Exteriors of a log home near Collingwood, Ont., where Mike Rogers and his wife, Kathy, were found shot to death in June.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Farmers say you could hear the crash from three miles away. Three months later, it still echoes through Ontario's cottage country, not only for its singular horror but for its inevitable linkage to a murder mystery that has outlasted the summer in Georgian Bay.
On June 8, Adam Rogers, 48, was killed in a truck collision, a day and a half after his 56-year-old brother, Mike, and sister-in-law, Kathy, 55, were discovered shot dead in their converted log-cabin home. Sources say their killer used a rifle and left no fingerprints behind.
The tragedies hit like a one-two punch to this sleepy vacation paradise. Now, with each passing day that the police say nothing, the rumours fly. All anyone knows for sure is that the brothers who had grown up here somehow died, violently, just a few days and 40 kilometres apart.
"Do you know that we don't know what's factual?" said one close relative. "I wish I could tell you because it's just driving us all crazy wondering why it happened. Who did it and why would they do it?"
Most of the speculation darkly posits that a fraternal feud over money somehow led to the chilling double-murder and, in turn, to the country-road crash that looked like anything but an accident.
Adam Rogers was driving on two-lane Highway 26, just west of a ghost town with the idyllic name of Edenvale, when he swerved his silver SUV into the path of an oncoming transport truck, which had just dropped off its load of corn at the ethanol plant. He died instantly.
"He was already blue by the time I got there," recalled Karen Davis, a nurse who checked in vain for a pulse just minutes after the impact.
Driving from two cars behind, Ms. Davis was among the eyewitnesses who compared notes in the aftermath. She had seen a ringing phone by the dead man's foot and suggested the collision could have been accidental. The other witnesses, including the transport driver, didn't buy it. Their consensus, in Ms. Davis's words: "It looked like he was trying to kill himself."
The wider Rogers family, still grieving, is vigilant about privacy. Court records, however, detail how $20,000 in cash once changed hands between the brothers, and how that exchange led to bad blood between them.
Different Paths
Dean Rogers, who died in 2010, was a Second World War veteran. He vacationed outside Collingwood with his Irish bride Joanne – and even taught hang-gliding there – back when the area was more of a backwater than the home of ritzy ski resorts. They had had four children when they moved there permanently.
"Adam was the wild one, Mike was the boring one," recalled a childhood friend.
Mike was also the brother who got lucky in love. He found his soulmate in Kathryn (Kathy) Wilson, falling in love at first sight with the Sault Ste. Marie beauty whose smile "could melt the polar icecaps," as a friend put it. They met while working for Wardair and travelled the world together. When their globetrotting ceased, they settled in the unlikely city of Kalamazoo, Mich., to run a restaurant.
A few years ago, the couple returned to the Blue Mountains. Because they had no children, they told friends that the duty of looking after the parents – including the mother, who has advanced Alzheimer's – rested on them.
Adam followed a very different path. A private man with the reputation of being a reclusive gambler, he did not contest 1998 divorce allegations that he was a deadbeat dad who had hidden his assets. A judge ordered him to pay $1,000 a month in child support on an income that he had stated to be $24,000 a year.
In 2003, his big brother tipped him to an investment opportunity. Adam bought a silent stake in a startup medical-services company whose shares seemed likely to skyrocket. But because Adam wanted to keep his name off the paperwork, he left stewardship of the investment in the hands of a company Mike had just incorporated.
All this, at least, is the uncontentious portion of a lawsuit that Adam filed in a Barrie, Ont., court just one year before the brothers died. The contentious part is Adam's allegation that Mike swindled him.
According to the statement of defence, after a few years Adam grew impatient and demanded that Mike give him his $20,000 stake back. Not wanting to deal in cheques, he is said to have met Mike and Kathy so they could pay him in cash. The handover is said to have taken place in January, 2008 – one month before the couple, then in the process of returning to Collingwood, purchased a $375,000 home near the base of Blue Mountain.
Adam would claim that he eventually learned "his proportionate share of the proceeds is the sum of $200,000." Mike's defence was that his kid brother had quit the deal and was "not entitled to anything other than the return of the original capital."
"The relationship of Michael Rogers and Adam Rogers has deteriorated significantly," defence documents say. The lawsuit was never resolved.
Different lives
Adam had launched his suit in April, 2011. By last spring, he was living a humble life – doing shiftwork at a Honda plant, and renting a room in a modest house in Barrie. He kept some of his possessions in a Storagemart.
Meantime, Mike and Kathy Rogers were listing their house for sale at $875,000 – or more than double what they had paid for it. On Wednesday, June 6, they were found slain in their basement.
The couple's Airedale terrier, Harry, was discovered in a closed room, hungry but unharmed. Most mysteriously, sources say, Mike's Audi had been driven to his Blue Mountain workplace – he was a property manager – where it was found idling in the parking lot Wednesday morning. That was the day his co-workers had reported him missing; he had not shown up for work that week.
The Ontario Provincial Police aren't commenting on the ongoing murder investigation. Nor is the OPP commenting on the Friday evening collision that killed Adam Rogers, a probe that remains open despite multiple witnesses branding it an apparent suicide.
Records do show that a day after the crash, police got warrants to search the Honda plant where Adam had been working and the Storagemart where he had kept some possessions.
"I'm pretty sure the word homicide was used," said an employee, recalling the police searches. He said he wasn't privy to what Adam had kept in his locker, but remembered him as a demanding client who was always "looking over his shoulder" and "very concerned the site was not secure."
In late June, at Mike and Kathy's funeral, mourners tried as best they could to focus on their happy marriage.
"We were trying not to dwell on hearsay," said one man who asked not to be named. "There would have been disbelief – even without all the speculation about Adam."
Colin Freeze