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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Weyborg Thun. And tonight, we leave Victorian-era England and return to modern-era United States of America.
A lesser-known serial killer sits on death row and claims to be responsible for the most famous murder case of the 1990s. The murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, allegedly by O.J. Simpson, was ultimately found not guilty.
The name of this serial killer is Glenn Edward Rogers, and his nicknames are The Cross-Country Killer and The Casanova Killer. This podcast has in excess of 7 million downloads in total, but both my Patreon page and my Facebook page are only visited by a few thousand.
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Any donation, no matter how small, is greatly appreciated. A charming, handsome, and volatile individual, Glenn Rogers was the focus of an all-points national manhunt after a cross-country rampage that left at least four women dead in four separate states. The consummate ladies' man, Glenn liked to pick up blonde and red-headed women in bars and ask them for a ride home.
Then he would try to spend the night with them. All those charmed by his redneck good looks are now stretched out in the morgue. His first victim is perhaps a former housemate whose corpse was found in January of 1993 under a pile of furniture in an abandoned house owned by the Rogers family.
His next known kill was a woman he met at a bar in Van Nuys, California. On September 1995, she was found raped and strangled inside her burning pickup truck. The third victim, another barfly, was found stabbed to death in her bathtub in Jackson, Mississippi on November 3rd.
Yet another woman's body was found in a bathtub in Tampa, Florida, on the 5th of November. His last victim was found stabbed to death in her bedroom on the 11th of November in Bossier City, Louisiana. Two days before his arrest, he told his sister that he was responsible for more than 70 deaths. Later, he recounted the number and said he was merely joking.
According to authorities, Glenn was being cooperative during a six-hour interview after his arrest on the 13th of November. On the 7th of May, 1997, Glenn was convicted of murder in a Tampa court for killing a woman he had met in a bar. The jury took eight hours to find him guilty of the murder of Tina Marie Cribs, and the next day, just three hours to recommend the death penalty.
On the 11th of July, 1997, Glenn was sentenced to Florida's temperamental Old Sparky for the stabbing death of Tina Marie Cribs. Glenn's brother, Claude, a real estate agent from Palm Springs, California, said after the sentencing, If you watch my brother, he's been sitting watching a movie. I don't think reality has set in.
Glenn, through his lawyer, is still claiming he is innocent. Rogers was scheduled to be put to death on Valentine's Day, 1999, in Florida, but he immediately appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, claiming that the state had not presented enough evidence to support the charges. Rogers also argued that the trial court should have granted the defense's motions for a mistrial,
because a witness was allowed to testify about a misdemeanor for which Rogers was convicted in California for. He also claimed the prosecution was also allowed to present an improper argument during closing arguments. His appeal was delayed until March 2001 and was ultimately denied. In April of 2005, Rogers filed another appeal, which is still pending.
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And tonight, I have with me a true treat for you, dear listener. A former reporter at the Cincinnati Inquirer, his books include the true crime journalism of O.J. Simpson and Glenn Rogers, The Juice, Road Dogg and Murder on Bundy Drive, and the previous edition, Road Dogg. The success effect is an unputdownable read,
and a business book about leadership and entrepreneurship, while The Mud Daddy Chronicles is memoir hung on annual fishing trips as well as a cautionary tale about harm to our nation's environment. He has also written Kindle books Pot of Gold and Fascinating Ohio, as well as the paperback Awesome Indiana. And Mr. Ekberg is with me tonight for an exclusive interview.
Thank you so much for coming on, Mr. Eckberg. Thomas, thank you. I appreciate that introduction. I'm doing fine. When one hears one's books written over the course of a lifetime listed like that, it makes me pretty happy, to be honest with you.
That's good to know. But we are not here to talk about your excellent authorship in the past. We are here to talk about dark crimes and murder. So let's dive in. Can you tell my listeners why you contacted me regarding Glenn Rogers and how you became involved with his story?
I contacted you because I realized that there was an appetite for whatever lessons one might take away from some awful tragedies and that your focus, while it certainly looks at crime, I think it also takes a look at the harm, the damage, and the loss that so many people have suffered.
have suffered as a result of serial killers
in America. My life was not always one where I thought I would be a true crime reporter. Once upon a time, when I worked at the Cincinnati Inquirer, I was a new guy, a young reporter. That means you work the four in the afternoon to one o'clock shift. You sat opposite a guy who smoked a cigar, although he didn't actually smoke it as much as he stuffed it into the corner of his mouth, dear Marty Hogan.
