SIXTY years after a couple was brutally murdered and chopped into pieces, a forensic sleuth believes he may have cracked the case wide open.
On June 23, 1965, police discovered the remains of Fred and Edwina Rogers in an unusual fashion—they were dismembered and placed carefully in the shelves of their old icebox at their home in Houston, Texas.
Initially, officers mistook the contents for butchered pig meat until they noticed two human heads through the icebox’s vegetable drawer.
The autopsy revealed that 73-year-old Edwina had suffered a beating and a gunshot to the head, while 81-year-old Fred had been brutally attacked with a claw hammer, and his eyes had been gouged out with his genitals removed.
The killer had been meticulous and barely left any blood in the house, which had been thoroughly cleaned. Their bodies had been drained and organs removed, cut up and flushed down a nearby sewer.
The police determined that the killings had happened on Sunday, 20 June – Father’s Day.
Now, for the first time, The U.S. Sun can reveal the jaw-dropping details of the bloody slaughter commonly known as “The Icebox Murders.”
After decades of investigations, only one suspect has been named, and the grisly crime remains unsolved.
The couple lived with their reclusive son Charles, then 42, who had deserted the home before the police entered and had never been found. He was declared legally dead ten years later in July 1975.
In news stories ever since, Charles has been described as an abused child who lived as a hermit with his hated parents.
His mom was said to have not even spoken to him in five years, and merely passed notes under his bedroom door.
Eventually, Charles finally snapped on what happened to be Father’s Day, the reports suggest.
NEW EVIDENCE
There have been countless unsolved killings in the US, but none have a backstory quite like this.
The story piqued the interest of forensic accountant Hugh Gardenier, 74, who in his youth had a summer internship near the house of horrors, and also had an aunt living in the area.
“She was scared to death that Charles Rogers – or whoever the murderer was – was still running around,” Hugh exclusively told The U.S. Sun.
“I would take long walks, and I found the house, I looked at it, I couldn’t put it out of my mind.
“And, then years later, in 1997, I slowed down in my accounting practice, and said, ‘Well, maybe now’s the time to solve the mystery.'”
Along with his late wife Martha, also a forensic accountant, they spent over three years researching the story.
In 2003, they released a book called The Icebox Murders, but it barely made a ripple. They were unhappy with the publishers, and it was advertised as “fact-based fiction.”
Nothing could have been further from the truth after the couple’s painstaking work on the case.
“It’s been like a giant jigsaw puzzle, we traced each piece, trying to fit them all together,” said Hugh, who now lives in Weldon, Texas, just outside Houston.
INSIDE THE SUSPECT’S MIND
Thirty years had already passed since the gruesome butchering when Hugh started digging into the case, and some connected to the case weren’t even alive.
Others were difficult to track down, but Hugh spoke to locals, some of whom were only kids at the time, law enforcement, and the lead detective, James Paulk, multiple times.
They built up a picture. Charles was a brilliantly intelligent man. He had a nuclear physics degree and was a Navy pilot during World War 2.
He worked for Shell as a seismologist and was known for his talent at finding gas, oil, and gold. He even spoke seven languages.
“He’s the guy who’d tell you where to dig for minerals, oil, and gas on your land”, says Hugh.
This knowledge would prove to be invaluable and could make companies and people very rich, said the author.
When he quit Shell in 1957, he slipped off the radar. Police said it was because he was a recluse, but Hugh found out he had a girlfriend, was going to work every day, and everyone in the neighborhood knew him.
“The time period of roughly eight years up to the murder in 1965, the police had absolutely no idea what he was doing. They didn’t know who his friends were, we had to put together his associates,” says Hugh.
“This case probably best emphasizes, every city has got an underbelly where there are a whole heck of a lot of people that are below the surface.”
CURIOUS CASE
Through his research, Hugh began to understand why police never found Charles’ body or even a trail to his whereabouts.
Hugh said, “With Rogers, he was never indicted for the murders. The lead detective Paulk had more than enough evidence to get the indictment, but the captain over the homicide division never moved to get an indictment.
“Well, it transpires his dad Fred was a well-known bookie and card dealer, poker games, things like that. Everyone we spoke to knew this as fact.
“He was also know for land swindling, he would flip land lots, and he sold them to some very well known attorneys, he made money for important people.
