Jennifer Lisa Smith, twenty-five, was in the cab of a truck in a parking lot off Southeast McLoughlin Boulevard in Oak Grove, south of Portland, in August 1987 when the driver stabbed her eleven times in the breasts, abdomen and back. She fell out onto the pavement. People from the Denny's restaurant next to the lot ran to help her; one had watched from a window and described the attack to another diner, who could not see the lot and called the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office. Several witnesses ran for their cars to box the truck in, but the driver went over the planted border and headed south on McLoughlin. One of them followed him through Milwaukie, Gladstone, Oregon City and Canby at speeds up to a hundred miles an hour, and when the truck turned into a driveway he wrote down the address, found a telephone and reported it. Smith died in the hospital. The man at the wheel was Dayton Leroy Rogers, and within days the bodies of the women he had taken into the Molalla Forest were being found. The Oregonian dates the Smith killing to August 7, 1987; other accounts give August 6, with his arrest the next day.
He was born on September 30, 1953, in Moscow, Idaho. His first known attack came in 1972, when he was eighteen: he took a fifteen-year-old girl from Eugene to a wooded area for sex and stabbed her. In 1973, after he struck two girls in Lane County, he was sent to the state mental hospital. By 1987 he was married with a child, ran a small engine repair shop in Woodburn, where he fixed lawn mowers, and was deeply in debt.
Prosecutors later described his method: he drove to Portland, picked up women working the streets, most of them struggling with drugs, gave them alcohol, took them to remote places, tied them up and tortured them. At least six he took into privately owned forest land outside Molalla in Clackamas County and killed there. What tied him to the bodies, according to later accounts, was a drinking habit: he poured miniature bottles of vodka into bottles of orange juice to make screwdrivers, and the bottles were left behind.
The women found in the forest were Lisa Marie Mock, twenty-three; Maureen Ann Hodges, twenty-six; Christine Lotus Adams, thirty-five; Cynthia Diane DeVore, known as Dee Dee, whose age is given as twenty in The Oregonian and twenty-one elsewhere; Nondace Kae Cervantes, known as Noni, twenty-six; and Reatha Marie Gyles, sixteen, whose first name also appears as Riatha. A seventh body lay unidentified for decades before she was named as Tawnia Jarie Johnson, eighteen; The Oregonian reported in March 2013 that she had been laid to rest after twenty-six years. Rogers was never charged in her death, and a 2022 report still described an eighth victim as found but never identified.
He was tried first for Jennifer Smith and convicted in 1988 of aggravated murder. The judge would not let the jury hear about the forest victims during that trial, and the sentencing jury gave him life. The six forest cases came next. Rogers asked the court for money to commission a public opinion poll on pretrial publicity in Clackamas County, to decide whether to seek separate trials; he was refused. He also argued that the Smith jury's finding on his future dangerousness barred the state from seeking death. In May 1989 a jury convicted him of thirteen counts of aggravated murder for the six women, and on June 9, 1989, he was sentenced to death.
The convictions held; the sentence did not. On July 9, 1992, the Oregon Supreme Court affirmed the thirteen convictions and sent the penalty back. A new jury again chose death. In 2000 the court threw that sentence out because the jury had been offered only death or life with the possibility of parole, with no option of life without parole. A Clackamas County jury returned death again in 2006, and on October 11, 2012, the Supreme Court vacated it and ordered another penalty trial. At that 2015 trial his lawyer, Richard L. Wolf, told the jurors that Rogers would waive all further appeals and admit his crimes in exchange for true life. Rogers told them the word sorry was not enough, but said he was sorry. On November 16, 2015, the jury sentenced him to death for the fourth time.
On November 12, 2021, a unanimous Oregon Supreme Court overturned that sentence too. A month earlier, in the Bartol case, it had ruled that Senate Bill 1013, the 2019 law narrowing aggravated murder, applied to people already condemned, and in the Rogers opinion Justice Adrienne Nelson wrote that his conduct was "no longer punishable by death." Clackamas County District Attorney John Wentworth said Rogers would be resentenced under the law of 1987, which pointed to life with the possibility of parole after thirty years, a term he had already served.
He was back in a Clackamas County courtroom for resentencing in April 2022 and again in July 2023, when he was seventy, for what was reported as his fifth sentencing. Some accounts credit his present life sentence to Governor Kate Brown's commutation, on December 13, 2022, of every death sentence in Oregon, though by then the Supreme Court had already removed his. The published record does not give the result of the 2023 hearing. He was last reported held at Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla.