Rogers was born in 1953 and ran a small engine repair shop in Woodburn, Oregon. He had convictions going back to his teens for stabbing and for assaults on women, and had served short sentences and been released.
In 1987 he picked up women working the streets of south-east Portland, most of them involved in drugs, drove them to the Molalla Forest in Clackamas County, and killed them. He bound them, cut them, and in some cases amputated their feet. Seven bodies were recovered from the forest in August 1987. An eighth killing, of Jennifer Smith in a car park in Oak Grove on August 6, 1987, was witnessed: he stabbed her and drove off, and a bystander took his registration. That is what caught him, and he was arrested on August 7, 1987.
The women named in the record are Cynthia Diane DeVore, known as Dee Dee, twenty-one; Maureen Ann Hodges, twenty-six; Reatha Marie Gyles, sixteen; Nondace Kae Cervantes, known as Noni, twenty-six; Lisa Marie Mock, twenty-three; Christine Lotus Adams, thirty-five; and Jennifer Lisa Smith, twenty-five. An eighth was found and never identified.
He was convicted of the Smith murder in 1988 and given a life sentence, then tried for the six of the seven forest murders that could be charged, convicted, and sentenced to death on June 9, 1989.
That death sentence has been vacated and reimposed four times, most recently in 2015, on questions of jury instruction and of mitigating evidence, and each time an Oregon appellate court has sent it back. He has been on death row for more than thirty-five years. In 2022 the governor of Oregon commuted all of the state's death sentences to life without parole, which ends the sequence.