Florida Jury Convicts Killer Suspected in Several Deaths

TAMPA, Fla. — A former carnival worker was convicted of murder Wednesday for killing a woman he had met in a bar, stabbing her twice and leaving her to bleed to death in a motel bathtub.

The jury took eight hours to find Glen Rogers guilty in the 1995 murder of Tina Marie Cribbs. He could face the death penalty.

Rogers also is suspected of killing three other women in a cross-country crime rampage in the fall of 1995.

In closing arguments Tuesday, prosecutor Karen Cox said Rogers, 34, stabbed Cribbs twice, twisting the knife as he pulled it out from 8- and 9-inch wounds in her chest and buttocks before leaving her to a slow, agonizing death.

But the defense maintained during a seven-day trial that Rogers wasn’t the murderer.

In his closing argument, defense attorney Nick Sinardi called the state’s case a “rush to judgment.” Prosecutors had no murder weapon, no motive and no eyewitness to connect Rogers to the stabbing, he said.

Both sides agreed that the defendant and victim met at a bar where Cribbs was meeting her mother. Her mom was late, and Cribbs left a beer at the bar and asked friends to tell her mother she would be back shortly. She drove Rogers to a Tampa motel and the two went inside and had sex.

The defense even conceded that Rogers stole the woman’s car, but insisted she was alive when he left the motel.

“Glen Rogers is a thief, not a murderer,” Sinardi said.

Cox told jurors that when Cribbs left the bar, “it was like she walked into a black hole. This woman . . . was never heard from again.”

Rogers was also convicted of robbery and grand theft auto.

He was arrested in November after a nationwide manhunt ended in a spectacular 100-mph chase in Kentucky. He was driving Cribbs’ car.

Rogers has been charged with murder in the slayings of three other women, but prosecutors were barred from mentioning those deaths during this trial.

In California, he is accused of strangling Sandra Gallagher, 34, and leaving her body in a pickup truck he had set on fire. In Mississippi, he is charged with stabbing Linda Price, 34, whose body was found in her apartment bathtub. And in Louisiana, he is accused of stabbing Andy Jiles Sutton, 37, whose slashed body was found on her punctured water bed.

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