Sandra Gallagher loved making others smile so much that anytime she went shopping, she would purchase a flower to give to a complete stranger. Usually, it was a carnation or a rose. “She’d just stop and say, ‘There’s the one,’ and she’d walk over and give somebody the flower and you’d watch their face light up,” Jerri Vallicella, Gallagher’s sister, told USA TODAY recently. “She wanted everyone to smile and be happy.”
Vallicella occasionally questions whether her sister’s sweetness and trustworthiness contributed to her being targeted by a budding serial killer thirty years ago. On the evening of September 28, 1995,
Gallagher assisted a man she had met at a nearby pub in the Van Nuys section of Los Angeles. According to court documents, they had flirted, played pool, and spent some time together. Vallicella said he informed her he needed a ride.
Vallicella grudgingly revealed that her sister had questioned a woman in the restroom whether she knew the man at all. Gallagher agreed to give him a lift to his apartment when the woman described him as a brother. One of her final moments was that one. Gallagher would go on to be one of five individuals thought to have been murdered by the “Casanova Killer,” who got his name from his attractiveness and propensity to approach women in bars.
Glen Edward Rogers, is scheduled to be put to death in Florida on Thursday. USA TODAY examines his misdeeds and, above all, the people he victimized.
🚨 EXECUTION DATE SET:⁰Glen Rogers — the “Casanova Killer” — is scheduled to die on May 15, 2025.
He claimed to have killed 70 people, including Nicole Brown Simpson.
Most dismissed it. But not everyone. 🧵⁰#TrueCrime #CasanovaKiller #DeathRow pic.twitter.com/z3nmxBPt0B— Nightcap Crimes (@NightcapCrimes) April 19, 2025
Who were the Casanova Killer’s victims?
Five victims were linked by authorities to the Casanova Killer. Four of them were reddish-haired mothers in their thirties. Three of the killings took place in a six-day span.
- Rogers briefly resided with Mark Peters, a 72-year-old retired electrician from Hamilton, Ohio, who was discovered dead in a shack owned by Rogers’ family in Beattyville, Kentucky, in January 1994. (Rogers was born outside of Cincinnati in Hamilton, Ohio.)
- On September 28, 1995, Sandra Gallagher, a Santa Monica resident and mother of three, was slain in Van Nuys. Her flaming car contained her body. The night of her murder, she had met Rogers in a bar.
- On November 3, 1995, Linda Price, a 34-year-old mother of two, was discovered fatally stabbed in her Jackson, Mississippi, bathtub. “He is my dream man,” Price told her mother when she lived with Rogers for a short time, according to a Dayton Daily News article that has been saved.
- On November 7, 1995, 34-year-old mother of two Tina Marie Cribbs was discovered fatally stabbed in a bathtub at a hotel in Tampa. She had met Rogers in a bar the night of her murder, just like Gallagher.
- On November 9, 1995, Andy Lou Jiles Sutton, 37, was discovered stabbed to death in her bed in Bossier City, Louisiana. She had three kids and a daughter, ages 19, 17, 8, and 6. It is thought that Sutton and Rogers shared a bed together before she was murdered.
They mattered and didn’t deserve to be m,murdered, Glen Edward Rogers will pay ultimate prices for unforgivable heinous acts. pic.twitter.com/rMetbCcHez
— Lavy (@bloodyleviath) May 14, 2025
Rogers stated shortly after his arrest that he had slain around 70 individuals, including Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, in June 1994 in Los Angeles. That was not supported by any evidence.
Witnesses claim that on the evening of September 28, 1995, Rogers saw Sandra Gallagher, then 33, playing pool at McRed’s Bar. According to court documents, the attractive and small married mother of three strawberry-blond boys was enjoying a $1,200 Keno victory.
Sandra “Sam” Gallagher, 33, had three sons, ages nine, ten, and fourteen, at the time of her death. “They were her whole entire world,” Jerri Vallicella, Gallagher’s sister from Colorado, said in an exclusive interview with USA TODAY. “There was nothing that lit up her smile and her eyes like her little boys.”
Glen Rogers, a Hamilton man infamously known as the “Casanova Killer,” is set to face execution after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed his death warrant this week.https://t.co/FdnFki2Uy0 pic.twitter.com/n3Ka6goDeo
— Local 12/WKRC-TV (@Local12) April 18, 2025
“She was the first punk rocker in Paradise,” Vallicella mentioned the town in northern California where the family had previously resided. “Her hair was dyed purple, cut real short, she’d wear a lime green shirt, bright orange pants. And my grandmother just about had a heart attack. She said, ‘The frumpier you look, the happier you get.'”
In order to survive and see the day Rogers was put to death, Mary Dicke, the 84-year-old mother of victim Tina Marie Cribbs, battled against lung and brain cancer. That day will arrive thirty years after the brutal murder of Cribbs. “I have God on my side.” In 2016, Dicke told Tampa’s WTVT-TV that she had vowed to live to see Rogers die, adding, “I hope he will stay on my side until I do see this done.”
