Rogers Pleads Not Guilty in Kentucky : Courts: Suspected serial killer is arraigned on charges related to chase, slayings.

As out-of-state homicide detectives began arriving here in hopes of solving a rash of grisly murders, suspected serial killer Glen Rogers pleaded not guilty Tuesday to charges arising from slayings in Louisiana and Florida and from trying to evade Kentucky police who captured him after a high-speed car chase.

Clad in a blue jail jumpsuit and looking tired, Rogers answered a Kentucky judge’s questions in a clear voice during a late-morning arraignment that was broadcast on closed-circuit TV as a crush of news reporters and spectators watched at a Madison County courthouse annex.

Meanwhile, Kentucky State Police Detective Floyd McIntosh said that during about six hours of police questioning that ended Monday night, Rogers denied killing anyone but admitted “he knew some of these victims.”

Rogers is suspected in a seven-week, cross-country killing spree that began in Van Nuys and left four women dead--in California, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida. He also has been linked to the death of an elderly Ohio man, and Kentucky police are fielding “numerous calls” about unsolved slayings from police in other jurisdictions, including Alberta, Canada.

Rogers, 33, was captured Monday after he tearfully said goodby to relatives near the small Kentucky town of Beattyville and then led local police on a car chase that reached speeds of 100 m.p.h. The Ford Festiva he was driving had belonged to a 34-year-old woman who was found dead last week after he met her in a Gibsonton, Fla., bar frequented by circus roustabouts.

A woman who described herself as a distant cousin of Rogers, Clara Smallwood, said she tipped police after Rogers visited her and other relatives Monday near Beattyville, about 50 miles east of Richmond in the rolling Appalachian foothills of east-central Kentucky.

“If he’d have gone out and killed somebody else, I would have been guilty,” she said.

Smallwood said that on Monday afternoon, Rogers--weeping and looking disheveled--came to the doorstep of the cabin she shares with her sister. The dwelling is across the street from the Rogers family cabin where an elderly housemate of Glen Rogers was found dead last year.

Smallwood, who has known Rogers all his life, said he asked her and her sister to pray for him--the first religious reference she said she has ever heard him make. After he left, she called police.

“It wasn’t out of fear,” she said of her motives for making the call. “It was out of concern” for the safety of Rogers as well as the public.

Rogers drove off on Kentucky 52, where he later was spotted by a state trooper carrying Rogers’ photo. Rogers tried to flee, threading his way through a police roadblock before officers shot at his tires and ran him off the road.

The strapping blond laborer became the target of a nationwide manhunt after he was seen leaving a Van Nuys bar Sept. 29 with a Santa Monica woman, Sandra Gallagher, whose strangled body was later found in her burning pickup truck.

Rogers is also wanted for questioning in the murder of Andy Jiles Sutton, 37, who was found last week stabbed to death in a Bossier City, La., apartment she briefly shared with Rogers.

Investigators have connected him to the murders of 34-year-old Linda Price, who was found Nov. 3 with her throat cut in her apartment in Jackson, Miss., and of Tina Marie Cribbs, a hotel maid who was discovered Nov. 7 stabbed to death in a motel bathtub in Tampa, Fla.

Police in Kentucky and Rogers’ nearby hometown of Hamilton, Ohio, also are investigating the death of Rogers’ 72-year-old former housemate, Mark Peters. His decomposing body was found last year beneath a pile of furniture in the Rogers family’s ramshackle cabin near Beattyville.

Also in California, Rogers is a suspect in four unsolved slayings in Port Hueneme and Ontario in which the victims were either strangled or stabbed and their bodies set afire or left in bathtubs.

Authorities say Rogers operated by singling out unattached women at blue-collar taverns and charming them with his good looks, smooth talk and neat attire.

He was charged Monday in Kentucky with wanton endangerment in connection with the car chase and with receiving stolen property--the getaway car he allegedly took from the slain Florida woman. He was also charged with being a fugitive from Louisiana, said Madison County Atty. Robert L. Russell.

Russell said Rogers pleaded not guilty during his 10-minute arraignment. At the hearing, Madison County District Judge William G. Clouse ordered him held without bail at the Madison County Detention Center in Richmond.

Rogers’ lawyer, public defender Ernie Lewis, warned that Rogers would not speak to investigators converging on Richmond from other states. Among them were two homicide detectives from the Van Nuys Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, who flew to Kentucky on Tuesday.

Rogers also refused to waive his right to an extradition hearing, scheduled along with a preliminary hearing for Tuesday.

“Great, great,” said Lynn Clontz, a step-niece who showed up to support Rogers at the arraignment. “I believe if he were in California or some place like that, he’d be dead by now. California has a bad history.”

Before the arraignment, Clontz and other family members expressed amazement that Rogers could be accused of such horrific crimes.

“The Glen I grew up with didn’t have a violent nature,” said Clontz, of nearby Berea, Ky. “He got into a little mischief, but he was never violent. . . . If someone were a psycho killer, you could sense that. You could see it in their eyes.”

She said she never thought that way of Rogers and could not believe him guilty “unless he’s changed.”

Judge Clouse said Rogers has other charges pending against him in Kentucky, including a failure to appear on a drunk-driving charge dating to August, 1987, and a failure to pay fines.

Russell, the county attorney, said Kentucky has no set criteria for determining which other state will have first shot in extraditing Rogers on more serious homicide charges.

But an FBI spokesman said it is likely Kentucky will prosecute Rogers before turning him over to anyone else.

“They can hold him there for a few months, or a few years,” spokesman Hal Nielson said.

Chu reported from Kentucky and Cheevers from Los Angeles.