Glen Rogers: the Casanova Killer, four states in six weeks and a chase in Kentucky

• Born15 July 1962, Hamilton, Ohio
• Known asThe Casanova Killer; the Cross Country Killer
• Convicted ofTwo murders in 1995: in Van Nuys, California, and Tampa, Florida
• Suspected inKillings in Jackson, Mississippi, and Bossier City, Louisiana, in 1995, and the death of a Hamilton man found in Kentucky in 1994; never tried
• Arrested13 November 1995, near Waco, Kentucky, after a car chase
• SentencesDeath, Florida, July 1997; death, California, July 1999
• DiedExecuted by lethal injection at Florida State Prison, 15 May 2025, aged 62

Glen Edward Rogers was convicted of two murders committed in 1995: of a woman in Van Nuys, California, at the end of September, and of a woman in Tampa, Florida, in early November. In the same weeks he was suspected of killing two more women, in Jackson, Mississippi, and Bossier City, Louisiana. He was arrested on 13 November 1995 in Kentucky after a high-speed chase, driving the Tampa victim’s car. A Florida jury convicted him in 1997 and he was sentenced to death; a Los Angeles jury convicted him in 1999 and he was sentenced to death again. He was never tried in Mississippi or Louisiana. Florida executed him by lethal injection on 15 May 2025, at the age of 62.

The case drew attention for its pace. The California Supreme Court, reviewing his conviction in 2013, set out evidence of four killings in four states in about six weeks, each of a woman he had met shortly before, most of them in bars. After his arrest he told police he had killed about 70 people, then said he had been joking. In 2012 a television documentary raised his name in connection with the 1994 Los Angeles killings for which O.J. Simpson was tried and acquitted; the Los Angeles police said they had no reason to believe Rogers was involved.

This account rests on the opinions of the Supreme Court of California (2013) and the Supreme Court of Florida (2025), the Florida Commission on Capital Cases record, the US Supreme Court’s order of 14 May 2025, and reporting by the Associated Press, the Tampa Bay Times, the USA Today Network’s papers in Florida, Ohio and Louisiana, WLBT in Jackson, WCPO and FOX19 in Cincinnati, Fox News and Oxygen, listed at the end. Where they disagree, it says so. In line with this site’s rules, the people Rogers killed or was suspected of killing, their families, the survivors and his own family are not named.

Hamilton, Ohio

Rogers was born on 15 July 1962, according to Florida’s capital-case record, and grew up in Hamilton, a working-class town north of Cincinnati. Evidence put before the California jury described him as one of seven children of a father who drank every day and beat his wife and children; Oxygen’s profile, drawing on a forensic psychologist, gives the same picture of the home.

He was convicted of forgery in Ohio in 1987, the California court recorded. In 1991 police were called to his house in Hamilton, where, according to the same opinion, he threatened officers during a stand-off and held a lit blowtorch to a door; he was charged with aggravated menacing and attempted arson. Oxygen describes the same episode as a brief jail term for setting fire to his front door. According to the USA Today Network’s Florida and Ohio papers, he had worked as a driver for the Hamilton school district and, for about four years, as a confidential informant for the local narcotics unit.

A missing man and a cabin in Kentucky

In October 1993 a 71-year-old retired electrician and veteran from Hamilton, who had given Rogers a place to stay, was reported missing along with his car and a number of valuables, WCPO reported. In January 1994 his remains were found in a cabin belonging to Rogers’s family in Beattyville, in the hills of eastern Kentucky, according to WCPO and the Cincinnati Enquirer. Authorities later said Rogers had either stabbed or strangled him, WCPO reported.

Rogers was the suspect. The Enquirer has reported that he was charged with the killing; WCPO describes him only as suspected. Either way he was never tried for it. By then he had left Ohio: Oxygen dates his move to Los Angeles to October 1993.

Van Nuys, September 1995

In Los Angeles Rogers lived in Van Nuys and, the California court found, had been drinking at a bar there called McRed’s for several weeks when, on 28 September 1995, he left it with a 33-year-old woman, a mother of three. He strangled her. Her body was set on fire in the cab of her own pickup truck, which was found burning early on 29 September behind a convalescent hospital, near his apartment. The court’s account and Oxygen’s agree on the date; the AP describes the killing as a strangling of a woman he had met at a bar, weeks before the Tampa murder.

Within days he had left California. According to the court’s summary of the trial evidence, he took a bus east, stopped to gamble in Las Vegas and went on to Jackson, Mississippi.

Jackson, Mississippi, October 1995

On 9 October 1995, ten days after the Van Nuys killing, Rogers met a woman in her thirties, a single mother of two, at the Mississippi State Fair in Jackson. WLBT, the Jackson television station, which revisited the case in 2019, heard from her family how much charm he had; according to the California opinion, within a week the two had rented an apartment together. Around Halloween relatives could not reach her. Her body was found days later in the bathtub of the apartment. She had been stabbed to death, and Rogers was gone.

