On November 5, 1995, a long-haired, bearded stranger danced to the jukebox at the Showtown bar in Gibsonton, Florida, and bought a round of drinks for a table of women. One of them was Tina Marie Cribbs, thirty-four, a waitress and the mother of two sons. She was a native New Yorker who had moved to Gibsonton from Oklahoma a couple of years before and lived three houses from her mother, who had given her a pager so they could stay in touch. The stranger asked her for a ride, and she left with him. Two days later a cleaner at the Tampa 8 Inn on East Columbus Drive found her in the bathtub of his room, stabbed in the chest and buttocks. He had told the desk clerk he was a truck driver whose rig had broken down, paid for an extra night on November 5, asked that the room not be cleaned, and loaded his things into her white Ford Festiva. Her wallet turned up the next day at a rest area in North Florida with his fingerprints on it. The man was Glen Edward Rogers, and by then he was wanted across the South.
He was born on July 15, 1962, in Hamilton, Ohio, one of seven children of Edna and Claude Rogers; his father ran a hydro pulp machine at the Champion paper mill. He was expelled from junior high school before he was sixteen. Some time after that he got his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Deborah Ann Nix, pregnant, and they married. They had a second child in 1981, and in 1983 she filed for divorce, saying he beat her.
The first killing laid at his door was in his hometown. Mark Peters, a seventy-one-year-old retired electrician and veteran, had taken Rogers into his Hamilton home. In October 1993 Peters was reported missing along with his car and several valuables, among them antiques, guns and a coin collection, and Rogers was gone too. On January 10, 1994, after his brother Clay led police to it, officers searched a cabin the Rogers family owned in Beattyville, Kentucky, and found Peters's remains tied to a chair under a heap of furniture. Rogers was never tried for his death.
By 1995 he was in California. On September 28 of that year Sandra Gallagher, a thirty-three-year-old mother of three, was seen with him at McRed's bar in Van Nuys. The next day her badly burned body was found in her truck, parked near his apartment; she had been strangled. It is the earliest killing the authorities treat as firmly established. He went east. At a beer tent at the Mississippi State Fair that fall he met Linda Price, thirty-four, a single mother of two teenagers, who kept telling her sister Kathy Carroll how good-looking he was. They briefly shared an apartment in Jackson. Carroll last saw her sister the night before Halloween; the next day Price did not answer her door when Carroll brought the grandchildren round to trick-or-treat, and she was later found dead in her bathtub.
After Cribbs came Andy Lou Jiles Sutton, a woman he knew in Bossier City, Louisiana. Her slashed body was found on November 9, 1995, on a punctured waterbed in her apartment. The women he was suspected of killing that fall were all in their thirties and red-haired, and he met them in bars or at the fair; the press called him the Casanova Killer and the Cross-Country Killer, and he was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.
He drove north. On November 13, 1995, Kentucky State Police Detective Bob Stephens saw Cribbs's car and gave chase, with a rookie Irvine police officer, Charles Cox, behind him. Trooper Ed Robinson fired a shotgun into the rear tires at a roadblock without stopping it, and after thirteen miles Sgt. Joey Barnes rammed the car into a ditch near Waco, Kentucky. A local television crew filmed the arrest. Rogers first told the police he had killed nearly seventy people, then said he had been joking and had killed no one. Of Cribbs he said that she had lent him the car and was alive when he left Tampa.
A Florida jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Tina Cribbs, with armed robbery and grand theft of her car, and he was sentenced to death on July 11, 1997. At the sentencing one of her sisters called him an animal. On June 22, 1999, a Los Angeles jury convicted him of murdering Sandra Gallagher, and on July 16 California also sentenced him to death. Those are the only two murders for which he was tried. The Florida Supreme Court rejected his direct appeal, which argued that the evidence was insufficient and that a witness should not have been allowed to mention a California misdemeanor.
In 2012 a documentary, My Brother the Serial Killer, promoted a claim that he had murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in 1994. His brother Clay said on camera that Glen had confessed to it, and in letters and a prison meeting with the profiler Anthony Meoli, Rogers claimed O. J. Simpson had hired him to steal jewelry from her house. The Los Angeles Police Department said it knew who had killed them and had no reason to believe Rogers was involved, and Fred Goldman said the evidence proved that one person, O. J. Simpson, was the killer.
Governor Ron DeSantis signed his death warrant on April 15, 2025. His lawyers argued that the sexual abuse he suffered as a child should have been weighed at sentencing and raised concerns about the lethal injection drugs; the Florida Supreme Court turned him down on May 9 and the United States Supreme Court on May 14. On May 15, 2025, at Florida State Prison, he told the victims' families that their questions would be answered "in the near future," addressed a last line to President Donald Trump, said "I'm ready to go," and was pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m. He was sixty-two. Cribbs's mother, Mary Dicke, had fought cancer for years to live long enough to see it. Gallagher's sister Jerri Vallicella said she could rest at last; Price's older sister Debbie Spikes, who attended with her family, said he had shown no remorse; and Sutton's son Randy Roberson said the death looked too easy, like going to sleep.