Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer Read Free

before
him. He would lose his anonymity and would be remembered in the
darkest annals of crime history.
    There are eight known dead victims, and
Turner and his colleagues suspect there are countless others whose
bodies haven't yet turned up, and perhaps never will. Here is the
chilling story of how Dayton Leroy Rogers became the Molalla Forest
Killer, a ravenous sexual psychopath whose lust for blood knew no
bounds.

Prologue
    March 1987
    Spring had arrived in northwestern Oregon
again, at least on the calendar. It would be at least another six
weeks, however, before the rhododendrons revealed their short-lived
blossoms of pink and white, about the same time that the abounding
rosebuds began to swell. It would be even longer before the warm
rays of sunshine broke through all the massive layers of gray,
ultimately proving that blue skies do exist above the dismal inkish
pall to which most northwesterners pay little notice. Until then,
the chilly mists and frequent downpours would continue their
atmospheric journey across the Coast Range Mountains, descending
upon virtually every parcel of earth west of the volcanic
Cascades.
    Tracie Baxter,* barely sixteen, bowed her
head and careened her body against the frequent blasts of cold,
wind-driven March rain as she confidently claimed her usual
position along a block of Portland's busy Southeast 82nd Avenue,
between Foster Road and Flavel Street. Donning a short, tight denim
skirt that exposed a lot of thigh, provocative passion-pink
anklets, and black high-heel shoes, the blond, brown-eyed young
street whore shivered from the chill, wishing that she had dressed
in something less scanty. But she wanted to attract some business
fast, and dressing that way was the most explicit means she knew of
to entice a john to stop right away, short of publicly undressing.
She was the only hooker in sight that evening, at least so far, all
alone in the dark save for the late commuters who seemed to
literally parachute off the buses at the nearby transit stop.
Watching them as they impatiently filed off, she briefly wondered
how long she would have to wait for a paying customer to stop and
knew that, despite the wretched weather and the accompanying
discomfort she was feeling, she would remain on the block as long
as was necessary.
    Southeast 82nd Avenue, one of the city's main
north-south arteries, embodied insanely whizzing traffic and muted
flashes of chrome at all hours of the day and night. It was a lot
like Los Angeles' Sunset Boulevard, but without all of the famous
landmarks and glitter of Hollywood. As with Sunset Boulevard, 82nd
Avenue was a haven for prostitutes, pimps, johns, runaways, drug
addicts, pushers—the dregs of society, the discarded remnants of
human hope gone astray. Most went by street names such as Dee Dee,
Mo, Gypsy, Noni, and so on, some so far gone that it took
considerable effort for them to remember their names, streetwise or
real. Many of the street "residents" lived merely for their next
fix of heroin or rock of crack.
    Most didn't know where they would sleep from
one night to the next, and the more desperate ones who ended up
there because there was no place else for them to go often sold
their bodies for a hamburger and a milk shake or a $15 motel room.
And the regular cruisers who had money to blow, the friendless
pariahs from the outer circle, knew just where to go to find what
they wanted. If it was illegal, they could easily acquire it on
82nd Avenue.
    Streetwise and aged beyond her tender teenage
years, Tracie knew 82nd Avenue well and in a normal workday—or
evening, as the case may be—traversed much of it. But she preferred
to work along the active strip in front of what then was known as
Bob's Big Boy Restaurant, where, it seemed, she had the greatest
success hooking johns. Over time, it became her block, well
within the boundaries of what she considered her territory.
Most of the other hookers, in an unspoken code of ethics, stayed
clear of it, at