And you learned how to do night rewrite. It's kind of quaint to think that today, 40 years later, there was an occupation where someone would go to work and digest crimes from a metropolitan area, put them in the newspaper, and people would read them the next day.
I became fascinated at that time by, frankly, by the criminal justice system and crime, what compels people to commit crimes, what leads authorities to catch those people, or probably more often than not, to not catch them. And as my career unfolded, which is another way of saying that,
I no longer worked the four to one shift, but worked the 10 in the morning to seven o'clock shift at the paper. I got a gig where I covered the common police court system in Cincinnati at the time, which is a city of about two million people in the metropolitan area, 300000 people in the city itself. There are two levels, three levels, actually, but the two levels I focused on of criminal justice.
It was called Muni Court and then Common Pleas Court. Common Pleas Court is the felony side of the justice system, while Common Pleas Court is sort of the jaywalking side. You didn't cross the street on the right side of the justice system. I would go to work each day in the press room of the courthouse.
And frankly, I would look for the most heinous thing, the most awful thing that somebody had done to somebody else. Find out where that trial was. There were 14 judges and write about it for the next day's newspaper. You wake up, you do the same thing. You shampoo, rinse, repeat day after day until the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months and the months turned into years.
What that did was give me an appreciation for what judges in America have to have to witness and what they go through and the trauma and tragedy they see and the families of the victims.
It gave me an appreciation for what police officers go through on a daily basis. And frankly, it gave me a new appreciation and opened my eyes to what criminals do on a daily basis, how they prey on innocent people and how they change lives and touch lives in a terrible way.
Now, sitting in a press room, I used to allow—this is kind of strange. America has the First Amendment, so you can't produce any law that infringes on freedom of press. So I made my press room a smoking room where anyone could come and smoke a cigarette and or a cigar.
There was a judge, God bless him, a judge named Donald Schott, who would have a jury out deliberating. And he'd come in and sit in my press room and smoke a cigar. And we would talk about events. And the one thing... And we'd talk about cases and trials. And the one thing that I think I learned from Judge Schott was you have to read every page. When there's...
It sounds simple, but there's often a cliff note way to go about covering crime. But what I learned was that particularly in civil cases, you had to read every page. Now, flash ahead, that's 1983 to 84. A decade later, I'd been exiled sort of by an editor who really didn't much like me, I think, to a small town called Hamilton, which is north of Cincinnati.
At that time, there was a guy named Glenn Rogers who went on a killing spree through the South. He grew up in Hamilton, Ohio. And another writer who was hired by the newspaper to cover the trial of Tina Marie Cribs, who was brutally slaughtered by Glenn Rogers one night in a motel room, Steve Combs had the presence of mind to say, there's more to this case than meets the eye. And
And I want to write a book about it. On his own dime, he came up to Cincinnati from Florida. We met and he asked me if I would help him cover the Glenn Rogers story from Rogers life and times in Hamilton.
Well, I was reluctant. I didn't get into the writing business, frankly, to write true crime books. My life had sort of taken me into that space, but it's nothing that I aspired to do. And I told Steve, well, I don't know. And Steve kept pushing me a little bit. And finally, I told Steve, yeah, I'll do it. I'll contribute what I can.
But Steve Combs realized that there was far more to this low rent kind of seedy killer, Glenn Rogers, than what met the eye. He covered the trial of Tina Marie Cripps from Florida. I wrote up some background material for him. He liked it. We decided we met in Richmond, Kentucky, and we decided that there was indeed more to this story than met the eye.
Steve had the presence of mind after the Tina Marie Cribs trial to go to the prosecuting attorney and ask for more documentation. She told him there is no more documentation. Well, you have those three pages is that.
Well, Steve went, look, ma'am, this isn't my first rodeo. I've been around a while. Steve was, among all things, a paramedic, a tax accountant, and a minor league baseball umpire. He liked details. And he told the prosecutor, I know there's more to this. And I know that you have the records and that you could let me see them or, in the best case, let me have them. And the prosecutor looked at him and said,
All right. See that box of records over there in the corner?
That's the judge's box. The judge was just in here. This is Tina Marie Cribs, had been brutally slaughtered by Glenn in a motel room. Glenn was later captured, brought to Florida and convicted. This was about an hour after the jury had spoken and had put Glenn in the electric chair in Florida, an electric chair, I should add, that didn't work very well. Back to the prosecutor telling Steve, she said, the box of records, judge told me to dispose of those records.
