The Castration Murders

In June of 1982, the body of 21-year-old Marty Shook was discovered in Daniel's Canyon, a mountain pass near Heber City, Utah. Over the next several years, investigators would struggle to identify his killer. However, in 1988, analysts discovered that he may have just been one victim of a sadistic serial killer...

On Wednesday, August 19th, 1981, the body of a man was discovered in Crawford Township, Pennsylvania, near Lock Haven, by an employee of the state's Bureau of Forestry. The body, which was nude at the time of discovery, was found in an area roughly fifteen miles south of Jersey Shore, approximately six miles away from Interstate 80, along a densely-wooded route primarily driven by truckers.

The male victim had been shot in the head once with a .38-caliber handgun - likely a revolver. Miles Houseknecht, the retired state trooper that once led the investigation, told reporters with the Pen Live Patriot-News:

"He was executed."

In addition to the single gunshot to the head, the victim had also received two hard blows to the head. The coroner's report would indicate that either the gunshot or the hits to the head could have been fatal, but the likely cause of death was homicide via firearm.

While this was a tragedy in its own right - almost every murder is - investigators were shocked to discover when they were called out to the crime scene that the victim had been mutilated after his death. Whoever had killed this young man, they had then gone through the effort of removing his genitals postmortem; likely with a knife, and a sharp one at that. A search of the region would fail to recover the victim's clothing or genitals, but investigators believed they had been killed elsewhere - due to the lack of blood at the crime scene - and then brought to the location where their body was later found, about a mile south of Rauchtown. Early reports indicated that this individual had been dead for just over a week, putting their estimated time of death around August 8th or 9th.

Approximately one month after this body was discovered, in September of 1981, investigators revealed to reporters that they had received an anonymous phone call on August 27th from a male caller, who claimed to have previously known the victim and had a notebook belonging to him. Police in Lock Haven, Connecticut would appeal for this person to come forward with whatever info they had, but it's unknown if they did, as updates in this story faded almost immediately thereafter.

This murder victim was eventually identified through fingerprints records, and his identity was later confirmed through visual contact by his family, who lived not-too-far away from where his body was found.

His name was Wayne Leigh Rifendifer, who had been born in August of 1951 as just one of eight children. He was born in North Carolina, but had previously lived in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, as well as most recently, Bridgeport, Connecticut along Beachwood Drive. Recently, though, Wayne had been traveling cross-country as a hitchhiker... and it was believed that this lifestyle of his ultimately led to a run-in with his killer.

Because Wayne's body was found not too far away from interchanges 27 and 28 along Interstate 80, it was believed that his body had been dumped from a vehicle nearby. A large number of the vehicles that traveled along this forested route were truckers, and even at this point in the early 1980s, police had begun to speculate that a large number of traveling serial killers were involved in the trucking trade: a line of work that allowed them to travel vast distances regularly throughout the year, and exposed them to a lot of people - particularly hitchhikers - they otherwise wouldn't be. While this pattern wouldn't be studied en masse until the early 2000s - when a member of the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation helped launch an initiative to study the correlation of truckers to serial killers - at this point, investigators were aware of it in some capacity.

Investigators would publicly theorize that Wayne Leigh Rifendifer had fallen prey to a traveling killer, due to his propensity to hitchhike, but wouldn't make any known connections to other cases for quite some time. When they did, years later, they were surprised to find that a killer with at least two known victims - and as many as five or more - had gone through the effort of mutilating his victims during or after their brutal murders, for reasons that remain a mystery to this day.

This is the story of the Castration Murders.

Ten months later - on June 14th, 1982 - a shocking discovery was made in Daniels Canyon, a mountain pass near Heber City, Utah. Just off of U.S. Route 40, in Wasatch County, the body of a young man was discovered by fisherman Lee Valdez in some trees approximately 32 feet away from the road.

This young man, who looked to be in his early to mid-twenties, had been shot once in the back of the head, right behind the left ear, with a .38-caliber handgun. Despite that, though, his body was found laying on its back, as if he had been carried to the scene and then dropped. But there was a significant amount of blood on his head and face, so much so that he ground around him was drenched in blood (at least, according to one newspaper article written at the time).

Wasatch County Sheriff Mike Spannos would tell reporters about this gruesome discovery:

"We found drag marks and blood spatters leading from the highway to the trees. It looks like someone just drove up, dragged the body out of the car, dumped it and then drove away.

"The body was completely nude, except for his socks. And the victim's male organs had been cut off."

The victim had been stripped of his clothing and belongings, and was found only wearing a pair of white socks. And, as you just heard in the quote a moment ago, this victim had been castrated; his genitals removed after death with a knife by his killer(s). Wasatch County Sheriff's Detective Stevan Ridge, who oversaw the investigation, described the victim as:

"... really carved up."

Coroners wrote in their report about the victim:

"The castration was post mortem by a long-blade, skinning, hunting-type knife."

