Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
HOGAN: KILLER HAD ‘A GRUDGE AGAINST THE WORLD’
After firing a half-dozen shots from a .40 caliber Glock semi-automatic handgun at his terrified exwife as she ran down her West Bradford subdivision’s street, and then later killing his mother and father with that same weapon as they sat side by side in easy chairs in their quiet retirement home apartment in East Goshen, Bruce Rogal got thirsty.
According to District Attorney Tom Hogan during a Wednesday press conference — at which he gave a dramatic recounting of Rogal’s rage-fueled attack on his family last week that culminated in his death at his own hands outside the home he had shared with his wife and son for more than 20 years — Rogal drove from the Bellingham Retirement Community in East Goshen after shooting his aged parents execution style, with one shot each to their heads, to a friend’s home on Strasburg Road in East Fallowfield.
“The friend (later) said, ‘He acted like nothing happened,’” Hogan told assembled reporters in his law library in the D.A.’s Office at the Chester County Justice Center. “He complained about his family, he complained about his wife, he complained about his parents. He didn’t mention a thing about shooting anybody.
“He had a beer with his friend,” Hogan said. Then he left.
The press conference was held to wrap up questions that had lingered in the days since Sept. 19 and 20 when the county was shocked by the report of a gunman on the loose who had killed two people and tried to kill a third.
In Hogan’s retelling, Rogal was a man who had a gripe with the world around him, and that anger led him to explode in rage.
“This is a tragic story of a man who had a grudge against the world,” Hogan said. “Bruce Rogal went through his life with grudges against everybody. Everybody he met, everybody he ran into, he disliked, he despised, he fought with, he complained about, and that included his own family — his parents, his wife, his siblings.”
He was angry at the way his divorce from his wife of 24 years, Catherine Christian, would end, largely because he felt Christian was hiding money from him to dilute the amount he would get in the settlement. He was angry at his parents for age-old complaints — at his mother for dropping him from a bassinet that eventually led to his recurring back pain, and at his father for having “treated him too roughly” as a child, the district attorney said. He was angry at his three siblings, even though they had shared equally in distribution of a million dollars from their parents’ sale of a summer property in New York.
Whether the signing of the divorce decree the day before his rampage set him off, however, will never be known for sure, Hogan suggested.
“The only person who knows why he did what he did is Bruce Rogal,” Hogan said. “It was one of those things that just came to a head.”
According to Hogan, Rogal had shown some tendency toward violent behavior in his marriage, having assaulted Christian during an incident just before she filed for divorce in 2015 in which he struck her with an object in their West Bradford kitchen. She was granted a Protection From Abuse order that prohibited him from living at the house or harassing her afterwards. He stuck to that order without incident, Hogan said, and was able to retrieve the two weapons he had turned over to a third party when the PFA expired in 2017.
Otherwise, he had only minor arrests for a misdemeanor in 1993 and summary citations in 2015 and 2017.
The DA said Rogal, a general contractor, was unemployed because of back surgery he had undergone, and was living in a rented home in Glenmoore from which he was facing eviction. He was dating a woman whom he had begun having an affair with when he was still living with Christian, although she did not live at the Glenmoore house. Hogan said his days largely consisted of viewing online pornography until the early morning hours, falling asleep, and waking in the middle of the day.
In the days before the rampage, Rogal had also been searching Google Maps for the area surrounding his wife’s home on Vermont Lane — searching, Hogan said, for escape routes. “That is (an indication) of somebody who is planning to do something at that residence,” he said.
On Sept.19, he checked a porn site around 4:54 p.m. and then got into his 2002 silver Honda Odyssey mini-van and drove from his home in Glenmoore to the West Bradford subdivision off Shadyside Road. In the car were the .40 caliber Glock he had purchased the year before and a high powered Bushmaster M-4 carbine rifle, along with a stock of ammunition for both weapons.
When he confronted Christian, who was outside the house working on her car, he drew the handgun and pointed it at her. She ran from the scene and he chased her, firing six shots that missed her but struck nearby homes. She found safety in a neighbor’s home, where she called police. By the time units from Downingtown Police Department arrived, Rogal was gone.
Hogan chillingly told reporters what happened afterwards.
Christian called the couple’s adult son, Walter, who lived with her and worked in Philadelphia, to tell him what had occurred. He, thinking quickly, then called other family members to warn them that Rogal was on the loose, armed and dangerous, and that they might be in danger.
One of those calls went to his grandparents, Walter and Nancy Rogal, who lived at Bellingham. He spoke with his grandmother momentarily, then heard the phone go dead.
“Walter realized this could be a big problem, and called Bellingham,” Hogan said. The security office there contacted the executive director, Jon DeLuca, who went himself to the Rogals’ apartment. “Walter and Nancy are there, and at first it looks like they’re fine,” Hogan said. “They are sitting in two recliners, right next to one another, just as they had spent decades of their marriage, next to each other. And they look perfectly peaceful.
“But when (he) gets in there, he realizes there is blood on both of their heads, and they’re both dead. They had both been executed. Head shots, to each of his parents,” said Hogan. “Each of those people, Walter and Nancy, were dead, killed by their ungrateful son.” The time was 6:15 p.m. Hogan went on to describe the “massive manhunt” that police across the county took to track Rogal down. They evacuated residents from Bellingham, thinking he might still be there. They kept Christian from returning home, and got Rogal’s siblings to leave their homes and evacuated his girlfriend from her residence. A Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) squad was dispatched to Rogal’s Glenmoore home. There, armed with a search warrant, they went in and found “hundreds and hundreds” of rounds for the two weapons that would ultimately be found in his possession, as well as two other guns that are still missing.
Hogan also showed a clip of a video taken by infrared camera from a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter that captured Rogal’s path from Strasburg Road, where he had apparently driven past the state police barracks at Embreeville, toward the Vermont Lane house.
When he arrived around 1 a.m., Rogal drove straight into the side of the house after cutting across a lawn. Hogan said that when he did so, he apparently put the barrel of the Bushmaster rifle in his mouth and pulled the rigger, killing himself.
The troopers who had followed him to the residence, however, saw only Rogal holding a rifle and leaning over. They fired on the car, striking him in the driver’s seat, but only causing superficial wounds.
A report from Chester County Coroner Dr. Christina VandePol confirmed that Rogal had died of a selfinflicted gunshot wound to the head, and had no other life-threatening injuries. Hogan said that there had not been an “exchange” of gunfire between Rogal and the troopers, as was first reported.
Law enforcement officials attending the press conference, including Chester County Detective Chief Kevin Dykes, Downingtown Chief Howard Holland, Capt. James Fisher of the state police, and Lt. David Leahy of the WesttownEast Goshen Regional Police Department, praised the comprehensive approach taken by all departments to responding to the set of crimes.
“This was a time when everyone stepped up to the occasion,” said Dykes. “We all came together,” echoed Holland. “We all had a common goal.”
Hogan expressed sorrow in the way the elderly couple died, and said they would be missed.
“Walter and Nancy Rogal, two elderly Chester County citizens, are dead at the hand of the own son,” he said. “They are mourned by their family. They are mourned by all of Chester County.”