I'm disposing of them by giving them to you.
Steve took the box, hustled out of there. I met him in Richmond, Kentucky, and posed the question that I don't know if it's been a blessing or a curse for me, but I asked him, did you read every page in the box? He said, well, I've been busy, haven't had time. I said, let me have the box. I need to read every page. And that set me off on a journey that would last, what, about 25, 30 years now, telling the story of
of Glenn Rogers and his time as a killer wandering through the South and through the Midwest in Ohio. What I found in the records was astonishing to me. And I'll give you the one moment when I realized I was going to have to commit myself fully to this project.
He had killed a man named Mark Peters, killed him in Hamilton, Ohio, wrapped him up in apparently a shower curtain and took him to this desolate hillside in Beattyville, Kentucky. Beattyville is basically a one cross light town or one stoplight town south of Lexington, west of Richmond in the kind of secluded part of America's Appalachia.
left Mark Peters on a hillside there and disappeared. A brother, Clay Rogers, had taken authorities to the hillside because he knew it was a family hunting cabin and that there was a family cemetery there. And Clay suspected that's where Glenn had deposited Mark Peters. And sure enough, they had found him there. Well, in the box of records, as I'm reading through
What they found as they searched that hillside, I came to the part where it talked about a short-sleeved Van Heusen shirt, checkered blue. And in the pocket of the shirt was a pack of Marlboro Lights. And tucked in the cellophane of the pack of cigarettes was a lottery ticket.
to a grandfather clock drawing at a Veterans of Foreign Wars club. All the towns in America generally have these little VF, they call them VFWs or American legions, and they have raffles from time to time. Well, on that raffle ticket were the initials MCP, Mark Clarence Peters, his home address, and a telephone number. And when I read that, it hit me.
Kentucky police had told Ohio police, which
led them to this hillside, that we didn't know who Mark Peters was. And in fact, we don't know if this body is Mark Peters. It could be anybody. We're going to have to wait for the pathologist's report to determine if this is Mark Peters. Well, when I saw that grandfather clock ticket, or I saw a copy of the ticket in that box of records, I knew right away, authorities knew exactly who this man was. They knew it was Mark Clarence Peters.
And this was a case of people pointing fingers one way or another because nobody wanted to investigate the death of this guy because he wasn't a rich man's daddy. He was just a guy who grew up in Hamilton, Ohio, a lonely old man who fell victim to what was then we thought was just a simple killer. And I knew then that I had to tell the story of Mark Peters and by extension, the story of
Glenn Rogers. And when I say I had to tell the story, that's a euphemism. We had to tell the story. Steve Combs contributed mostly to that book. The lion did a lion's share of the trial coverage. I told the story of, and it's a sad story on a lot of levels of how, how Glenn Rogers turned into the monster that he became. Ultimately, when I look at serial killer stories or books about serial killers, I,
I always posed the question, how did that guy end up like that? And how did I end up the way I ended up? What happened in our lives or what happened in our DNA that led us on such two different paths? How did Glenn Rogers become Glenn Rogers?
Glenn Rogers went on to get captured in Kentucky. After that capture that night, he does a late-night interview with a local sheriff, a sergeant, investigator. Might have been with state police. And he talked to him about his life and times. Much of it lies, but much of it, we would later realize, was cold, hard truth.
Glenn claimed killed 40 to 70 people. Now, we immediately thought that was a load of malarkey. It was a guy bragging over bum cigarettes in an interview room when he's charged with murder. But the more we looked into it, the more skeptical we became of our initial reaction that Glenn Rogers was a big blowhard and that maybe, in fact,
He did kill 30, 40, 70 people. He had claimed to be a sort of a fix-it man, a hit man for the mafia, the Armenian mafia, which we thought was a real stretch until we realized, hmm.
No, there wasn't Armenian mafia operating out of Los Angeles. They owned a restaurant. They owned apartment buildings. Glenn worked at apartment buildings. And as we dove deeper and deeper into the story of Glenn Rogers and...
And what he called road-dogging around the country, which is a euphemism for he'd get on a Greyhound bus. He would commit a crime, go to a Greyhound bus station, buy a ticket to anywhere, and roll that bus right into his new place where he would be living in a homeless shelter or find some quick, crummy place to sleep. When he was road-dogging, that's how he got around. And so we pieced together a story of Glenn, his killings.
