Richard W. Rogers Jr. was a surgical nurse at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, a man neighbors on Staten Island remembered as polite, tidy and quick to lend a hand. In November 2005 a jury in Toms River, New Jersey, convicted him of murdering two men he had met in Manhattan: Thomas Mulcahy, a Massachusetts sales executive killed in July 1992, and Anthony Marrero, a New Yorker killed in May 1993. Both men were stabbed, and their bodies were cut apart and left in plastic bags along roads in southern New Jersey.
The killings belonged to a series that alarmed gay New York in the early 1990s. Four middle-aged gay or bisexual men who had last been seen in Manhattan bars or near the Port Authority Bus Terminal were found dismembered beside highways in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York between 1991 and 1993, and the tabloids called the unknown killer the "Last Call Killer." Rogers was charged with only the two New Jersey deaths. The jury also heard evidence about the other two, Peter Stickney Anderson in 1991 and Michael Sakara in 1993, but no state ever charged him with them.
The case was solved by fingerprints. Twenty years earlier, in 1973, Rogers had killed a housemate in Maine with a hammer, told a jury it was self-defense and been acquitted. Maine kept his prints. When New Jersey detectives sent newly recovered prints from the bags across the country in 2000 and 2001, Maine was the state that answered. Rogers has always denied the killings.
Rogers was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the eldest of five children of a lobster fisherman and a telephone worker, the New York Daily News reported after his arrest. He was named for his father, Richard Westall Rogers, an outdoorsman who taught his son to hunt deer and ducks and to fish along the Plymouth coast. In the early 1960s, according to a cousin quoted by the Daily News, the father moved the family to Florida for a better-paid job as a machinist.
Rogers graduated from Florida Southern College in Lakeland in 1972 with a major in French, and belonged to the junior Kiwanis and the Spanish club there. He then went north to the University of Maine at Orono as a graduate student in French.
On the afternoon of Saturday, April 28, 1973, Rogers killed Frederic A. Spencer, 22, a fellow University of Maine student who lived in the same building in Orono. Spencer's body was found a few days later by two bicyclists off Route 116 in Old Town, wrapped in a nylon tent. Rogers was arrested that spring and charged with murder.
At his trial in Penobscot County Superior Court that fall, Rogers testified that when he walked into his room, Spencer came at him with a hammer. He said he wrenched the hammer away and struck Spencer with it repeatedly, then held a plastic bag over his head to stop him struggling. He admitted that he had cleaned the room, thrown out a bloodstained carpet, waited for dark and left the body in the woods. "I wanted very much to go to the police," he told the court, as the Bangor Daily News reported, "but by then I felt it would look very suspicious."
The judge reduced the charge to manslaughter. In November 1973 the jury, after about three hours, acquitted him. Rogers spent about six months in jail before the verdict. On his way out he thanked a juror and assured him the jury had done the right thing, the Daily News recounted in 2001.
The Maine attorney general's office kept an index card on the case. Among other details it recorded his fingerprints, which went into a state police filing cabinet and stayed there.
After the acquittal Rogers moved to New York and studied nursing at Pace University in Manhattan, earning a master's degree in 1978. He joined Mount Sinai Medical Center in 1979 and worked there for 22 years, rising to surgical assignments. At the time of his arrest he was caring for children with heart conditions in the pediatric surgical intensive care unit. His state nursing license was clean.
He lived for many years in a co-op on Merle Place on Staten Island, where neighbors described him as the kind of neighbor everyone wanted: helpful, friendly, and almost compulsively clean. One recalled the constant sound of his vacuum cleaner; another remembered him carrying garbage bags out inside cardboard boxes. The Merle Place apartment was fully renovated around 1995. About a year before his arrest he moved to a townhouse on Bridge Court in the Fort Wadsworth section of Staten Island.
The 2008 appellate opinion in his case records that Rogers was a gay man who frequented gay bars in Manhattan, among them the Townhouse on East 58th Street and the Five Oaks in Greenwich Village, that he was generally drawn to men older than himself, and that he sometimes told people he was a nurse at St. Vincent's hospital, where he never worked. Friends and relatives quoted in 2001 said they had never been sure of his orientation.
