Dayton Leroy Rogers was convicted of seven murders in Clackamas County, Oregon: the killing of Jennifer Lisa Smith in August 1987, and the killings of six women whose bodies were found in the Molalla Forest later that month. He was in custody for Smith's death when a hunter came upon the first of the forest victims. A seventh woman found there was not identified for 26 years.
His case became one of the longest in Oregon's courts. Juries sentenced him to death four times, in 1989, 1994, 2006 and 2015, and the Oregon Supreme Court vacated each sentence. The last ruling, in November 2021, held that a 2019 change in state law meant his crimes were no longer punishable by death. His convictions were never overturned.
An Associated Press report in 2012 said his first known attack came in 1972, when he was 18, against a 15-year-old girl in Eugene. In 1973, after he assaulted two girls in Lane County, he was sent to the state mental hospital. He was released in 1974, and his crimes, the AP wrote, continued for more than a decade.
By 1987 he ran a small engine repair shop in Woodburn, according to the Oregon Supreme Court. The AP described him as a former lawn mower repairman.
KPTV has called Jennifer Lisa Smith his last victim. The Oregon Supreme Court's 1992 opinion sets out the night. Rogers picked her up in Portland and drove to a convenience store and then to a restaurant parking lot in Clackamas County. In the early hours of August 7, 1987, between about 2:30 and 3 a.m., witnesses heard a woman screaming. One witness saw Rogers and shouted at him. He ran, dropped a knife behind a nearby building and drove off in his pickup. Another customer wrote down the license plate.
Smith was killed. KATU and the Associated Press later described her death as the 1987 murder of Jennifer Lisa Smith in a Clackamas County parking lot.
Rogers drove to his shop in Woodburn. Police found blood in his truck there and, in the shop's wood stove, the burned remains of clothing and parts of shoes. They arrested him at 5:35 a.m. He smelled strongly of alcohol, the court wrote, and he told a detective that he had "bought some miniatures at the liquor store." He had bought a ten-pack of miniature bottles of one brand of vodka the evening before.
Those details mattered later, when the knife he dropped behind the building and the miniature bottles were set beside what was found in the forest.
On August 31, 1987, a hunter found a woman's body in the Molalla Forest in Clackamas County and called police. Over the next week six more bodies were found in the same general area, seven women in all. The medical examiner estimated that they had been there from one to three months and found that each had been stabbed or cut.
Six of the women were identified. The Oregon Supreme Court named them by surname: Gyles, Mock, Cervantes, DeVore, Adams and Hodges. Reports by KPTV in 2023 gave their full names and ages:
Lisa Marie Mock, 23.
Maureen Ann Hodges, 26.
Christine Lotus Adams, 35.
Cynthia DeVore, 20 (KPTV spells the name De Vore).
Nondace Cervantes, 26.
Riatha Gyles, 16.
Police saw links between the Smith case and the forest deaths, according to court records summarized by Oregon Public Broadcasting. Riatha Gyles was 16, a child.
The seventh woman remained unidentified for decades. The court noted in 1992 that she had not been identified.
The Oregon Supreme Court listed what investigators recovered from the area in the forest. There were about 38 miniature vodka bottles, a sleeve that had held ten miniatures, and 34 orange juice containers. There was also a knife.
The physical evidence pointed back to Rogers. The knife he had dropped near the restaurant lot on the night of Smith's death was the same model as the knife found in the forest. A green pull tab, similar to those on the juice containers found at the scene, was in his truck. Several hairs in the truck were similar to the hair of Lisa Mock, two were consistent with Nondace Cervantes's hair and two with Cynthia DeVore's. Type O blood matching Smith's subtype was found in the truck, along with other type O and type A stains; Cervantes and Adams had type O blood and Gyles type A.
The case also rested on witnesses. At the forest trial, the state called eleven women who had gone on paid "dates" with Rogers. They described their encounters with him, his habit of mixing vodka into small plastic juice containers, trips to places in or near the Molalla Forest, and ways he had deceived them about the dates. The trial court admitted that testimony, together with evidence of the Smith killing, to show identity and intent.
Rogers was tried first for Smith's death. A Clackamas County jury convicted him of aggravated murder; KATU and the AP date the conviction to 1988.
The penalty phase followed Oregon's procedure at the time, in which the jury answered a set of questions. The jury answered no to the question of whether he had acted deliberately with a reasonable expectation that death would result, and no to the question of whether he was likely to commit future acts of violence that would make him a continuing threat to society. It answered yes to the question of whether the killing was an unreasonable response to any provocation by the victim. Because of the two no answers, he was not sentenced to death for Smith's killing.
Rogers was indicted in six cases on 13 counts of aggravated murder for the forest deaths. The six cases were tried together, nearly a year after the Smith trial, in Clackamas County.
Before trial he asked to move the case out of the county and asked for public funds to commission an opinion poll on pretrial publicity. The trial court refused both. Jury selection took several weeks. Prospective jurors were questioned one at a time, and each side was given 48 peremptory challenges instead of the usual 12. Rogers used all of his.
