Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer by Gary C. King Read Free Book Online

on the first drive-by, well before
he reached Lombard Street.
    Jenny Smith, twenty-six, a buxom, brown-eyed
blonde, had just garishly poised herself on her turf near the
intersection of Union Avenue and Wygant Street for the fifth or
sixth time that evening. Wearing a charcoal gray-and-white-striped
pullover Nike sweatshirt, skin-tight Levi's jeans that left little
to the imagination, hot-pink socks, and tennis shoes, Jenny hoped
she wouldn't have to wait long for another customer to come along.
Her feet hurt like hell, and she had been nearly ready to call it a
night when she saw Dayton pull up. She manufactured a smile when
she recognized him as a former customer.
    She had gone out with him during Portland's
annual Rose Festival in June, when the Navy comes into port and
turns the city into a week-long party, and on another occasion
earlier in the spring. She held no hatred or animosity toward him,
at least not yet. He had always paid her well and had always been
friendly. When he stopped on her corner early on the morning of
August 7 and invited her to go with him, she never hesitated. She
eagerly climbed inside his truck and waved goodbye to a female
friend, another hooker, who waited nearby in a parked car, serving
as Jenny's lookout and driver that evening.
    Jenny was a big woman, but she knew how to
dress and held her weight well. Although neither particularly
attractive nor completely unattractive, she did have very large
breasts, which Dayton liked in his women, and her clothing
highlighted her most positive features to the extreme. Dayton also
liked her because she hadn't rejected his sexual fetishes on their
previous dates. She hadn't minded being tied up while he played
with her feet and masturbated. But then, he hadn't been rough with
her, either. Now, certain he had won her confidence, that was going
to change.
    No doubt the date proceeded like most of the
others, with Dayton starting things off by drinking vodka and
orange juice to put himself in the mood and to deaden his date's
mental faculties. They also likely drove around town as a prelude
to leaving the city. But for some reason, Dayton didn't take Jenny
to the Molalla forest.
    She might have persuaded him not to go there
because of the extra time it would take. To Jenny, time was money.
Or maybe Dayton hadn't yet worked up to the point of telling her
about his forest hideaway, his torture chamber in a natural
setting. It was even possible that he had done something to make
her feel ill at ease and that she somehow convinced him she would
do whatever he wanted as long as they remained in town. Whatever
the reason was that they didn't go to Molalla, Jenny Smith, unlike
some of the other women who had lived to talk about their
experiences with Dayton, would not survive the night. Jenny would
join the others, the ranks of the dead, on whom he had so
fiendishly acted out his fantasies, victims that even the police
didn't know about yet.
    Exactly where they went and what they did
during the first hour and half of their date was never firmly
established. No one, except for Dayton and Jenny, knew the precise
details of what happened between them from 1:30 to 3 A.M. Since he
won't talk and the dead tell no tales, those facts may never be
known. What is known is how Dayton Leroy Rogers violently murdered
Jenny Smith early that summer morning.
    It was only minutes before 3 A.M. when they
pulled into the parking lot of a small business complex at 16239
Southeast McLoughlin Boulevard in Oak Grove, a Clackamas County
suburb of Portland. Safeco Insurance and a recently vacated
building sat on one side of the tree-lined parking lot, and the
Portland branch of the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC)
and a Denny's restaurant occupied the other side.
    Dayton parked near the front of the GMAC
building, which was close to the rear of the parking lot. He had
been to that location many times before and knew that it was the
darkest area of the parking lot. He would have