Every day was hot in Houston in the summer of 1965. We lived in a second-floor walk-up Midtown apartment in an old building on Hadley Street with no air conditioning. I can remember a rotating cube on a nearby bank building that displayed the time and temperature. It was always in the 90s.
On June 23, just under 2 miles west of our apartment, Houston police captain Charles Bullock and his partner L. M. Barta went to 1815 Driscoll Street to check on an elderly couple at the request of a worried nephew.
As far as I can remember, I never knew anything about this case until just recently.1
1815 Driscoll Street, Houston, Texas,
scene of what was to become known as the Ice Box Murders
scene of what was to become known as the Ice Box Murders
The 1965 Houston Ice Box Murders2
On June 23, 1965, two Houston police officers were dispatched to the Montrose neighborhood home of 81-year-old Fred and 72-year-old Edwina Rogers to conduct a welfare check after Edwina’s nephew Marvin reported that his phone calls to his aunt had gone unanswered for days. After receiving no answer after knocking, the officers forced their way into the Rogers’ home. Upon entering, the officers found nothing unusual but noticed food sitting on the dining room table. One officer opened the refrigerator and found what appeared to be numerous cuts of washed, unwrapped meat neatly stacked on the shelves. The officer later recalled that he thought the meat was that of a butchered hog. As the officer was closing the door, he noticed two human heads visible through the clear glass of the vegetable bin. The heads were those of Fred and Edwina Rogers. What the officer initially thought were unwrapped cuts of hog meat were the couple’s dismembered limbs and torsos. Police later discovered the couple’s organs in a nearby sewer (the organs had been removed, cut up, and flushed down the toilet) while other remains were never found.
Police determined that Fred and Edwina Rogers had been killed on June 20, Father’s Day. An autopsy showed that Fred was bludgeoned to death with a claw hammer. His eyes had been gouged out and his genitalia were removed. Edwina had been beaten and shot, execution style, in the head. Police further said that the bodies were dismembered in the upstairs bathroom by a person “with some knowledge of anatomy”. There was little blood in the house and it appeared it had been thoroughly cleaned after the murders. The little blood that was found led to the bedroom of Charles Rogers, the 43-year-old son of Fred and Edwina. There, police found a bloodstained keyhole saw but no trace of Rogers himself. A search for Rogers was launched and a warrant was issued for him as a material witness to the crime, but he was never found.
In 1975, a Houston judge declared Rogers legally dead so his estate could be probated. The case still remains officially unsolved and Rogers remains the only suspect.
Houston forensic accountant Hugh Gardenier and his wife Martha have continued to investigate the case and concluded that Rogers did murder his parents and was later killed in Honduras. While they have dismissed John R. Craig and Philip A. Rogers’s claim that Rogers was a CIA operative due to a lack of evidence, they admit that Rogers did have dealings with contract workers for the CIA when he worked as a seismologist.
The Gardeniers believe that Rogers planned the murder of his parents for years because his father was abusive and both parents were “devious con artists”. According to them, Fred worked as a bookie who regularly engaged in illegal activities such as gambling and fraud. They believe he continued abusing Charles into adulthood and began stealing large sums of money from him. The Gardeniers claim that after Rogers killed and dismembered his parents, he fled the U.S. for Mexico and was never found because he was aided by “powerful friends” he met through his ham radio hobby and while working for various oil and mining companies. They have theorized that Rogers eventually made his way to Honduras, where he was killed over a wage dispute with miners.
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1815 Driscoll remained empty and abandoned after the murders. It was bulldozed in the early 1970s. The property was joined with others for deluxe townhomes built in 2000.
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Endnotes
- I had been in Houston for only a couple of weeks.
After finishing the 7th grade, my grandparents had driven me from North Platte, Nebraska, to Wichita, Kansas, where I boarded a bus, alone, heading to Houston.
I was 13.
My mom had left my sister and me with our grandparents three years earlier when she went chasing after a husband who had left her. Now, I was spending the summer with her and her newest husband, Harry—not the same man she had been married to in 1962. - “Charles Rogers (Murder Suspect).” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, most recent edit August 28, 2022. Accessed October 20, 2022
Note:
There are numerous articles and posts on the murders and on Charles Rogers. Rather than use them as references to create still another post, it made more sense to just use material from Wikipedia.