Despite an extensive search of the area, the victim's clothing and belongings were never recovered. And sadly, some heavy rain the night before the body was discovered made it impossible to take impressions of tire tracks leading to and from the crime scene. This lack of evidence meant that police were going to have to rely upon more investigative methods to uncover any leads regarding their victim, whose identity would remain a mystery for more than a year.

A witness that had been near the crime scene the morning of the discovery described seeing a woman in the area near when the victim's body had been found - Daniels Canyon - shortly after his supposed time of death. She was described as a young woman with blonde hair who was reportedly a hitchhiker looking to leae for Kansas, having been picked up by two men and then dropped off near Kamas. Wasatch County Sheriff Mike Spanos would tell reporters with The Deseret News:

"Evidently the woman saw something happen in that canyon, and we would like to find her and talk with her. We are having a composite drawing made of her now, and we will begin looking for her as soon as that's done."

While this woman was initially proposed as a potential suspect, there seems to have been little publicly-available evidence to support that. As far as I know, police only considered this woman a potential witness, and were unable to identify and/or locate her in the months to come - as they struggled to attain the identity of this murdered young man.

Over the next year-and-a-half, investigators received a number of tips that went nowhere, including at least one woman who claimed to have spent the night with the victim but was unable to identify him at the morgue. However, police kept forwarding information about the victim to other police agencies throughout the country, including details and photographs of his tattoos.

Eventually, word of this murder victim reached Truckee, California, where a young man named Marty Shook had been reported missing shortly after his body was found nearly 600 miles away...

Marty James Shook was a 21-year-old from Truckee, California, who had last been seen roughly two days before the discovery of his body in Wasatch County, Utah.

On June 12th, 1982, Marty had said goodbye to his family in Sparks, Nevada, where his mother lived. Had had told his family that he was heading to Colorado to find work, and like Wayne Leigh Rifendifer - whose body was found hundreds of miles away the year prior - Shook was a known hitchhiker who had traversed throughout the region multiple times already. He seemed to know which areas to stick to in order to stay safe, but had only been gone for two days when his body was discovered more than 500 miles away in Utah, approximately 50 miles southeast of Salt Lake City.

Sadly, though, Marty wasn't identified until well into 1983, during which span, most of the leads relating to his case had faded away from memory and interest in his story waned. Speaking to the Wasatch Wave in 2000, former Sheriff's Detective Stevan Ridge stated:

"By the time they found out his identity, the trail was cold."

Because Marty wasn't a local and had likely only been in the area for a few hours at most, police had trouble obtaining much information about his travels during the two days he had been gone from home. He had no known connections in the region, and nobody came forward to claim that they had seen him between June 12th and 14th. To make matters even more complicated, none of his clothing or belongings ever surfaced, including the blue denim hat and navy blue t-shirt he'd been wearing when he left home, or the items that he carried with him, which included: a Jansport backpack, a light blue sleeping bag, a buck knife in a black leather case that he wore on his belt, and a silver chain around his neck.

Shortly after the discovery of Marty's body in 1982, investigators theorized that they had found his genitals, which had been severed postmortem. A severed penis was discovered at a rest stop in Kansas a short time later, but the identity of its owner was never confirmed. Public hairs from this specimen were sent to the Wasatch County Sheriff's Department, but they were lost at some point, making a DNA match later on impossible.

Eventually, the murder of Marty Shook would become a cold case for the Wasatch County Sheriff's Office, but that didn't stop police from investigating any lead they could find. In the In the weeks after his body was discovered - before his identity was learned by police - they linked his case to a similar story that had unfolded in Wyoming roughly two months beforehand...

In the weeks after the discovery of Marty Shook's body, as police struggled to identify him and learn about the exact circumstances of his death, they loosely linked his murder to another case approximately 400 miles away, near Casper, Wyoming.

On May 13th, 1982 - roughly one month before Marty's death - a 24-year-old man was at the Red Men Lodge, an after-hours bar in Casper. There, he met two men about his age, maybe a little older, who had some drinks with him and offered to give him a lift home in the early morning hours.

The three left the bar in the vehicle the two strangers had arrived in, a white cab semi towing an empty flatbed trailer. However, as the inebriated 24-year-old directed the other two men toward his home, he noticed that they were taking a different route down a long and isolated stretch of highway. As he later recounted to the Casper Star-Tribune:

"I noticed they were going a long way down the highway and I started to get suspicious. They finally stopped at the Glenrock intersection (along I-25) and told me to get out. Before that I had noticed a shotgun in the sleeper.

"They told me to empty my pockets and then they went really crazy when they found out I didn't have any money."

At this point, the two men bound his hands behind his back with a length of hemp rope, and then - with him still alive and fully conscious, albeit inebriated - castrated him with a knife. Try as he might against the rope binding, he was unable to break free, and was forced to endure the painful act before being shot in the back with a shotgun. Per the man in the Casper Star-Tribune:

"They cut me first while my hands were tied behind my back. Then they shot me in the back with a shotgun. They lifted my head up to see if I was alive and one of them said, 'He's dead, he can't be alive.' Then they left.

