On June 23, 1965, two Houston police officers responded to a call for a welfare check on Fred and Edwina Rogers by knocking on the door of their Montrose house and then forcibly entering the home. When one opened the fridge, he found what appeared to be multiple packages of pork.
Sad to say, the gruesome truth was even darker than that. The dismembered remains were “on all the shelves and in the freezer compartment,” as the Amarillo Globe-Times reported the next day. These fragments were “cut in unwrapped, rinsed off bits smaller than individual joints.” After opening the fridge and seeing two human heads, the police had an inkling of what they were dealing with.
Later investigation revealed that both Edwina and Fred were murdered in the house, with the former shot in the head and the latter beaten to death with a hammer before being carried into the master bathroom, bled out, dismembered, and stored in the refrigerator. The medical examiner said to the Globe-Times, “Whoever did this apparently took their time and knew what they were doing.” It was a relatively clean dismemberment, according to the witness.
By morning, the police had narrowed their suspect pool down to one person: the couple’s son, Charles Rogers, 43, a recluse who rarely left his house and only connected with his parents via notes pushed under his bedroom door. Blood was found on the keyhole of his bedroom door, despite the thorough cleaning that had been done.
Despite a countrywide manhunt, Charles was never located and was never able to talk with the authorities. In 1975, he was officially pronounced deceased.
Hugh and Martha Gardenier, a Houston couple, reopened the still-unsolved case of the “Ice Box Murders” in 1997 and even self-published an e-book on the subject. They think they know who did it, and it was Charles, of course.
Why? The Gardeniers claim that Charles was molested by his parents into adulthood, both physically and mentally, and that they committed fraud against him by forging his signature on land deeds at the end of their lives. Charles, not his parents, was the legal owner of the home where they all resided, and Edwina had presumably taken out loans against it and kept the proceeds for herself. The writers state that following the crimes Charles fled to Central America, where he eventually perished.
It’s an interesting theory, but it’s still only a theory. It’s possible that the killer(s) of Fred and Edwina Rogers will never be identified.
