Touch Of Evil

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Up next, a serial killer was on the loose in New York City.

These people were chopped up.

It's just a savage way to die.

We felt that he really pissed somebody off.

The media labels him the last call killer.

The last call for drinks.

That's the last that was seen of them.

Nearly a decade passes, and police still have no suspects.

Until advances in forensic science finally help pinpoint the killer.

It's the most bizarre case I've ever been involved involved with.

For sanitation workers collecting trash along the New Jersey Turnpike in 1991, it was a day like any other.

Until they found a plastic bag so heavy, the men decided to look inside.

The worker felt like it was a pumpkin or something.

But it was was something else.

It was a head, a human head, human skull.

When police arrived at the scene, they found even more bags with more body parts.

The body was severed into seven pieces.

Two legs, two arms, upper and lower torso, and the head.

There were ligature marks on his wrists, which suggested he was tied up or bound at some point.

One bag contained latex gloves, a bed sheet, shower curtain, and a blood-stained saw.

It tells law enforcement that this happened in some home or a rented place, a hotel room.

It could be any of those things.

The victim's wallet was found in one of the bags.

There was clearly no attempt to hide the identity of the victim.

The victim was 56-year-old Thomas Mulcahy, an executive for an information information company in Massachusetts, who'd been in New York City on a business trip.

He was married for approximately 33 years.

He had four children, with the youngest being, I believe, 18 years of age, and the elders were young adults.

Mulcahy had been stabbed to death, then dismembered.

The body parts, as well as the bags themselves, were washed before they were dumped.

Well, the washing tells us that the killer wants to remove evidence and two, that there is an intimate aspect to it of keeping the body close.

It's erotic.

You're taking care of the victim.

Thomas Mulcahy's wife told police some personal information she felt might be pertinent.

She said at some point in his life, he started experimenting with homosexual sex.

I don't know that she approved of it.

By tracing his credit card activity, detectives learned that Mulcahey's last transaction was at an ATM at 11.15 p.m., two nights before his body was found.

Tom Mulcahey draws $200 from an ATM machine at 49th and Avenue of Americas.

With our luck, the camera system was down, so we had no pictures.

There was no evidence Mulcahey had ever returned to his hotel room that night, which was only a block away.

But there was evidence he had stopped in a nearby bar.

Mulcahey was seen at the townhouse bar, which is an upscale gay bar in Manhattan.

He was intoxicated.

This was consistent with the medical examiner's report.

The medical examiner determined that Thomas Mulcahy's blood alcohol level was above the legal limit.

Witnesses said that Mulcahey was talking with a white male with brown hair.

But no one could say for sure whether they left the bar together.

Using the witnesses' descriptions, police created a composite sketch, which was distributed to the media.

We were unsuccessful.

Everything we did up until that point was unsuccessful.

But there was one item found with Mulcahy's body that provided an important clue.

In one of the trash bags was the wrapper for the latex gloves.

The price sticker showed they were purchased from a CVS drug store in Staten Island, New York.

But investigators still faced a daunting task.

There were almost half a million people living in Staten Island.

We had nothing.

You know, we were grasping the stroll.

One year after finding Thomas Mulcahy's dismembered body, New Jersey police had another case that was eerily similar, this time in Manchester Township, New Jersey.

The body parts were bagged in a similar fashion.

They were double-bagged, double-knotted.

The most striking thing, at least to me, was the way the bodies were dismembered into the same seven seven parts.

Prints were taken and put into the system, and it turned out that this particular individual had a minor criminal record.

He was identified as Anthony Marrero.

Marrero's record showed he was a gay prostitute.

Like the Mulcahy case, Marrero's body parts and the bags had both been washed before they were dumped along the side of the road.

We had really no prints, no DNA, anything that could tie us to a viable suspect.

Also, like Mulcahy, the victim had ligature marks on his wrists and ankles.

There's something called a signature killer, that is a killer who tends to repeat their process with several victims.

The cuts that were performed on his body were described as being disarticulated.

in that you actually don't just cut right through the bone, you actually pull the joints apart and cut through cartilage as opposed to bone.

This disarticulation was a vital clue.

We know it was post-mortem.

The precision of the cuts led us to believe that this was done by somebody who had some knowledge.