“But Fred and Edwina were expendable, they were old, just trash to the police, we were told after they discovered the bodies in the refrigerator, they found a bunch of files that were tied to Fred Rogers and all his [bookie] transactions with everyone in town, these files were destroyed as it would have incriminated police officers, judges, a lot of people.
“The police had limited resources and a whole lot of people would have been busted if the true story had come out.
“I could never confirm this, but one of the things we were told was that, after their bodies were discovered in the refrigerator, there was a whole lot of scrambling, people were taking files that were tied to Fred Rogers and transactions they had had with him, and possibly transactions they had with Charles, and they were destroying the records.
“They had no compelling reason to bring him to justice because he took care of a problem for them. I talked to the lead detective Paulk a number of times, they never found anything in the house that looked like it would be a register or a log, or anything of that nature that a bookie would keep.
“Now that seemed very, very strange to us, that no ledgers were found, Fred had been a bookie since the twenties.”
MOTIVE REVEALED
A lot of things the police said didn’t ring true, such as the sewers where the organs had apparently been disposed of. Hugh and Martha checked the sewer city map from that time, and the location didn’t even connect to the house.
The couple wasn’t convinced the police put much work into finding Charles, and then they discovered the authorities had a motive to cover up the whole thing.
“Charles wasn’t expendable. Charles too was making money for people [like his dad] – but not one person ever gave him up. They wouldn’t chase him to the end of the earth,” he says.
Hugh and Martha traced Charles’ 1959 Cadillac all the way down to Mexico and into Honduras. It was here that they believe he was doing his exploratory work, and it explains why he was making hay for other people.
“He was making money for big people in Texas, he was very, very smart when it came to oil and gas exploration in seismic work. He was on the cutting edge with respect to things he did. So why kill the golden goose?”
Such work comes with danger. They found out pre-murder that Charles was friendly and had business connections with another local man, Anthony Pitts, who was involved in drug and gun smuggling in Central America.
They believe Charles had determined that he was going to live out his days in Central America and was never coming back. He was making money down there and had no love for his parents.
The killing was perfectly planned, and he’d symbolically picked the day as payback to his parents.
Hugh explains, “He did this on Father’s Day, he could have picked any other day, and didn’t skip town for a few days.
“This was very, very dark, very violent. But this was done by a man who knew that he would never return to the United States, he would never have anything to do with his parents again.
“This is strange to put it this way, but he approached this like an engineering problem.
“I’m not saying by any stretching measure that Charles was an angel, a choir boy, he was always somewhat detached, a loner, he spent an awful lot of time reading, but I just think he approached it with a very organized mind.”
CHARLES’ CHILDHOOD
The press reports are right that he did have an abusive upbringing, but Hugh also found out that his parents had been stealing his money and assets behind his back, which would have been typical of Fred’s dubious character.
He says, “There was a measure of payback there, and he had finally gotten to a point where he wasn’t going to take it anymore.
“He’d had a bad childhood and they were defrauding him, they’d taken land he owned that was in his name, even the house they lived in was his, they were forging his signature on documents.
“Yet he also knew good and well that he was leaving the country, so he decided to murder them and make it significant by doing it on Father’s Day.
“He was making a statement, the murders were a statement. It terrified people, the police were spooked by this, they really didn’t know how to pursue this guy because he was totally different from anybody they had ever had to deal with.”
So what happened to Charles? If he was living today, he’d be 103, so it’s unlikely he’s still alive, but he could have been in the 2000s.
Hugh can only trace Charles back to the eighties and no further forward. There was the global financial crash, and it all had an effect.
He believes Charles was killed, unsurprisingly, considering the nature of his work in dangerous, poverty-stricken countries.
“We don’t know what happened to him, but we do know a whole lot of stuff that was coming to a head in the early eighties down there. Pitts was killed in a plane crash, we do know that,” says Hugh.
“Killing people was the nature of his business down there. Also consider the fact that in the early eighties, oil and gas busted out twice.
“The people in Texas who were paying him to do his work down there, the money dried up. But where else could he go? He was never going to come back to the US.
“I think it was a matter of he got crossed up with the wrong people in his oil exploratory work and was in an extremely bad part of Honduras where you don’t cross with the locals.”
After over 5,000 hours put into the case, Hugh has absolutely no doubt that Charles didn’t just fall off the end of the earth. He has clear evidence that he lived his final days in Central America.
Hugh said, “I have no doubt that he was probably killed down there, but what we do know for certain, from interviewing people that had been down there in Central America, it was certainly Charles Rogers.”