And throughout the story, we kind of realized that Glenn had lived in L.A. for a number of years, had sort of fallen into the Los Angeles crime scene and drug dealing scene. And family members had written about how Glenn was responsible for the murders on Bundy Drive.
We didn't have the wherewithal to go out to LA and investigate any of that. I spent a couple of days calling up painting companies and contractors to find out if there was anything to it. And initially,
The first edition of Road Dogg, we kept all of the OJ and Bundy Drive part out of that book because we couldn't prove anything. We were journalists. We thought of ourselves as serious, although small town, let's face it. Cincinnati is not a giant metropolitan area.
But we were journalists, and we were only going to write about what was true, what we knew to be true, and not what we suspected. So that in Road Dogg, when we have Wayne Brockman driving a dirty yellow Dodge Diplomat, it's a dirty yellow Dodge Diplomat. You can count on it. Later, however, and later is a euphemism for stupidity.
10 years, I guess, I get an email from an Australian filmmaker named David Monaghan, and he wants to interview me in Cincinnati for a documentary he's putting together. The documentary would take a look at Glenn Rogers, take a look at his life and times. And then he asked, or rather his assistant asked a pretty probing question. And what do you know about Glenn's connection to OJ?
When we got that email, it was like a clarion call went off. And it was time for us to tell the world what we knew and what we thought about Glenn Rogers and his time in L.A. Now, granted, he had gone off on a killing spree through the South, convicted of murder in Florida for Tina Marie Cribs, convicted of a murder in L.A. of Sammy Gallagher.
Not convicted, but certainly linked to the murder, the killer of Linda Price and the killer of Andy Giles Sutton, who were from Jackson and Biloxi, Mississippi. And
Once we decided that OJ, we had to tell people what we knew and thought about OJ, it raised a whole lot of questions I think that people are asking today. The first one is, what's a guy from Ohio, a state in the Midwest, who's now living in Indiana, what's he possibly going to tell us about a crime that happened in California in 1994 that was perhaps one of the biggest crimes in the history of California jurisprudence?
And I'd like to think that what we were able, what we came up with was an awful lot. And, and I like to think that what we found out about Glenn Rogers offers a
society some cautionary messages about how serial killers are born, how they are created, how they get raised, and the cruelty, the brain damage, the drugs that lead to someone losing any bit of conscience or a sense of right and wrong.
And out of that came the book O.J. Simpson and Glenn Rogers, The Juice, Road Dog, and Murder on Bundy Drive. Fantastic. That is a lot to take in. Excellent.
Thank you. I just, before we go into more detail about OJ and, uh, you mentioned something that I just need clarification on. You mentioned the electric chair. When I read up on the case, it seemed to me that he is pending an appeal. Was he executed? No, he's on death row. It's a quirk of that jurisprudence in America that has kept him on death row.
The one thing I learned about covering trials in Cincinnati was that prosecuting attorneys have go-to lines in their opening arguments, and they have go-to lines in their closing arguments. If you're on a jury, you don't know that this guy's used this line on 15 juries ahead of you and the 15 capital cases he's had over the last four years prior to this one. Here's an example.
Tomorrow morning, the sun will rise and the sun will rise on Curtis Johnson. The sun will not rise on the victim of this terrible crime. The sun set on that man on the day that he met blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you hear these closing arguments day after day, month after month, get a little cynical. Well, what happened in the Glenn Rogers case was that prosecutor
I believe her name was Leanne Gowdy. She had a go-to line. If there's one thing that my family and friends know me for, it's being an amazing gift giver. I owe it all to Celebrations Passport from 1-800-Flowers.com, my one-stop shopping site that has amazing gifts for every occasion. With Celebrations Passport, I get free shipping on thousands of amazing gifts. And the more gifts I give, the more perks and rewards I earn. To learn more about Celebrations Passport,
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Visit BetterHelp.com slash Serial Killer today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash Serial Killer. And she talked in closing arguments. In Glenn's case, she talked about her father going off to fight in a war, Desert Storm, even though he was dying of cancer. And he did that because he had a duty and he knew he had a duty.
And he would fulfill that duty. She told the jurors, you too have a duty. You're here today to fulfill that duty. Well, Thomas, you can't tell the jury in a capital case that they have a duty to convict. They don't have a duty to convict. They have a duty to be fair. They have a duty to look at the evidence. They have a duty to render a verdict. But they don't have a duty to put someone into an electric chair.
