Open Case | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

Hugh Gardenier: Fred and Edwina had been fighting for decades. They maintained in
the kitchen two separate refrigerators. One refrigerator kept Fred's food in it.
The other refrigerator kept Edwina's food in it. They came up and they fought constantly.
And this had been going on for decades. Phoebe Judge: Fred Rogers was born in 1884,
a real estate agent who also had a side career as a bookie. His wife Edwina was
15 years younger. They lived in Houston, Texas, and by all accounts absolutely hated each other.
We're hearing about them from Hugh Gardenier. In June of 1965, a relative called the Houston
police and said he hadn't been able to get Fred or Edwina on the phone for days.
Two Houston patrol officers went to the house and knocked on the door. When no one answered,
they entered the house to investigate. Hugh Gardenier: And in the story that is
told in the folklore of this story is that one of them was looking for a cold beer. So he came up,
went over to the refrigerator, and he saw what he thought was the side of a hawk.
He looked at it and said, "Well, that's a good piece of meat that's going to waste."
And he was starting to close the refrigerator, and he looks down in the vegetable crisper,
and there was Edwina Rogers' head. And she was staring right back at him. When the police and the medical examiner got to the house, and they started pulling
the body parts out of the refrigerator, and they were laying them out on black plastic, on top of
the linoleum kitchen floor, they thought there was only one body. And it was only after they started
coming up and pulling body parts out and counting them that they realized they had two victims.
Phoebe Judge: Edwina and her husband Fred had been murdered, cut up, and put in the refrigerator.
The police found their bodies on Wednesday, and by Thursday had focused their attention on Edwina and
Fred's son, Charles Rogers. Charles was 43 years old and lived with his parents. He was described
by neighbors as a "complete hermit, who went out of his way never to see his mother and father."
The family maid told police that Edwina had not seen her son face-to-face in five years.
Hugh Gardenier: Yeah. His mother would slip notes under the door, and sometimes Charles was there,
sometimes he wasn't. She would take a broom and with the handle would knock it against the
ceiling of the room if she thought that the music or the noise from the bedroom above was too loud,
or if she wanted Charles' attention. Phoebe Judge: After the murder of his parents,
there was a nationwide manhunt for Charles Rogers, but he was never seen or heard from again. It's
still considered an open case. But back in 1997, Hugh Gardenier and his wife, Martha, took it upon
themselves to do a little more digging. Hugh Gardenier: It causes pretty close to heart attacks, when you show up on someone's doorstep
35 years after the fact, and you start asking them questions about a double homicide in June of '65.
They first stare at you blankly, and they say, "Well, I don't know anything about it."
You then come up and pull out a document that has their name on it. And you start
going through the linage of the document. And at that point in time, I think we were
either a whole lot smarter or a whole lot dumber than we are now, because we did some
pretty gutsy things in order to get information. Phoebe Judge: It was especially gutsy considering
that the Gardeniers have no law enforcement training whatsoever. They're accountants. A
husband and wife accounting team running their own business, Gardenier and Associates.
[Laughing.] Would you knock on the door and say, "Excuse me, we're accountants"? Hugh
Gardenier: Nah. Nah. Nah. Nah. [Playful keyboard music, in organ style.] Phoebe Judge: They do regular accountant stuff — taxes, audits — but they're also
certified forensic accountants. Hugh Gardenier: In essence, the best way to put it is, when people look at numbers,
they might see a number that is $15,000. That's the whole number. We come up and
we tear that number apart, and we determine how it was composed. What put it together,
the documents that back it up, and the story. Phoebe Judge: So, you're like paper detectives.
Martha Gardenier: Exactly. We follow the paper trail. Phoebe Judge: Hugh and Martha retraced every step of the original police investigation,
and didn't accept anything as fact without checking it out for themselves. They
basically audited the police reports. Martha Gardenier: It would be things like
a Saturday afternoon with my 12-year-old son, going down to the neighborhood where
this happened with tape measures and maps, and measuring sewer openings. And going down and
going through the archives of the City Planning Department and looking where the sewer lines ran,
so that we knew exactly which sewers connected to the house. And the ones that police said had been
used to flush organs didn't even connect to the house. So, that wouldn't have been possible.
Hugh Gardenier: You come up there, there are certain things in life that become a quest.
And you come up and you get involved with it, and it's like you're unraveling a string from a giant
knotted ball, and you keep working with it and working with it and working with it. And I would
say this, that during the years we worked on this, it was a singular challenge. Because you came up
and said, "I know the answer is out there." In our minds, we were and are satisfied that we unraveled
the mystery, and we were able to document it. Phoebe Judge: They estimate they put more than
5,000 hours into this, interviewing more than a hundred people. And they think they've solved,not
only the mystery of why Charles Rogers killed his parents, but how he managed to disappear.
I'm Phoebe Judge, this is Criminal. [Mysterious marimba music.] Martha Gardenier: His childhood was pretty grim by most acceptable standards. It was a life of
alcohol and physical abuse and emotional abuse. And it was very tough for him. He was small for
