That's my mother and Dave Rogers,
and that's Kern County Fair, don't know what year.
A couple in love, you know?
Well, people right now just think about it.
She was so blinded by his love, his affection,
his everything for her that she couldn't see anything else.
And even if she did see it,
she wouldn't let herself believe it.
I mean,
the man's a monster.
[newscaster] The bodies of a 20-year-old woman and a 15-year-old girl
who both worked Union Avenue were found in the same
Arvin Canal, both killed with the same weapon.
But it was a bombshell when the killer turned out to be
a sheriff's deputy, David Keith Rogers.
Mr. David Keith Rogers, yep, this is him.
Typical picture of...
of evil.
Policemen are supposed to be good people, you know,
they're supposed to be.
That man cost me a lot right there, cost my mom,
he cost a couple lives.
My mom passed away, this man's still alive
and he still has that smug look on it,
even though look where he's at.
That's taxpayers, we spend seventy thousand dollars
a year to house this
this killer here, and that's evil.
[The Paper Chase's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" plays]
[static crackling]
[strings continue playing sinister tune]
-[knock at door] -[creaking]
-[banging on door] -[creaking]
[water dripping]
-[banging on door] -[creaking]
[sinister chord strikes]
This is a photo album.
Um, my mom kept every article there was
to deal with the case and stuff.
And as you go through it, you just -- she kept
a re -- a detailed record of all the police articles and...
I guess it was to remind her. I don't know.
I wouldn't have done that, but she just -- she kept
everything she could.
My feelings at the time was,
"Why, why torture yourself," you know?
But she loved that man, no matter what.
This is after he was arrested.
"'I had been through three marriages.'
"Mrs. Rogers said, 'When those ended, I figured there ain't no
"man out there worth having. Then along came David
"and changed my mind.
"I never in my whole life had a man open car doors for me.
"I've never had anyone buy gifts for me for any reason,
"bring home flowers, hold my hand whenever you go,
"wherever you go, and wanted to be with you all the time.
"That's why everything was such a shock,' she said,
"her voice trailing off.
"We always talked about things,
"and this other personality just wasn't there.
"I know it's hard for people to believe.
"It never surfaced in David, not in his job,
not in his home life'".
That best describes the whole thing.
It was the facade he was putting on.
I mean, he was a very good person to her,
you know, and, you know, she was quite happy,
and she never did -- she did never see it.
So that was her opinion of him, and she kept it till the end.
She truly loved the man.
But his true colors finally came out.
[ominous music plays]
[solemn music plays]
That is the wedding picture of them.
From the time I met him until they got married was
a short amount of time in my eyes.
But my mom's happiness was, was the most important thing.
It was everything.
I mean, she brought me into this world.
She deserved everything she could get.
I was happy that he was gonna make my mom happy.
My father was a drunk, and he abused her a lot.
And, you know, he's a cop, so that means he's
a good character, supposedly.
-[murmurs] -Like a wolf in sheep's clothing
right there. He is.
[dramatic music plays]
[Tony] Bonding with David Rogers was a little hard.
We were all staying over there at his house,
and it was that macho thing.
You know, it was his house and the whole thing.
You know, he was alpha. You know, he just, dominance.
He just projected, you know, "You do as I say"
and everything.
You know, he was a typical [bleep].
And then I -- being a cop kind of made me nervous, you know,
just as a kid who's doing dumb things.
And I was pretty much experimenting with drugs
at the time.
And it made me nervous, to say the least.
He had a garden growing in the backyard
and some things to it.
And I basically took over the garden.
And then I was thinking that'd be the perfect time to
sneak in a couple of pot plants,
because I had them hidden between some tomato plants
and got away with it for quite a while.
And then I came home one day, and it was in my bedroom,
sitting on my bed.
[suspenseful music plays]
He found the plants.
He pulled them, dirt and all,
put them in the middle of my bed.
I was waiting for the scolding that's gonna come
or the lecture that's gonna come behind it.
And act --
he could arrest me, you know, for that if he wanted to,
because it was a felony at the time.
