The lawyer for a
former nurse charged with killing and dismembering two
gay men in New Jersey told a jury that police may have
arrested the wrong man, suggesting that his client's
fingerprints prove he did nothing more than carry bags
in which mutilated body parts were found. In opening
statements Wednesday in state superior court, David Ruhnke,
the lawyer for Richard W. Rogers, said other
fingerprints were found on the bags as well.
"Start thinking
to yourself, maybe there's more than one person, or
maybe Mr. Rogers just carried the bags," Ruhnke told the
jury. "They promised to prove to you beyond a
reasonable doubt the man who sits here...is the
killer. Maybe they don't have the right guy."
But assistant
prosecutor William Heisler told jurors that the true
killer was sitting before them in court. Rogers, 55, of
Staten Island, N.Y., is charged with two counts of
murder, but prosecutors are not seeking the death
penalty because the dismemberments were carried out
after the victims were dead. He was arrested in May 2001
after forensic scientists matched his fingerprints to
those found on plastic bags containing two victims'
body parts.
Thomas R.
Mulcahy, 58, of Sudbury, Mass., a computer equipment sales
executive, disappeared in July 1992 after attending a
business meeting in New York. His remains were found
two days later, in separate locations in Woodland and
Stafford townships. In May 1993 the remains of Anthony E.
Marrero, 44, a gay prostitute who disappeared in New York,
were found in a bag along a road in Manchester
Township.
Prosecutors also
plan to introduce evidence about the killings and
mutilations of two other men. Although Rogers is not charged
in those killings, Judge James N. Citta ruled that the
jury should be allowed to hear about them to weigh
whether the similarities in the killings amount to a
"signature" that could belong only to Rogers.
The big break in
the case came on May 28, 2001, when Maine authorities,
who had recently gone online with an automated fingerprint
identification system, matched Rogers's prints to
those on the bags that contained Mulcahy's and
Marrero's dismembered remains. His fingerprints were on
file in Maine because he had been tried in November 1973 for
the slaying of his graduate school roommate at the
University of Maine, Frederick Spencer. Claiming
self-defense, Rogers was acquitted in the
hammer-beating death.
Rogers was also
tried--and acquitted--in a 1990 abduction and
assault in New York. In that case the victim met
Rogers in a gay bar and returned to Rogers's home,
where he said he was drugged with spiked orange juice and
stripped and then woke up bound at the wrists and legs.
(AP)
Charlie Kirk DID say stoning gay people was the 'perfect law' — and these other heinous quotes