By Gary C. King
Dayton Leroy Rogers, many readers will recall, was known around Portland, Oregon in the 1980s as the Molalla Forest Killer. Although Rogers was also acknowledged as a respected businessman, devoted husband and father by day, by night he became notorious for abducting women off of Portland's streets and forcing them into sadistic bondage games as he thrilled himself to the point of ecstasy by the pain and mutilation he inflicted upon his victims. If the number of victims who endured Rogers' evil-doings were not enough, it was the homicide probe that revealed the magnitude of Rogers' viciousness that caused him to be remembered as the worst serial killer in Oregon's history.
Born on September 30, 1953 in Moscow, Idaho to a pair of what some would call religious zealots, Rogers moved around considerably during his youth, wherever his parents took him and his siblings. At one point the nearly always strapped for money family was known to have resided for a period in a chicken coop, but by Rogers' teenage years the family had moved west and eventually landed in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, south of Springfield, a somewhat rural area. Rogers' father was known to dislike children, and reports of Dayton's youth indicated that he was frequently subjected to severe punishment by his father for misbehaving. While residing in Pleasant Hill, Rogers attended school and worked part-time as a carpenter. Harboring anger and resentment toward his parents, Rogers' grades were poor — mostly Cs and Ds — and he dropped out of school his sophomore year against his parents' wishes and moved north to Corvallis where he obtained a job as a house painter for $2.35 per hour.
Rogers did not remain in Corvallis for long, however, and soon moved again, this time south to Eugene, Oregon, where he obtained another job as a house painter with a relative on his mother's side of the family. It was while in Eugene that he met and married his first wife, against the wishes of his family — she was not of their faith. His parents, who were Seventh Day Adventists, considered it an utter disgrace for him to marry outside their faith. In August 1972, within 30 days of his marriage, Rogers had his first major run-in with the law when he attacked a 15-year-old girl with a knife after a chance meeting and a sexual encounter which, he claimed, had been consensual. The girl miraculously survived a deep knife wound to her stomach, and Dayton was quickly apprehended by the police because he had told the girl his name. He eventually admitted to the crime and blamed the violent incident on marital problems that he was having with his new wife. As would become his custom Rogers, facing hard jail time, plea-bargained his case down to second-degree assault and pleaded guilty on February 13, 1973. As a result, his hands were slapped and he received no prison time — instead, he was placed on four years' probation.
Rogers soon became consumed by entertaining violent sexual fantasies while drinking heavily, and his drink of choice had become vodka and orange juice — a screwdriver. He was eventually divorced from his first wife, and there were additional attacks on young, teenage girls. But each time that he was caught for his crimes, he had gotten off easy. For the latest attacks, he had been sentenced to a stint as a mental patient at the Oregon State Hospital. Despite violent fantasies during episodes of masturbation, Rogers was back on the streets by the end of 1974. He met the woman who would become his second and final wife a few months later, in 1975, and they were married in October of that year.