"Right then, I wanted to scream, with all that pain and everything. But something had hold of my tongue and I couldn't. I turned around just in time to see them running to the truck and pull off real slow.

"I had began prayin' real loud after they left and I started walking along a barbed wire fence toward Douglas. I was walkin' real good even though I was shot, my hands were tied and one testicle was hanging down to my knees.

"They were killers possessed by demons. They left me for dead."

The man had been castrated with a knife and then shot in the back with a shotgun at point blank range - a distance of approximately six feet - but thankfully none of the pellets hit his spine. Even with these grievous injuries and his hands bound behind his back, the man was able to squeeze through an opening in a fence and walk along it for quite some distance, eventually being found by a couple of passers-by near the South Glenrock interchange on I-25 at approximately 5:00 AM, telling them:

"Please help me. I've been shot. I've got to get warm."

The man was taken to a nearby hospital and treated for his injuries, with officials stating that it was a miracle the two witnesses had stumbled upon him when he did. He risked bleeding out if he'd been left on his own for much longer.

Thankfully, the 24-year-old was able to make a full recovery. He was treated for his injuries, and per a newspaper article months later, was even scheduled to have surgery to help replace his missing genitals. However, for obvious reasons, his identity was withheld from the public. He would cooperate with police to the best of his ability and provided a description of the two suspects:

One man was described as a husky white male, between 28 and 30 years old, who stood between 5'8" and 5'10" and weighed approximately 170 pounds. He had curly hair that was either sandy blond or red-blond in color, and was clean-shaven, but may have had a mustache, and wore prescription-type glasses.

The other was described as young-looking, between 20 and 23 years old, standing between 5'6" and 5'8" with a slim build (approximately 130 - 140 pounds). He had straight, collar-length hair that was light brown or sandy brown in color, and had a narrow chin with drawn cheeks, dark-colored eyes, and a medium dark complexion. He also spoke with a slightly Southern accent.

When last seen by the surviving victim, these two men were seen getting back into their white semi cab pulling a flatbed trailer, which was heading south on I-25.

Sadly, the victim had been drinking pretty heavily and was unable to remember parts of the story, with his description of the suspects varying in retellings of the story to police, making it hard to pin down exact descriptions. When composite drawings were finally made in August 1982, anyone with information had likely forgotten it, or were no longer able to piece together certain parts of the story.

It also didn't help that the survivor himself - who was just a month out from a brutal assault that left him permanently mutilated - was dismayed by the police response, with certain comments of his hinting that police weren't treating it as seriously as they should have... which, sadly, was the case for a lot of sexual assault-related crimes in the 1980s.

The survivor would recount the attack on his life in an interview with the Casper Star-Tribune roughly one month after it happened, in a story that was published on June 12th, 1982. This happened to be the same day that Marty Shook set out from his family's home in Nevada; approximately 24 hours later, he'd be dead, and just hours after that, his body would be found in Daniels Canyon, Utah.

In the weeks after Marty's body was discovered, police in Utah and Wyoming theorized a link was possible, with Wasatch County Sheriff Mike Spanos telling reporters:

"It's all supposition at this point, but we feel there is a possible tie-in with the incident that occurred in [Wyoming] last month. The biggest similarity was the fact that the victim was mutilated and his nude body left on a heavily traveled road."

While the two crimes had taken place some distance apart - approximately 400 miles away from one another - police believed a link was genuinely possible. They received reports of two men matching the composite sketches from the Casper case being seen in Vernal, Utah the day before Marty's murder, a town less than 30 miles west of Daniel's Canyon. However, as far as I can tell, these two men were never identified - nor were the suspects in the Wyoming case.

In a story published the following January (1983), reporters from Glenrock, Wyoming wrote that the case remained unsolved, with police having been unable to identify the two men responsible for castrating and shooting the 24-year-old laborer in Casper. As described by Converse County Sheriff Charles Widick:

"There still isn't anything concrete on the case. We don't have any suspects or leads."

As far as I can tell, the police have never closed the book on this brutal assault, and it remains unsolved to this day. For that reason, it's impossible to say whether or not there exists a connection to the murder of Marty Shooks in Utah. However, while there exist many similarities in the two cases, there are just as many minute differences: the firearms used to commit the crimes (a .38-caliber handgun and a shotgun), the usage of rope to bind the victim's hands, and the fact that in one case the victim survived.

It is unknown if this case is related at all to the cases oft-attributed to the Castration Murders, but its unsolved nature is a disturbing note in this rabbit hole of a story.

Following the murder of Marty Shooks in Utah, investigators continued to look into his cases when new tips or leads surfaced. But as the months began to turn into years, those leads became fewer and fewer. Within a couple of years, the grisly murder case had gone cold, and there was little movement in either.

However, in 1988, the details of Marty Shook's murder was entered into VICAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program), one of the first national databases used to track violent crimes and trends. There, it matched up with the murder of Wayne Leigh Rifendifer, whose story I detailed in the episode introduction.