In August 1988 Rogers was arrested on Staten Island after a 47-year-old Manhattan man told police that, a month earlier, he had gone to Rogers's Merle Place apartment, lost consciousness and woken to find himself tied to the bed while Rogers beat him. Rogers was charged with assault and unlawful imprisonment. He was acquitted at a trial without a jury. The New York Post reported in 2001 that the verdict came in December 1988, before Judge Charles Kuffner; Gay City News, reporting on a 2004 prosecution motion, and NBC's TODAY.com in 2023 put the acquittal in 1990. The records were sealed.
Peter Stickney Anderson was 54, a 1960 graduate of Trinity College who had worked for years as a broker in New York and then, from 1975 to 1988, as an assistant vice president and portfolio manager in Mellon Bank's trust group in Philadelphia. He lived alone at the Wanamaker House on Walnut Street. He was a staff sergeant in the First City Troop, the Philadelphia cavalry unit of the Pennsylvania National Guard that traces its history to 1774, and friends said his 13 years in the troop were the association he was proudest of. He was a history enthusiast, active in Republican politics and charities, and the father of two. His estranged wife told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he was "such a gentleman" and that she could not imagine why anyone would hurt him.
On Friday, May 3, 1991, Anderson rode to New York with a friend to attend a fundraising dinner for Tony Brooks, a Philadelphia City Council candidate, and stayed in the city. He was last seen in Manhattan that night; the 2008 court opinion places him near the Waldorf Astoria. On May 5 a maintenance worker found his body in a trash barrel at a rest area on the westbound Pennsylvania Turnpike in Rapho Township, Lancaster County, wrapped in several layers of plastic bags. He had been stabbed in the abdomen, and his body had been mutilated. Members of his troop on their way to drill at Fort Indiantown Gap recognized him from a police sketch posted at turnpike tollbooths, and National Guard dental records confirmed his identity. He was buried on Martha's Vineyard.
Rogers was never charged with Anderson's death. At his New Jersey trial, however, fingerprint examiners matched prints on the bags that held Anderson's body to Rogers, and the judge allowed the jury to hear the evidence.
Thomas R. Mulcahy, 57, grew up in the West Roxbury and Roslindale neighborhoods of Boston, was educated at Boston College and Fordham University, and had worked since about 1960 for Honeywell's computer business and its successor, Bull HN Information Systems of Billerica, Massachusetts, where he was director of international account sales. He had once run Honeywell's office in Johannesburg. He and his wife, Margaret, had lived in Sudbury since 1961 and raised four children there. He was a parishioner at Our Lady of Fatima, where he had helped organize the couples' club, and neighbors remembered the annuals he planted around the house every spring.
"He was such a loving father," his youngest daughter, Tracy, then 18, told the Courier-Post after his death. In a joint statement his children said they had grown up with "a great dad and a great friend." Police later said his family had told them he was bisexual; friends and co-workers had not known. Prosecutors at trial described him as a bisexual man who visited gay bars when he was in New York on business.
On Tuesday, July 7, 1992, Mulcahy flew from Boston to New York and checked into the Barbizon Hotel on East 63rd Street. The next morning he gave a sales presentation to about 20 business people at the World Trade Center. He was last seen there that afternoon and later in the evening; the court record places him near the Townhouse bar at about 10:30 to 11:15 p.m. on July 8. He never checked out of the hotel, and his belongings were left in the room.
On the morning of Friday, July 10, 1992, state highway workers collecting trash from the Butler Place rest area on Route 72 in Woodland Township, Burlington County, took the bags to a maintenance yard, where one broke open. Inside six bags were human remains. That afternoon a second crew found a further bag at the Stafford Forge rest area on the Garden State Parkway in Ocean County. Mulcahy's identification card, his briefcase and business papers were in the bags, and he was identified within two days. His wife had gone to the Sudbury police to report him missing on Friday afternoon and was told there that he was dead.
