3 On Your Side revisits serial killer’s link to 1995 murder in Jackson

JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) - The mother of a woman who was murdered in Jackson more than 20 years ago is pleading with the governor of Florida to keep her daughter’s alleged killer behind bars.

Carolyn Evans remembers every detail and emotion connected with the violent stabbing death of her daughter, Linda Price, who was 34 when she met Glen Rogers at the Mississippi State Fair in October of 1995.

“Linda was walking down through the fair, and he got ahold of her hair and said, ‘That’s the prettiest red hair I ever saw,’” Evans recalls. "Of course Linda just fell madly in love with him.... First thing we knew, they had rented an apartment together.”

The couple lived at the Briarcliff South apartments on Rainey Road, and they seemed happy. Everyone liked Price’s new boyfriend, who worked on a construction crew building the new Olive Garden restaurant in north Jackson.

“He’d come and eat at my house," Evans says. "I would have never dreamed of him doing what he did. He had so much charisma. He was just a person that could fool you. He really charmed us.”

On Halloween night in 1995, when the family went to get Price to help with trick-or-treating, no one came to the door.

“I looked through the window, (and) what upset me so bad -- the bathroom curtain was pulled (closed)," Evans remembers. "Linda cleaned houses, and she would always leave her bathroom curtain pulled back. So I had the funniest feeling. I told my granddaughter that went with me, I said, ‘Linda’s in that house. I just feel it.’ She said, ‘Mimi, don’t say that,’ but I said I feel like she’s in that house, I really do.”

It would be several days before they could force their way inside. A mother’s intuition was right.

“The guy opened the door and he went in, and when he came out, he was white as a ghost. He looked at me, and he said, 'I’m sorry.’ I said, ‘She was in there, wasn’t she?’ He said, ‘Yes, she was.’ I said, ‘Was she in the bathtub,’ and he said yes.”

Price had been stabbed to death, her body left in the tub. Glen Rogers, the new boyfriend, was gone.

Chuck Lee was the Jackson police detective on call the night Price’s body was found. He is now retired, but he remembers the case well.

“There was a bloody mop in the kitchen sink, there were bloody paper towels in the garbage can, and blood smeared on the floor," he says of the crime scene. He says it was evident that someone had tried to clean it up but soon realized the job was too big.

Lee says after interviewing Price’s family members and acquaintances, it became clear that Rogers was their prime suspect. Jackson police quickly alerted the public to be on the lookout for him. The phones started ringing with calls from investigators in other states where young women had been killed the same way.

“I had police agencies from all over the United States and Canada calling and inquiring about this individual," Lee says. "They had some unsolved murders they were trying to connect him to.”

And there were more to come. On November 6, the body of Tina Marie Cribbs was found in a motel room bathtub in Tampa, Florida. Three days later, the body of Andy Jiles Sutton was found in her apartment in Bossier City, Louisiana.

“When victims started showing up so close together in Mississippi, Louisiana (and) Florida, all indications were that he was going all over the United States, from state to state to state, killing people,” Lee says. “So it had everybody in the United States on high alert. Is he coming to my state next?"

Finally, on November 13, two weeks after Linda Price’s death, Rogers was captured after a high-speed chase in Waco, Kentucky. He was driving the Tampa victim’s car.

“In watching the video of his arrest, you could tell he was not a normal individual by the crazed look on his face,” Lee still recalls.

A jury in Tampa later convicted Rogers of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to the death penalty. He was given another death sentence in Los Angeles for killing a 31-year-old woman he’d met at a bar just before he moved to Jackson.

He was never tried for Price’s death.

“(The Hinds County District Attorney’s Office) made the decision not to try him," Lee says. "He had two death penalties, and they didn’t want to put our victim’s family through the trial.”

All these years later, Rogers, now 57, is still on death row in Florida as a mother continues to grieve back here in Mississippi.

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