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More than 50 years ago, on April 28, 1973, Frederic Spencer, a University of Maine student, was bludgeoned to death. His killer dumped Spencer’s body just off Route 116 in Old Town, not far from the Interstate 95 exit on Gilman Falls Avenue, where it was eventually found.
Twenty-eight years later, Richard Rogers, the former University of Maine graduate student who was Spencer’s roommate and who Maine State Police believed killed him, was convicted of the murder of two more men — this time, in and around New York City. He is currently serving two life sentences in New Jersey State Prison.
Rogers was acquitted of Spencer’s murder back in 1973, after a five-day trial in Penobscot County Superior Court, in which Rogers claimed he was not guilty due to self-defense. But it is believed by police in New York, New Jersey and elsewhere that in the ensuing years, Rogers may have been responsible for up to four more murders, and possibly more — not including the murders of the two men for which he was convicted in 2005, and that of Spencer’s.
Rogers, who would come to be known as the Last Call Killer, is a serial killer who primarily targeted gay and bisexual men in New York City in the 1990s. He lured them from bars in Manhattan, murdered and dismembered them, and then dumped their bodies in garbage bags along highways.
If he had been convicted of murder in Maine in 1973, it’s possible none of those subsequent killings would ever have happened.
Those murders and the lives of the men who were killed are the subject of a new documentary series on HBO, “Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York,” which premiered last week and airs on Sunday nights through July 30. It’s based on the 2021 book “Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York,” written by Elon Green.
Before Rogers took the lives of multiple people, however, he was a shy, awkward youth growing up in Massachusetts and then Florida, a straight-A student in a working class family. After graduating from Florida Southern College with a degree in French, he went to the University of Maine in 1973 for a master’s degree, also in French. He lived at 10 Main St. in Orono with three roommates, including Spencer. He was described as a loner.
On the afternoon of April 28, 1973, Rogers hit Spencer eight times in the back of the head with a hammer, and then placed a plastic bag over his head to asphyxiate him. That evening, he wrapped Spencer’s body in a nylon tent and dumped it in the woods. Once Spencer’s body was recovered, a key in his pocket led police to a post office box the roommates shared. Rogers was arrested on May 1, and was quickly arraigned in court.
During the trial, Rogers claimed that Spencer attempted to attack him with a hammer, but that he managed to wrestle it out of his roommate’s hands and attacked him in self-defense. In a panic, he disposed of the body, rather than go to the police. Rogers’ testimony was so convincing that his attorney asked for the charges to be reduced to manslaughter, which the judge granted. On Nov. 2, after deliberating for less than three hours, the jury reached a verdict of not guilty.
Rogers relocated to New York to attend nursing school and was soon hired at Mount Sinai Hospital. For the next 15 years, he kept a low profile, until a 1988 alleged assault on a man Rogers met at a bar in Manhattan. Rogers allegedly brought him back to his Staten Island apartment and drugged him repeatedly, removed his clothes and tied him to the bed. Eventually, police said Rogers carried him out of the apartment, and a month later was arrested for the assault. He was acquitted at trial.
It is also suspected that Rogers murdered men in Florida in 1982 and in Connecticut in 1986, though police have never conclusively proved the connection.
The four murders for which Rogers was either convicted for or suspected of committing occurred between 1991 and 1993: Peter Stickney Anderson in 1991, Thomas Richard Mulcahy in 1992, Anthony Edward Marrero in 1993, and Michael Sakara, also in 1993. In 2005, Rogers was convicted only of the murders of Marrero and Mulcahy — not of Anderson or Sakara.
All the victims were gay or bisexual men in their 40s and 50s, and all were either stabbed or beaten to death. All except Marrero were last seen at gay bars in Manhattan. Their bodies were cut into multiple pieces and had been washed clean, placed in garbage bags and disposed of along highways in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
In an era when LGBTQ+ people in New York were under constant threat of physical violence as the HIV/AIDS epidemic ripped through the community, the killings further terrorized people. In the HBO series, “Last Call,” the stories of the murdered men are told in poignant, tender detail, underscoring the strength of the gay community of the era, and the brutality and devastation it bore for so many years.
It would take another eight years for police to connect Rogers to the crimes. The big break came in 2001, when Maine finally put its Automated Fingerprint Identification System online. Though new fingerprints had been lifted from evidence in 1999, matches from Rogers’ 1973 arrest in Orono couldn’t be made for two more years. The match was made in May 2001, and within a few weeks, Rogers was arrested. He finally went to trial in October 2005, and was convicted of the murders of Mulcahy and Marrero.
Upon Rogers’ arrest, Frederic Spencer’s mother, Louise, who lived on Mount Desert Island, told the Bangor Daily News that the news of the arrest did not bring them much relief.
“This just renews the pain that we have felt all these years,” she said. “We have been in such pain, and this just opens the wound and makes it fresh again. It wasn’t a happy thing for us that [Rogers] went free.”
