Slaying Victim’s Mother Testifies

TAMPA, Fla. — The last time any of her friends saw Tina Marie Cribbs alive, it was a Sunday afternoon and she was flirting at a bar with a handsome blue-eyed stranger while waiting to meet her mother for a barbecue.

By the time her mother, Mary Dicke, arrived at Showtown USA, Cribbs had left to give Glen Rogers a ride, leaving behind an empty bar stool and an ice cold beer, Dicke testified Wednesday at Rogers’ murder trial.

‘I called her beeper . . . 30 times that evening,” Dicke said from the witness stand, wiping tears from her eyes. “I knew something bad had happened.”

Rogers, 34--who is also accused of killing other women in Van Nuys, Louisiana and Mississippi--is on trial on a charge of first-degree murder, accused of twice stabbing Cribbs and leaving her bloody body in a motel bathtub as he fled with her car and jewelry in November 1995.

Cribbs’ mother and friends testified Wednesday that the 34-year-old Cribbs was a responsible woman who held down three jobs to support her adolescent sons and was close to her mother.

Dicke, 55, testified that she had no trouble identifying the jewelry that police found when Rogers was arrested because she had bought her daughter the two sapphire rings and gold heart-shaped watch, and wore identical items herself. She also had bought Cribbs’ patchwork purse and wallet, the same as the ones she carried.

Mother and daughter lived three homes away from each other in a mobile home park and met for coffee every morning and evening, she testified.

Dicke also had bought Cribbs the white Ford Festiva that Rogers was driving when he was arrested and the pager Dicke used in her desperate attempts to reach her daughter. She described their relationship as “very, very close.”

Dicke searched for her daughter that Sunday evening--driving around looking for Cribbs’ car--and all day Monday. On Tuesday, she heard a report that a woman’s body had been found at a nearby motel.

“I knew it was her,” she said, her voice breaking.

At the Tampa 8 motel that Tuesday morning, maid Erica Charlton had used her key to enter the room Rogers had rented, ignoring a handwritten “do not disturb” sign that had been hanging on the door since Monday morning.

As she pushed the bathroom door open to leave clean towels, Charlton testified, she noticed bloody towels and bloody pants on the floor. The shower curtain was partially closed. “But I could see a body in the tub. I could see she was a dead person,” Charlton testified. “And I ran from the room screaming.”

Rogers faces the death penalty if convicted here. He did not react to Wednesday’s testimony, except to stand and nod as witnesses identified him.

His mother, Edna Rogers, and brother, Claude Rogers, sat in the front row, across the aisle from Dicke and her friends.

Other cases in which Rogers is charged with murder:

* In California, he is accused of strangling Sandra Gallagher, 34, of Santa Monica, in September 1995 and leaving her body in a pickup truck he set afire outside a Van Nuys bar.

* In Louisiana, he is accused of stabbing Andy Jiles Sutton, 37, in Bossier City. Her slashed body was found on her punctured water bed in November 1995.

* In Mississippi, he is accused of stabbing Linda Price, 34, whose body was found in her apartment bathtub in November 1995.

He also is suspected in the 1993 slaying of his elderly roommate, whose decomposed body was found wrapped in a sheet in an abandoned Kentucky cabin.