law school graduate, choosing her words carefully, relates off camera that Charles Rogers had no connection to the CIA, or any of the parties alleged to have been connected with the events in Dallas. "He was what he said he was, a geophysicist."

Gardenier and Hughes in their unpublished manuscript, The Ice Box Murders,cite a string of inconsistencies in the investigation, possible political influence, gambling and criminal ties, and power broker oil wildcatters as all influencing the 1965 homicide investigation which never led to an arrest.

Gardenier concludes with the obvious, "the truth wasn't told back in 65'."

For more information on this case see their web site at  iceboxmurders.com, and the web site for KHOU television, the CBS affiliate in Houston, at  KHOU.com.