by Gary C. King
Turner and Estes arrived at Connie's apartment in Tualatin, a Portland suburb, at 11:05 A.M. When Turner asked if he and Estes could talk to her about Dayton, Connie smiled and said, "I like cops. I really do." She added that she appreciated what they were trying to accomplish, but she did not want to talk with them at that time.
"I'm sure you can appreciate the position I'm in," she said. She told the detectives that she believed God had put them there to do their job, but she just did not want to talk to them.
They contacted other family members of Dayton's, including his mother, but none of them would confirm Clifford Shirley's report that Dayton had confessed the murders.
On December 31, Estes contacted Clifford Shirley by telephone. Before she could say why she was calling, Clifford told her he was glad she had called. He said that he had intended to call her or Turner anyway, to let them know that he and his wife had visited with Connie and another of Dayton's relatives, at which time Clifford had informed them that he had talked to the police about Dayton's purported confessions.
Connie, in responding, had explained to Clifford that she should not be saying anything at all about Dayton's case on the advice of legal counsel, adding that she had already said too much. She denied to the Shirleys that Dayton had actually confessed the Molalla forest murders to her, but that it was only in her own thoughts that she believed Dayton was guilty. She did indicate that Dayton had confessed something to her, but it was not the Molalla murders and she was not going to say what it pertained to.
Before leaving for the evening, however, Connie did reveal to the Shirleys that Dayton had called her on the evening of the day that Turner and Estes had visited her. She said she had told him that the detectives had been there, and it had upset him that the police were still fishing for information.
As the new year of 1988 began, Turner had run down additional information about Cynthia Diane DeVore, Dee Dee to her street friends and johns. Among the things he learned was that she was the daughter of an alcoholic mother and a father she never knew. She practically grew up on the streets until state authorities stepped in and removed her from her less than adequate environment. Still, she seemed to have little or no idea where life's road was taking her.
Gone were the beatings and the neglect, the hunger and the fear of being left alone, once the state Children's Services Division became involved and placed her in a series of foster homes. Although saddened by the changes at first, she eventually felt grateful that she no longer had to answer to her mother for the things she had done "wrong," which, apparently, had included merely being alive. When she was adopted out of a foster home by a decent family at age eleven, Dee Dee's life suddenly took on new hope. She made a lot of friends, her grades improved markedly, and she even began dreaming about growing up and going to college someday.
Slowly, however, her life began to turn again for the worse. She began running with the wrong crowd and took to the streets, hanging out at the video arcades on 82nd Avenue with the other street kids and staying out late. She was soon experimenting with drugs, first alcohol, then marijuana, and it wasn't long before she advanced into the harder drugs and began regularly using crank, a powerful methamphetamine. She eventually became a "bag bitch" for her dealer, which helped to pay the costs of her own drugs. Although her life had already begun to fall apart, it wasn't until she dropped out of Cleveland High School during her sophomore year that she truly headed down the dead-end road of no return. As her dependence on drugs increased, she lost much of her self-respect and began slipping farther and farther into the abyss of death. Occasionally she would pull herself out of the muck, and found herself in and out of a number of drug rehabilitation centers, to no avail. Her adoptive parents, who had initially been so optimistic about her future, soon felt hopeless. When Dee Dee quit coming home, they nearly gave up on her. She was lost, and there seemed to be no way back for her.
Although broad in the hips, Dee Dee, despite her life-style, was still a good-looking girl with long, flowing brown hair, blue eyes, long, thin arms, and a large bust. At five feet seven inches tall and 120 pounds, she naturally attracted a number of boys and young men, with whom she frequently slept around. At nineteen she became pregnant and defiantly announced to everyone that she was going to keep the child when it was born. Still using crank, though less frequently, she had quit using the needle during her pregnancy for the sake of her unborn child. But she still had to survive and, preferring the streets to going home, it wasn't unusual to see her walking the boulevards, her abdomen bulging, propositioning potential johns with her pet pit bull at her side, given to her as a birthday present by a boyfriend.
Dee Dee's most prized possession arrived with the birth of her daughter, whom she'd had out of wedlock. She took the baby with her nearly everywhere when she wasn't hooking. Because of her life-style, however, a caseworker at the Children's Services Division, after having been anonymously tipped off, began taking steps to remove the child from Dee Dee's custody after it was decided that she would be safer and better cared for in a foster home. But Dee Dee wasn't about to make that task an easy one for the caseworker. By then a full-blown methamphetamine freak, Dee Dee had few possessions and moved from drug house to drug house when she wasn't living out of some seedy motel room with some equally sleazy man looking to make a quick buck from her misery.
After Turner checked with all of his contacts and informants, Tracie Baxter's name came up again in connection with Dee Dee. When he contacted Tracie, he learned that she may have been the last person to have seen Dee Dee alive on July eleventh, between five and six o'clock in the evening. When she last saw her, said Tracie, Dee Dee was trying to pick up a john on 82nd Avenue near Powell Boulevard.