Both of the victims were young male hitchhikers who bore a striking resemblance to one another, with Wasatch County Sheriff's Detective Stevan Ridge telling reporters with the Deseret News:

"Oddly enough, our victim and theirs looked an awful lot alike. They both had basically the same build."

It seems like these two men had been the killer's "type," and had likely been singled out because of their appearance. Both had been shot to death with a .38-caliber handgun in summer months - Wayne Rifendifer in August of 1981 and Marty Shook in June of 1982 - and both had been sexually mutilated after their death.

Some had a hard time believing that the two may have been killed by the same killer(s) due to the geographic distance between them, with Ridendifer's body being found near Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, and Marty Shook's being found in Daniel's Canyon, Utah - roughly 2000 miles away from one another. However, the similarities in the two cases were too eerie to ignore, so ballistics tests were ordered to compare the rounds that had been fired in both their crimes. The Pennsylvania State Police Lab that performed this analysis wrote:

"The comparison revealed that the bullet that killed Shook and the bullet that killed Rifendifer were fired from the same weapon."

The firearm that had been used to kill these two men was confirmed to be the same, and in November of 1989 the results of this forensic ballistics examination would reveal that this firearm was likely of Charter Arms manufacture.

Surprisingly, though, this analysis revealed that this firearm may have been used in even more crimes that police had not yet attributed to this unidentified killer or group of killers...

On Wednesday, November 26th, 1986, the body of a young man was discovered near Litchfield, Connecticut, at a rest area along Route 8. The now-closed rest area, just north of the Litchfield-Thomaston town line, was frequently used by truckers and was known to be a hotspot in the region for gay and bisexual men to hook up. Police had actually dropped by the rest stop hours before the body was discovered - at around 2:00 AM - but hadn't seen anything suspicious.

The following morning, the body of the male victim was discovered by a trucker, having been wrapped up in a quilt and green garbage bags. The body had been dumped along a snowbank at the rest stop, and even though there was little blood found around it, it was apparent that this victim had been horribly mutilated.

The victim had been castrated by their killer(s) either before or during their death, and afterward, the killer(s) had continued to mutilate the corpse. They had removed the victims head and legs, decapitating them and then cutting off their legs near mid-thigh. The victim's nipples had also been removed. Despite a widespread canvas of the region - which included searches through dumpsters - police were unable to recover the victim's head or legs.

According to the chief state medical examiner, there were no visible injuries found to the victim's torso, indicating that he may have been shot in the head. And based on the damage to the victim's skin, it was believed that they may have been mutilated and dismembered while alive.

However, for some reason, the killer(s) had apparently not been concerned with the victim being identified, as they had left his arms and hands intact. The young man's fingerprints were sent to be analyzed by the FBI in Washington D.C., where they quickly established a match.

Jack Franklin Andrews was a slight man - standing approximately 5'9" and weighing approximately 135 pounds, with red hair and blue eyes - who had grown up in the Kansas City region.

As investigators began to learn about the victim of this gruesome murder case, they discovered that he had been no stranger to law enforcement. Jack Andrews had an extensive criminal record in multiple states, including California, Kansas, Florida, Tennessee, and Oregon. The crimes he had been convicted of included burglary, possession of stolen property, assault with a weapon, providing false information, and assignation to commit prostitution. Surprisingly, though, he had never committed any known crimes in Connecticut - where his body was found in November of 1986 - but had previously spent time in a mental hospital and had just been released from his most recent prison stint months before his death.

Jack Andrews had used at least three names in recent memory, including Jack Franklin Walsh, Jack F. Walsh, Charles E. West, and John E. Davison, and had used at least three birth dates that put him anywhere between 25 - 27 years old. The most commonly-recognized birthdate on official documents was July 28th, 1960, which would have made him 26 at the time of his death.

These numerous aliases made it hard to keep track of Jack Andrews, who - as I mentioned - had been released from prison just a few months before his death, in August of 1986. Afterward, he had spent a few weeks living with his mother and grandmother in Kansas, but as reported by the Hartford Courant, was last seen in Oklahoma, where he'd proposed marriage to a woman he'd met at a mental hospital. She and her family didn't take too kindly to this surprise proposal, though, and had called the police on him.

From there, he struck out on his own, hitting the road as a hitchhiker, which his family had always frowned upon. Joe Quartiero, a former-detective investigating the case, had told reporters with the Hartford Courant:

"We said how would he get there, and we figured it would be by trailer truck. He had no wheels and truckers pick up hitchhikers for companionship, just to talk. We figured he had to be in trucks because cars wouldn't pick him up normally."

Surprisingly, police were able to track down some sightings of Jack Andrews beyond his last known encounter in Oklahoma. They discovered that he had been in Nashville as recently as November 19th of 1986 - approximately one week before his body was discovered in Connecticut - where he had applied for a job at a Burger King. He'd be seen days later, on November 22nd, in Fairfield, Connecticut, by a store clerk in a rest area off of I-95.

Approximately one day later, investigators surmised, he'd be dead.

