Wayne and Sherrie De Vore have lost track of how many hearings they’ve endured over the years in the case of their daughter’s killer.
They used to take time to prepare their remarks for court. This week, though, Wayne De Vore said his post-traumatic stress disorder and depression made it too difficult, so he instead brought notes from an earlier hearing, detailing the complete devastation Dayton Leroy Rogers wrought on his family.
Speaking through tears, De Vore told Clackamas County Circuit Judge Todd L. Van Rysselberghe that he and his wife feel obligated to sit through every court hearing not only to honor the memory of their daughter, Cynthia, but also those of the seven other women Rogers killed.
“The girls as we call them, they can’t speak for themselves,” he said. “We promised we would speak for them for as long as we can.”
Rogers – known as Oregon’s most prolific serial killer – was back in court for yet another sentencing, the fifth time since his 1989 conviction.
The case ranks among the state’s longest-running and most expensive, with a taxpayer-footed tab for his defense climbing well into the millions.
Four previous sentencing hearings followed various successful appeals. Juries condemned Rogers to death each time.
His crimes date to 1972, Clackamas County prosecutors say, when Rogers suddenly plunged a knife into a 15-year-old girl when he was 19. She survived.
Rogers ran a small-engine repair business and lived outside Canby. He would go on to torture and sexually abuse at least two dozen women; eight did not survive.
His victims were young, vulnerable and, he knew, unlikely to go to the police. He targeted women who suffered from drug addiction and traded sex for money.
His killing spree ended Aug. 7, 1987, when he was arrested in the stabbing death of Jennifer Lisa Smith, a 25-year-old Portland woman whose nude body was found behind an Oak Grove restaurant. Shortly afterward, he was named the prime suspect in the deaths of other women whose decomposed bodies had been discovered earlier in the Clackamas County woods.
During a hearing that began Monday, Clackamas County First Assistant District Attorney Scott Healy detailed Rogers’ crimes for the court, a catalog of horrors that involved torturing women, often for hours, and dumping them in the Molalla forest.
“The defendant’s peers are people like John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Gary Ridgway, the Green River killer,” Healy told the court.
“The defendant is the worst of the worst offenders, arguably, in the history of the state of Oregon,” he said.
Rogers, now 69, appeared in court remotely, following along from a large monitor mounted on the wall. He sat at a table in a cinderblock room at Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla, where his longtime lawyer, Richard Wolf, told the court that Rogers lives in an “honors” housing unit and tends to incarcerated men with dementia.
Rogers appeared to scribble notes from time to time, saying little other than to confirm for the judge that he could hear the proceeding.
During one of his previous sentencing hearings in 2015, Rogers apologized to the families of the women he killed and was resigned to his fate.
“I have clearly shown to all and myself that I belong in prison for the rest of my life,” he said then, according to a court transcript of the hearing. “I absolutely agree that I have forfeited my place in free society and that I forever belong behind bars until I die.”
In 2021, the Oregon Supreme Court overturned Rogers’ death sentence, saying an earlier ruling on another death penalty case applied to Rogers and that his crimes no longer met the definition of aggravated murder — the only offense eligible for capital punishment in Oregon.
That sent the case back to Oregon City for this week’s hearing.
Wolf sought to have him sentenced under rules in place at the time of his convictions in the late 1980s. Rogers would have been eligible then only for a sentence of life with the possibility of parole after 30 years.
Rogers was convicted in 1989 of killing Lisa Marie Mock, 23; Maureen Ann Hodges, 26; Christine Lotus Adams, 35; Cynthia Diane De Vore, 20; Nondace Kae Cervantes, 26; and Reatha Marie Gyles, 16.
Separately, in 1988, he was convicted of killing Jennifer Lisa Smith, 25. The remains of his eighth victim, Tawnia Marie Johnston, 18, were found in 2013; he admitted he killed Johnston in a 2015 court hearing but was never charged with her death.
Prosecutors sought a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.
Wolf said Rogers would agree never to pursue release even if he was eligible to seek parole. He said the sentence that came with the possibility of parole would allow Rogers to retain his housing and job within the prison system. He noted that Rogers has been eligible for a sentence review in the past but declined to pursue it.
Van Rysselberghe was not persuaded.
He handed down six sentences of life without the possibility of parole, noting Rogers’ “extreme cruelty to vulnerable women.”
“He preyed on women by persistently taking advantage of their isolation and drug dependencies to manipulate them into serving his perverse interests,” Van Rysselberghe said.
Rogers, he said, “heinously tortured and brutalized women. He used knives, twine, coat hangers and other forms of restraint to carry out his plans.”
Wolf said he will appeal.
The De Vores, both about the same age as Rogers, are convinced they’ll be back in court again someday for another appeal.
“This will never be over until he’s dead or we are dead,” said Sherrie De Vore.
“That’s what I look forward to: him being dead,” said Wayne De Vore. “That is the only way this will be over for us.”