It was ironic, reflected Turner as he talked with Tracie, that only days earlier Tracie had pointed out Dayton Leroy Rogers's light-blue pickup truck to Dee Dee while walking with her on 82nd Avenue and Flavel. Tracie had even told her, just as she was telling everyone that she knew, how the man in the pickup had taken her into the forest, hog-tied her, cut her foot, and threatened to kill her. Tracie had cautioned Dee Dee to avoid the guy like the plague, insisting that he was dangerous. But just as certain as Reatha, Lisa, Noni, Christine, and Maureen had disappeared without a trace, so had Dee Dee.
Like the others, Turner learned, Dee Dee was soon missed by her friends and family, and many openly wondered what had happened to her. But because of her transient lifestyle and addiction to drugs, no one bothered to report her missing. Everyone assumed that she would turn up one day soon, they hoped alive and well. But she hadn't. Instead Dee Dee had vanished, swept away into the night just as mysteriously as the other girls had been.
On January 15,1988, however, Dee Dee's whereabouts were no longer a mystery. Using dental records at the Oregon Health Sciences University Dental School, Cynthia Diane DeVore was positively identified as Molalla forest Body #4.
Chapter 24
After failing at several repeated attempts to get Dayton's wife, Sherry, to talk to him, Turner enlisted the aid of his colleague, Lynda Estes, to get the job done. Sherry had talked to Estes before, so she might be willing to do so again. His reasoning for using Estes was simple. They were both women, and Estes, though known as a relentless investigator, possesses a captivating and sympathetic quality about her that gets people to open up. Although they couldn't force Sherry Rogers to talk to them or to testify against her husband, it was Turner's hope that she would talk, if only to help clear up some minor details, such as Dayton's frequency of staying out all night and whether or not he ever used her car.
Estes reached Sherry at her father's home and explained that she needed to talk to her about Dayton. Sherry was reluctant to meet with her and said she really didn't want to talk unless she absolutely had to. She added that she would not do anything to protect Dayton, but she wanted to stay as far removed from the situation as possible. Estes insisted that she understood Sherry's feelings, but explained that it had come to her attentio
n that Sherry had seen a bag of jewelry on one occasion that didn't belong to her and she needed to talk about it. Still, Sherry did not want to discuss it.
Estes reiterated her understanding of Sherry's feelings, but added that the task force had seven homicides that they were investigating and that there might be more, the implication being that there were probably more bodies out there somewhere. Sherry acknowledged that she knew what Estes had implied and, as luck would have it, she agreed to talk with Estes and Deputy District Attorney Andy Eglitis. Sherry made arrangements to meet them at the home of one of her friends in Canby.
Appearing somewhat withdrawn and hesitant, Sherry told Estes and Eglitis that she had found a bag containing jewelry inside Dayton's pickup about two weeks prior to his August 7 arrest. The jewelry, she said, did not belong to her.
Earlier in the day, she said, a Sunday afternoon in late July, she and Dayton had gone to Costco Wholesale to make some purchases. Dayton bought supplies for his business, while Sherry made some purchases for their home. She didn't recall precisely what they had done after leaving Costco, but she said she thought they had gone out to dinner. At any rate, it was dark when they arrived home and both of them were tired. Dayton felt so tired that he went directly into the house.
Under normal circumstances, Sherry said, she had nothing to do with Dayton's truck. But on that occasion, she said, she had loaded Dayton's business supplies from her car, a Honda, into his pickup. However, suspecting for some time that Dayton had been going out on her, she decided to take the opportunity to snoop.
There were two paper bags on the floor inside the pickup, she said. One contained machine parts. The other, which she described as a very small brown paper bag, contained various items of jewelry. Using a flashlight, she also looked inside the glove compartment and found two small containers of liquor, both full. Not being a drinker herself, she couldn't recall what kind of liquor was in them.
While she was in the process of going through the pickup, Dayton looked outside. She said it made her feel somewhat sheepish, but she decided to take the small bag of jewelry inside the mobile home with her. She went directly into the bathroom, where she dumped the jewelry out onto the counter. There were two silver chains that appeared to be broken, and a ring that may have had a turquoise stone set in it. There was also a silver cigarette lighter. There were other items as well, but they were all wadded together and she said it was doubtful that she would be able to identify any of it if she saw it again.
She had not had much time to examine the jewelry because Dayton walked into the bathroom while she had it out on the counter. As she returned the pieces to the bag, she asked Dayton where he had obtained the jewelry. He told her that he had found it in the trash, and left it at that. He took it away from her, and she never saw it again.
"Do either of you smoke?" asked Estes.
"No, neither of us does."
"Have you ever noticed any of your pantyhose missing?" Estes was thinking about all of the pairs of knotted pantyhose found in the Molalla forest.
"I wouldn't know. I have a drawer full."
Sherry explained that when she got runs in her stockings, she always threw them in a drawer so she could save them to wear under slacks at a later time. She had so many pairs, she said, it would be difficult to know if any were missing.
"When you would do the laundry, did you ever notice anything suspicious, such as blood, on Dayton's clothes?"
