Baby Be Mine (22 page)

“How good it felt?”

“Hard to say. Good in some great thoughts and memories—but also a knot in the stomach. Most are throw-aways. No one gives a shit. No one is even looking.”

Davidson reminded him, “Remember your philosophy. Prey and predators.”

“Most prey I have found is not worth looking for.”

“Do you have regrets on this one? Because you fear getting caught? Or you feel sympathy?”

“Neither,” BuggerButt tapped out on his keyboard.

“Good.”

“Maybe some fear of seeing something that comes forward if pics are out there. Usually no one knows they are missing or no one is going to come forward with ‘I saw . . .' ”

“Did anyone see what happened?”

“I don't think so. But sometimes people do but it means nothing. You have to operate on the premise if you look like you know what you are doing, people don't notice. If you ‘sneak,' people wonder what you are up to. If you stop and pick up someone and look like it is normal, then they don't think squat.”

“I agree. Your best method is to act as if it is nothing out of the ordinary. Will you continue telling me about what happened after you picked it up?” Davidson asked.

“It took a beer after it smoked a joint. Got very drunk—was not used to drinking,” he wrote. “Got it drunk enough that it agreed to take a pill.”

“What type of pill?”

“Phenobarb,” he wrote. “Became most compliant.”

“An anti-convulsant, a barbiturate?”

“Yeah. It really slows down muscle control along with the beer. It was warm enough that I detoured to do an Ozark overnight. Its clothing was added to the campfire I built to knock off the night chill. Damned shoes fucking stink and smoke when burned.”

BuggerButt wrote that after undressing the blond Skidmore boy, he tied him to a tree. He then revealed the depths of his depraved mind as he recounted the unspeakable
physical torture he perpetrated on the young Branson Perry.

The normal imagination cannot even conceive of the disgusting abuse that was a warm memory to BuggerButt. And the medical student on the other end of the Internet conversation reveled in each moment.

Besides the repulsive physical acts BuggerButt performed, he also recited with even more pleasure the joy he found in the mental torture of Branson and of all his victims.

“You can do it willingly by telling it you are going to let it go if it does what you want. Hope springs eternal until you smash it.”

“Very nice technique,” Davidson wrote.

BuggerButt admitted that his greatest pleasure was when he so thoroughly broke his victims that they were willing to commit suicide to escape from him. He said when he first started commiting these crimes, he used drugs for courage.

“You did drugs?” Davidson asked.

“But I figured out it was just a crutch to let me do what I wanted. So did not use when I did one. Made it much more real since I know it is me and what is in me—not some drug. In some ways, it no longer matters what I do with the body. It is the mind I love to destroy and break. Actually, I am disappointed even if it suffers horribly if I don't break it totally.

“When it begs me to kill it—it doesn't always happen—but when it does I know it is broken. Each mind is different and learning that mind is the real game to tearing down barriers. Destroying hopes. Building false ones.”

“And do you deny its request?”

“Actually, yes,” BuggerButt wrote. “It becomes so powerless that it can't even determine its own death. But it comes anyway. I like destroying values and morals and religion—making it feel totally helpless.”

BuggerButt then talked about the victims that he drove to such extreme despair that they committed suicide. “The youngest that offed itself was maybe 14. Oldest was probably 40's,” he wrote.

“How do you mange a 40 yr old grown man alone?”

“With its legs and arms broken. Actually it is the older teens and 20's that are the hardest and have to be kept tied or cuffed the entire time.”

“But probably most enjoyable when you break them,” Davidson interjected.

“Don't go so far on broken feet, either. Remembered that from scout camp where I worked for some summers.”

“I was a boy scout.”

“Scouting taught me many skills. Some I am sure they are not proud of.”

“Like knot tying, ‘be prepared,' ” Davidson suggested. “Well, I have been thinking about doing it for real.”

“I hope so,” BuggerButt wrote. “I want you to know the feeling. The power.”