The medical examiner found that he had died of stab wounds to the chest and abdomen, probably on July 9. Ligature marks on his wrists suggested he had been tied. Investigators told reporters that the body had been taken apart with near surgical precision. In the bags they also found a saw, latex gloves and other items that would later be traced to stores on Staten Island. Burlington County Prosecutor Stephen Raymond said there were no suspects.
Anthony E. Marrero was 44. He was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in and around Philadelphia. His brother Louis told The New York Times in 1993 that as a young man Anthony had dreamed of pitching for the Phillies and had once been invited to a daylong tryout; he kept the invitation and showed it to his brother. His marriage broke up in 1980, and after that, his brother said, he traveled, visiting their mother in California and spending time in Washington and New York, sometimes returning with stories of good fortune and sometimes asking for help. He settled in New York around 1985 and worked for eight months in 1990 as a custodian.
Police and prosecutors said that by 1993 Marrero was struggling with drug addiction and supported himself through sex work with men around the Port Authority Bus Terminal. That is how the record frames his last days; it is not the whole of who he was.
Marrero was last seen near the Port Authority in early May 1993; sources give dates from May 4 to May 6. On May 10, 1993, his dismembered remains were found in bags beside a dirt road in Manchester Township, Ocean County. He had been stabbed several times in the back. Police identified him by showing his photograph to people who knew him at the bus terminal. One of the bags was a plastic grocery bag from the Acme chain's President's Choice line, which investigators later traced to a store on Staten Island.
Michael J. Sakara, 56, was a typesetter at the New York Law Journal who lived on West End Avenue on Manhattan's Upper West Side. He was 6 feet 4, with a deep baritone, and for more than 20 years he had been a regular at the Five Oaks, a piano bar on Grove Street in Greenwich Village, where he sang show tunes while Marie Blake played and often closed the night with "I'll Be Seeing You." Friends described him as bright, worldly and wary. He had lived openly with a partner for nine years until the partner moved out in early 1993.
In the early hours of July 30, 1993, Sakara left the Five Oaks; the 2008 court opinion says he left with Rogers at about 4:30 a.m. The next morning a hot dog vendor found his head and arms in a trash can at a scenic overlook on Route 9W in Haverstraw, Rockland County. His legs and torso were found on August 8, about eight miles north in Stony Point. He had died of severe head injuries.
No fingerprints linked Rogers to the bags that held Sakara's remains. But a Five Oaks bartender later testified that Sakara had spent his last night at the bar with a man he introduced as Mark or John, a nurse at St. Vincent's, and she identified that man as Rogers. Rockland County prosecutors never charged Rogers, citing a lack of evidence, The Journal News reported in 2015.
Sakara's death brought the cases together. Rockland County District Attorney Kenneth Gribetz said in early August 1993 that investigators were comparing the Haverstraw remains with the New Jersey deaths of Mulcahy and Marrero and with the Pennsylvania death of Anderson. Medical examiners noted the similar way the bodies had been cut apart and packed. Law enforcement agencies in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania formed a joint task force, and the FBI was consulted.
The New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project offered a $10,000 reward and handed out fliers in the West Village with safety advice: learn the name of anyone you take home, introduce him to friends, and make sure someone knows whom you left with. Activists from groups such as Queer Nation pressed the New York police to take a more active role. A fifth death that summer, that of Guillermo Mendez, a Cuban refugee found dismembered near Schenectady in July 1992, was briefly examined and then set aside; Schenectady's police chief said he did not believe it was related.
Detectives followed the "Mark or John" lead by gathering employment photographs of male nurses from city hospitals, including Mount Sinai. The bartender was shown Rogers's picture in 1993. Accounts differ on what she said: a lieutenant testified at trial that she picked him out, while other reports say she thought the hair looked similar but did not make a positive identification. Either way, because Rogers worked at Mount Sinai and not St. Vincent's, he was not pursued. Investigators also traced the grocery bag and the saw to the area of a Staten Island shopping strip, but fingerprints from the bags matched no one on file. The 2008 opinion records that the task force had gone cold by the end of 1993.
