Ex-UM student held in murders 2 deaths linked to Maine case

BANGOR – A former University of Maine student, once tried and acquitted of killing another UM student in Orono in 1973, was arrested in New York City on Tuesday after evidence from the Maine slaying linked him to a series of nearly decade-old murders in other states.

Police detectives from New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, along with the FBI have worked for almost a decade searching for the killer or killers of four gay or bisexual men who were dismembered and discarded along highways there between 1991 and 1993.

A couple of weeks ago, forensic scientists at the Maine State Police Crime Lab let them know they might want to check out Richard W. Rogers Jr. Police arrested Rogers Tuesday morning in New York City and he has been charged with the death of two men. He’s also being investigated in the death of at least two more men. His bail was set Tuesday at $1 million. He remained at a New York City jail and is awaiting extradition to New Jersey.

Rogers, 50, has been living on Staten Island and has worked as a registered nurse at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City for the past 20 years, according to the Ocean County District Attorney’s Office in New Jersey.

Rogers, originally from Plymouth, Mass., was 22 and a graduate student at UM studying French in 1972 and 1973. He lived in an apartment at 10 Main St. in Orono. He quickly became a suspect in the April 1973 death of 22-year-old Frederic A. Spencer, originally from Norwich, N.Y., who lived in the same apartment building.

Spencer’s body was found a few days after his death by two bicyclists riding along a deserted stretch of Route 116 near Old Town. The body was partly wrapped in a small, green nylon tent.

After his arrest, Rogers told police he hit Spencer on the head several times with a hammer when he caught Spencer in his apartment. He said Spencer attacked him with the hammer, but he was able to get the weapon away and struck Spencer until he died.

Six months later, a Penobscot County jury acquitted Rogers of manslaughter.

As the jury left the courtroom that day, Rogers called after one juror and said, “Thank you very much. I assure you that you did the right thing,” according to press reports at the time.

At that time, Rogers said he was anxious to get back to his home in Massachusetts.

But two weeks ago, Rogers’ connection to Maine resurfaced when a set of fingerprints taken from a plastic bag that contained the body parts of a man murdered eight years ago and left along a New Jersey highway landed on the desk of Kim Stevens, a forensic scientist at the Maine crime lab.

“We get prints like this all of the time,” Stevens said Tuesday morning. “We run them, but we don’t usually get a match.”

Maine’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS, is linked to systems in New Hampshire and Vermont. Agencies from across the country often send fingerprints collected from crime scenes off to other states hoping their fingerprints match prints in that state’s system, according to lab director Tim Kupferschmidt.

A task force formed last year to take a new look at the old murders recently resubmitted information to all AFIS operational systems in the country. The last time the prints were submitted, Maine’s AFIS system was not online.

“This is what we do in our normal course of business. We rarely get anything. But this one hit on this gentleman,” the director said. “For the first time in this investigation, they had a name to go with those prints.”

The slayings that occurred from 1991 to 1993 ignited fear among gay men in New York City. The New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-violence Project handed out fliers offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible.

On Tuesday, Rogers was charged with the murder of 44-year-old Anthony E. Marrero of New York City, whose body was found on May 10, 1993, in six trash bags ditched along a New Jersey state highway. Police said at the time that Marrero was seen in several gay bars in Manhattan before he disappeared.

Rogers also was charged Tuesday with the July 1992 death of 58-year-old Thomas Mulcahy, whose dismembered body was discarded in several garbage bags along roadsides and highways in Ocean County, N.J.

Mulcahy, a business executive from Sudbury, Mass., was in New York City for business at the time of his death, according to reports in the The New York Times. He died of multiple stab wounds to the chest, heart, lungs and stomach, according to a police spokesman.

Investigators for years have suspected that the Mulcahy and Marrero killings were connected, in part because of a common fingerprint found on the plastic bags used to dispose of the bodies.

When the first task force was formed it also was looking into the August 1993 death of Michael J. Sakara, 56, of Manhattan. Sakara, a typesetter for The New York Law Journal, was last seen leaving the Five Oaks bar and restaurant in the West Village. He was found the next day in Haverstraw, N.Y., dismembered in two plastic bags inside a garbage can.

On Tuesday, Michael Bongiorno, district attorney for Rockland County, N.Y., said no charges had been filed against Rogers in the Sakara case but added that the matter was being looked at closely.

Meanwhile, a detective from the Pennsylvania State Police was in New Jersey on Tuesday talking with investigators there about Rogers’ arrest. Trooper John Comeford is investigating the May 1991 death of Peter Anderson of Philadelphia, whose dismembered body was discovered along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Lancaster, Pa. Comeford also has been in touch with scientists at the Maine State Police Crime Lab and just last week requested a set of Rogers’ fingerprints.

Anderson was last seen leaving the same Manhattan bar where Mulcahy was last seen, according to reports published in the The New York Times.

While he attended UM, Rogers participated in the folk group that sang at the Newman Center at the university. Roxanne Moore Saucier, a reporter at the Bangor Daily News, sang in the group with him and visited him frequently in jail after he was arrested for Spencer’s death.

“He was just a nice guy who got together with us once a week and sang with us in church,” Moore Saucier recalled Tuesday. “He was quiet. … We never talked about his case because he said he couldn’t talk about it.”