“I figure I can easily get access to drugs to sedate,” said the medical student. “Wrap it in a sheet and put in my trunk to leave no evidence on the car.”

“Other details you need to deal with also but when you are ready, I will walk you through it.”

“I appreciate it, my mentor,” Davidson wrote.

“I want you to be successful.”

“Right, I want success.”

“Your ability to think about things that can be found is good. So, you need to first find a place to do it. Then the place to dispose of it.”

“I think the key to that is randomness.”

“Ideally where it won't be found. Gator swamps are nice if you could get to one easily . . . but I think that is still too far.”

“Not really,” Davidson wrote.

“Water does a real number on evidence if you had to use the gulf. Gators take food into their dens and let it rot first. Rarely are things found.”

“I have to find a secluded area to conduct the torture.”

“Your first will have to be fast and to the point. Usually best. Longer scenes are fun but you don't have your senses
honed yet. Some very intense but only a few hours of pain is what I would recommend.”

Returning to his lurid description of the death of Branson Perry, BuggerButt wrote: “It was an eighteen-hour project actually.” He explained how he had to clean up the scene by sifting the ashes to remove anything identifiable that had not been incinerated and dispose of the body in a manner that guaranteed it would never be found.

In other correspondence, he claimed he eviscerated Branson's body, thrown the internal organs in a ditch and then tossed the body into deep water. Without the guts inside to decompose, he explained, the body would not bloat and therefore, would not float to the surface.

“I want to have that experience and soon,” Davidson wrote.

S
pecial Agent Roberts contacted the Nodaway County Sheriff's Department and inquired about any missing children in the Skidmore area. There was only one person who matched the description in the chat log. And Branson Perry was such a good match to all the facts that Roberts knew the disgusting conversation on Davidson's computer was no baseless fantasy.

The FBI served a court order on America Online to obtain information about the actual identity of BuggerButt. In short order, Roberts had a name for Davidson's correspondent—Jack Wayne Rogers. Rogers lived in Fulton, a town of 12,000 in central Missouri.

Located in the rolling foothills of the Ozark Mountains, Fulton was an area of lush, green beauty. The nature-infused serenity of state parks was just a short drive in any direction. Fulton was also the home of the internationally
known Winston Churchill Memorial and Library and of a section of the Berlin Wall that was moved to the campus of Westminster College and transformed into a sculpture commemorating Churchill's 1946 Iron Curtain speech.

Fulton, as the seat of Callaway County, was the site of a bizarre Civil War footnote. Callaway County citizens saw the approach of Union soldiers and initiated talks which led to a mutual ceasefire agreement with the United States. Upon their success in diplomacy, they renamed the county the Kingdom of Callaway—an appellation that they still use in the county to this day.

Fulton was also the model for the town depicted by native Henry Bellamann in his novel,
Kings Row
. The 1942 movie based on this book starred Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings and Ronald Reagan.

Jack Rogers added a new chapter to the history of Fulton. But it was a tale the other citizens would like to erase.

Detective Clint Barnett of the Fulton Police Department confiscated and searched the trash that Jack Rogers left on the curb for pickup in January and February 2003. He did not find any evidence of his involvement in child pornography in the garbage, but he did obtain proof that Rogers resided in the home—that information was important to obtain a search warrant.

Roberts and his team of investigators, including officers from the Fulton Police Department, descended on his ordinary-looking two-story white frame home at 707 Nichols Street on March 18. What they found inside was not ordinary in the least.

In the search of the property, the investigative team seized handcuffs, sex toys, and bondage and torture equipment—collars and limb restraints, gagging devices, leather whips and full latex body suits that covered from head to foot with only a small hole for breathing—from Rogers' Chrysler Town & Country minivan.

Inside the house itself, Agent Roberts found clamps,
cauterization tools, bandages, sharpened knitting needles and the plastic cup from an athletic supporter pierced with nails that pointed inward.