For the rest of the decade the cases sat unsolved in three states. Rogers kept working at Mount Sinai. According to evidence later summarized by TODAY.com from the trial record, he stopped going to the bars after the killings and, when he returned, told acquaintances different stories about where he had been.
What reopened the investigation was a phone call. According to the 2008 appellate opinion, the task force was revived in 2000 after Margaret Mulcahy asked the New Jersey State Police for an update on her husband's case, at a time when fingerprint technology had improved. A 14-member task force with investigators from the New Jersey State Police, Ocean County and Rockland County took up the case in March 2000.
The evidence went to Canada for vacuum metal deposition, a process in which a thin film of metal, such as gold and zinc, is evaporated onto smooth surfaces such as plastic, revealing prints that ordinary powders miss. The court record says the Toronto Police obtained 17 prints from the Mulcahy evidence in July 2000; the Hartford Courant reported in 2001 that the work was done by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Sixteen of the prints matched unidentified prints already lifted from the bags that held Marrero. The two New Jersey killings were now tied to the same person, but no database held his prints.
Investigators mailed packets with the prints and a summary of the case to agencies in every state and Puerto Rico. In April 2001 they also resubmitted the prints to the national Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Maine had not been part of that system when the prints were first run in the 1990s. Maine State Police had since begun entering their old paper records, and on May 14, 2001, a Maine analyst reported that the prints matched those taken from Richard Rogers in 1973. "It took a long time to do the mundane job of putting the fingerprints into the database," a Maine State Police major told the Hartford Courant, "but something like this makes it all worthwhile."
Final comparisons attributed 16 prints on the Mulcahy bags, two prints and a palm print on the Marrero bags, and 18 prints and a palm print on the Anderson bags to Rogers. None were found on the Sakara evidence.
On May 27, 2001, New York City police officers asked Rogers to come to police headquarters, suggesting that he might be the victim of credit card fraud. The next day, May 28, a lieutenant and a detective interviewed him after he signed a waiver of his rights. When they laid out the evidence, the court record says, he nodded and became visibly nervous; he then asked for a lawyer and the interview ended. Contemporary reports describe his arrest that week at Mount Sinai.
Investigators searched his Bridge Court townhouse, his former Merle Place apartment and his locker at work. They reported carpet fibers consistent with fibers found with Mulcahy's remains, and the prosecution later introduced a Bible from his home with marked passages about a nurse and about the dismemberment of a murder victim. No human remains were found. Rogers at first fought extradition, then was taken to New Jersey, where he appeared before Superior Court Judge Peter J. Giovine in Toms River, entered no plea, and was held in the Ocean County Jail on $1 million bail. He remained there until trial.
Police across the Northeast reopened old cases after the arrest. Connecticut detectives said they would look at the 1986 death of Jack Franklin Andrews, whose remains were found at a Route 8 rest stop in Litchfield, and the 1994 death of Benjamin Rosario in Bridgeport.
In January 2003 an Ocean County grand jury indicted Rogers on two counts of murder and two counts of hindering apprehension. Ocean County Prosecutor Thomas F. Kelaher said both men had been stabbed repeatedly and that Rogers had met them shortly before they died. He explained the nearly two-year gap between arrest and indictment as the time needed to compare evidence and run tests across several agencies.
Rogers's lawyer, David A. Ruhnke, raised two main challenges. The first was jurisdiction. The prosecution's own theory was that the killings happened on Staten Island, where Rogers lived, and New Jersey may try a murder only if the death or the injury that caused it occurred in New Jersey. The second was the fingerprints. "A lot of fingerprint science comes down to a fingerprint examiner saying 'I know it when I see it,'" Ruhnke told Gay City News in 2004. He also called the bite-mark evidence in the case "classic junk science."
