Ramon Jay Rogers was the resident manager of an apartment complex in San Diego when, in March 1996, police came looking for a missing woman from Poland. Within weeks he was charged with three murders spread over nearly three years: his former best friend Ron Stadt, who vanished in June 1993; Rose Albano, who lived with him and was carrying his child when she disappeared that December; and Beatrice Toronczak, the mother of his young son, who disappeared in February 1996, a week after arriving in San Diego.
A San Diego County jury convicted him of all three killings in June 1997, the two women as first degree murder and Stadt as second degree murder, and voted for death. The California Supreme Court affirmed in 2009. The decision corrected one part of the sentence: a death sentence cannot rest on a second degree murder, so the court set the term on Stadt's killing at 15 years to life and left the judgment of death standing on the others.
Little is known about Rogers's early life beyond what his relatives said at his trial. Members of both his biological family, the Franks, and his adoptive family, the Rogers family, testified for him at the penalty phase. They described two families who stayed close and visited each other while he grew up, and they said he had been placed with the Rogers family because of money, "not because of anything he did." He never showed resentment about it, they said.
The picture they gave was of a healthy, happy young man with friends and girlfriends, who played sports in high school, helped around the house and at times held two or three jobs at once. Long-time friends from Idaho also testified on his behalf. His date of birth does not appear in the court record.
He served in the Navy, and it was there that he became close friends with Ron Stadt. After both men left the service they settled in San Diego. When the case reached the jury in 1997, the defense could point out that he had no prior convictions and, by its account, no criminal conduct in the first 33 years of his life.
At some point he worked in front of the camera. United Press International, reporting his conviction in 1997, described him as a former actor who had a role in the television series Renegade. By the mid-1990s he was managing an apartment complex in San Diego and living in one of its units.
Ron Stadt was Rogers's best friend from the Navy and, for a time, his roommate. He worked at a shop in the San Diego area and had a family of his own. In July 1992 he separated from his wife, and he briefly moved in with Rogers, but left because he felt uncomfortable there. He and his wife were soon in a dispute over custody of their child.
In April or May 1993 Stadt learned that Rogers had been having an affair with his estranged wife. He intended to use that in the custody case.
On June 24, 1993, a coworker heard Stadt in a heated telephone conversation with Rogers in the late afternoon. Stadt left work that evening saying he was going to meet Rogers, and he was uneasy about it. His estranged wife saw the two men together shortly afterward.
Stadt was due at work the next day. He did not come in, and he never came back even to collect his paycheck. His credit cards showed no activity after June 24. He was never seen again, and his body has never been found.
On July 2, 1993, Rogers told an Imperial Beach detective that Stadt had come by at about 6:45 p.m. that evening to pick up the jewelry. To other people he gave other accounts over time: that Stadt had been killed in a fight, that he had driven off into the sunset, that he had left to avoid paying child support. He told Stadt's estranged wife that Stadt was "mountain lion food." When she remarked that Stadt could be identified by his dental work, Rogers answered that it was "the only thing" he had forgotten and "the only mistake" he had made, according to her testimony.
Other evidence tied Rogers to his missing friend's belongings and contacts. He had Stadt's key to his wife's car and Stadt's radar detector. Two women testified that Rogers had called them on unlisted telephone numbers they had given only to Stadt.
UPI gave Stadt's age as 29.
Rose Albano lived with Rogers in his apartment at the complex. She had two children from before the relationship, and by late 1993 she was pregnant. She said Rogers was the father, and he told friends the child was his.
He did not want the child or a life with her. He told one friend that he wanted her to have an abortion and move out. He told another that he did not want to marry her or to support her two other children. Before she disappeared, he told a woman he knew that Albano would be leaving in two weeks to take a secretarial job.
On December 17, 1993, Albano withdrew more than $4,600 from her retirement account. Her parents last saw her on December 18.
Rogers reported her missing on December 23. He told police that she lived with him, that she might be carrying about $6,400 in money she had withdrawn, and that he had last seen her on December 12 at about 1:00 p.m. The next day he called again, gave a different address, and said he had last seen her on December 21 at 7:00 a.m.
People around him noticed how little he seemed to care. He did not bring up her absence unless someone asked, and when one acquaintance suggested they go and look for her, he was evasive. To different people he said she had gone to Los Angeles, to see her sister, shopping in Mexico with Stadt, shopping and never come back, or to the Philippines.
On December 29, 1993, she was found dead in the Valley Center area of San Diego County. The authorities told her family that she had been identified on January 27, 1994.
