Robert Rogers Dies at the Hands of a Friend
(“Prints Among Thieves,” Forensic Files)
Greed can take hold of just about anybody, whether it’s a teenager working a funnel cake concession with an overflowing cash box or a county treasurer eyeing the public coffers and thinking he really deserves to be paid for OT.
Most people can shake off the temptation, even if they do create a few mental blueprints for absconding with the funds.
“Prints among Thieves” tells the story of a respectable-seeming woman who followed her greed the whole way. She killed the man who stood between her and a pile of money. And she didn’t go about the homicide passively.
Curiosity stoked. Instead of “accidentally” leaving a tennis ball on the staircase or trying the Forensic Files tribute switcheroo of anti-freeze in a Gatorade bottle, Sharon Kay Zachary got up close and personal.
On April 26, 1996, she beat 80-year-old Robert Rogers to death in a bid to gain full access to his personal fortune.
A short update to her story appeared on this blog last year, but Google has logged so many searches for her name lately that a longer treatment seems in order.
Cash king. For this post, I looked around for more intelligence on Zachary and also tried to find out whether Rogers’ estranged son ultimately ended up with his dad’s assets.
So let’s get started on the recap with additional information drawn from internet research:
Robert Rogers was a colorful old coot who made a small fortune in real estate and trucking in Battle Creek, Michigan. He enjoyed throwing cash around in public. Local thieves preyed upon him multiple times, but Rogers continued to store large sums of cash in his home and on his person.
He had grown up during the Great Depression and didn’t trust banks.
Rogers lived alone in a house on a huge plot of land in Emmett Township, Michigan. His wife had died a few years before he met Sharon Zachary.
Rogers and his only child, an adopted son named Donald, went for long stretches without communicating. When they were together, they argued a lot.
Like a daughter. But Robert Rogers found an agreeable surrogate child in Zachary, a 31-year-old neighbor he hired as a caregiver. He had trouble with his eyesight, so he put Zachary’s name on his checking account and gave her power of attorney to handle his financial transactions.
He also made her the sole beneficiary of his estate.
Forensic Files didn’t mention it, but newspaper accounts reported that Zachary, her husband, Mike, and teenage son, Josh, lived in a house they were in the process of buying from Rogers at the time of the murder.
After one of the robberies, Rogers moved in with the Zacharys for a while and the four became like family, according to “Love Thy Neighbor,” an episode of Mansions and Murders.
Seamy undercoat. Mike Zachary did some kind of work for a carpet retailer, but he tended to have periods of unemployment, according to Tom Headley, a retired Emmett Township police officer who appeared on Mansions and Murders.
Sharon worked as a used-car salesperson, which probably explains a lot.
She may have had persuasive charm, but she was lacking in the common sense department.
It was foolish enough of her to start helping herself to Robert Rogers’ money, but why did she call attention to the theft by buying a car, a truck, a boat, and furniture and taking her family to the Caribbean?
Diminutive killer. Those extravagances added up to about $65,000, according to Forensic Files, and she also transferred another $55,000 in funds to her bank accounts.
At some point, Rogers discovered the financial shenanigans and decided to revoke her power of attorney.
Before he had a chance, a 911 operator got a call from Sharon Zachary to report what looked like a burglary at Rogers’ house. (Her rather husky voice on the phone doesn’t really match the photos from that time; she looks bookish and petite.)
Initial suspect. Police arrived on the scene to find a hole in a sliding glass door to Rogers’ house, disarray inside, and Robert Rogers lying dead on the floor, struck at least 25 times in the head with a heavy object. Someone had gone through his pockets.
Sharon Zachary probably figured the alienated son would take the fall for the old man’s death.
At first, investigators did focus on Donald Rogers.
Shared animosity. While his father never lacked for cash, Donald had to work two jobs, a shift at General Motors and a part-time gig selling real estate. Donald had once tried, unsuccessfully, to get his father to give him power of attorney — a suspect move.
And the two men were short-tempered. One of their disputes allegedly got physical. All things considered, Donald must have seemed like the perfect patsy for Sharon Zachary.
But Donald had a solid alibi and passed a polygraph test.
“We argued, but it was just the way we got along,” Donald would later testify in court, according to the Battle Creek Enquirer.