Almost immediately, investigators theorized that Jack Andrews had been killed by a trucker. Not only had his body been found at a rest area mostly-frequented by truckers, but he had been hitchhiking in the months before his death. This seemed to be much more than a coincidence. As recounted by investigator Nicholas Sabetta to the Hartford Courant in 2000:

"These types of crimes seem to fit somebody [who would] have an occupation which would cause them to travel through several states."

At one point, detectives even received a tip about a semi-truck seen at the rest stop where Jack Andrews' body had been found - on the morning that his body was discovered. As reported by the Hartford Courant, officials at the trucking company said there was no reason for a truck of theirs to have been there - or even in the area - on the day in question. However, as I mentioned earlier, this rest stop was known as a bit of a gay hotspot in the area, so it's possible that there was a more innocent explanation for the trucker's presence... but in the absence of any additional evidence, seems to stand out a little, especially since this crime seems to have a sexual component of some kind.

In 1988, the details of Marty Shook's murder from Utah in 1982 were entered into the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) where analysts began to link it to the Pennsylvania murder of Wayne Leigh Rifendifer the year beforehand, 1981. However, as they began to analyze the two cases together, they began to link it to the still-unsolved murder of Jack Andrews from 1986.

While Jack Andrews had been murdered noticeably later than the other two, following a four year gap from the killer(s), there were noticeable similarities. Like Marty and Wayne, Jack had been hitchhiking at the time of his death and was a known transient. He was also incredibly similar to them in appearance, with a short, slight build and reddish-brown hair. Also, his body had been found near Litchfield, Connecticut, which isn't too far away from Bridgeport, where Wayne Rifendifer had started his final, fatal hitchhiking journey. Perhaps the two had decided to hitch a ride with the same trucker.

After linking these three cases together, a psychological profile was commissioned with the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit, which led to the widespread belief that the killer was a trucker of a traveling salesman of some kind; someone that knew which roads to utilize to make efficient use of time, and which would remain quiet or isolated enough to commit these crimes and dispose of the victims' remains. After obtaining this profile, investigators were even more sure that the killer was a trucker of some kind that had started in the northeast, before moving westward, where he, according to Detective Stevan Ridge:

"... then got more strange and started doing more mutilation."

Something that investigators struggled with, however, were the differences between Jack Andrews' murder and the first two. As I mentioned, there was a four-year-gap between the 2nd and 3rd murders (1982 - 1986) and Jack was murdered in November. The other two crimes took place in summer months (June and August). Also, his body had shown a more extreme form of mutilation; while the other two had been shot in the head and castrated postmortem, Jack Andrews had been mutilated during his death, and had not only been decapitated but had his legs and nipples removed from his body, never to be found. Because of this, medical examiners were unable to confirm his cause of death, with many theorizing that he had been shot in the head (but without his head to confirm that, this remains just a theory).

For this reason, Jack Andrews' murder remains unsolved to this day. His connection to the killing spree known as the Castration Murders remains theorized to this day, but without any additional evidence in the case, it's impossible to tell for sure. Regardless, though, there has been a suspect theorized for years to be responsible for Jack's murder... making him a prime suspect in this unsolved serial killer saga.

Richard Westall Rogers Jr. - infamously known as the "Last Call Killer" was born in Plymouth, Massachussets in June of 1950. His family would relocate to Florida during his childhood, and he would end up spending his formative years there, where he was later bullied in high school due to his high-pitched voice and effeminate personality. Years later, he would come out as a gay man.

Rogers attending college in Florida, but would move up to the University of Maine for graduate school. There, in his early twenties, he would attempt to murder his housemate, Frederic Spencer, with a hammer; later asphyxiating him with a plastic bag when he kept breathing. He originally tried to cover up the crime, but was ultimately caught due to his own ineptitude. During trial, he made a convincing witness, claiming self-defense, and the charges were reduced to manslaughter. It made no difference, though, as he was acquitted on all charges in November of 1973.

From there, Richard Rogers moved to New York, where he finished nursing school in 1978. He became a surgical nurse at the medical center in Mount Sinai, and would work there for the next two-and-a-half decades, through 2001. During that span, very few people suspected anything untoward with Rogers. But in 1988, he actually stood trial for kidnapping and assaulting a man, having lured him back to his apartment and then slipping him roofies, then injecting him with a substance that caused him to lose consciousness again. Thankfully, the man survived and filed a police report, but the subsequent nonjury trial resulted in yet another acquittal for Richard Rogers in December of 1988.

Over the next handful of years, a series of killings began to unfold in the region. The victims were gay and bisexual men who were last seen in piano bars in Manhattan, but whose bodies were found dismembered and dumped into trash bins along the highways of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The crime spree commonly referred to as the "Last Call Killings" started with Peter Stickney Anderson in 1991, then continued with Thomas Richard Mulcahy in 1992, and both Anthony Edward Morrero and Michael J. Sakara in 1993.

In addition to being murdered and dismembered, the victims also showed signs of castration and mutilation, with each having been stabbed and/or bludgeoned multiple times.