In the weeks after she vanished, Rogers paid about $4,000 to have a used engine and new tires put on his truck.
UPI gave Albano's age as 33.
Police questioned Rogers about Albano's death in March 1994. Afterward he handed a woman friend $2,400, his airline ticket to Poland, his ATM card and its PIN, his mailbox keys and his passport, and later gave her $600 more and sent her Toronczak's passport. He told her he was afraid of being treated as a suspect. She gave the items back after about two weeks.
No charge followed in 1994, and Rogers stayed on as manager of the complex for two more years.
A woman he met in January 1993, while she was going through a divorce, testified that he pursued her with calls, cards and chalk messages, and that he once left a note inside her locked car. She said he told her that if she ever wanted someone "taken care of," he knew bad people who could make a person disappear so that no trace would be found.
A one-time girlfriend testified that she had once told Rogers, falsely, that she had killed someone. He later asked her to shoot a former business associate of his, and they talked about a price of $10,000 to $20,000; he showed her where the man lived. She backed out, telling him she had never killed anyone and could not. Rogers said he had not believed she would go through with it and had only been testing her. The record does not date the episode, and he was not charged over it.
In 1994 he assaulted one woman, and in March 1995 he attacked the woman he was then seeing. Neither incident led to a conviction, but both were proved to the jury at the penalty phase as uncharged acts of violence.
Beatrice Toronczak had a son with Rogers, a boy who was five years old in March 1996. She had been raising him in Poland. Rogers disapproved of how the boy was being cared for and wanted him back, and in late 1995 he traveled to Warsaw. He returned to San Diego with his son on January 3, 1996.
Toronczak followed. She arrived in San Diego on February 11, 1996, and moved into his apartment, displacing his live-in girlfriend, whom he moved to another unit in the complex. At times she had used another surname, Szulc.
She was last seen on her birthday, February 18, 1996, or shortly after. Rogers did not look for her and showed no concern. He told people he did not know where she was, that she had run off with a man toward the Mexican border, or that she had gone to Germany, Las Vegas or Poland.
About a week after she vanished, on February 24, a woman who was with Rogers asked him, "Who are you going to kill next?" He said nothing, but she testified that he became visibly upset, paced and dropped his head.
UPI gave Toronczak's age as 32.
Toronczak's mother lived in Germany. She could not persuade Rogers to report her daughter missing, and she feared he was responsible. Her daughter had told her that Rogers once threatened to lock her in a storage area. On March 6, 1996, a woman acting on the mother's behalf made the report to the San Diego Police Department and passed on that warning, asking officers to check the storage area.
On the morning of March 11, Detective Richard Carlson read the report and telephoned Rogers, who said Toronczak had been gone a week to a week and a half and then hung up. Carlson called the woman who had made the report, who repeated what the mother had said and told him she believed Rogers was involved.
At about 1:35 p.m. Carlson arrived at the complex with uniformed officers. No one answered at Rogers's apartment, and neighbors said he controlled the storage rooms. When Rogers arrived he held to his account that she had been gone about a week and a half. Asked about the threat to lock her in storage, he did not deny it. He refused repeated requests to open the storage rooms.
The officers entered storage rooms he controlled without a warrant, then sealed them and obtained a telephonic search warrant. The evidence seized under it established that Toronczak was dead and linked Rogers to her death.
While the officers worked, Rogers sat in a police car and telephoned his girlfriend. She later told a man that Rogers had said on that call that he "did it" for them. At trial she denied that the call took place.
He was charged with Toronczak's murder and then with the murders of Albano and Stadt, under San Diego County Superior Court case number SCD 119402.
The three killings were tried together in San Diego County Superior Court in 1997, with Judge Frederic L. Link presiding. Jury selection began on June 9, 1997. Prospective jurors filled out a 20-page questionnaire of 118 questions, signed under penalty of perjury, covering their backgrounds, their views of the criminal justice system and their attitudes toward the death penalty. The judge then questioned them orally. Defense requests for questioning by the lawyers themselves and for individual, sequestered questioning were denied.
The prosecution's case rested on circumstantial evidence and on Rogers's own words and conduct: the shifting stories about where each victim had gone, the two inconsistent missing-person calls about Albano, the money, the possessions of Stadt's that he held, the remarks to Stadt's estranged wife, the telephone call from the police car, and his silence and agitation when asked whom he would kill next. Jurors also heard about his statement that he knew people who could make someone disappear and about the request that a girlfriend kill a former business partner.
