Paul Rogers was twenty-seven years old and the father of a nine-year-old son. He lived in a flat on Catherine Street in Toxteth, Liverpool, England. He was unemployed in the summer of 2000 but was known to sell marijuana in a small capacity, mostly to friends and locals.
At around eleven p.m. on August 5th, Paul was sitting on the couch watching television with his son Josh when two men burst into the flat, their faces covered by masks of the killer from the film Scream. The men demanded money, but even after Paul gave them some, they didn’t seem satisfied and continued to argue with him in the hallway. At last, one of the intruders shot Paul in the stomach in front of the victim’s horrified son. Both attackers then fled the scene.
Paul made it back into the living room before collapsing, at which point Josh used his father’s cell phone to call an ambulance. Emergency services arrived in short order and transported Paul to the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, but his injuries were too severe, and he died the following morning.
According to Paul’s son, the man who shot his father stood around five foot ten inches tall and wore a thick black padded jacket, black leather gloves, black Adidas tracksuit pants, and Kicker shoes. The gun he used was possibly fitted with a suppressor.
The other man was an inch or two shorter and was dressed almost identically, though he wore a dark jacket that partially concealed his face.
It later came to light that Paul’s neighbor, a university student named Cathryn Bolton, had arranged for two acquaintances to perpetrate a robbery against Paul Rogers. She reportedly had a dispute with Paul about a bicycle that she alleged Paul had stolen. She was in the pub with the two attackers and told them to rob him and even let them into the flat through the communal entrance she shared with her neighbor.
A friend of hers who knew about the scheme agreed to wear a wire and engaged Bolton in conversation about the crime. On the ensuing tape, Bolton insisted she didn’t know that one of them had a gun and hadn’t meant anyone to get hurt. At her later trial, she received a four-year sentence for conspiracy to rob.
Although Bolton presumably knew the identity of at least one of the assailants, neither of them was ever charged with the slaying of Paul Rogers. In fact, one of the suspects, nineteen-year-old Hussain Obad, was himself murdered less than a year later, gunned down in a suspected gangland shooting in February of 2001.
There have been no further developments in the case since that time.
Crime Immemorial 