When she used that line, the appeals began to flow, and the Supreme Court of Florida determined that, one, you cannot urge a jury that they have a duty to put someone in the chair, and two, someone cannot be put in an electric chair at that time in Florida should the Supreme Court found
With a system that had both judge and jury agreeing on the penalty. It can be one, it can be the other, it can't be both. And as a result of that little quirk, Glenn's sentence has been stayed. Will it be stayed indefinitely? I don't know. But he's been on death row ever since, and that's where he is today.
One of the chilling facts about Glenn Rogers, though, is how frequently he killed. Usually women who reminded him of his mother, but not always. He was a contract killer who preferred to kill with a knife.
He preferred to kill up close. He preferred to surprise his victims. And he knew a couple of things that a lot of killers perhaps know but don't use. And that is that if you cut someone in the thigh with a knife and pull the knife out with a twisting motion, you're going to catch the femoral artery. And when you catch the femoral artery, the person will weaken and then the person will eventually die.
With Tina Marie Cribs, she was stabbed from behind in the femoral artery. Another thing Glenn would do, and I believe that was something he did to mark his crimes, he would leave a broken timepiece somewhere in the vicinity of the victim. In Tina Marie Cribs, it was a Shea watch, a Shea watch, by the way, that I'm not, I don't want to spoil the book for any would-be readers, but it was a Shea watch that would lead to Glenn's undoing. I
I believe that one of the similarities between his murders and the murders on Bundy Drive is the smashed watch face of Nicole Brown Simpson. It marked Glenn's smashed watches and timepieces to mark the time of death, to mark his kill. He left a pager under Tina Marie Cribs as well. There are other parallels that are similar, but
But that timepiece one and the fact that Glenn would kill with a knife up close, often with a slashed throat. He slashed the throat of Nicole Brown Simpson. He slashed the throat of Linda Price. He would swab up his crime scenes.
He was a police informer in Hamilton and for Butler County, which is a jurisdiction around Hamilton. When I say a police informer, that means the police would pick him up. They'd send him into a low rent bar, the Choo Choo Lounge, Limbo.
Glenn would try to either make a marijuana buy or sell marijuana to somebody. And the police would, once they hit the street, the police would sweep down and they'd have a new case to prosecute. And they'd give Glenn $100 for his troubles. He would later then testify against the individuals that he set up with these minor drug buys. So Glenn knew the ways of police investigations. And he knew that a couple of things...
would always lead police to the perpetrator. Footprints, and anyone who watches any TV show on TV knows this, footprints in the crime scene, fingerprints. Well, Glenn wore gloves. By the way, they were gloves in Bundy, gloves that he stole from OJ where he did house painting and maintenance work for OJ. And then Glenn would also do something else at his crime scenes.
He would take the victim to the bathtub so that the blood would drain into the bathtub. And then he would swab the crime scene floor with paper towels or whatever he had handy to remove all of his footprints and heel prints. It's very difficult for police to catch a random killer. It's very difficult, I think, for police and authorities to catch a hired killer. The random killings that Glenn embarked on,
And the other thing to keep in mind is that Glenn was something of a cop magnet. If you saw this guy rolling in an old Buick down your street, you would immediately get nervous. He looks like a thug. I mean, he looks like a criminal. He's no cute looking Ted Bundy. Although when he cleans up, he looks pretty good. He's no, he was a charming, but rough edged guy. And,
And he knew the ways that police investigated, and he knew how to obfuscate and basically thwart those investigations as well. I see. Thank you for that. It's almost as if you have read my questions beforehand.
Excellent. So can you go into a little bit? We are not unlimited on time. So if you can just go briefly into what you know about Glenn Rogers' childhood and his upbringing and if he was bullied or abused in any way. Oh, my Lord. He faced abuse from almost day one. His brother told me how there's a description of this. And when the jury in his trial hears from a brother,
who talks about the terrible upbringing they had. His mother would force the kids to take baths. It was so cold in the bathroom, you could see your breath. She would hold both kids underwater, Clay and Glenn, because
because they were unruly to the point of drowning. Both Clay and Glenn, Clay told me they would open their eyes underwater and look at one another, and it fused the relationship between them that became almost paranormal. They had to wait in line for free cheese and face the humiliation and bullying of classmates as the classmates drove by as they stood out in the rain.
in a line that would be two blocks long waiting for cheese. And when they'd get up to the door to get their free government cheese, the government worker would say, we're done for the day, we'll see you tomorrow, and they'd go home hungry. His mother was beaten by an abusive father. The father beat Glenn. Glenn became something of a street urchin in his early teenage years. Some terrific work by David Monaghan.
