The Assassination of Sammy Rogers
Gone Cold - Texas True Crime
Vincent Strange
4.4 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 22 December 2025
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rogers was widely known and deeply respected, a self-made oilman, school board trustee, hospital board member, and lifelong resident of Caddo. His killing stunned a quiet rural community and launched a massive manhunt involving local law enforcement, Texas Rangers, roadblocks, and aerial searches. Despite the scale of the response, the gunman vanished without a trace.
In the months and years that followed, investigators chased hundreds of leads, offered substantial rewards, released composite sketches, and examined every possible motive: robbery, personal conflict, business disputes, even a professional hit. None led to an arrest.
More than forty years later, the murder of Sammy Rogers remains unsolved. The case left behind a town suspended in unanswered questions, a family who witnessed the violence firsthand, and an investigation that went cold almost as quickly as the killer disappeared.
If you have any information about the murder of Sammy Martin Rogers, please call the Stephens County Sheriff’s Office at (254) 559-2481.
Sources: The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Abilene Reporter-News
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The weather. Tomorrow, expect a... Biting cold front. Mmm, how naughty. I wonder what I'll be wearing or taking off. The night will be wild and untamed. Expect heavy, lashing rain that'll soak you to the skin. By Monday, temperatures will rise, slowly but surely, reaching their peak in the afternoon. |
| 0:23.0 | Not in the mood for miserable weather? |
| 0:25.5 | Fly cheaply to Turkey with Sun Express. |
| 0:28.6 | Sun Express, non-stop sunshine. |
| 0:34.9 | Gone Cold Podcasts may contain violent or graphic subject matter. |
| 0:36.9 | Listener discretion is advised. |
| 0:47.7 | In Stevens County, the land doesn't rise or fall dramatically. It stretches. Pastures run into scrub. |
| 0:58.9 | Mesquite breaks the horizon. Roads arrive quietly, intersect, and continue on without ceremony. If you weren't looking for it, |
| 1:05.0 | and if you missed the signs, you could pass right through Caddo, Texas, and never know you had been there at all. Cato is tucked into eastern Stevens County, about 10 miles east of Breckenridge, where |
| 1:13.1 | U.S. Highway 180 cuts across pasture land and low rolling hills. |
| 1:19.7 | The story of Caddo begins in the late 19th century on land that had long been used as a campsite |
| 1:26.8 | by the Caddo people, whose name the community adopted. |
| 1:31.6 | Settlers arrived in the 1870s, and by the turn of the century, |
| 1:36.5 | Caddo had the markers of a small but stable rural town, churches, a school, a post office, |
| 1:48.6 | and families tied to ranching and farming. For a while, |
| 1:57.8 | it was enough. Then, the oil boom of 1916, 1917 changed everything. Like much of North Central Texas, Caddo swelled almost overnight. |
| 2:02.5 | Oil workers poured into the area, businesses sprang up, and by 1920, the population had climbed |
| 2:10.2 | to around a thousand people. It was loud and crowded, but temporary. When the boom slowed, so did Cato. The wells declined, |
| 2:21.6 | workers moved on, and the town began the long contraction that defined the rest of its existence. |
| 2:29.1 | By mid-century, Cato was shrinking steadily. Young people left for larger towns. |
| 2:36.2 | Businesses closed. |
| 2:37.9 | The school disappeared. |
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