Crown Prosecutors will try to prove that a man accused of killing both his parents deliberately planned the murders and his escape.
24 year old Cameron Rogers is on trial for the 2016 murders of 69-year-old Dave Rogers and 63-year-old Merrill Gleddie Rogers.
It’s the Crown’s contention that Cameron Rogers hid the bodies of his parents for a week behind a shed, one in a suitcase and the other wrapped in a tarp, all the while making plans inside the family home to take off to the United States.
It was a gruesome discovery for an Ottawa police officer on a cold November evening, working on a trip from Montreal police that someone had confessed to killing his parents in this Ottawa home.
In court today Montreal police officer Jeffrey St-Onge identified that "someone" as Cameron Rogers, saying that as they approached Rogers on a Montreal street a week after the murder, he told them:
"I killed my parents two weeks ago in Ottawa. The bodies are behind a shed in the back yard,” adding "I did it with a knife."
Today Crown Prosecutors outlined their case against Rogers, who is accused of killing his father, former Ottawa Citizen Reporter Dave Rogers and his mother, government employee Merrill Gleddie Rogers.
The Crown outlined a possible motive for the murders saying that in the weeks leading up to that November 20th day, Cameron Rogers had been arguing with his parents about his classes at Algonquin and his lack of money. On November 20th, the Crown contends, “the cloud burst.”
Crown lawyer Matthew Geigen-Miller contends that Cameron used a wooden sword to stab his mother. When his father came running in, Geigen-Miller told court, Rogers stabbed him, too. When the sword broke, he used 3 knives. Geigen-Miller says Dave Rogers died quickly with a “fatal injury to the back...made with enough force to "puncture his lungs” but that his wife lay moaning on the ground, for at least 30 minutes.
"He knew she was alive,” Geigen-Miller told court, “He left her to die on the kitchen floor."
The Crown says Rogers wrapped his mother in a tarp and stuffed his father in a suitcase and hid the bodies beside a shed in the back yard. They maintain Rogers stayed in the family home in Carleton Heights for a week after the murders, telling family and friends who called or stopped by that his parents had the flu and were sick in bed.
Geigen-Miller says Rogers then boarded a train to Montreal where he bought a ticket to Washington, before being turned back by a border security guard who was suspicious about Rogers’ reasons for traveling to the U.S. Back in Montreal, Geigen-Miller says Rogers hid out in a building under construction but that, as it got colder, he decided to call 9-1-1 and confessed to the murder.
Cameron Roger’s defense lawyers will argue to their client’s mental state at the time of the murders and the fact that Rogers identified himself as being autistic. Cameron Rogers pleaded guilty to two lesser counts of manslaughter but not guilty to the two counts as read. The Crown rejected that in order to proceed with the first degree murder trial. The trial is expected to last six weeks.