And went to dinner, sat down at the table.
Nothing was said. I kept staring at him.
He was looking at me.
But I think a lot was really said
without being said.
It was his way of controlling me,
making me squirm and enjoying it.
The feeling was terrible, actually.
And it -- that went on for a while, just every time
I looked at him, always had that [bleep]-eating grin.
Man never said a word.
Never, not one word ever mentioned about it, ever.
It ate me up as he tried to hold something over me
that he could use later on.
But, yeah, that was definitely his way of showing that,
you know, "I'm the man," and, well, he was in control.
And after that, it was just downhill.
[tense music plays]
[intriguing music plays]
I was the oldest of my friends.
I had the only vehicle, and I couldn't make it home
without being pulled over by a sheriff.
Anytime I saw a cop on the way out, I knew
I was going to get pulled over.
And I'm sure he just said "Well, let's give this kid"...
a, you know, "Let's make him nervous
or something like that." You know, I know he did.
You get pulled over like nine different times
in one night by sheriffs.
You know he had something to do with that.
Got old real fast after the second
and third time, you know. I mean, we did nothing wrong.
He was just messing with me, which really pissed me off.
But nothing I can do about it.
Yeah, definitely he was getting off
on it completely.
I mean, he always wanted control over everything.
Yeah, he did, and, you know,
he was gonna make my life miserable.
When my mom first met him,
my mom had a house on Penny Street.
It was supposed to be empty.
The thing on my mind was "Party house."
There was like five of us in there just getting high.
Next thing you know, the door flies open,
and there's two policemen standing there.
We were all surrounded, light shining on the house,
and just the feeling of being trapped in a room like that.
And then in the back of my mind, "Am I going to be OK over this?
Or is it going to be bad? How it's going to play out?"
And I had a hard time explaining to them.
"Dave's my stepdad, you need to call him, this is his house."
Right at that instant, the door pops open.
[tense music plays]
[footsteps approaching]
[Tony] And he just walked up,
stuck his head in through the door and looked around.
Looked at me.
But nothing was said.
You know, he just, he gave me that look.
Like, "I can do this at any time."
It's the way he did things.
He just seemed to show up where we were at all the time.
Like, this was back before tracking,
back before cell phones and everything,
but he just seemed to know where I was at all the time.
And he'd show up, just...
It's kind of weird, now that I think about it.
He always showed up.
But that probably was his way of trying to put his hand
on top of me, knowing he'd squish me at any time.
[intriguing music plays]
Yeah, they called it the Jeep posse.
They all had Jeeps or four-wheel drives,
and they all did everything together.
Brothers, basically.
That's a typical picture of them.
About every other weekend, Dave and my mom
on the one end, and then
uh, three of his partners and a wife there.
It was mostly just a gathering of them eating and drinking.
That's -- that's what they do.
And if the women wasn't involved,
the bull[bleep] started.
The men would make a bonfire and sit around it,
but I didn't want to be with them.
So I just would lay back into that ground where no one
would see me and just listen and observe.
And they're all just [bleep] telling their stories
and cleaning their weapons.
Dave stood up, all of a sudden,
like, "It's my time, y'all hush."
Then he tells his story.
And he tells a story of how he had arrested a young man,
and he said this guy was getting on his nerve,
so he decided he would show him who's boss
and took him down to the river and...
made him get out of the vehicle, made him kneel by the river.
He said, "I put my gun to the back of his head,"
and then he's like, "Y'know I can do this and get away with it."
And I'm sure the guy was scared.
You know, I'm sure he was.
You have control of their life at the moment.
I mean, I don't even want to think about it anymore,
about that.
It was kind of like him when he just stared at me.
You know, he gives that person that thought
of what could have been.
So once again, it's that controlling factor.
He is now in control.
And then he put him back in the car, and...
and then he just took him to jail.
And I was looking for someone to say something about it.
[chuckles]
Nothing.
Which scared me because he's a cop,
you know, he's a cop and they're supposed
to protect people.
I thought I knew that man.