He was never tried for her death. A retired Jackson police detective, Chuck Lee, told WLBT that the Hinds County district attorney’s office decided against it because Rogers already had two death sentences and it did not want to put her family through a trial. The Shreveport Times reported the same reason for the absence of any trial in Mississippi or Louisiana. In California, evidence of the Jackson killing was put before the jury at the penalty phase of his trial.

Tampa and Bossier City, November 1995

On 2 November 1995 Rogers met a woman at a bar called the It’ll Do Lounge in Bossier City, Louisiana, across the Red River from Shreveport. He spent the night at her apartment and left the next day, saying he had to fetch his truck, according to the California court. On 4 November he arrived by taxi at a motel in Tampa, telling the clerk that he was a truck driver whose rig had broken down, as both the California and Florida supreme courts recount.

The next day, 5 November, he met a 34-year-old mother of two at the Showtown Bar in Gibsonton, just outside Tampa, and asked her for a ride. That evening he paid for an extra night and asked that the room not be cleaned. The following morning the clerk saw him drive off in her car. Her wallet, with his fingerprints inside, was found at a rest area off Interstate 10 near Tallahassee. When a cleaner entered the room, past a handwritten ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign, she found the woman’s body in the bathtub. She had been stabbed. This sequence is taken from the Florida Supreme Court’s 2025 opinion and agrees with the Tampa Bay Times and the USA Today Network’s account.

Rogers drove her car back to Bossier City. On or about 8 November the woman he had met there, a 37-year-old mother of four, was found stabbed to death in her bed. A pickup truck left in the car park of her apartment complex was registered to Rogers in Mississippi, and a warrant was issued for his arrest, the California court recorded. The Shreveport Times reported in 2025 that he was never tried in Louisiana.

The four women had much in common. All were mothers in their thirties, and the AP and the USA Today Network both note their red or reddish hair. Newspapers called him the Casanova Killer and the Cross Country Killer. According to the USA Today Network, he had been placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.

The chase in Kentucky

From Louisiana he drove north through Tennessee into Kentucky. On 13 November 1995 he was in the area of Beattyville and Waco, where he had relatives. A Kentucky State Police detective, Robert Stephens, spotted the stolen car on the highway, according to Oxygen, and the chase that followed ended near Waco with his arrest. The California court says he threw beer cans at the pursuing cars and ran red lights, and that police finally rammed his car to stop it. A WCPO camera crew, in Waco to interview a relative of his, joined the line of police cars and filmed the arrest.

In custody he told police he had killed about 70 people, the AP reported. Other accounts put the figure at ‘nearly 70’ or ‘more than 70’. He later took it back. WCPO and the USA Today Network both report that he said the claim had been a joke, and WCPO adds that he said he had never killed anyone. No investigation has come close to the number. In 2012 FOX19 reported that police had directly linked him to five deaths and named him a suspect in more than a dozen others; Fox News, at the time of his execution, described him as suspected of at least five killings in five states. The Jackson detective told WLBT that investigators from many states had called, hoping to tie him to their own unsolved cases.

Two trials, two death sentences

Florida charged him with first-degree murder, armed robbery and grand theft of a motor vehicle. He was tried in Tampa in 1997, and the jury found him guilty on all three counts; the California court gives the date of the Florida conviction as 7 May 1997. At the penalty phase the defence called two experts, a psychiatrist and a forensic psychologist, and evidence was heard that he had porphyria, a disorder that can affect the nervous system. The jury unanimously recommended death. On 11 July 1997 Judge Diana M. Allen sentenced him to death for the murder, with natural life for the robbery and five years for the theft of the car, according to the Florida capital-case record and the USA Today Network. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence in March 2001.

Florida’s courts then approved his extradition to California. In Los Angeles he was tried for the Van Nuys killing. He testified that he had not killed the woman, the California court recorded, but the jury heard evidence of the Tampa and Bossier City killings as proof of a common plan, and the Florida conviction made him eligible for the death penalty under California law. He was convicted of first-degree murder and arson on 22 June 1999 and sentenced to death on 16 July 1999. He was returned to Florida that August. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on 25 July 2013.

Death row and the execution

Rogers spent the following decades on Florida’s death row. His appeals in state and federal courts failed in turn: the Florida Supreme Court rejected his postconviction claims in 2007, 2012, 2018 and 2021, a federal court denied habeas relief in 2010, and the US Supreme Court declined to hear his case in 2011.

On 15 April 2025 Governor Ron DeSantis signed his death warrant, setting the execution for 15 May. His lawyers argued that his earlier state-appointed counsel had a conflict of interest; that newly discovered evidence of sexual abuse and trafficking in his childhood in Ohio would have led a jury to spare his life; and that, because of his porphyria, lethal injection would be cruel and unusual. The Florida Supreme Court rejected all three claims on 8 May 2025. On 14 May the US Supreme Court denied a stay and refused to hear the case, without comment.

He was executed the next evening at Florida State Prison near Starke and pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m., the AP, the Tampa Bay Times and Fox News reported. He was the fifth person executed in Florida that year.