Prosecutors, for their part, asked to tell the jury about the deaths of Anderson and Sakara, the 1982 Florida death of Matthew John Pierro, and the 1988 Staten Island case. After a hearing in September 2005, Judge James N. Citta ruled on September 29 that the jury could hear about Anderson and Sakara, to show identity, opportunity, intent and plan. He excluded the Pierro case as too remote and too different, and the 1988 case was not admitted.
The case was tried before Judge Citta in Toms River in the fall of 2005. William J. Heisler, chief trial attorney in the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office, presented 33 or 34 witnesses, among them the workers who found the remains, detectives, medical examiners and fingerprint analysts. The prosecution argued that all four men had been stabbed, bore ligature marks, had been packed the same way in plastic bags, had been washed, and had been cut apart in nearly identical ways.
Lieutenant Matthew Kuehn of the New Jersey State Police testified that Mount Sinai attendance records showed Rogers was off work on and after the day Mulcahy disappeared, on May 5 and 6, 1993, and on the relevant days in the Anderson and Sakara cases. The Five Oaks bartender placed him with Sakara on Sakara's last night.
Ruhnke told the jury that police had arrested the wrong man. Fingerprints on bags, he argued, showed at most that Rogers had handled them, and other unidentified prints were found too. He cross-examined the fingerprint witnesses about the FBI's mistaken 2004 identification of an Oregon lawyer in the Madrid bombing case. Rogers did not testify and called no witnesses.
Because no one knew where the men had died, the jury was told it could infer that a murder took place in New Jersey from the fact that the body was found there, and it answered a special question on that point. On November 10, 2005, after about three hours of deliberation, it found Rogers guilty of both murders and both counts of hindering apprehension, and found that New Jersey had jurisdiction over both killings. Prosecutors had not sought the death penalty.
"In my personal view," Heisler told Gay City News, the fingerprint evidence, "his fingerprints on bags containing dead bodies obtained over two years, was pretty compelling." Ruhnke said he understood the verdict: "I hope they are right and they haven't convicted an innocent man."
On January 27, 2006, Judge Citta imposed the maximum the law allowed: life in prison with 30 years of parole ineligibility on each murder, and five years with two and a half years of parole ineligibility on each hindering count, all four to run one after another. The parole bars add up to 65 years. Rogers was 55. According to the Associated Press, as reported by Gay City News, Citta called him "an evil human being" and said he hoped Rogers would die in prison "without ever having freedom again."
Clarence Patton, executive director of the Anti-Violence Project, called the sentence the end of a long struggle for two of the families and said he hoped the other cases would be resolved so those families could have some closure.
Rogers appealed. His lawyer had said the decision to admit the Anderson and Sakara evidence was "enormously prejudicial," since it presented him to the jury as a serial killer. On July 22, 2008, the Appellate Division (Judges Lisa, Lihotz and Simonelli) affirmed the convictions and sentence in State v. Rogers, No. A-5885-05T4. It found the similarities among the four killings strong enough to count as a signature, held that the Sakara killing had been proven by clear and convincing evidence, and found no error in the jury instructions, the admission of his head-nodding during the police interview, the prosecutor's summation, or the instructions on territorial jurisdiction. The New Jersey Supreme Court declined to hear the case (196 N.J. 599, 2008).
Rogers then sought post-conviction relief, arguing among other things that his trial lawyer should have sought a change of venue and investigated two men he said had made incriminating statements. Judge James Den Uyl denied the petition on October 19, 2010. The Appellate Division affirmed on September 4, 2014, calling the claim about the two men a bald assertion with nothing to support it and finding no sign of community prejudice in Ocean County. No later ruling in his favor has been reported.
Rogers is serving his sentence in the New Jersey prison system. The Journal News reported in 2015 that he was at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, the state's maximum-security prison. TODAY.com reported in July 2023 that he was serving two consecutive life sentences. He refused requests from the journalist Elon Green for an interview, The Guardian reported in 2021, and he has never publicly discussed the killings. His lawyer said after the verdict that Rogers maintained he was innocent of all the crimes.
He was still in a New Jersey prison in July 2023. Under the terms imposed in 2006, he cannot be considered for parole until he has served at least 65 years.