These four cases went cold for almost an entire decade, with police circling around Richard Rogers but not identifying him as the killer until 2001, when fingerprints taken from evidence recovered at the crime scenes were matched up. Evidence found at Rogers' home was taken and matched other evidence taken from the crime scenes, including carpet fibers and trash bags.

While Richard Rogers was only tried for the murders of two victims, Thomas Mulcahy and Anthony Morrero, due to the evidence available to prosecutors, the other two cases (Peter Anderson and Michael Sakara) were ruled admissable evidence at trial. For these two murders, Richard Rogers was found guilty and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, which he is still serving to this day.

Other than the two murders for which he wasn't convicted, Richard Rogers is believed to have killed more men but has remained quiet in the decades since his arrest. He is believed to have committed at least two crimes that would extend his known crimes by an entire decade, and spread out his geographic footprint by hundreds of miles.

Investigators believe that in April of 1982, Richard Rogers murdered Matthew John Pierro, whose body was found off of a dirt road near I-4 in Daytona Beach, Florida. Like the other known victims of Rogers, Pierro had been stabbed and strangled to death, and his nipple had been bitten off of his body. Not only is it believed that a bite mark on Pierro's body could be a match for Rogers' teeth, but he was confirmed to have been in the area at the time of the killing to attend a college reunion.

Richard Rogers is also a favored suspect for the murder of Jack Andrews, whose body was found dismembered in a quilt and trash bags in Connecticut in November of 1986. Not only would this match up with Rogers' M.O. - killing men and distributing their body parts throughout the Northeast - but would fit within his geographic area, with Litchfield, Connecticut being less than a hundred miles out from New York City.

While it is unlikely that Richard Rogers committed the other crimes often attributed to the Castration Killer, Wayne Leigh Rifendifer and Marty Shook, it is possible that he is responsible for Jack Andrews' murder and has yet to admit it. Only time will tell whether or not the truth ever gets revealed.

As I've mentioned a couple of times already, the entering of the details from Marty Shook's murder into VICAP in 1988 seemed to kick off the series of events that led to this story unfolding. Until then, police had not yet linked his murder to the others. While they remained uncertain whether or not Jack Andrews had been a victim of the same killer due to a lack of evidence, ballistics testing had confirmed that Wayne Leigh Rifendifer and Marty Shook had been shot and killed by the same firearm.

However, during this analysis, they found at least two other cases that came up as potential matches: one that predated the others from Wyoming in 1980, and another from Georgia in 1983.

The first known case that investigators could link to the Castration Murders was a case from August of 1980, which hailed from an area already known to investigators: Casper, Wyoming.

In almost everything I've found online, the details in this case have been rather scarce. In the few publications that have published information about it, they describe the victim as a 27-year-old that was known to hitchhike, who was shot to death with a .38-caliber revolver at least ten times, but was not mutilated postmortem. They would prove to be the only victim who wasn't. Through ballistics evidence, this case was later linked to the others.

Sadly, though, this is the only information available about this case through readily-available sources. However, I do think that I was able to find the case this information references, which took a fair amount of digging in some old news archives.

Willard E. Judd was a 27-year-old that had moved to Casper, Wyoming in July of 1980 to work the nearby oil fields. His body was found on August 10th, 1980, near Natrona County's Government Bridge, approximately 30 miles south of Casper. His body was found in a parking area near Highway 220, lying on his back with his limbs outstretched, having been shot ten times in the upper torso and head. Several of the bullet shells were found near his body, indicating that he'd been killed at the location where his body was found.

Surprisingly, though, no sign of struggle was found at the crime scene, leading investigators to theorize that Judd had possibly been incapacitated elsewhere and then shot again at the location where his body was found. According to the coroner's report, he'd been dead for anywhere between 8 and 32 hours when his body was found, and may have been swimming before he was ambushed and killed, based on his state of undress.

Unlike the other victims, Willard Judd's belongings were found at the crime scene, but there was only one item in his wallet: a ticket from the Colorado Highway Patrol for hitchhiking. Because of this, police were able to confirm his identity through some relatives in Louisiana, who identified the body.

A short time later, investigators released a statement saying that they were looking for a suspect: a white man in his twenties, who stood about six feet tall with a slim build and short blond hair, who was wearing blue jeans and a red-and-white plaid shirt when he was seen. This man was apparently seen in the location where Judd's body was found, and was believed to have been with him the night before his death, at a nearby bar in Alcova.

In 1982, police arrested two men for the crime, based on information obtained from an inmate serving a life sentence in South Dakota. But that information was later revealed to be false, resulting in the two men being released without charge.

As far as I can tell, police made no further movement in the case, and Willard Judd's murder remains unsolved to this day. Along with a case in Georgia, it was linked to the Castration Murders due to ballistics testing, but there hasn't been any movement on it in decades.

The other murder case linked to the Castration Murders - which would be the fourth in a timeline of events - took place in July of 1983.

Sadly, little information about this case has ever been revealed to the public. The only information I can find about this victim is that they were discovered in Georgia and had been found almost entirely nude, wearing only a swimsuit at their time of discovery, and had been shot multiple times.