The defense argued that Rogers had no motive to kill any of the three, while others did, and that several key prosecution witnesses could not be believed. No physical evidence, it pointed out, tied him to the deaths of Stadt or Albano. On Toronczak, the defense pointed to his girlfriend, who it said had a motive, had access to the storage-room keys and owned an item in which evidence was found.
Before the case went to the jury, the defense asked for an instruction allowing a verdict of voluntary manslaughter on the Stadt count. It argued that the heated phone call, Stadt's anger over the affair and the custody fight, and an earlier outburst of temper by Rogers could support a killing in the heat of passion. Judge Link refused, and the Supreme Court later agreed that there was no substantial evidence that Stadt had provoked a sudden, impassioned reaction.
The jury was also instructed that efforts to conceal evidence could show consciousness of guilt. The Supreme Court held that instruction proper because the evidence allowed the inference that Rogers had tried to prevent identification of a victim.
Judge Link was away on court business in Sacramento on June 30, 1997, and Judge Christine Pate took the bench that afternoon to receive the verdicts. The forms the jury returned contained findings of both first and second degree murder on two counts. With the agreement of both sides, Judge Pate clarified what the jurors intended and struck the surplus second degree findings.
The jury found Rogers guilty of the first degree murder of Beatrice Toronczak, the second degree murder of Ron Stadt and the first degree murder of Rose Albano, and found true the special circumstance that he had been convicted of multiple murders.
The difference in degree carried legal weight. First degree murder in California generally requires proof of premeditation and deliberation or another specified circumstance; second degree murder does not. The jury's verdict on Stadt meant it was satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that Rogers had killed his friend with malice, though not that he had done so with premeditation.
The penalty phase began the following week. The prosecution relied on the circumstances of the three murders, on the two uncharged batteries of 1994 and 1995, and on testimony from Toronczak's mother, Stadt's father and Albano's father about the people they had lost.
The defense called his biological and adoptive relatives, his friends from Idaho, and the former girlfriend who had turned down the request to kill his business associate; she told the jury he had been happy, never rude or disrespectful, and calm even when his girlfriend was angry with him. Witnesses described him as kind, gentle, respectful, not aggressive, and a good and caring father to his son.
Two experts testified. Kirsten Fleming, a neuropsychologist, found him a bright man with "a very high-functioning brain," with no sign of acquired or developmental brain damage, though she noted a "somewhat low frustration level." Samuel Benson Jr., a psychiatrist, said Rogers did not fit the profile of a serial killer, and that because his brain functioned normally he could not explain the crimes as the product of a malfunctioning brain.
In argument both sides addressed the mitigating factors: no prior convictions, no criminal conduct for most of his adult life, respect toward women and elders, military service, love for his son, his family's pleas for his life, and any lingering doubt about his guilt. The prosecutor told the jurors that the three murders had been proved, "three of them," and, on the question of compassion, that Rogers "gave none, he deserves none."
The jury returned a verdict of death. It used a single death verdict form that did not say which counts it covered. Judge Link entered the judgment of death on September 10, 1997, and the sentence was imposed on all three counts, including the second degree count.
Every California death judgment goes directly to the state Supreme Court. Rogers was represented by Kent Barkhurst, a deputy state public defender; Deputy Attorney General Adrianne S. Denault argued for the state. The court decided the case, People v. Rogers, on July 6, 2009. Justice Marvin Baxter wrote the opinion, and Chief Justice Ronald George and Justices Joyce Kennard, Kathryn Werdegar, Ming Chin, Carlos Moreno and Carol Corrigan joined it. There was no dissent.
The central search question was whether the officers could enter the storage rooms without a warrant. The court held that they could. Given the missing-person report, the mother's account of the threat to lock her daughter in storage, Rogers's inconsistent accounts and his refusal to let officers look, exigent circumstances justified the entries before the telephonic warrant was obtained.
The court rejected a long series of other claims. It found the written questionnaire and the judge's questioning of jurors adequate, and held that a claim about racial-bias questions had been forfeited because the defense never asked for them. It held that the witness's question about whom he would kill next, and his reaction to it, was admissible: his response was nonverbal conduct, not hearsay, and relevant to consciousness of guilt. It upheld the use of photographs of the victims in life and of autopsy photographs. It assumed that the evidence of the note left in a locked car might have been wrongly admitted but found any error harmless.
On the change of judges for the verdicts, the court held that Rogers had forfeited the issue by not objecting, and that any error was harmless and not structural. It rejected his argument that the single, unlabeled death verdict form had misled the jury into weighing the second degree murder as a capital crime, finding the prosecutor's reference to "three murders" a fair argument about the circumstances of the crimes.