The jury found him guilty on all 13 counts; KPTV dates the convictions to May 1989. At the penalty phase the jury answered yes to each question, and the court sentenced him to death.
During the trial a juror had an encounter in a restroom with the mother of one of the victims. The judge refused a mistrial, found the juror had not been affected and gave the jury a cautionary instruction.
Rogers argued that the Smith jury's finding that he was not a future danger barred the state from seeking death in the forest cases. The Oregon Supreme Court rejected that. The question of future dangerousness, the Oregon Supreme Court wrote, depends on a defendant's life up to the time of the decision, and "the issue to be decided changes continuously with time."
On July 9, 1992, the Oregon Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Peterson, affirmed all of the aggravated murder convictions. It rejected his claims about venue, the poll, the jurors, the evidence of other crimes, the restroom encounter and the jury instructions. It found the evidence sufficient on every count.
Some of the rulings were close. The trial court had refused to excuse prospective jurors who knew of his conviction for Smith's murder; the Supreme Court called that "questionable" but held any error harmless, because the jury heard substantial evidence about the Smith killing anyway. It held that state employees were not automatically disqualified from sitting as jurors in a state prosecution, and that the trial court had been entitled to excuse a juror whose views on the death penalty would have substantially impaired her duties. It also held that Rogers had no right, under either the federal or the state constitution, to an instruction telling the penalty jury it could weigh any lingering doubt about his guilt, and that he would not be entitled to one on remand.
It vacated the death sentence. The penalty jury had not been asked what the court called the "fourth question": whether death was the right sentence for this defendant, considering every aspect of his life and his crimes. Under an earlier ruling of the court, a sentencing jury had to have an effective opportunity to consider all aspects of the defendant's life. The AP later said the 1992 reversal followed a United States Supreme Court ruling that had invalidated Oregon's death penalty law. Justice Fadeley dissented from the decision to send the case back for a new penalty trial, arguing that the court lacked authority to repair the statute. The case returned to Clackamas County.
A second penalty jury, in 1994, again chose death, according to the court's 2012 opinion. On May 4, 2000, the Oregon Supreme Court vacated that sentence as well. The AP reported in 2012 that the court struck the sentence because the jury could choose only between death and life with the possibility of parole; it upheld the convictions but said the jurors should have been able to consider life without the possibility of parole.
The third penalty trial was set for early 2006 before Clackamas County Circuit Judge Ronald D. Thom. Juror orientation meetings were held on January 17, 2006.
At the hearing, the AP reported, jurors heard conflicting testimony about whether he was likely to commit future crimes, and they unanimously rejected the defense argument that 18 years in prison had changed him. KGW later quoted what Rogers told that jury: "There is never a day that I don't struggle from the very core of my heart and soul over the despicable acts I've committed." The jury sentenced him to death.
The Oregon Supreme Court heard argument on January 12, 2012, and on October 11, 2012, it vacated the 2006 death sentence. The opinion was written by Justice Walters; four members of the court did not take part.
The controlling error concerned the jury. On the juror questionnaire, Judge Thom had told prospective jurors they could withhold their names, addresses and employers and those of their families. He told them the option was offered "for no other reason than to help protect your anonymity from the public and the press," and said he was following a county-wide policy. Of the 12 jurors seated, eight were told that "the attorneys" had their names and four that "the parties" did, and three declined to answer at least one of the optional questions. Defense lawyers were given jurors' names under an order that barred them from sharing the names with Rogers. The defense argued that the secrecy suggested to jurors that Rogers was dangerous and made it harder to question them and use challenges well, and it asked the court to dismiss the whole panel. The Supreme Court held that a court may empanel an anonymous jury only on strong and particular grounds for protecting the jurors' identities, that the trial court had made no such findings, and that the error was not harmless.
The court also held that the trial court should not have admitted evidence, over Rogers's objection, of a consensual sexual experience he had with another male as a teenager. The state had argued that it showed urges that would continue in prison; the court found that the state had not shown the "close link" to future dangerousness that the law required.
The case went back to Clackamas County a third time. At that time Governor John Kitzhaber had declared a moratorium on executions for as long as he was in office, the AP noted.
On Monday, November 18, 2013, the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office said that DNA evidence had identified the seventh woman found in the Molalla Forest as Tawnia Jarie Johnston. She was 18 when she was killed. The sheriff's office said she had come to the Portland area in the spring of 1987 and gave few other details, KATU and the AP reported. KGW reported the identification as that of the eighth victim of Rogers. Neither report said that he had been charged in her death.
The fourth penalty trial took place in 2015 in Clackamas County Circuit Court. In late October, KATU reported, a jury was deciding for a fourth time whether he should die.
In closing arguments the defense asked for life in prison. His lawyers said he was "humiliated and full of shame" and was no danger to people in prison. Prosecutors said he was a danger both inside and outside prison and that the victims and their families deserved justice, KGW reported. The jury returned a sentence of death in each of the six consolidated cases, the fourth time he had been sentenced to death.