Like Willard Judd, this victim was linked to the others in 1988, following the VICAP submission of Marty Shook. It's believed that information in this case has been kept confidential by authorities because of its unsolved nature, but has been linked to the others through ballistics evidence - which, if you recall, had linked together Marty Shook's murder to that of Wayne Leigh Rifendifer.

In publications published years ago, investigators hinted at possible connections to other cases in other states, but it remains unknown if any of those connections have been linked through evidence.

Due to the proximity of the five victims' bodies nearby roads frequented by truckers, investigators surmised that the killer responsible for the Castration Murders was either a door-to-door salesman or a trucker of some kind... someone that traveled regularly traveled vast distances for work.

Sadly, there are no shortage of possible suspects that fit this mold: truckers that traverse vast geographic regions in the United States, and prey upon the helpless to satisfy their grim urges. One such example is Randy Kraft, also known as the Scorecard Killer and the Freeway Killer, who lured young men into his vehicle and then plied them with alcohol or drugs, oftentimes both. They were then bound, tortured, and sexually abused by Kraft before being killed, often in graphic ways. Many victims were found with burns and injuries to their body, and some were found dismembered, mutilated, or castrated.

However, while Randy Kraft was linked to some cases in Michigan, almost all of his murders took place in the state of California and Oregon. Now, it is possible that he is a suspect in this case - after all, his crime spree lasted for many years, only coming to an end in 1983 - but he doesn't seem like a serious match for the Castration Murders just because of the vast differences between the crime sprees.

That being said, Randy Kraft is definitely the archetype for this type of killer; someone that took advantage of the naivete of youth to prey upon young victims during their travels of the country. During the 1970s and 1980s, hitchhiking was a popular mode of transportation, and several dozens of traveling killers preyed upon that fact . In fact, there are three known serial killers from the state of California that share one of Randy Kraft's nicknames, "The Freeway Killer," because of how common this was decades ago.

In 1991, FBI agent Terry Green, who was the then-director of the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP), suggested that the supposed end of the Castration Murders in 1986 meant that the killer was likely either deceased, imprisoned for another crime, or had left the United States, telling reporters:

"If the killing stops, it's our experience that he's dead, he's in jail or he's gone to somebody else's area."

Of course, in the decades since, we've learned that this isn't always the case. We've seen killers like Dennis Rader (BTK) or Joseph James Deangelo (Golden State Killer) stop committing crimes due to other factors in their lives, such as starting a family or becoming occupied with their job . It's possible that this killer simply moved on for some reason we can only guess at, or changed their M.O. enough as to avoid suspicion.

Someone who preempted this theory was Pennsylvania State Trooper Steve Toboz, who told the Deseret News back in 1989:

"He could still be doing it and the bodies just aren't being found. He could be burying them. We were lucky we found our body."

In the latter half of 1990, police in Montebello, California began investigating a middle-aged man after learning that he had been accused of molesting and raping an underage boy. T he 50-year-old man, Harry Christ Manos, had been a teacher at Schurr High School since 1967, where he taught math and science. There, he was well-liked by the faculty and the families of students, with Principal James Douglas describing him as an "excellent teacher."

Police had started to investigate Manos after he was identified as a potential abuser by a 17-year-old runaway, who had been hitchhiking in June of 1990 when Manos picked up the teen near Las Vegas. At the time, Harry Manos was on his way to a physics conference in Minneapolis, and offered to take the teen with him on the journey. He would even reach out to the teen's parents and obtained written permission allowing him to take the runaway into his home, enrolling him in the school that Manos taught at.

Months later, however, the runaway had left Manos' home, and was being treated at a psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt that December. While being treated, the teenager claimed that Manos had sexually abused them during their brief stay.

On December 21st, 1990, police arrested Harry Manos at his Alhambra home, charging him with three counts of oral copulation with a minor. However, the most shocking news was yet to come: during a search of Manos' home, police discovered disturbing objects. They found a lot of pornographic videos and photos of young men, which, assuming they were of-age, wasn't necessarily strange in and of itself, only when paired with other concerning items. However, these items were found alongside photos and magazines depicting torture, castration, and mutilations, as well as a large amount of literature written by Manos under the pen name "Carl Alcorn," which wrote in extensive detail about bondage, torture, mutilation, and the castration of young men.

Shockingly, in the home of this unassuming high school teacher, police also found a jar containing a severed penis and testicles inside a locked file cabinet in a closet. As you can imagine, investigators had several questions, but Manos refused to speak to police while awaiting trial.

An examination of the severed genitalia revealed that it was real, having been cut from a recently-deceased man shortly after his death. Despite later claims by Manos that it had come from a cadaver at a medical school, that was proven to be unlikely, with Dr. James Ribe from the L.A. Coroner's Office claiming that the genitalia weren't embalmed. As reported by the Wasatch Wave in 2000:

"Since medical schools obtain their cadavers by donations from the deceased family, medical cadavers are never coroner cases. Medical schools want individuals who died of natural causes and are embalmed, since the cadaver will be utilized for an entire semester at room temperature."

