Glen Edward Rogers was executed at Florida State Prison on the evening of May 15, 2025, for one murder committed thirty years earlier. He was convicted of two. Five deaths are attributed to him. The number that attached itself to his name in public, and which he supplied himself, was seventy.
He was born at Hamilton, Ohio on July 15, 1962, into a violent and alcoholic household, and had a record of arson, assault and theft from his teens. He was six feet tall, red-haired and easy in company, and he worked the carnivals. That combination is the method of the case rather than decoration on it: he met women in bars, went home with them or moved in within days, and killed them. The press called him the Cross Country Killer, because the deaths were in five states, and the Casanova Killer, because of how he got in the door. He had been in and out of trouble in Ohio for two decades before the first death, and none of it was the kind that puts a man on a national list.
The first death was not a woman and did not fit. Mark Peters, a retired electrician of seventy-two, had given Rogers somewhere to stay. In January 1994 he was found tied to a chair in a cabin belonging to the Rogers family at Beattyville, Kentucky. Police searched it on the suggestion of Rogers's own brother. Two things in that are worth holding on to. The man he killed was someone who had helped him, which is the same relationship in a different form as the women who took him home within days of meeting him. And the person who told the police where to look was his brother, which is the first indication in the record that his own family had worked out what he was.
In September 1995, in Van Nuys in Los Angeles, Sandra Gallagher, thirty-three, a mother of three, was seen with Rogers at a bar. She was strangled, and her body was found the next day in her truck, which had been set alight and was parked near his apartment. California convicted him of her murder in 1999, by which time he had been under sentence of death in Florida for two years. He drew a second death sentence for it, and was returned to the state that already held him.
The pattern was quick and it did not vary much. He met them in bars, he was welcome almost at once, and twice he had been living in the house before he killed the person who owned it. Linda Price had taken him in. So had Mark Peters. The others he killed within a day or two of meeting.
Then, in six weeks, three more. Linda Price, thirty-four, a mother of two, had briefly lived with him; she was found stabbed to death in the bathtub of her home in Jackson, Mississippi on November 3. Tina Marie Cribbs, thirty-four, a mother of two, met him at a lounge at Gibsonton in Florida and gave him a lift back to the carnival lot where he was working; she was found stabbed in the bathroom of the Tampa 8 Inn on November 7. Andy Lou Jiles Sutton, thirty-seven, a mother of four, met him at the It'll Do Lounge in Bossier City, Louisiana, and was found stabbed in her bed on November 9. Every one of the women was a mother in her thirties, and three of them were redheads.
By the time of the third November killing he was the subject of a national manhunt, with four deaths in six weeks across four states and a description circulated everywhere. It ended on November 13, 1995 at Waco, Kentucky, about forty miles from Lexington, after a police pursuit. He was driving Tina Cribbs's white Ford Festiva.
Tina Cribbs's mother, Mary Dickey, tried to reach her daughter repeatedly on the night she was killed and could not. She told the court at the trial that she had known something bad had happened. That is the whole of what the family had for two days, and it is the part of these cases that the file format does not hold: the interval between a woman not answering her telephone and a body being found in a hotel bathroom.
The case against him in Florida was assembled out of very ordinary things. Cribbs's wallet turned up at a rest area, and two of his fingerprints were on a receipt inside it, matching prints found in his room. His watch was under her body. The key to the locked hotel room was in his luggage.
A jury in Tampa convicted him in 1997. He was sentenced to death for the murder, to life for robbery with a weapon, and to five years for grand theft of a motor vehicle. In 1999, while he was already under sentence of death in Florida, California convicted him of the first degree murder of Sandra Gallagher and sentenced him to death there too.
Judge Diane Allen passed the Florida sentence on July 11, 1997, on a unanimous jury recommendation, and the method of execution named at the time was the electric chair. The direct appeal was rejected by the Florida Supreme Court in 2001. What followed was a quarter of a century of further applications in the state and federal courts, none of which succeeded; the Attorney General's letter to the Governor recommending the death warrant set them out as a list.
Mississippi and Louisiana never tried him at all. The reason given was that he was already under a death sentence in Florida. So the deaths of Linda Price and Andy Jiles Sutton were never put to a jury, no verdict was ever returned in either, and the two families never sat through a trial about what happened to them. Linda Price's sister had been the one who reported seeing Rogers with her. Andy Jiles Sutton's children waited twenty-eight years for the execution of a man who was never charged with their mother's death, and said afterwards that he had got what he deserved. Neither killing has a verdict attached to it, and neither ever will.
This is not peculiar to Rogers. It recurs through this archive. Derrick Todd Lee was charged with seven murders and tried on two, and once the death sentence was in place the remaining families chose not to continue. Prosecutors could not bring charges against Sean Vincent Gillis for all eight of the killings he admitted, and put the uncharged ones before the court as evidence at a sentencing hearing instead. A capital sentence closes the file efficiently, and the cases that fall outside it stay open in the only sense that matters to the people waiting on them. What the three cases have in common is that the decision is made on grounds of efficiency, by people who already have the outcome they want, about families who do not.
Against those two convictions, Rogers offered the public a figure of seventy. No investigator has ever supported it. It is the same shape as the claims examined elsewhere in this archive: Henry Lee Lucas cleared 213 cases with confessions the Texas Attorney General later found he could not have committed, and Ottis Toole claimed hundreds and was convicted of two. A number supplied by the man himself is not evidence of anything except that he supplied it.
The extreme version of it arrived in 2012, when a documentary promoted the claim that Rogers had murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. The Los Angeles police rejected it outright. Members of his own family who had appeared in support of it have since walked it back. The claim had no evidentiary basis that any investigating agency accepted, it was advanced about a case that had already been tried and acquitted in criminal court and litigated in a civil one, and it was made on behalf of a man who was by then under two death sentences and had nothing further to lose by making it. It remains the thing many people know about him, which is a fair measure of how far a claim can travel once a killer makes it and someone with a camera repeats it. Rogers himself said nothing to settle it. His last words included the remark that in the near future questions would be answered, which answered none.
Governor Ron DeSantis signed the death warrant on April 15, 2025. The United States Supreme Court denied the final appeals the day before the execution, without comment. Among the arguments his lawyers had run over the years was that the childhood abuse he suffered, now taken seriously enough by the state legislature to feature in other capital statutes, should reduce his sentence to life. His defence had argued through the appeals that he was sexually abused as a child and that it bore on his culpability. No court accepted it as a reason to reduce the sentence.
He was the fifth person Florida executed in 2025, and the year was not half over. That is worth noting because it is the reason the case returned to the news at all, thirty years after the killings and twenty-eight after the trial. Readers who met the name in 2025 were reading about a scheduling decision.
He was pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m. The procedure took sixteen minutes. In a final statement he thanked his wife, who had visited him at the prison that day, said that in the near future questions would be answered, and addressed a remark to the President. No member of Tina Cribbs's family spoke to reporters afterwards. The children of Andy Jiles Sutton issued a statement saying he had got what he deserved, and that he had not deserved the twenty-eight years he had been given.
The arithmetic of the case is worth setting down plainly, because the name he is filed under obscures it. Seventy claimed by him. Five deaths attributed by investigators. Two convictions. One execution, for one woman, thirty years after she gave a man a lift back to a carnival lot.