Margaret Mulcahy, whose call helped restart the investigation, lived to see the conviction. The families of Peter Anderson and Michael Sakara never saw anyone charged. Prosecutors in Rockland County and in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, did not bring cases against Rogers.
The case drew new attention in 2021 with Elon Green's book Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York, which won the Edgar Award for best fact crime and centers on the victims' lives. Green told The Guardian he believed the long delay in solving the case owed something to anti-gay indifference and to leads that were not followed, as well as to the way the bodies were spread across jurisdictions. HBO adapted the book as a four-part documentary series, Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York, which premiered on July 9, 2023, with interviews with victims' relatives and partners, activists and investigators.
Convicted, and final: the murders of Thomas Mulcahy and Anthony Marrero, and two counts of hindering apprehension.
Suspected, never charged, evidence admitted at trial: Peter Stickney Anderson (Pennsylvania, 1991), linked by fingerprints on the bags; Michael Sakara (New York, 1993), linked by a witness who saw them together and by similarities in the killing, with no forensic link. Both were proven only to the standard the trial judge applied for admitting evidence, not by a verdict.
Prime suspect, never charged: Matthew John Pierro, found stabbed and strangled near Interstate 4 in Lake Mary, Florida, on April 10, 1982, after leaving a gay bar in Orlando. Police said a bite mark on his body matched Rogers's teeth and that Rogers was in Florida at the time; the defense called bite-mark comparison junk science, and the trial judge excluded the case. Sources give Pierro's age as 21 or 25.
Examined, never charged: the Connecticut deaths of Jack Franklin Andrews (1986) and Benjamin Rosario (1994). No published result linked them to Rogers.
Acquitted: the 1973 death of Frederic Spencer in Maine, which Rogers admitted causing and called self-defense, and the 1988 Staten Island case. These are not murders in law.
About 1950: Richard Westall Rogers Jr. is born in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Early 1960s: the family moves to Florida.
1972: graduates from Florida Southern College in French.
April 28, 1973: kills Frederic A. Spencer, 22, in Orono, Maine; arrested that spring.
November 1973: acquitted of manslaughter in Penobscot County Superior Court.
1978: master's degree in nursing, Pace University.
1979: begins work at Mount Sinai Medical Center.
August 1988: arrested on Staten Island on assault and unlawful imprisonment charges; later acquitted at a non-jury trial (December 1988 or 1990).
May 3 to 5, 1991: Peter Stickney Anderson is last seen in Manhattan and found on the Pennsylvania Turnpike (suspected; never charged).
July 8, 1992: Thomas Mulcahy is last seen in Manhattan.
July 10, 1992: his remains are found in Burlington and Ocean counties, New Jersey.
Early May 1993: Anthony Marrero is last seen near the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
May 10, 1993: his remains are found in Manchester Township, New Jersey.
July 30 to August 8, 1993: Michael Sakara leaves the Five Oaks; his remains are found in Haverstraw and Stony Point, New York (suspected; never charged).
August 1993: multistate task force forms; $10,000 reward offered.
End of 1993: investigation goes cold.
March 2000: task force revived after Margaret Mulcahy asks for an update.
July 2000: prints recovered from the Mulcahy evidence in Canada; they match the Marrero prints.
April 2001: prints resubmitted nationally.
May 14, 2001: Maine reports a match to Rogers's 1973 prints.
May 28, 2001: Rogers is interviewed by New York detectives and arrested that week.
January 2003: indicted in Ocean County on two murders and two hindering counts.
September 29, 2005: judge admits the Anderson and Sakara evidence.
November 10, 2005: convicted on all counts.
January 27, 2006: sentenced to consecutive terms totaling at least 65 years before parole eligibility.
July 22, 2008: Appellate Division affirms; certification later denied.
October 19, 2010: post-conviction relief denied.
September 4, 2014: denial affirmed.
2021: Elon Green's Last Call is published.
July 9, 2023: HBO series premieres; Rogers reported still serving his sentence.