However, despite this not being taken from a medical cadaver, Dr. Ribe believed that this set of male genitalia had been cut by someone with surgical experience, writing:

"There was no evidence of repeat cutting. A novice would likely make several repeated passes of the knife through the tissue before cutting completely through the tissue."

Sadly, the severed penis and testicles found inside the home of Harry Christ Manos were never identified because the genitalia had been saturated in rubbing alcohol. As such, no DNA could be lifted from them, and to this day, they remain identified as "John Doe No. 283."

Manos later claimed that the genitalia had been given to him by a former-lover of his named Christian Shea, approximately five years before his arrest (~1985) as a "gag gift" of sorts. Sadly, though, at the time, California didn't consider possession of body parts to be a criminal violation, so Harry Manos was released and not charged with any wrongdoing for possessing the human genitalia, maintaining his innocence. As far as I can tell, nothing resembling murder charges were ever filed against him, despite police believing that he knew more about the severed genitalia than he let on.

In November of 1991, Harry Christ Manos was acquitted on the child molestation charges, although the jurors in that trial never got to see evidence of the severed genitalia in his possession, with the judge believing it was not pertinent to the molestation charges. Attorneys for Manos attacked the teenage victim's credibility on the stand, and his word - that of a teenage runaway with behavioral issues and a suicide attempt - didn't stack up against that of an esteemed teacher. This eventually led to the jury deadlocking at 10-2 in favor of innocence, resulting in a mistrial. Prosecutors chose not to reissue the charges, believing they'd be unable to win a conviction with another jury.

Harry Christ Manos returned to his normal life, and even returned to the classroom the following year, 1991. As far as I can tell, he never had to answer for how he had come to possess a set of severed male genitalia, which - when stacked up on top of his vast amount of literature and art depicting mutilation and castration - doesn't exactly paint a flowery portrait.

The man that Harry Manos had blamed for gifting him the jar of human genitalia, Christian Shea, had been an ex-lover of Manos' and lived elsewhere at the time of his arrest. A search of Shea's apartment revealed additional concerning items, including "a human skull, a dissection kit, and miscellaneous writings regarding the castration and torture of individuals," as reported by the Wasatch Wave. Like the genitalia Harry Manos had in his possession, the skull was analyzed and believed to be real, likely taken from a recently-deceased homicide victim, yet it's not believed that Christian Shea ever had to answer for having it in his apartment.

When speaking to reporters following his acquittal, police made it clear that they believed Harry Christ Manos had committed crimes that went unanswered. Not only had he been accused of committing sexual crimes against an underage boy, he had a large collection of writings and art depicting the abuse of young men - many of which was graphic, including mutilations, torture, and castrations - but he also had a jar of an unidentified male's genitals, which was never explained away. His ex-lover coincidentally had an unidentified human skull in his home, indicating to me that there might be some kind of connection between the two.

The commonly-accepted victims of the Castration Murders (except for the fifth and final victim, Jack Andrews) were all killed during summer months; time that Harry Christ Manos, a teacher, would have had off. And according to at least one rather-vague source, Manos could be placed in various spots in the U.S. where the bodies of mutilated young men had been found, but police never had enough hard evidence to implicate him in any specific crime.

Speaking about this case, Weber State College professor Kay Gillespie, who taught criminology, told the Deseret News in 1989:

"Society needs to see an offender apprehended almost immediately or in a short period of time. Unsolved cases bring a lack of confidence and frustration in the justice system... There's always the fear that the person is still out there."

This is absolutely the case here. While these stories are all older than I am - some by nearly a decade - they all remain unsolved to this day. The victims have nearly been forgotten by the world around them, relegated to the occasional mention on articles talking about spooky serial killers that were never caught.

In an article carried by numerous newspapers in 1991, Jim Bell, an investigator with the Salt Lake City medical examiner's office, stated:

"The hardest thing an agency is faced with is when you have three murders and they stop. It becomes your responsibility to let the rest of the country know because he's out there and he's going to kill again."

Much of the information in this episode took quite a bit to track down, because it simply hasn't been digitized. If you attempt to look up information on the Castration Murders, you'll find a Wikipedia page, which has little more than a handful of paragraphs with vague information about the victims and the supposed killer.

This is so heartbreaking to me, because... as much as the true crime community has grown over the last handful of years, with everyone trying to highlight obscure cases from their neck of the woods, there are still so many stories that slip through the cracks. And there is still so much more information out there that's yet to be found - or in certain cases, rediscovered - and presented to the world. Hopefully I've helped do that with this story, but I encourage anyone with information in this case - information you have or information you can find - reach out to me and let's try and piece together even more detail in the lives and deaths of these young men.

Until such a time, the stories of Wayne Leigh Rifendifer, Marty James Shook, Jack Franklin Andrews, Willard E. Judd, and the other young men linked to the "Castration Murders" will remain unresolved.