Police find missing woman's body

Foul play isn't likely, police say

RALEIGH -- Friends and family say Mildred Early Rogers began wandering from home in February after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease late last year.

Rogers, 76, took her last walk down a gravel road off Yonkers Road near Crabtree Creek. Police say she wandered down the tree-lined road that gave way to soft dirt and then grass before she became mired in a boggy area with heavy vegetation and died.

She had not been seen since Saturday afternoon, five hours before her husband reported her missing. She was found at 2:15 p.m. Tuesday more than two miles from her home on Dennis Avenue.

Police are not sure when Rogers died, though they do not think foul play was involved because her body bore no signs of injury.

"It may have been exposure," Raleigh police Capt. Chris Bertram said Tuesday near the entrance of the road that led to where Rogers was found.

Police had used all-terrain vehicles, horses and a helicopter to search the wooded area near Crabtree Creek for three days before finding Rogers' body, Bertram said.

H.B. Rogers called police at 9 p.m. Saturday after his wife did not come home for their daily routine of watching the evening news and going out for dinner. After she disappeared, Rogers, 74, prayed for the safe return of his wife of 20 years while worrying that someone had attacked her. After police found his wife's body, he said he felt "a sense of closure."

"The suspense of her being missing is gone," he said late Tuesday afternoon from the couple's home. "What was found is not at all something to celebrate."

The Rogers' neighbors, Scott and Deb Blackley, hurried to the site where Mildred Rogers was found after hearing news accounts about it.

Deb Blackley said Mildred Rogers had been her friend for more than 30 years and described her as a loving, hard-working woman before she became ill. She said she first noticed signs of her neighbor's illness in October.

"She started losing her keys," Blackley said. "She would come over and talk with me and call one of her sons."

That was when H.B. Rogers told the Blackleys that his wife had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

"It was like all of a sudden, 'Boom,' " Blackley said. "I didn't know much about the disease, but I'm learning."

Blackley said Mildred Rogers would often visit her home and sit most of the day.

"She would be talking normal about her childhood and things she did with her father," Blackley said. "Then she couldn't remember where she left her pocketbook."

H.B. Rogers, a retired public relations employee, said his wife would frequently leave their home, just north of downtown near Lions Park, early in the morning and end up a mile or two away. He said he tried to persuade his wife not to leave but never tried to physically restrain her.

When Mildred Rogers first started walking away from home in February, the Blackleys did not think it too unusual.

"It wasn't a cold winter," Deb Blackley said.

But the couple became concerned this summer when they saw her walking along Raleigh Boulevard in 100-degree heat wearing layers of clothing.

"Sometimes she would have on pants, a dress and a long-sleeved sweater on top of that," Scott Blackley said.

H.B. Rogers arrived at the entrance of the dirt road about 3 p.m. Tuesday. He asked police to take him to the place where his wife's body was found. But a police detective could only take him partway because of the thick vegetation.

"I just wanted to satisfy myself and see where she had faltered," he said.

H.B. Rogers returned home just before 4:30 p.m., where he sat alone and crestfallen. He said friends and neighbors offered their homes to him, but he gently waved them off.

"Her presence is still here," he said. "All her clothes. Her things. That will be enough."