Looks at how Glenn was a young male prostitute who would work the truck stops up and down interstate I-75 with a woman accomplice who helped him. He suffered some of the
most terrible beatings because he put guys in jail. And if you go to jail in Ohio for marijuana at the time, there were a lot worse crimes out there. So you might be out on the street in about six months and you know, the first person they go looking for would be the guy that put them in there and that'd be Glenn Rogers. So he, he had extensive damage to his face,
Although I believe a lot of the damage that happened to his face came from the knuckles of Ron Goldman. When Ron chose not to run from the knife, I think that he showed us not who was holding the knife, but he showed us who was not holding the knife. Ron, black belt in karate. OJ, face perfect. Lynn Rogers, face smashed in, called in sick the next day.
He dropped out of school when he was in junior high, and soon his life of crime took him to the Ohio Reformatory, I think up near Springfield, but I'm not quite sure where it was in Ohio. In any event, the Reformatory was later closed down because of sexual abuse of the inmates by the guards. Glenn was traumatized in many, many ways, and we detail some of those because that gets back to the central question. How?
How is it that someone turns out to be like you or me and somebody else turns out to be like Glenn Rogers? I don't know if there's a genetic predisposition to crime. You look at some of the figures from history. I'm watching a terrific TV show now called The Vikings because my name is Ekberg. Second grade teacher told my father that you're an American now and we have a C in there, but really it's Ekberg, E-K-B-E-R-G.
And my family, his half came from central Sweden. You look at what people go through in those early formative years. And if you are a kid who doesn't read very well and you have a learning disability, which Glenn likely had, you're going to be a troublemaker in class. And troublemakers carry that halo of troublemaker from one year to the next, to the next, until finally they drop out.
and they become kind of one-man crime brigades is what Glenn Rogers became. There's an element, too, that he may have... I believe he killed his father. His father got a debilitating illness, became a problem for the family. One March night, Glenn was left alone with his father, who could not get up off the sofa anymore. And when morning came, his father was dead, and Glenn was still alive. Glenn...
told a co-worker at the Ohio taxi that he had killed his father one night. The co-worker didn't know what to do. I found the co-worker by, I didn't say dumb luck, but really, I believe it was providence that led me to him. And the co-worker who didn't know what to do about this confession that came at three in the morning at the Ohio taxi parking lot in Hamilton, Ohio. So he did nothing, but he did tell me about it. So props to him for that.
Yeah, his was a life of abuse and sadness, and misery was brought on untold number of families as a result of that. I don't talk about that to excuse it. I only bring it up because in reality, that's what happened. And when people are bullied, when people are left behind, when they are traumatized by their parents and others, society pays that price.
people pay the price. That is very well said indeed. And when you talk about the abuse and neglect that Glenn Rogers went through, I'm very much reminded about Eileen Wuornos down in Florida and her fate and how she was abused all her life and ended up being a serial killer as well. So that's interesting. Let me ask you this. Do you think that happens as a way for...
individuals to get back at society. In Glenn's case, I think he was getting back at his mother by killing women who reminded him of his mother.
Well, that's very interesting, and I am no psychiatrist, so it would be difficult for me to speculate too much. But after covering all of these serial killer cases, what I can see is that these people, men and women, that have been abused and bullied and have their childhoods destroyed, they get a warped sense of justice and the difference between right and wrong.
And often they never grow out of this savage state of childhood because people are savages. We have a Stone Age brain. And in the Stone Age, we survived by brute force. And society weans us off of that instinct as we grow up and are educated and civilized.
But these killers and psychopaths, they never seem to grow out of that phase where any opposition, any humiliation, any bad feeling is resolved by extreme violence. So, but then again, I am no psychiatrist, so I cannot say for sure, but that seems to be, to me, a common thread throughout these
many, many cases on record. Now, moving forward, I know your passion in this book maybe lies more in the O.J. Simpson case than the canon serial killings of Glenn Rogers. And my listeners may not be as well versed in the O.J. Simpson case as most Americans are. So can you, in a few words,
Just tell us, who were the main players in the OJ case and what were the controversy about?
Yeah, I can. I'll keep it brief because I agree with you. I think the story of Glenn's life and the trauma he brought to so many families, including the Goldman family, is probably the important thread that people need to take away. The OJ case is fairly simple to me. And it starts, frankly, in OJ Simpson's
was found not guilty of murdering his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman on a patio in Brentwood on Bundy Drive. Even though OJ's blood was on the scene, his gloves, one glove was on the scene, another glove was behind the cottage.
