06/23/2026
The Unsolved Ice Box Murders. Check out this story from Troy Taylor's American Oddities Museum.
THE UNSOLVED ICE BOX MURDERS
On June 23, 1965, Houston, Texas, police captain Charles Bullock and his partner, L.M. Barta, arrived at a small home on Driscoll Street. They were answering a call from Marvin Martin, who was concerned because he hadn’t heard from his aunt and uncle, Edwina and Fred Rogers, for several days. He’d called many times but there was no answer. Both of them were elderly and Marvin was worried, so Bullock and Barta were sent on what should have been a routine welfare check.
They turned out to be nothing routine about the call.
Fred and Edwina lived with their adult son, Charles, at the Driscoll Street house. Oddly, though, even their closest neighbors didn’t know that Charles lived there. He was an eccentric recluse who left the house each day before sunrise and didn’t return until late at night. He even refused to have contact with his parents, who lived in the same house. They never saw him and were only allowed to communicate with him by slipping notes under his bedroom door in the attic.
When the two police officers knocked on the door, there was no answer. As they looked around, though, things seemed off. They tried to open the back door, but it seemed jammed. When they peered into the window, they saw several flowerpots stacked up against it. They managed to get in through the front door and Barta went upstairs while Bullock checked the kitchen. The house was silent and dark. There didn’t seem to be anyone home.
No one knows what prompted Bullock to open the refrigerator – he couldn’t recall in later interviews – but he found it stacked from top to bottom with what looked to be butchered hog meat. Since it seemed that Fred and Edwina weren’t home, he thought it strange that they had left so much meat to go to waste. He shook his head and started to close the door when he glanced down at the vegetable drawer at the bottom of the icebox.
He saw a woman’s head, her eyes wide open and staring at him
Bullock was visibly jolted. Instinctively, he slammed the door closed and then re-opened it – yes, the head was still there. He grabbed the handle of the drawer next to the one with the woman’s head in it and yanked it open. There was the head of a man in the other one. Bullock called out for his partner, and they immediately called for backup.
More officers arrived and they soon discovered that the meat in the refrigerator was not hog meat at all – it was the butchered remains of Fred and Edwina Rogers. They had been dismembered and then packed into the icebox. The medical examiner later stated, “Whoever did this apparently took their time and knew what they were doing.”
The autopsies revealed that the couple had died on June 20. Edwina had been shot in the head. Fred had been beaten to death with a claw hammer. His eyes had also been gouged out and his ge****ls had been removed. The house had been cleaned before the police arrived, but investigators did find traces of blood in the bathroom, which led them to believe the butchering had been done there.
While the house was being searched, detectives were looking for the couple’s son. Charles. He was the only survivor of what seemed to be a massacre. He could provide important information – or he could be a suspect. And with the evidence that soon came together, it was looking more and more like he had played a role in the murders.
Besides the bathroom, the only other blood found in the house was on Charles’ bedroom door. Police also found a handsaw in his room. This, combined with his reclusive nature and his cold relationship with his parents, made him the leading suspect in the murders. In fact, to this day, he is the only suspect.
The problem, though? No one knows where he is.
A manhunt was launched for Charles. They searched the records at the train and bus stations, questioned the neighbors – who didn’t know he even lived with the Rogers – and since he had served as a pilot during World War II, local airfields were checked to see if he had rented a plane. They had no luck. No trace of Charles was ever found, and he was declared dead in 1975.
But was he dead? Probably not. Houston authors Hugh and Martha Gardenier believe that Charles committed the murders after a lifetime of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse by his parents. He had been treated horribly and even as an adult, they had been stealing checks he received from his military service. Most of the damage had been done by Fred, which explained why his murder was the most brutal – and why his ge****ls had been cut off. After the murders, the authors believe, Charles used connections in the oil industry from the nine years he spent working for Shell and escaped to Mexico.
Although very few people doubt that Charles was guilty of the murder of his parents, what actually happened on the day he snapped and slaughtered them remains a mystery.