his age. So, there was a lot of bullying from other kids and he basically became a loner.
But he was a brilliant person. Phoebe Judge: Charles Rogers had gone to the University of Houston. He was in the Navy in World War II, and ended up becoming a geophysicist,
first for Shell Oil Company, and later on his own. He's the guy who’d tell you where to dig
for minerals, oil, and gas on your land. While newspapers in the '60s described him
as a bizarre shut-in, Hugh and Martha discovered that wasn't the whole story. He had a long-term girlfriend. He communicated with people all over the world on a ham radio,
and owned property, including the home where his parents were murdered. He'd had a pilot's license
and flew himself around the Sierra Madres in Mexico looking for gold and silver.
Hugh Gardenier: We very quickly determined with this case that this was not a typical
violent crime with the perpetrator or suspect acting in the manner of a violent criminal.
It was like a white collar crime. Phoebe Judge: What do you mean? What does that mean exactly? Hugh Gardenier: Well,
what it means is this: it was money motivated. Charles' parents had defrauded him. They had come up and forged his signature with respect
to deeds on land that he owned. His mother had come up and liened the house, which he owned the
house. She had told everyone that they owned the house, not Charles. And so it was a matter of:
she had taken out loans against the house and pocketed the money. This was one of the things
that was missed with the police investigation. They never had the time or the resources to put
together the paper trail, and to look at it from a standpoint of: what were the financial
transactions that led up to the murders? Phoebe Judge: Hugh and Martha say Charles had
been abused by his parents well into adulthood, and that he planned their murders meticulously.
He approached it as a kind of engineering problem, first developing a course of action,
and then making backup plans and backup-backup plans. Finally, on Father's Day 1965,
Charles asked his mother to come up to his room. Hugh Gardenier: And he put a bullet in her head.
He then went downstairs. He got a claw hammer out of a tool box that belonged to a handyman
that they had that would work on the house. He went in, dragged his father, Fred Rogers. He was 81 years old. He dragged him out of the bed, and then he proceeded to beat
him to death with the hammer. Then after that, he dragged their bodies to the master bathroom
on the first floor and proceeded to dissect their bodies, drain the blood, and come up
and put the bodies in the kitchen refrigerator. Phoebe Judge: Charles didn't leave his house for
three days. He was patient and careful, making sure there was no trace of what he had done.
He even staged parts of the house to make it look like a robbery. He left the gun on the nightstand in his bedroom, slipped out a back window,
and disappeared. [Driving guitar music.] Back in 1968, a few years after the murders, a small item ran in the Houston Chronicle
with information that the police had initially withheld from the public. The day after police had found the bodies of Edwina and Fred Rogers, a man who looked
exactly like Charles Rogers had walked into an office building. Employees reported that the man seemed nervous, and said he was a welder and
wanted to apply for a job overseas. When they asked his name, he said it was Anthony Pitts.
That's all the newspaper item said, but Hugh and Martha figured out that Charles Rogers' girlfriend
worked in that office, and that she was expecting Charles. She was going to sneak him the keys to a
getaway car. It was all part of the plan. Hugh Gardenier: Well, the secretary, Jean,
provided him with a 1959 Cadillac. He came up, and this was Charles. Charles drove the 1959
Cadillac down to Mexico. He crossed the border at Presidio, and then he headed on to Chihuahua.
Phoebe Judge: The police never made that connection. All they knew was that Charles
Rogers had pretended to need a job and given a fake name, Anthony Pitts. But this small
news item became even more meaningful to Hugh and Martha when they were digging around and
remembered that Charles had a pilot's license. Hugh Gardenier: We knew so much about his
personality that we went, "I bet he used his own plane when he got his pilot's license."
So, we were in a situation where we looked at the pilot's license, we could not make the end number
out completely, but we had it down to a range of numbers. We went up to the Texas A&M library and
started pulling out old registration information from the FAA. We got it down to a list,
a sequence of possibly 10 numbers. We then ordered microfiche on all of those aircraft registration
numbers from the FAA in Oklahoma City. When we got the microfiche in, we went through, bingo.
One of the planes was Charles Rogers' plane. Phoebe Judge: They followed the sales records of
the airplane, a Cessna 140, and found that Charles sold it to a man named Pop Folwood, who went on
to sell it to a man named Anthony Pitts. Hugh Gardenier: And we went, "Wait a second.
Pitts. Where does Pitts fall in this?" We then come up and look into the newspaper
article in 1968 that describes somebody by the name of Pitts, who is a welder for a supposed job interview. We started pulling records from the Department of
Public Safety in Texas and the DEA, and we managed to get a goldmine of information that,
in turn, started leading to Charles' associates. But it all opened up with that pilot's license, and that Cessna 140. Phoebe Judge: This was their first major
breakthrough. Anthony Pitts was a real person. He'd worked with Charles Rogers in Central America
before the murders. Now they needed proof that the two men continued to work together afterwards.
And they found that proof by following a name that kept appearing in Charles Rogers' business
records: John Mackey. They tracked down Mackey's lawyer, who put them in touch with Mackey's widow.
She knew exactly who Charles Rogers was. Hugh Gardenier: Widows will talk after their,
