“They found DNA on the victims that didn’t match mine—big surprise,” he wrote to a friend from jail in 2003, per Green’s Last Call, “and they didn’t find any evidence of a crime scene in my house or my apartment that I was living in at the time.”
But prosecutors leaned heavily into the fingerprint evidence. “Thomas Mulcahy, 16 fingerprints, nine different fingers,” Ocean County Prosecutor William Heisler said in his opening statement. “Anthony Marrero, two fingerprints on the bag containing his head, and another palm print. Peter Anderson, 17 fingerprints and a palm print. Michael Sakara turns up dead 27 hours after he’s seen with him.”
Though he ultimately wasn’t charged with the murders of Anderson and Sakara—both homicides that technically remain open to this day—authorities expressed belief then and now that Rogers killed them both, and the judge at his 2005 trial allowed prosecutors to introduce evidence from those cases.
Rogers did not testify on his own behalf. The jury found him guilty of murder after a few hours of deliberations.
Mulcahy’s daughter Tracey sent a presentencing statement to the judge, in which she called her father “a good man who worked hard, and he deserved the best from life. For me…that’s what made what Richard Rogers did all the more tragic.”
Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York premieres Sunday, July 9, on HBO at 9 p.m. and will be streaming on Max, with episodes dropping weekly.