His lawyers planned to seek a mistrial, alleging that the jury foreman had written about the trial on social media; blog posts were entered as evidence, and a judge was to decide later whether a new trial was needed, according to KGW. Governor Kate Brown was continuing the moratorium on executions at the time.
In 2019 the Oregon Legislature passed Senate Bill 1013, which narrowed aggravated murder, the only crime in Oregon that can carry a death sentence. As OPB summarized it, the crime now covers the murder of a child under 14, the murder of a law enforcement officer, a terrorist attack that kills at least two people, and a killing in prison by a person already convicted of murder. The law was not made retroactive.
On October 7, 2021, in State v. Bartol, the Oregon Supreme Court held that the legislature had changed what OPB called the "prevailing societal standards" for executions. On November 12, 2021, it applied that reasoning to Rogers. In a unanimous opinion by Justice Nelson, the court held that the three theories on which his convictions rested, intentional maiming or torture and two felony-murder theories, had been reclassified as first-degree murder. "The conduct that defendant was found guilty of committing is no longer classified as aggravated murder, and it is no longer punishable by death," the court wrote. The death sentences therefore violated the proportionality requirement of Article I, section 16, of the Oregon Constitution. The state's argument that another constitutional provision barred the challenge failed.
The court vacated the death sentences and sent the cases back to the Clackamas County Circuit Court for resentencing. It rejected without discussion his challenges to the guilt phase, and because he could no longer be sentenced to death it did not reach his other claims. OPB reported that it was the third time in two months that an Oregon court had set aside a death sentence.
In December 2022, Governor Kate Brown commuted the death sentences of everyone on Oregon's death row to life without parole, KPTV reported. Rogers was no longer under a death sentence by then.
KPTV reported on July 10, 2023, that Rogers, then 70, faced a fifth resentencing that week in Clackamas County. He was held at Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla.
KPTV reported on July 10, 2023, that Rogers was held at Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla and was awaiting resentencing in the six Molalla Forest cases that week. His convictions stand.
Proven by final judgment: the aggravated murder of Jennifer Lisa Smith (jury verdict, 1988), and 13 counts of aggravated murder covering Lisa Marie Mock, Maureen Ann Hodges, Christine Lotus Adams, Cynthia DeVore, Nondace Cervantes and Riatha Gyles (jury verdict, 1989; affirmed 1992; the guilt-phase challenges were rejected again in 2021).
Attributed but never reported charged: the death of Tawnia Jarie Johnston, whom the sheriff's office linked to the Molalla Forest case through DNA identification in 2013.
Accounts differ on several details: the number of victims, given as six convictions (AP), seven women tied to him (KPTV) and eight women (OPB, KGW); the number of aggravated murder counts, 13 in the forest cases (Oregon Supreme Court) and 14 in all (OPB, which counts the Smith conviction); the spelling of DeVore (De Vore in KPTV); and the year of the first penalty proceeding, which the 2012 opinion gives as 1987 although the other opinions and reports place the first death sentence in 1989. KPTV wrote in 2023 that he was sentenced to death for the Smith conviction; the Oregon Supreme Court says he was not. The AP said in 2012 that he had admitted the killings; at his first trial he did not, and the Oregon Supreme Court opinions do not describe such an admission. A 2015 KATU report said he was convicted of killing women in the 1970s and 1980s; the convictions cover 1987.
1972: At 18, he attacks a 15-year-old girl in Eugene, his first known attack (AP).
1973: After assaulting two girls in Lane County, he is sent to the state mental hospital; he is released in 1974.
Spring 1987: Tawnia Jarie Johnston arrives in the Portland area.
August 7, 1987: Jennifer Lisa Smith is killed in Clackamas County in the early hours; Rogers is arrested at 5:35 a.m. at his Woodburn shop.
August 31, 1987: A hunter finds a woman's body in the Molalla Forest; six more are found over the next week.
1988: A Clackamas County jury convicts him of the aggravated murder of Smith; he is not sentenced to death.
May 1989: He is convicted of 13 counts of aggravated murder in six consolidated cases and sentenced to death.
July 9, 1992: The Oregon Supreme Court affirms the convictions and vacates the death sentence.
1994: A second penalty jury chooses death.
May 4, 2000: The court vacates the second death sentence.
January 2006: Jury selection begins for the third penalty trial; the jury chooses death.
October 11, 2012: The court vacates the third death sentence.
November 18, 2013: The sheriff's office identifies the seventh forest victim as Tawnia Jarie Johnston, 18.
2015: A fourth penalty jury chooses death.
2019: Senate Bill 1013 narrows aggravated murder.
October 7, 2021: The court decides the Bartol case.
November 12, 2021: The court vacates the fourth death sentence and orders resentencing.
December 2022: Governor Kate Brown commutes all of Oregon's death sentences.
July 10, 2023: KPTV reports that Rogers, 70, faces a fifth resentencing that week.