Margie Marie Stocks Rogers, 58, female, White, was killed on April 27, 1991, while working at Rogers Roost, the small convenience store and gas station she co-owned with her husband off Interstate 70 in Thompson Springs, Grand County, Utah. Early that morning, she was shot twice and the register was robbed; investigators would later document that a. 22-caliber handgun was used.
The violence at the desert outpost unfolded quickly, with the killer entering during opening hours and leaving with a small amount of cash before fleeing into the open country along the interstate. Deputies found Rogers inside the store; the scene bore the stark signs of a robbery turned lethal, and detectives soon began piecing together a multistate trail pointing to a transient suspect who had been moving east out of California.
Within a day, authorities stopped and detained 45-year-old Phillip Carl Jablonski at a Kansas rest area, initially on an out-of-state warrant; Grand County investigators traveled to question him about Rogers’s homicide. Evidence and witness work connected the Thompson Springs killing to Jablonski’s brief, violent spree that April, and prosecutors in Utah charged him with first-degree murder, aggravated sexual assault, and aggravated robbery in Rogers’s death.
In the broader criminal cases that followed, Jablonski was ultimately convicted and sentenced to death in California for multiple murders committed in April 1991; official accounts and subsequent reporting identify Rogers as one of his five victims. Decades later, Jablonski died on California’s death row, closing the chapter on prosecutions but not the memory of the woman taken from her family and roadside store on that spring morning.
