Richard W. Rogers
Early Testimony
The prosecution opened its case on October 28, 2005, with witnesses who discovered the bodies. Donald Giberson described how he came across a plastic bag on a dead-end dirt road on May 10, 1993 that proved to contain just the arms of Anthony Marrero from New York. Marrero had been a known gay hustler who disappeared. Giberson stepped close to the bag and believed it contained a rotting deer carcass, but when he recognized human fingers, he called the police. Thomas Mulcahy's remains were found less than a year earlier, on July 10, 1992, in trash containers at two separate rest areas along roads in Ocean and Burlington Counties.
The police searched for leads in the Marrero case, later connecting the arms to a torso and legs found elsewhere, but the case nevertheless went cold for seven years. Mark Woodfield, the lead investigator, looked at several suspects just after the dismembered bodies were found, and took their fingerprints, but the technology to lift reliable prints from plastic bags was not available for making comparisons until 2000.
Matching fingerprints from the bags to Rogers at that time was the first break in the case. A New Jersey State Police fingerprint expert, Detective Sergeant Jeffrey Scozzafava, testified on November 1 to how sixteen prints from the bags that wrapped the remains of Thomas Mulcahy were a match to Richard Rogers, a former nurse at Manhattan's Mount Sinai Hospital. Only one fingerprint that was also lifted from the bags remained unidentified, he said.
Since there are more prints than just those of Rogers on the bags, defense attorney David Ruhnke insists that the presence of Rogers' prints does not necessarily implicate him in murder.
This is one of the four cases in which the prosecution will be allowed to present evidence. Reporters in New Jersey papers indicate that challenging the fingerprint evidence is likely to be Ruhnke's key strategy. However, with Rogers' fingerprints found on several bags used to wrap gay male victims who were all treated essentially the same way, it will be difficult for a jury to dismiss that as incidental unless the fingerprints of some other person are also found on bags that wrapped more than one of the victims. Yet Rogers was seen with the victims before they disappeared, which adds circumstantial evidence to the case.
Rogers is also suspected in a fifth murder that will not be included in these proceedings.