quite frankly, philandering husbands are dead. It's amazing the information you can get out. Phoebe Judge: John Mackey was running mining
businesses in Mexico and Honduras for investors back in Texas. He needed a solid geophysicist
to assure these investors that they'd be digging in the right place: Charles Rogers.
Whether or not the Texans recognized Rogers from the newspapers honestly didn't seem to
matter. He was really good at his job. Hugh Gardenier: Charles literally had an
employer in Houston. The owner of the company could have come forward. [Melancholic piano music fades in.] He could have said, "Hey, I know this
man. I know where he is. I know what his habits are, his pattern." No, the gentlemen wouldn't. And a lot of the reason that people didn't come forward that knew things,
is they had either made money from Charles Rogers, or they were making money from Charles Rogers.
He, in essence, was the golden goose. Phoebe Judge: Do you think he's still alive? Hugh Gardenier: No. It's a situation,
if Charles were still alive, he would be one old codger now, because he was born in 1921. No,
the story we get, and this is through John Mackey's widow in Honduras, and also through
an attorney that put together the papers down in Honduras, and some other people down there,
was that he was murdered by the Campesino miners, and that his body was thrown into the river.
Phoebe Judge: The Honduran national police came to Mackey's home and said an American
geologist had been pickaxed to death over a wage dispute. His body had been dumped in the
river and had been found downstream. Between the heat and the fish, the body was badly decayed and
difficult to identify. John Mackey told the officers he had no idea who it could be.
[Piano music ends.] This might be personal, but I'm interested. You two were married in 2001, but you were working together before you were married
and maybe became a couple. In any way, do you think this investigation brought you together?
Martha Gardenier: It was sort of a strange courtship. [Hugh and Martha laugh.] Phoebe Judge:
Why are you laughing, Hugh? [Laughs.] Martha Gardenier: [Laughs.] Well. When your Saturday night date consists of
looking for murders, it's kind of an odd courtship. I don't know that it — well,
that's hard to say. I think it did, maybe, bring us a little bit closer, but...
Hugh Gardenier: The two of us are research adrenaline junkies. Martha Gardenier: That's true. Hugh Gardenier: Okay? And when we
get involved in endeavors like this, we dig and dig and dig, and we essentially
feed off of each other. And yeah — Martha Gardenier: It's very easy to corrupt each other. Hugh Gardenier: Yeah.
Martha Gardenier: I don't know that it actually played a part in us eventually getting married,
but I do believe it brought us closer together because we just synced with it. Hugh Gardenier: Yeah. Phoebe Judge: They published all
of their findings in a book. They'd expected it to be a non-fiction book. But in 2003,
The Ice Box Murders was published as a novel. Hugh Gardenier: 85% of it is straight fact. It
was a matter of Martha and I arm wrestled over the other 15%. We just literally rolled around,
because my first intent was this growling gritting of my teeth, and going, "By golly, this will never
be written as a novel." And there were going to be footnotes everywhere, and so forth, and we're
going to reference the specific documents. Martha Gardenier: But most true crime
is about stories or cases that have actually been solved and gone to trial. And that's a
big part of it, is that there is a closure to the case. But in this case, where it's still
considered to be an open case, it's much more difficult to say, "Okay, this is non-fiction."
Phoebe Judge: It's an incredibly dense novel, moving back and forth through time, and going
down these long paths with side characters. Just the sheer amount of detail that they put into this
book makes you understand the level of research. And really, it's rather violent in parts.
Hugh Gardenier: Some parts of this, I got to admit in getting ready for this, we were going through and we were rereading the book, and I came at one point, "Oh my God, I wrote
this stuff?" It's a situation, "My lord, Martha, I'm absolutely amazed that you ever married me."
Martha Gardenier: That's true. Phoebe Judge: I think that's true too, because I
read a couple of those pages and thought, "Wow." Hugh Gardenier: Yep, yeah. [Optimistic electronic music.] Phoebe Judge:
The house where Edwina and Fred Rogers were killed was bulldozed by the city of Houston in 1972, with all the furniture inside. Hugh went out
there with a metal detector once and found parts from Charles Rogers' ham radio.
It was just an empty lot for a long time, until 2000, when developers put condos on it.
Hugh and Martha haven't taken on any other cases. They're very proud of the work they did,
and it's been hard to let go. They're keeping their eyes out for a new paper trail to follow,
but nothing's seemed right yet. Hugh says maybe he's a one-case guy. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohrer and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers and Johnny Vince Evans.
Special thanks to Alice Wilder and Will Pierce. Julienne Alexander makes original
illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.
Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the 13 best shows around.
Shows like Radio Diaries. This month, Radio Diaries is celebrating its 20th birthday. You can
hear their first teenage diary from 17-year-old Amanda Brand. Amanda knew she was gay, but her
parents kept insisting she'd grow out of it. Amanda Brand: I wear a cross between skater
clothes and industrial gothic. My parents think I should dress more feminine, but what do they know,
right? They grew up back in ancient times... Phoebe Judge: Go listen. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight foundation and MailChimp
celebrating creativity, chaos and teamwork. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Jingle: Radiotopia. From PRX.