Hidden mint. Meanwhile, detectives found a partial shoe print on a glass shard in the house that matched one of Sharon Zachary’s size 6½ sneakers. And next to a pond on Robert Rogers’ property, there was a set of house keys. A diver recovered a metal pipe that had been submerged in the pond but still carried a trace of Rogers’ blood.
After investigators uncovered Zachary’s financial misdoings, they theorized that she had bludgeoned Rogers to death, staged the scene to look like a burglary, and accidentally dropped her set of Rogers’ house keys while throwing the murder weapon into the pond.
Oddly, there was still more than $133,000 of cash stashed inside Rogers’ house. Zachary either missed it or didn’t want the risk of having to hide it somewhere. With Rogers dead, she’d inherit a great deal more from the will anyway. Newspaper accounts pegged the total at $500,000 to $750,000.
Out of the ordinary. Although the trial, which began in 1997, was no O.J. Simpson or Casey Anthony sensation, it did cause a stir in Battle Creek.
“In the 1990s, we had a boatload of homicides, but most of them were drug-related,” recalled Battle Creek Enquirer crime reporter Trace Christenson during a phone interview with ForensicFilesNow. “This one [the Robert Rogers case] was different so it was a bigger deal. And forensics was starting to be a new big thing at the time.”
At the trial, defense attorney John Hofman described Zachary as a caring human being. “She is afraid of blood, she is a small person, and she would not do this,” he said, according to the Battle Creek Enquirer.
Jailhouse rat. But Calhoun County prosecutor David Wallace portrayed her as a woman in the throes of greed, “like a kid in a candy store.”
Zachary’s cell mate, an embezzler named Michelle McCormick, told the court that Zachary had confessed that she and Rogers argued about money and she killed him.
It came out that Zachary had once been accused of misappropriating funds from a car dealership, according to court papers.
Feeling flush. Nicholas Batch, a lawyer who had done work for Robert Rogers, testified that he advised Rogers against selling a house to the Zacharys because they weren’t “credit worthy” — more evidence that her plans exceeded her means.
A witness named David Garity testified that Zachary and her husband told him they could contribute $80,000 to a business the three wanted to start, according to the Battle Creek Enquirer.
But Zachary would never get a chance to follow through on the venture.
She received a guilty verdict for first-degree murder and armed robbery.
On September 15, 1997, Circuit Court Judge Stephen Miller gave her life without parole plus 15 to 30 years.
Goodbye to you. Her son, Josh, 18, cried in the courtroom when he heard the sentence, according to a newspaper account. (By the way, Sharon Zachary was 32 years old at that time. So did she — yikes — give birth to Josh at 14?)
Sharon Zachary proclaimed her innocence after the verdict. According to the Battle Creek Enquirer:
“This will not end until the day I go home,” she said. “I think she’s home now,” Donald Rogers said a few minutes later.
In 1998, Judge Miller denied Zachary’s motion for a new trial. In 2000, a Michigan court of appeals reaffirmed her conviction.
Low-to-medium risk. Today, she resides in Huron Valley Complex in Ypsilanti. She’s probably feeling a little cramped lately, as Michigan has consolidated all female prisoners into Huron Valley, making it the state’s only facility for women.
There’s no shortage of adversity at Huron Valley.
In 2016, corrections officer Lauralie Herkimer complained of dangerous conditions in the facility, including ceilings so leaky that they shorted out the lights and employees so drained from working overtime that they had trouble doing their jobs.
That same year, a prison guard was charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of 25-year-old inmate Janika Edmond.
On the bright side, the Department of Corrections has designated Zachary as Level II — on a scale of I to V — security-wise, suggesting that she has behaved herself well enough while behind razor wire.
Inflammatory situation. Incidentally, the house where she killed Robert Rogers continued to generate interest after the murder.
“There were rumors that there was more cash hidden in the house, and they had some issue with people going through the house,” Christenson said. “I don’t think they ever found anything.”
In March 2015, the property made news again.
It burned down in what newspapers described as a suspicious fire. No one was living in the house at the time.
andonline
The owner was listed as Donald Rogers.
So it looks as though Donald succeeded in supplanting Sharon Zachary as his father’s heir and received his rightful inheritance.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime.