The biggest horror of all was the documents and photographs found on the computers seized from Rogers' residence. Child pornography consumed byte after byte of space-more than a thousand images in all. There was also a wealth of images depicting mutilation and torture. The words Rogers wrote on his computer were chilling, too. The torture and murder of many males was described in graphic detail under the online pseudonyms of BuggerButt, ohailsatan and extremebodymods.

The horror that even one individual this depraved existed was compounded by the knowledge that there were many others willing to listen—and to enjoy—his lethal ravings. And those men were not crazed individuals living on the edge of society. These were men who lived seemingly respectable, ordinary lives and worked in professional positions—one was the vice president of patient services at a hospital.

On April 9, the Missouri Highway Patrol, led by Sergeant David Merrill, did a simultaneous followup search at the home and business of Jack Rogers. The specific mission of this excursion was to find evidence linking Rogers to the murder of Branson Perry.

They seized Rogers' minivan, which they searched a month earlier. This time, they found a necklace with a turtle claw pendant—just like the one Branson's grandmother Jo Ann Stinnett said he'd worn for good luck. From inside his home, they seized a scalpel kit from the nightstand beside his bed, and from the basement they took a green box containing sexual paraphernalia. A tool box with more sex toys was located in the travel trailer on his property.

Roger owned and operated Decker & Decker employment service on the second floor of the Kelly Plaza complex in Columbia—a city about midway between Kansas City and St. Louis.

An employee of Decker & Decker claimed she spotted Rogers on several occasions running off copies of stories featuring acts of sadomasochism, mutilation and homosexuality that he had written under the pseudonyms Jolly Rogers and BuggerButt. She said that he mailed these stories to prison inmates.

At his business, officials seized his computers and a manual describing a “gender nullification procedure,” a phrase used to describe surgical castration. They discovered a room there that Rogers had converted into a recreation area for the practice of the Bondage-Domination-Sado-Masochist lifestyle.

The forensic analysis of his computer confirmed that Rogers had accessed the TruthOrFiction website where Becky Perry's plea for help for her missing son was posted. One photo on a confiscated compact disk showed Rogers dipping a severed penis and scrotum into his mouth. Another showed discolored male sexual organs artfully arranged like haute cuisine on a white dinner plate with a green-and-pink flowered edge. The plate sat on a checkered tablecloth. There were also before and after photographs of a man who had undergone the removal of his sexual organs at the hands of Jack Rogers.

It also showed that Rogers had deleted material from his company computer the day after the federal search of his home. It showed an additional document dump on April 4. Rogers did not stop at altering his own computer files. He obtained the password to the Yahoo account of Barry White—one of his correspondents. White did not have a computer of his own, but communicated with Rogers through public computers, and all of his emails were kept on the Yahoo server.

Rogers had written to him about cutting off a man's fingers and storing them in a plastic bag in his glove compartment. He sent White various digital images, including one of Rogers standing by a roiling pot. Rogers' commentary with that photograph bore a repulsive remark: “You would not taste anything
quite as good as boiled testicles.” These organs Rogers claimed he obtained when he surgically castrated other men. Rogers deleted all of this material from White's account.

While doing the search at Decker & Decker, Sergeant Merrill and Corporal David Rice interviewed their suspect “We're investigating the disappearance of a boy from Skidmore, Missouri. Have you ever been to Skidmore?”

Rogers said that he had not.

Merrill then asked, “Have you ever been on an Internet website related to Branson Perry or stumbled onto information regarding Branson Perry?”

Jack Rogers denied several times that he had ever seen any of that information. “I wish I could help you, but I do not know anything about the missing runaway.”

Rice said, “We did not say that Branson Perry was a runaway. Where did you hear that he was a runaway?”

Jack Rogers shifted in his chair displaying a restless discomfort. For a moment he was silent. Then he said, “I just assumed he was a runaway.”

Merrill pulled out a copy of the TruthOrFiction website labeled “Exhibit 2” and showed it to Rogers. Jack looked at it and denied ever going to that site on the Internet.