Somebody in the medical profession, possibly somebody along those lines.

One of the bags found with Marrero's body had the words, President's Choice on it.

This shopping bag was sold at only nine locations and one of the locations happened to be Staten Island.

The store in Staten Island, which sold those bags, was close to the CPS drugstore that sold the latex gloves found with Thomas Mulcahy's body.

The reasonable assumption is that the killer either lives or works in that neighborhood because that would be within what's called their zone of familiarity, their comfort zone.

Using a process called super glue fuming, investigators were able to lift two partial fingerprints and a partial palm print from the bags.

These prints were entered into the nationwide fingerprint database of known criminal offenders.

The results of that entry and the search were negative.

There was no match.

We had ran out of leads and

it wasn't looking too promising.

Two months later, Investigators' worst fears were realized when another dismembered body was found in a garbage can 12 miles outside of New York City.

There was no doubt this was the work of the same killer.

The body was placed in similar type garbage bags, double knotted, double bagged.

There were seven pieces also.

And again,

The body and the bags had been washed down.

There was no physical evidence recovered, no fingerprints, no DNA that was foreign to him.

The victim was identified as 56-year-old Mike Saccara.

He was a fixture in the Five Oaks bar in Greenwich Village.

The Five Oaks was a piano bar, and it did cater to the gay clientele.

Lisa Hall was a bartender at the Five Oaks on the night Mike Saccara was murdered.

Lisa said a white male came into the bar and sat next to Mike.

She had never seen the man before.

I assumed he knew Michael because why would he, when there's empty seats, go sit right next to him?

And I made the man a scotch and water and Michael said, Lisa, this is so-and-so.

He's a nurse at St.

Vincent's.

When she left the bar, Michael and this man were still there.

No one saw the two men leave the bar together.

The detectives asked me for a name.

I said it was like John or Mark, a very common name.

But I didn't really remember a name.

I remembered a face.

So investigators created a composite sketch based on Lisa's description.

But even Lisa knew finding him wouldn't be easy.

Detectives across New York and New Jersey were desperately trying to find a serial killer who was targeting gay men.

The media dubbed him the last call killer.

The most recent victim, Mike Saccara, was last seen in a bar with a white male whom he introduced to the bartender as a nurse working at St.

Vincent's Hospital in New York.

When police followed up with the local hospitals, they identified a male nurse at St.

Vincent's, 38-year-old Mark Slayton, who not only resembled the composite drawing, he also lived in Staten Island near the stores where the killer purchased the latex gloves and garbage bags used in the murders.

Unfortunately, Slayton's prints didn't match the prints found on the plastic bags.

It's heartbreaking.

You're out there pounding the payments, you know, doing everything you can, and you don't have an answer for them.

So it was very frustrating.

Thinking that the killer may have misled his victims about where he worked, Detective Kuhn enlisted his own children in the investigation to distribute the composite sketch of the killer to all the local hospitals.

Unfortunately, the flyers didn't generate any significant leads.

And soon, the case turned cold.

Many, many man-hours, hundreds, if not thousands of man hours, devoted to these investigations.

And essentially the trails just went cold.

The murder stopped too, leaving police to suspect the killer may have changed his MO.

So our thoughts were either he's locked up, he's dead, or he's still out there, he's just getting a lot better at it.

Then, eight years later, the case went in a new direction.

It happened when investigators heard about a new fingerprint technique that was being used in Toronto called vacuum metal deposition, or VMD.

The vacuum metal deposition machine is the ultimate machine to find fingerprints on non-porous materials.

You can have material that was stored for 50 years.

Investigators immediately sent a dozen bags from the last call killer case to Toronto.

They'd been in storage for years.

In the Canadian lab, the bags were exposed to 10 milligrams, about 20 cents worth, of gold, which was heated to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to turn it into a gas.

This gold vapor creates a film over the surface being tested, but it is invisible to the naked eye.

Then,

Vaporized zinc is introduced into the chamber.

It adheres to gold, which locks any prints in place so they can be photographed.

The end product is a negative of the fingerprint on the surface, the non-porous material, and

that's what we end up seeing.

The VMD process yielded 16 partial prints on the bags from the Mulcahy murder and three from the Marrero case.