At the penalty phase, the court assumed that the trial judge had misread one sentence of an instruction, telling jurors they "may" rather than "shall" consider mitigating evidence, but found no prejudice because the correct instructions had been read twice and given to the jury in writing. It held that the prosecutor's "he deserves none" remark had been forfeited by the lack of an objection and was not misconduct in any case, since a prosecutor may argue that a defendant does not deserve mercy. It rejected his challenges to California's death penalty statute, to the lack of intercase proportionality review, and under international law, and it found no cumulative prejudice.
The one error that required a change was on count two. A death sentence is not an authorized punishment for second degree murder, and the trial court had imposed one on the Stadt count. The Supreme Court corrected the judgment to provide a prison term of 15 years to life on that count and, as modified, affirmed the judgment of death.
Judge Link served more than 40 years in the San Diego County courts and, by his count, ruled on more than 250 murder cases, three of which ended in death sentences. Speaking to KFMB-TV as he prepared to retire, he named the Rogers case among them, describing a man who had killed a woman he called his wife, his pregnant girlfriend and his best friend.
The victims' families took part in the case. Toronczak's mother, who had pressed for a search from Germany and passed on the warning that led police to the storage rooms, testified at the penalty phase. So did the fathers of Ron Stadt and Rose Albano.
Proven and final: the first degree murders of Beatrice Toronczak and Rose Albano, the second degree murder of Ron Stadt, and the multiple-murder special circumstance, all affirmed in 2009.
Contested at trial: Rogers's guilt on every count. The defense argued that he had no motive, that others did, that key witnesses were not credible, and that no physical evidence linked him to Stadt's or Albano's deaths. It argued that his girlfriend had a motive and the means of access in Toronczak's case. The jury rejected those arguments, and the Supreme Court found the evidence and the trial fair enough to stand.
Not established: how any of the three died. The court's opinion does not give a cause of death for any victim, and Stadt's body has never been found. The jury's second degree verdict on Stadt means it did not find that his killing was premeditated.
Never charged: the request to a former girlfriend to kill a business associate, which Rogers said was a test. The 1994 and 1995 batteries were proved only as uncharged acts at the penalty phase.
Details that vary: Judge Link, in his later interview, described Toronczak as Rogers's wife; the trial record describes her as the mother of his son. The ages reported by UPI in 1997 do not say whether they refer to the victims' ages at their deaths.
July 1992: Ron Stadt separates from his wife and briefly lives with Rogers.
January 1993: Rogers meets and begins pursuing a woman going through a divorce, who later testifies against him.
April or May 1993: Stadt learns of Rogers's affair with his estranged wife.
June 24, 1993: After a heated phone call with Rogers, Stadt leaves work to meet him and is not seen again.
July 2, 1993: Rogers tells an Imperial Beach detective that Stadt came by that evening for the jewelry.
December 17, 1993: Rose Albano withdraws more than $4,600 from her retirement account.
December 18, 1993: Her parents see her for the last time.
December 23 and 24, 1993: Rogers reports her missing twice, giving different last-seen dates.
December 29, 1993: She is found dead in the Valley Center area of San Diego County; she is identified by January 27, 1994.
March 1994: Police question Rogers about Albano's death; he hands his passport, money and bank card to a friend, saying he fears being a suspect.
1994: Uncharged battery on a woman.
March 1995: Uncharged battery on his then girlfriend.
Late 1995: Rogers travels to Warsaw for his son.
January 3, 1996: He returns to San Diego with the boy.
February 11, 1996: Beatrice Toronczak arrives in San Diego and moves into his apartment.
February 18, 1996: Her birthday; she is last seen on or shortly after this date.
February 24, 1996: A woman asks Rogers whom he will kill next; he reacts with visible agitation.
March 6, 1996: A missing-person report is made to San Diego police on behalf of Toronczak's mother.
March 11, 1996: Detective Richard Carlson calls Rogers, then goes to the complex; officers enter the storage rooms and obtain a telephonic search warrant.
1996: Rogers is charged with the murders of Toronczak, Albano and Stadt.
June 9, 1997: Jury selection begins in San Diego County Superior Court.
June 30, 1997: Verdicts: first degree murder of Toronczak and Albano, second degree murder of Stadt, multiple-murder special circumstance true.
July 1997: Penalty phase; the jury returns a verdict of death.
September 10, 1997: Judge Frederic L. Link enters the judgment of death.
July 6, 2009: The California Supreme Court affirms the judgment of death as modified, setting the sentence on the second degree count at 15 years to life.