I didn't know he was doing all that
to that... to that extreme.
[Tony] Bakersfield wasn't like it is today.
Back then, it was actually a small town.
Dave Rogers had the prostitution beat.
It was Union Avenue from 58 to, you know, all the way to 178.
It was basically
the bad part of town, you know, because he requested
for that beat, you know, there.
He lent me the truck numerous, numerous times.
And I would run across notes that had, you know,
information on females.
Their age, and the whole thing.
He would take a picture of them. I don't know why he did that.
At the time, I was assuming it was part of his job.
But now I know that it wasn't.
You know, it was leading into something worse.
There was no telling what was in his evil mind.
If it was for sexual fantasies or anything,
or because he wanted to do something later, or...
I don't know.
Yeah, I can't really answer that.
The sheriff's...
test came up, I recall that, and I don't know if
he encouraged me to do that or I jumped on it, you know,
I just, the salary was good.
And in a way, I guess I might want to impress him,
you know, follow his footsteps or whatever.
I really don't know my train of thought at the time,
but it sounded like a good thing to do.
I would hear him talk to mom about the authority he had
and just his day, you know,
he got this crud off the street or he did this and that.
And I wanted to be able to do that.
If he pulls someone over, you're on probation or anything
like that, and you do a search, you find a gun and drugs
or something like that, he'd just look at the guy
and say, "Well, what's this?" And they'd go, "What's what?"
You know, he goes, "Exactly."
And he'd take the gun, he'd take the drugs.
He took them home. That's what he did.
And then he abused the women in a different way.
Uh, these poor women, too.
He pulled over a couple women that were intoxicated.
He was going to take the driver to jail for DUI.
And he ended up getting her phone number
and was gonna meet her later.
She didn't get in trouble. She drove away.
When he came back to the car, he told me, you know,
that's one of the perks of the job.
And I was just so confused because he's telling me this
and he's supposed to be loving my mom and the whole works,
but how can you love someone and do that?
That's crossed my mind a few times, but if he was,
I passed because I never did.
I didn't want to hurt her.
No, I didn't care about him. It was all about her.
You know, she was in love with the man.
He was a loving husband with her.
The only time I ever saw good Dave
was when my mom was around.
When he wasn't with her, he was like a Jekyll-and-Hyde,
you know.
He was a whole different person when he wasn't around her
or had anything to directly relate to her.
There was this one time I was with him on a ride-along.
He pulled over a good-looking woman,
and he said, "Well, watch this."
And, yeah, he got her to remove her top
and, you know, he fondled her breasts and...
Like it was nothing, like it was [bleep] nothing.
And then I felt guilty because maybe he did that
just to show it to me, you know?
Maybe if I wasn't there, maybe he wouldn't have
done that. I don't know.
This is hard.
I just felt bad because of the shame that she had to feel.
The way he acted and treated people,
it's like he had no regard for me being there,
that I'm witnessing this.
Not that I was anything special, but I was
his wife's son, so, you know, he didn't even act
like he was worried that I would repeat it.
I don't know if he was testing me, if I could keep a secret
or, or, you know,
join the brotherhood.
I don't know, it makes me feel like I was a bad person, too.
I didn't...
I didn't do something about it when it happened,
which I should have.
And so I'm embarrassed about that part of it.
And, like, you know,
I've tried to suppress the thoughts of it for so long.
I just know as a -- as a decent human being,
you can't let people get away with stuff like that, you know?
And I was in a position where I could have done something,
and it just kept getting worse.
I hate people not thinking good about me,
because I felt I was a good person, and man,
there's just so many things I can't say.
He -- he showed me the bad side of what he does,
how you get favors by just, um,
abuse of power.
He got away with it and just kept going and going and going.
I didn't do nothing about it, and I should have.
And I just -- I just don't know. I just, it -- I'm sorry,
I should have done something.
Can I have a second, please?
Just for a second.
[door creaks]
[ominous music plays]
[Tony] Yeah, but I was the one in position to do
something about it.
Let's do what we can do, right?