These prints were of much better quality than the original ones.

The new prints were entered into the National Fingerprint Database of known criminal offenders.

Again, there were no matches.

But Detective Kuhn also sent hard copies of the prints to each state, since not all states had put their prints into the nationwide database.

This was our last shot, and we felt that if we could reach out, that maybe they'd put that little extra effort into the submission.

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When the fingerprints of the last call killer made it through the mail to Layton Print Examiner Kim Stevens in Maine State Police Crime Lab, She was happy to help out.

The state of Maine hadn't yet put all of their prints prints onto the national fingerprint database.

I received the prints in the mail with a cover letter, and I read the letter and the synopsis of the case.

Kim Stevens entered the last call killer's prints into Maine's state database.

But I thought there's no way I would get a match.

I had done a lot of searches for outside agencies, and the chances I thought would be very slim.

But the database of known criminal offenders in Maine turned up 30 possible matches.

So 30 prints came up in the list for me to look at one by one side by side to see if they could be the print.

For the side-by-side comparison, Stevens used the original hard copies made by the 30 criminals when they were arrested and inked by police.

It's time-consuming and exhausting.

Do you want to do it when your eye is fresh and you're ready to make comparisons?

Then, Stevens found one that she thought matched.

Every time I went to the next ridge and found detail that agreed, obviously it was surprise.

I was jumping up and down for joy and couldn't believe it.

The final step is to have the match verified by another examiner.

And that person agreed.

The prince belonged to Richard Rogers, a former graduate student in languages at the University of Maine.

In 1973, Rogers was charged with using a hammer to kill his college roommate.

He wrapped the body in a plastic tent and left it on the side of the road.

Richard Rogers apparently said that the other man had approached him for sex and the other man attacked him.

So, in self-defense, he attacked back and ended up killing him.

Mr.

Rogers claimed self-defense and was acquitted.

Amazing.

After he was acquitted, Rogers got a nursing degree and eventually moved to New York.

At the time of the last call murders, Rogers had been working as a surgical assistant at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

That's where police arrested him.

He was gay, didn't really seem to have any long-term relationships.

In your wildest dreams, you would not look at Richard Rogers and say, this guy is a serial killer.

We learned that during the times of these

murders, Richard Rogers had been off duty.

Lisa Hall chose Rogers' picture from a photo lineup as the man she saw with Mike Saqqara at the bar on the night Saqqara was murdered.

I'm just so glad they got him before he could murder any other people.

Rogers lived in Staten Island.

just blocks from the stores where the garbage bags and latex gloves were purchased.

Detectives searched Richard Rogers' apartment and they found an array of videotapes: hush, hush, sweet Charlotte, Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

He had a Bible in which there were earmarked passages referring to beheadings and dismemberments.

Also in Rogers' apartment, they found a vial of a prescription drug used as a sedative.

It's one that's not screened for in a routine autopsy.

You can use it as a date rape drug, or you can use it to knock people out.

Prosecutors believe Rogers would pick up his victims in gay bars.

He targeted men who were drinking heavily.

Rogers may have used a date rape drug and taken his victims back to his apartment.

Or they may have gone willingly.

Once there,

the evidence shows he stabbed them, then

dismembered the bodies.

He most likely moved the bodies to New Jersey at night to avoid detection.

But even the most careful criminals make mistakes, and Rogers left evidence behind.

The elaborate washing of the victims and the bags didn't remove everything.

As for motive,

Rogers wouldn't talk.

All experts can say is that the murders had a clear sexual motivation.

It's the most bizarre case I've ever been involved with.

And for all of these men, there was just no dignity in death.

In November of 2000, Rogers was tried and convicted of two of the murders, the cases where they had the most forensic evidence.

He was sentenced to two life terms plus 65 years in prison.

We never never gave up.

You keep plugging along.

It never ceases to amaze me what we get in terms of forensics, whether it's fingerprints,

DNA, any number of things.

It's the most powerful tool you can have in a courtroom as a prosecutor.

It was pretty horrible to sit there and look at this man that actually murdered Michael Saccara and to think about all the other people that lost their lives and all their families and friends that lost people because of this monster was sitting there.

but at least he was finally put away.