And a hat that may or may not have belonged to O.J. was also found on the scene. Our premise is a simple one. Glenn did work for O.J. painting on Bundy Drive and or regular maintenance work and probably sold drugs to Fay Resnick, who is a friend of Nicole Brown Simpson.
O.J., who had a great life at the time, and that is pretty much money for stupid movies, money for sitting on the board of directors, came to Glenn and said, I want you to steal this.
my wife's jewelry because we're about to get a divorce and I want those jewels back. Four years before, he himself had beat up Nicole, left before the cops came, went to a golf buddy's house, went back over to the house where his wife was later that night about 1:30, went right up to the bedroom, grabbed some diamonds, took them out of the Rockingham estate, put them under a neighbor's garbage can,
Went back to his golf buddy's house. When the cops didn't show up, he sent AC Cowling over to the garbage can
to get the diamonds. Very telling to me when I found that anecdote in the literature on OJ, because I believe the same thing happened in 1994. OJ told Glenn Rogers, here's a key to the condo. Go into the condo on this upcoming Friday night. We'll all be at a dance recital and get the diamonds. I'll be at the dance recital, and I'm just going to tell her, I don't know what happened to your diamonds.
Well, I think Nicole knew that he'd be coming for the Diamonds again, and she either took the Diamonds with her or she had them on at the dance recital. By the way, this explains the key in OJ's overnight bag when he came back from Chicago.
When Glenn then comes back to OJ's house in the early hours of that evening, says there were no diamonds there. OJ says we're going either. He doesn't believe him or he says we're going to go back there now. She's home now. You're going to go in and get the diamonds going to rob her the old fashioned way. Glenn goes into the patio. Nicole comes out. OJ sitting in the Bronco outside sees Ron Goldman go into the back door. OJ figures, oh, this is going south real quick.
Gets into the patio, follows Ron Goldman into the patio. Glenn, who's armed with a knife and is probably already conked Nicola in the head,
Thanks. This is wonderful. Cuts OJ on the hand, so OJ's blood's on the scene. He dispatches and murders Ron Goldman. Goes back, puts a one-heel print on Nicole's back, slices her throat. Nicole has protein DNA under her fingernails. No one's been able to identify it. It's not OJ's, and it wasn't Ron Goldman's. My notion is it was Glenn's.
Glenn, who had stolen gloves from OJ without OJ knowing it, leaves one glove at that crime scene. He goes probably at knife point, tells OJ, we're going back to your house because you still you told me half up front, half later.
Goes back to Rockingham Estate with O.J. O.J. has a limo driver waiting for him. He goes in the back way. Glenn goes in the front door as the hooded figure is walking across the driveway. By the way, none of the blood on the driveway belonged to O.J., although he had dripped blood everywhere else on the scene. And when he gets upstairs, O.J. either gives him the money or goes back out to the car to get the money. But he gets the money. O.J. leaves with the driver of the limo.
Glenn, before he leaves the house, flips the glove over behind the condo or behind the cottage where Cato Kaelin lives. It's interesting that when OJ got to the airport, he immediately called Cato Kaelin from a pay phone and said, go set the burglar alarm. My thinking was that he wanted
and hoped that Glenn would still be there and Cato Kaelin would walk in on Glenn Rogers, who would then kill Cato Kaelin as well. And it would look like a madman had killed people at both properties. However, Glenn had left by the time Cato Kaelin went in to set the burglar alarm. But again, the last thing he did was he flipped the second glove over the scene, over the fence behind the cottage. Glenn Rogers left false clues at his crime scenes.
If it was a mere breaking and entering, he'd leave some cigarette butts that he grabbed from a bar that he hit on the way to the crime scene. At the Bundy Drive crime scene, I believe he set up O.J. with stolen gloves that belonged to O.J., a hat that he probably stole and probably belonged to Jason, son of O.J., and disappeared into history.
OJ thought he didn't want Nicole Brown Simpson dead. He wanted her humiliated. And the way you humiliate a Hollywood jet setter is you steal their diamonds and you stick the IRS on them. And I think that's what he did. But to me, the sad trauma of all this is that
For all the sadness of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, well, there's a Linda Price. There's an Andy Giles Sutton. There's a Tina Marie Cribs. There's probably 12 other women whose names I don't know. There's a Carolyn Brannon who disappeared. There's a Kelly Camargo in Hamilton. All of those lives that were lost because
Glenn Rogers was able to roam and wander at will. The fact is that he was mean.
