THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 25, 1995 TAG: 9501250428
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY PERRY PARKS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: GATESVILLE LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
On the evening of Aug. 18, 1990, three young people pulled into the parking lot of Rogers Grocery at Corner High crossroads in Eure, where they were planning to meet a friend.
A man in a reddish plaid shirt and baseball cap approached them, wielding a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun. He said he was a law officer on a drug bust and advised them to leave.
``I remember his eyes. They were like an ice blue,'' Katherine Winslow Lowe testified in Gates County Superior Court Tuesday. She and her companions left.
Around 10 a.m. the next day, store employee John W. Lambert turned his key in an unresisting lock and entered the grocery to flip on the lights. As he walked down the center aisle, he nearly stumbled on the naked, blood-stained body of Linda Rogers, 16.
Nearby was the body of her mother, store-owner Minh Linda Rogers, 42. Both had been shot in the neck at close range.
A Hertford County man, Jerry Wayne Conner, was later identified as the armed man who had posed as a drug agent. Conner, then 25, was convicted in April 1991 of raping the daughter and killing her and her mother and robbing the store. He was sentenced to death.
The witnesses who helped convict Conner nearly four years ago were in court again Tuesday, retelling their stories in a second hearing to determine whether Conner should die for his crimes or serve a life prison sentence.
``They're bringing it back because of some motion that the U.S. Supreme Court heard,'' said Tim Rogers, father and ex-husband of the murder victims.
``My feeling is he should already be dead.''
The North Carolina Supreme Court sent just the sentencing portion of the case back to Gates County last year, acting on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling expanding the questions defense attorneys can ask potential jurors. The ruling came after Conner was sentenced, District Attorney Frank Parrish said, but the court applied its guidelines retroactively.
Evidence in Conner's new hearing began Tuesday after a week of jury selection. The case is expected to continue through Friday and may go into next week, defense attorneys said.
``What we will have to do here,'' Parrish said in an interview last week, ``is present most all of the evidence that the original jury heard. It's pretty much like we're putting on the whole show.''
Parrish, who helped prosecute the case as an assistant district attorney in 1991, told the panel of nine women and three men that he would seek the death sentence.
Court-appointed defense attorneys Kevin Leahy and A. Jackson Warmack Jr., who represented Conner in the original trial, did not make an opening statement. Leahy said he was not yet sure if all his witnesses would be allowed to testify and did not want to prepare the jury for something that wouldn't happen.
Wearing a dark suit, Conner, with a thick-set, muscular build and closely cropped dark hair, sat next to his attorneys. He spoke only once, answering confidently when Resident Superior Court Judge J. Richard Parker asked if he understood an agreement between the prosecution and defense.
The courtroom was largely empty throughout the day, with a few front seats occupied by Tim Rogers, his and Minh Rogers' son Jeff, and other family members.
Jeff and Tim Rogers live in Windsor, Va. Tim and Minh Rogers had met in Vietnam and married in the early 1970s, divorcing after about eight years. Minh and Linda Rogers were living in Whaleyville, Va.
Parrish called more than half a dozen witnesses Tuesday from a list of nearly 30 slated to testify. People who had seen and talked to Conner between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. the night of the murders strained to remember details of their encounters and, one by one, pointed across the room to identify the him as the killer.
Defense attorneys, who said they will not dispute Conner's guilt in the case, probed witnesses on details of what they saw and when. The lawyers said they cannot discuss their overall strategy while the case is under way.
In the 1991 sentencing hearing, a psychiatrist testified that Conner had some personality disorders but was sane.
Conner had been working as a long-distance truck driver and living with his wife and three children. A law officer testified Tuesday that the shotgun had been found in the children's bedroom dresser.
KEYWORDS: MURDER RAPE SEX CRIME SHOOTING
TRIAL by CNB