[producer] Let's give it a shot.
All right.
[Tony sharply exhales]
Sorry. [chuckles]
God.
I really don't know why he confided in me.
It escalated to him confiding in me over certain things,
like be part of him or bond with him or whatever.
He dropped the tidbits of it, you know, little bits of
information here and there during conversation.
"If you ever do something real bad,
you don't leave evidence."
You know, "You use the weapon, you get rid of the weapon"
You, know, "You chop it up, top up the barrel,
"so the serial number's gone. Get rid of it.
Anything you wore, anything you drove."
You know, "if you keep your truck,
you put new tires on it.
No witness is the best witness for you," you know?
"And no evidence is the best," you know?
"So just, you do what you do."
And back then, there wasn't DNA, a hardly, just starting
and stuff, so you didn't have to worry about that.
He thought he was untouchable.
There was plenty of little flags along the way.
I don't know what I was thinking at the time.
I just wanted to, if anything ever happened,
I wanted documented proof that, you know,
you can't tell a story unless you can prove it.
Things I observed and witnessed,
everything, anything I witnessed, good and bad,
everything was bad.
He found that, the journal too.
I'd left it out, I was just sitting on the couch,
and I wrote on it on the coffee table
and just left it there.
He picked it up, not knowing what it was, and opened it up,
and he was about...
He couldn't have been more than a few pages into it when
I went in there and I said, "Oh, what do you got
in your hand?"
It was just a scary thing.
Well, I walked in there and saw that it was...
It made me nervous that he was reading it.
I kind of...
I kind of like I got caught, my game's up, you know.
He goes, "Is this yours?"
And I'm like, "Yeah, that's mine."
"Sure seems like it's got a lot of information about me in it."
I said, "Well, come on, Dave, what do you expect?"
You know, "I got to remember things," you know.
"You told me to keep information.
That's what you do," because he had always --
you know, cops have to write down and stuff
so they can remember for the report.
So "I just write all this stuff down."
I didn't write good [bleep],
'cause there wasn't any.
He just threw it down on the coffee table
and walked away.
He wasn't happy.
I saw the disappointment in him,
thinking that I would do something like that,
because I was supposed to be part of his family, you know,
like, "Are you going to use that against me?"
Or you know, wha -- wha -- I don't know
what he was thinking about it.
It changed his opinion on me. It had to.
I never talked to him about it, but after he had seen it
and everything, I just quit gathering information.
[stuttering] I think a little bit of that stopped me
because of the fear of what could have happened.
I was scared as hell.
I still don't know to this day what happened to it.
I probably did throw it away.
I don't know.
I feel guilty over it.
I always, I'll live with the fact that, you know,
I could have, maybe what if I had said something?
Why didn't I talk to somebody about it, anybody, you know?
I had no one to confide in. I did nothing.
And it ended up with two deaths.
It makes me feel like [bleep].
That's when I noticed he had a fixation on prostitutes.
We would go driving down Union, which was his beat,
and he would say, "Hooker, hooker,
stay away from her. She's a cop."
It was an obsession with him.
And he, you know, he...
I don't know, it's hard to explain.
Um...
that's what I saw.
They're just things I'd rather not say.
I'm protecting me.
[tense music plays]
OK. He, uh...
He got me laid by prostitutes a few times.
[ominous music plays]
He -- he hooked me up with some of the girls
free of cost because of his power.
Uh... I'm embarrassed about that.
It was just, I mean...
[stutters]
...it's, you know,
I don't know if it's to look back and just to
walk into a room with a stranger
and then she's all over you, you know,
and he had direct involvement in that, you know,
he had something over them and he told them to do this.
And at the time I was just getting laid.
[ominous music plays]
I mean, and it's not normal. No, not normal at all.
You know, I really don't know to this day why.
You know, I think in a way he was grooming me
to let me know that when you become a cop,
this is what you can get away with...
because people are afraid to say anything about it.
Maybe that was his way of holding something over me.
You know, and he was probably doing that, both of them.
He was not only grooming me.