In 1965, Charles Rogers of Houston, Texas, was the main suspect in an unsolved murder and managed to cpmpletely disappear from the police and have never been able to track him down. The case remains open until one day in 1997, forensic accountants Hugh and Martha Gardenier decided to look into the murders, and were able to uncover evidence that the police missed. Now it looks like they solved this mystery.

Learn more about Hugh and Martha’s book, The Ice Box Murders. http://iceboxmurders.com/

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. https://link.chtbl.com/n33u0HsA

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We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery.

Artwork by Julienne Alexander http://www.yssrs.com/.

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Episode transcripts are posted on our website https://thisiscriminal.com/.

Episode 41 originally published 4/15/2016 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-41-open-case-4-15-2016

Brief Summary

Hugh and Martha Gardenier investigate the Ice Box Murders of Fred and Edwina Rogers, uncovering financial motives and Charles Rogers' escape plan.

Key points

The Ice Box Murders. Fred and Edwina Rogers were found murdered and dismembered in their refrigerator.
Charles Rogers' Disappearance. After the murders, Charles Rogers vanished, leading to a nationwide manhunt.
The Gardeniers' Investigation. Hugh and Martha Gardenier spent years unraveling the mystery behind the murders.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

That's a good piece of meat that's going to waste.

Police officer discovering Edwina's head in the refrigerator.

1:20WatchNov 16, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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