Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer (5 page)

At one point they stopped at a 7-Eleven, and
the suspect purchased a six-pack of beer and two cans of Coke while
Heather bought her cigarettes. Afterward he offered Heather a
drink, and she chose a Coke over a beer. When they approached
Oregon City a few minutes later, the man calling himself Steve,
guzzling the beer, turned off at a location which Heather could not
adequately describe to the deputy. Although she felt like she had
become lost, she said that they appeared to be on a logging road
somewhere past Oregon City. Turner guessed that he had taken her on
one of the logging roads just off the Molalla Forest Road.

When the man continued to drive on and on,
Heather finally asked him where they were going. He responded that
he was going to drive into the hills and said that he wanted to
"tie someone up and fuck them." The statement had frightened
Heather, and when he moved to touch her thigh, she pushed his hand
away. She insisted that he take her back to Portland, but he
refused and sped up to about forty miles per hour on the unpaved
logging road.

Heather grabbed her shoes off the floor,
ready to make a break for it when the time was right. But the man
caught her eyeing the door handle, and he reacted instantly. He
swerved the pickup recklessly, so she would lose her sense of
balance, and reached toward her, placing his hand over her chest to
prevent her from jumping out of the truck. He then stepped on the
accelerator and was soon speeding to more than sixty miles per
hour.

Although she had been terrified that she
would be raped or killed, Heather never gave up. She continued to
struggle violently and when they approached a curve she managed to
break free of the man's hold. As soon as she spotted a log truck
behind them, she opened the door and jumped from his speeding
pickup. The suspect slowed his vehicle a little but, apparently
aware of the truck following him, kept on going.

When the logger rounded the curve, he saw
Heather lying in the road and slammed on his brakes. Seeing that
she was injured and grateful that he hadn't hit her, he helped her
into the cab of his rig. One of her eyes was bleeding, which he
helped her to cover, and she had other scrapes and cuts. She told
the logger that she had to jump out of the man's pickup because he
was going to kill her. Since she was obviously very shook up, the
logger didn't probe her with questions. Instead, he arranged to
have her driven to a medical clinic in Molalla, where it was
determined that she had suffered a concussion and multiple
abrasions to her left temple area, right forearm, and hand.

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.