The documentary and the Los Angeles claim

In November 2012 the cable channel Investigation Discovery broadcast ‘My Brother the Serial Killer’. It featured one of Rogers’s brothers and a criminal profiler who had corresponded with him, and it suggested that Rogers might have been involved in the killing of O.J. Simpson’s former wife and her friend in Los Angeles in 1994, a case in which Simpson was tried and acquitted in 1995. The brother said that Rogers had told him so, and Rogers had worked in Los Angeles in 1994, FOX19 reported. In a 1996 interview with a Hamilton radio station, according to the same report, Rogers had denied killing anyone.

The claim has never been substantiated. The Los Angeles Police Department said it had ‘no reason to believe that Mr. Rogers was involved’, and Los Angeles prosecutors later said they did not think so either, the AP reported; the USA Today Network reported the same LAPD response. When the film was released, the AP noted, a detective and a prosecutor who had dealt with Rogers were sceptical, and one of the victims’ families criticised it. No charge has ever followed.

Where the accounts differ

• The chase: the USA Today Network describes a 13-mile high-speed chase; the California Supreme Court says the pursuit ran for 50 miles through four towns before police rammed his car.
• The Van Nuys victim’s age: 33 in the California Supreme Court’s opinion; WLBT, in 2019, said 31. The Shreveport Times listed the Van Nuys killing under 1994; the court, Oxygen and the AP all place it in 1995.
• The Bossier City killing: the California opinion gives both ‘on or about November 7’ and 8 November 1995 for the killing; the Shreveport Times says she was found on 9 November.
• When the Tampa victim was found: WLBT gives 6 November 1995; the USA Today Network and Oxygen say two days after she left the bar with Rogers on 5 November, that is, 7 November.
• The claimed total: ‘about 70’ (AP), ‘nearly 70’ (USA Today Network) and ‘more than 70’ (WCPO). All three report that he later withdrew the claim.
• The Ohio case: WCPO and the Cincinnati Enquirer say the cabin where the missing Hamilton man was found was in Beattyville, Kentucky; the Palm Beach Post’s profile places the Rogers family cabin in Ohio. The Enquirer says Rogers was charged with that killing; WCPO says only that he was suspected. WCPO and the Enquirer give the man’s age as 71, the Shreveport Times as 72.
• The death warrant: the Florida Supreme Court and the USA Today Network date it 15 April 2025; Fox News says 16 April.
• The prison: most reports place the execution at Florida State Prison near Starke; the Palm Beach Post’s preview gave its location as Raiford.
• The Florida dates: Fox News gives the year of the Tampa murder as 1994 in one passage and 1995 in another; the court records and every other source give 1995.

The portrait

The portrait above is a detail of the coloring page drawn for Bloody America, which gives one killer to each state. The full page shows Rogers with long hair falling to his shoulders and a full beard, against rows of old one-cent coins. A long fixed-blade knife stands on one side, and a medallion on the other holds a smaller knife. In one corner is a map of the United States labelled Mississippi, the state where he was suspected but never tried; in the other, a hooded reaper with a scythe above the figure 5+. The nameplate reads “Glen Rogers”, “The Casanova Killer” and “1993 – 1995”, with a judge’s gavel and a ticket marked “Death” beneath it. For other case files, see Bobby Joe Long, Randall Woodfield and Carl Eugene Watts.

If you find an error in this account, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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Questions people ask

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Sources

Every date and name on this page was checked against at least two of the following. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

1. People v. Rogers, S080840Supreme Court of California, 25 July 2013 (SCOCAL, Stanford Law School)
2. Rogers v. State, No. SC2025-0585Supreme Court of Florida, 8 May 2025 (FSU College of Law archive)
3. Inmate details: Glen Edward RogersFlorida Commission on Capital Cases (archived)
4. Order list, 14 May 2025 (Rogers v. Florida, 24-7169)Supreme Court of the United States, 14 May 2025
5. LA County suspected serial killer linked to O.J. Simpson case executedAssociated Press (Patch), 16 May 2025
6. Documentary: Inmate may be involved in OJ caseAssociated Press (Washington Examiner), 20 November 2012
7. Florida executes Glen Rogers for 1995 Hillsborough murderTampa Bay Times, 15 May 2025
8. Who is Glen E. Rogers? Convicted serial killer to be executed for 1995 Florida murderPalm Beach Post / USA Today Network – Florida (Yahoo News), 16 April 2025
9. Hamilton serial killer executed in Florida for 1995 murder of a motherCincinnati Enquirer (Yahoo News), 15 May 2025
10. One of Glen Rogers’ victims was a Louisiana woman. The serial killer has now been executedShreveport Times (Yahoo News), 16 May 2025
11. 3 On Your Side revisits serial killer’s link to 1995 murder in JacksonWLBT, 22 August 2019
12. Convicted serial killer from Hamilton executedWCPO, 15 May 2025
13. Did Hamilton serial killer murder O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife?FOX19, 20 November 2012
14. Casanova Killer Glen Rogers executed in Florida after nearly three decadesFox News, 15 May 2025

The facts on this page come from public records and the published sources above. If you find an error, write to hello@truecrimeart.com and it will be corrected.

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