He was having something over my head
just in case.
I was just so conflicted that, you know, I wanted to do good,
but I knew there was something wrong with that man.
[Tony] There was a time there
in Dave's career that a prostitute
had made the accusation that he had done
some pretty heinous things to her.
He had picked her up at the Wienerschnitzel on Union
in California, made her get in his car,
drove her to Union Cemetery,
made her get out of the car, undress,
and did numerous things to her, and then drove her back to
Wienerschnitzel and dropped her off.
She went in and complained about it, and he got suspended
during the investigation.
So, that gave me the first notion that
he may not be as good as he thought he was.
He denied it, you know, basically.
But he let her believe that it was all bull[bleep],
and that, you know, everything will be fine.
But I know he did it.
You know, he told me he did it.
Part of me maybe wished that, you know, she'd find out
and leave and stuff like that.
I'm almost 100% sure she suspected,
but she loved the man and...
she stayed by him.
[intriguing music plays]
He asked me if I would help him do something.
I said, "Yeah, I'll help you do anything, what?"
He said, "I need to get rid of a few things."
I said, "OK, what's that?"
We went to the shed and we pulled out
two gunny sacks of -- there had to be at least 40 handguns
in there, at least.
There was a -- a couple sawed-off shotguns.
Maybe because the way he acquired them, he was afraid
that they would come out to his house.
I could just tell he was in a rush and we took them
to someplace and we dumped them
in the water.
They were in the deepest part of the river.
I bet they're still there today.
[ominous music plays]
I was just trying to help the man.
I had that feeling like I'm doing something really wrong
right here, right now.
[suspenseful music plays]
Then when court came, the lady did not show up to
court and no ifs, ands, or buts until they had no case.
The feeling or the talk around was that, well, maybe
he got rid of her. I don't know.
She just didn't show up to testify.
And that's all they had was her.
You know, that's all they had was her.
So he got his job back.
But they took him straight to the jailhouse.
That's where rookies go.
You know, that's where you go in the beginning
to earn your time to get out on the street.
And that made him angry.
And that's where it all went downhill.
That's when the fascination and everything got heated
towards hookers because of what she did.
I think he was mad because that one tried
to take his life away from him or something.
He's got some resentment.
You know, he hated hookers after that.
He hated all women except my mom.
He just looked at women, looked at them all, yeah, like,
yeah, you know, sluts, whores, [bleep], you know,
all of the above, and he was gonna make them pay
one way or another.
[eerie music plays]
It was a normal day
on February the 13th, a Friday.
I was working down at the truck stop
when my neighbor from across the street
called and told me, you know, "Tony, there's at least
a dozen cop cars at your mom's house," you know.
And he said, "Tony, what happened?".
And I said, "I don't know.". And I went and told my manager.
I said, "I got to go.". I just hauled ass there.
And I went in there. "Mom, are you OK?"
I was more concerned about her.
I was just consoling her and then, and it was so loud
in there with all the officers talking.
And so that's when I officially found out
what his charges were for
murder.
Two -- two counts of it.
And they were all discussing, you know, who's trying to,
who's setting him up?
You know, who's trying to blackmail -- you know,
none of them believed it. None of them believed it.
[phone rings]
Phone rang, and I think I was the only one who heard it.
So I went and I got it.
And then I picked it up, and it was that message
from the jailhouse saying, "You have a call
from," you know, "Kern County." And I said, "Hello?"
And he goes, "Tony, let me talk to your mom."
She got the phone, and everybody
kind of quieted down a little bit.
And the... and then it happened.
I mean, she slid down in the chair, she turned white,
and she said, "He confessed.".
She said, "He [bleep] confessed."
That was the beginning of the end.
I mean, I'll never forget that moment in my life.
I saw -- I saw the life drain from my mother,
you know, right then.
Because that was her everything.
You know, everything. I lost my mom that day.
Unfortunately, that's Janine Benintende.
And I think she was 21 years old.
A young prostitute.
I think he killed Janine, probably
early, early '86. She had been in the canal for
for quite a few days and was unrecognizable.