"No. Never."
"Did you ever own any dogs?"
"Yes. We owned a couple of dogs a few years ago."
"Did they wear collars?"
"Yes. The last one came with a collar."
Sherry explained that they hadn't kept the dogs very long. They just didn't fit in with their life-styles. When asked if she knew what had become of any of the collars, she said she didn't know.
"Do you know whether or not Dayton is a drinker?" asked Estes.
Sherry said she thought there might have been one time before they were married that she suspected him of drinking. But she had never smelled alcohol on his breath and has wondered about the reports of his drinking that she'd heard about after his arrest.
As for being out late, Sherry said that Dayton often would say that he was working at the shop or had been with friends. When asked if she knew Tommy Parker, Dayton's gay lover, she said that she did. She said she knew that Dayton visited him, but she did not believe that it was frequently.
Sherry told Estes and Eglitis that Dayton had never been violent with her. At the time she married him, she also thought he was innocent of his past crimes. But, she admitted, she had not known the whole story, either. She felt that communication between them had been good until the past year, during which time it had begun to deteriorate.
During the summer of 1987, she said, Dayton had been going out a little more frequently, but Sherry could not say precisely how often. She said she wouldn't be comfortable saying whether it was one or two nights a week, or whatever. She did say, however, that she had noticed that Dayton had been dead tired for the two months prior to his arrest. She wasn't sure why.
She said she never knew Dayton to use the name Steve. They had gone to Reno, but always together. They usually went there once a year.
In response to Estes's prompting, Sherry reiterated during this conversation that she had never bled inside Dayton's pickup, nor could she think of anyone who had. She occasionally rode in the pickup, but it was seldom. She had never noticed any cuts in the paneling, door liner, upholstery, or on the seat. Basically, she said, they each used their own vehicle. If they went someplace together, they usually went in her Honda.
When Dayton went out alone, he often wore jeans or casual slacks with polo shirts or button-down shirts. He had two pairs of western boots with pointed toes that he wore often. One pair was seized during the execution of the search warrant on their home, and she stated that she didn't know where he kept the other pair.
"Did Dayton shower frequently?" asked Estes.
"There were no unusual showers. Sometimes, after work, when he came home hot and sweaty, he would shower. And sometimes in the morning before he left for work."
"Did he ever do magic tricks for you?"
Sherry said that he did on occasion, but the magic tricks never involved rope or the tying of knots. She never noticed any wire or rope in Dayton's truck.
"Are you familiar with the Regency-Sheffield brand kitchen knife?"
"No, I'm not."
To her knowledge, there were no knives missing from their home, with the exception of the knives that had been seized during the execution of the search warrant associated with Jenny Smith's murder.
When asked whether she had ever gone fishing with Dayton on the Molalla River, Sherry said that she had. However, Dayton didn't go fishing frequently. When he did, it was usually with someone other than herself. On the few occasions that she had gone fishing with him, he had taken her to a location out past Dickie Prairie, just off the Molalla Forest Road.
As Estes and Eglitis left the interview, each suddenly realized just how big of a will-o'-the-wisp Dayton really was. It was one thing to delude a street whore, but to mislead one's own wife for years took a fair amount of skill and manipulation. Not to mention cold-heartedness.
Turner and Estes re-interviewed several of the Molalla forest victims' family members in an attempt to determine what types of jewelry, if any, the victims might have possessed at the time of their disappearance. It wasn't until they reached Christine Adams's children, Floria, fourteen, and Tamera, twelve, that they felt they had a link between one of the victim's jewelry and that which had been in the bag inside Dayton's truck. Both of the girls, observed the detectives, were still in a lot of pain over the loss of their mother.
"Floria, do you know if your mother carried a cigarette lighter?" asked Estes as gently as she knew how.
"Yes," said the girl. "It was a long silver lighter with a unicorn on it. It had some turquoise on it, too."
"Mom wore rings." However, Floria was unable to describe them, except to say that one may have had a diamond.
When asked whether Christine wore earrings, Floria said she believed her mother would have worn gold ones. She was allergic to the other types of metals and could only wear gold. She pointed out a dangly type earring in one of the photos Turner had spread out on the table, but said she couldn't be sure if that one was her mother's.
At one point Floria told Turner and Estes that her mother usually wore faded blue jeans or black slacks. She also had a pair of pink and white tennis shoes. When Turner asked whether or not her mother ever wore clothing with decorative studs or rhinestones, Floria said that she had. Her mother, she said, had a pair of jeans with star-shaped studs, or grommets, that ran down the side of the pants. When Turner pulled out a photograph of some of the contents of Dayton's wood stove, Floria pointed out star-shaped studs and said they were much like the ones she'd seen on her mother's pants.
When Turner showed Floria and Tamera photos of the jewelry they had discovered and believed to be related to the case, the two girls pointed out a wedding set. They said their mother had worn a wedding set with a diamond similar to the one in the photograph. They stopped short of positively identifying the ring as Christine's, although Floria was certain about the star-shaped studs.