He was an SOB, there's no doubt about it. But it was a creation of, I believe, how he was raised and perhaps the meanness that he felt in his life. Here's what a brother had to say about bath night in the Rogers house. The bathroom itself was not heated, and it had one of those old claw-leg bathtub. Everything always leaked in there. And that probably helped rot out the floors. There was always ice in there.
There'd be an inch of ice on the bathtub in the wintertime. You could see your breath when you walked in there. And I can remember that as far as towels to dry with, we basically had dish towels. You know how you'd have a worn out dish towel? That was our bath towels. You'd turn the water on as hot as you could. Steam would be coming out of the tub. You undressed and ran in as quick as you could because you were freezing. And as soon as you got through, you were freezing. I mean, you couldn't dry off. You were so cold. And you were throwing out anything you could to keep warm.
As far as the bedrooms upstairs, everybody slept in the master bedroom, the little back bedroom. There was a bed in there. It became a storage or junk room. So when you slept in there, no one wanted to sleep in there. But when you slept in there, you were surrounded by stuff stacked up all over. You had to crawl through a tunnel to get to the bed. Space heater was in the main bedroom. The other room had no heat in it. You had five boys to sleep in there.
Two little windows. And when the guys wanted to sneak out at night, they'd open that window and they'd sneak across the roof of the kitchen and keep on going. It's a terrible way to live. And there are consequences as a result. Indeed. Before we continue with the show, here is a brief word from my sponsor, MedMen.com.
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And I was very happy to hear that you are of Scandinavian descent. That makes this a familiar podcast episode, me being a Norwegian. So...
Just to round up a bit here. So what we can deduce is that Glenn Rogers was a serial killer, not just a spree killer. He's known to have killed probably five people that we know of. But also, you claim in your book that he killed the wife and boyfriend of O.J. Simpson.
And that he also was a gun for hire for the mafia and may have been guilty of killing as many as 40 up to maybe 70 people all in all. Is that correct? Yeah, it's astonishing. And before I go any further, thank you for your interest in this story. And thank you for your interest in my work. I really do appreciate that. And I just want to take a second to thank you for that.
Well, it is my pleasure. And I'm always happy to have new and interesting material for my humble podcast. So time to round off soon. But I always ask my interviewees, have you listened to my podcast?
I think what happens to me is I wrote my one true crime book and I realized it's not a topic that I enjoyed. I felt a moral obligation to do that. But to be honest with you and to be truthful with you, constitutionally, no, I can't. I can't read a crime story in a newspaper these days. So my apologies, no. But my gratitude for what you do, yes, because you cannot...
People need to be aware that these individuals are out there. Here's some quick math for you. If there's one Glenn Rogers in greater Cincinnati, that's 2 million people, and there's 330 million people in America, that means there's 150 guys like Glenn Rogers in America right now. It's a staggering number. It's not a very scientific way to get at a number, but it gives you some sense of just how much...
danger there is out there and that people should listen to their guts. If they're in a situation and their gut tells them something's not right about this guy, something's not right about this situation, listen to your gut and get out of there. The story of Glenn Rogers to me is a cautionary story. What you do is a cautionary podcast. Thanks for that. Thanks for what you do. Well, thank you for saying that. I appreciate it.
And with that, I think we can end this interview. Thank you so much for joining me, Mr. Ekberg. Or as they say in Sweden, Mr. Ekberg. Mr. Ekberg. You're welcome. It has been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you. And so ends the tale of Glenn Rogers, the Casanova killer.
In the next episode of the Serial Killer Podcast, we will once again return to Victorian-era England and the further exploits of Jack the Ripper. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. I have been your host, Thomas Warburg Thun. Doing this podcast is a labor of love, and I couldn't have done it without my loyal listeners.
This podcast has been able to bring serial killer stories to life, especially thanks to those of you that support me via Patreon. You can do so at theserialkillerpodcast.com slash donate. There are especially a few patrons that have stayed loyal for a long time.
Your monthly contributions really help keep this podcast thriving. You have my deepest gratitude. As always...
Thank you, dear listener, for listening. And feel free to leave a review on your favorite podcast app, Facebook, or website. And please do subscribe to the show if you enjoy it. Thank you. Good night and good luck.
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