The Ice Box Murder Case
An elderly couple was found murdered in their home. Their son, who was suspected of being involved, disappeared and was never found.
Charles Frederick Rogers, born on December 30, 1921, was a seismologist, pilot, CIA agent, and concurrently a murder suspect. He disappeared in June 1965 after police found the mutilated bodies of his parents in the refrigerator at their home in Houston. The media named this case the Ice Box Murder case.
Charles Frederick Rogers (December 30, 1921 — disappeared June 23, 1965) was Fred and Edwina Rogers's son. When he was 21 years old, he enrolled at Texas A&M University, but he dropped out of the campus. Charles then enrolled at the University of Houston, where he eventually graduated and earned a bachelor’s degree in nuclear physics.
During World War II, Charles was a US Navy pilot and joined the Office of Naval Intelligence. Charles seems to have intelligence above the average person. He was excellent at many things and even became a seismologist for Shell Oil for nine years. He suddenly resigned in 1957 without any explanation.
In 1965, Charles was unemployed and lived with his parents, Fred Christopher Rogers (81-year-old) and Edwina Ivor Rogers (79-year-old), in Houston's Montrose area. Based on the information from his neighbors, Charles's behavior was odd. Even the communication between Charles and his parents was only through notes tucked under his bedroom doors.
Discovery of Fred and Edwina Rogers’ bodies
That day, June 23, 1965, two Houston police officers came to the Rogers home. They received reports that the couple did not answer the phone after being contacted for days.
The two policemen then went into the house to investigate. The two policemen did not found anything strange. The house looked empty, and they haven’t found Fred and Edwina in the house. In the kitchen, there was some food left on the dining table. An officer then opened the refrigerator and found large quantities of unpackaged meat filling the refrigerator shelves that he thought was pork.
Finding nothing, they decided to leave the house. But before closing the door, an officer was stunned. He accidentally saw two human heads in a vegetable basket. The two heads belong to none other than Fred Rogers and his wife, Edwina.
The police confirmed that the meat filling the refrigerator shelf was human flesh, limbs that had been cut into pieces. The police then searched for internal organs that could not be found. They started checking the sewers and toilets for the discharge of the organs but found nothing.
After an autopsy was carried out, it was discovered that the two of them were murdered around June 20, 1965. With his eyes removed and his missing genitalia, Fred's body was allegedly hit with a claw hammer on the part of his head before he died. Meanwhile, Edwina was beaten and shot in the head.
The police who carried out the crime scene found evidence that the bodies were mutilated in the bathroom upstairs in the house. There were very few blood traces in the house, one of which was in the keyhole of Charles’s room. The police concluded that the killer was a professional person, worked very cleanly, and well-understood anatomical figure.
Charles was searched, and an arrest warrant was issued to him as an important witness for the crime, but he was never be found.
In 1975, a Houston judge declared Charles declared legally dead in 1975, and the case has not been officially resolved. The 43-year-old Charles Rogers is still the only suspect.
The Rogers family home at 1815 Driscoll Street was left empty after the murder. For many years this house was left abandoned until it was torn down in 1972. In 2000, a condominium was built on the land.