I mean, they had to go through fingerprints to get her,
even though her hands were swollen, I guess.
Somehow they got fingerprints off of her and they were able
to match her up in the database.
That's how they found out that was who she was.
And they had no clue whatsoever.
But she was shot six times
with a.38.
He was even investigating
part of the investigation team that was investigating for that,
investigating a murder he did, but nobody knew.
Then I was wondering, well, wha -- was he in there,
you know, to try to do something to cover it up,
but he didn't need to because they had nothing at all.
I mean, he -- he got away with the first one
for a year and 11 days.
They would have never busted him on that.
They would have never found out, ever.
And the second one, Tracie Clark, same canal,
same gun, you know, same everything.
Yes, sir.
Same gun, same ammunition.
That's a picture of -- it's Tracie Clark.
One of -- his second victim.
I think she just got into town that night.
And he shot her once, kicked her out of the truck,
drove away, came back,
and then emptied the gun in her.
Then when they did the ballistics
and it was the same gun,
she was like fifteen-and-a-half years old.
And I think she was six weeks pregnant.
Fifteen-and-a-half. Wow.
I'm sorry for that.
And then how many did he do that they don't know about
is a thing, too.
They were investigating about 11 unsolved murders
that were related to
homeless women or prostitutes or something like that.
They asked him a whole bunch of times about that,
and he never denied anything.
He didn't say he didn't do anything.
But, yeah, he...
he did two that we know, and no telling how many
that could have been. I don't know.
[newscaster] Rogers was tried and convicted of both murders, and in 1988,
his penalty phase of the trial began,
the time for jurors to decide if he should be sentenced
to life without parole or death.
They chose death.
That there's more than one victim in it.
And she loved that man no matter what.
And she stayed by him.
She didn't believe it at all, no matter how hard I tried to
convince her to the point where I said bad things,
and none of it worked.
That's love.
She was in love with the man. And I don't understand.
I tried to get her to stop, but it just wouldn't work.
You can't make someone stop loving.
My mom went approximately every three months,
once he got sentenced up there
and finally got to San Quentin, about the first five years
it was every three months she'd go up there
and stay the night. But then it got expensive,
and she just couldn't, she couldn't do it,
and her health started falling, but I think the total was
14 times she saw him before she had to stop.
She stayed home. She didn't go nowhere.
She waited for phone calls. She waited for letters.
And then to watch her suffer for the 12 years
she suffered after that it was -- is really painful.
I never even thought about forgiving him.
In fact, I hate him more today than I did back then.
Huh.
Morro Bay.
That's a picture of my mother and me.
She was happy, she was...
She loved going to the beach and loved going camping.
And I...
I just called her over and took a picture,
and God, she looked happy.
I would consider myself mama's boy.
I took care of her, and she took care of me.
I miss that woman.
But that was in her time of happiness right there,
just waiting to be shattered.
I mean, I wrote him a letter
after my mom passed away.
I poured my heart into it
and told him how I felt and how I had to take care of her,
how she suffered so much.
And I just wanted the man to know exactly
what she went through, you know, and that he was directly
responsible for putting her through it.
And he responded with,
"Your mom was a nice person."
That's all I got.
That's the one and only letter I ever got from him,
and that's all he said.
I don't know what I was expecting.
I know it just -- it hurt so much.
I lost everything,
absolutely everything. I lost my home.
I lost my pursuit of a law enforcement career
after he was arrested. They didn't want me.
My mom lost a lot too, so, you know, at least say
you're sorry.
If anything else, he never did that.
And for him just to respond like that, you know,
was the final nail in the coffin.
I don't give a [bleep] what happens to him now,
you know?
He should have died a long time ago.
It's just not right.
I didn't deserve it. She didn't deserve it.
The two girls' families didn't deserve it.
And I didn't even think about any of this stuff until this,
you know, I tried to block it all out.
When my mom passed away, I thought I was done with that.
You know, that part of my life is gone and stuff like that.
But guess what? [chuckles]
It'll never leave.