Man serving overseas with U.S. Army charged with grandparents’ murder in SC

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CHESTER COUNTY, S.C. (WBTV) – A man serving overseas in the U.S. Army has been arrested and charged with the 2020 murder of grandparents in Chester County, authorities said.

According to Chester County Sheriff Max Dorsey, 24-year-old Gene Alexander “Alex” Scott, of Columbia, S.C., is charged with two counts of murder and one count of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime.

Dorsey says this was a “crime of greed.” The Sheriff could not get into too many details, but said there was a financial issues prompting the murders.

On June 21, 2020, Chester County deputies were called to a home on Doe Street in Richburg, where the bodies of 61-year-old Gene Rogers and 78-year-old Billie Rogers were found, authorities said.

On Oct. 21 of this year, the Chester County Grand Jury returned indictments charging Scott with the murders, according to the Chester County Sheriff’s Office.

Within hours of the arrest orders being signed, the U.S. Army was notified and Scott, who was serving in Germany, was taken into custody by military police, authorities said.

On Oct. 23, Scott was transferred into the custody of the Chester County Sheriff’s Office by military police once he arrived at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport, according to law enforcement.

Neighbors describe the Rodgers as good and kind-hearted people, so they were devastated to find out they were killed because of what investigators call greed.

”It’s a big shock,” says Amber Moore, who lives just around the corner.

Moore and Chance Millwood are not far from the now empty mobile home. The news was hard to believe when they heard Monday morning Scott had been arrested for the murders.

”He just seemed to be so normal but there was so much darkness underlying that,” says Moore.

Scott was a military man serving in the Army after a four-year stint with the Marines. While in the marines, Scott was apparently at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. He was an Ammo Technician there. Deputies say he left the Marines in January of 2020. A year later, and a little more than six months after the murders, he joined the Army. He did Infantry training at Camp Benning in Georgia. He was an Infantry Soldier stationed out of Vilseck, Germany.

Millwood, a fellow military man, says the military background was not unusual.

”Honestly this is not a huge surprise. There’s a lot of things that go on most people don’t want to talk about,” he explains. “And it’s not all pretty.”

For the Sheriff’s Office Deputies who are also veterans, investigating one of their own was not easy.

”I mean they were particularly upset because someone like that had been through the same type of training that they had been through…it was difficult for them,” says Dorsey.

Dorsey says they believe Scott enlisted in the Army to escape what he had done, but deputies kept up with him regularly determined to get to the bottom of this crime.

”They are not cold cases,” he says. “They are cases we put effort into every day.”

Back at the mobile home, the small reminders of what happened here still haunt Millwood and Moore to this day.

”It makes you wonder what was going through his head the whole time,” says Moore. “You never know.”

He is currently being held in the Chester County Detention Center awaiting a bond hearing, deputies said. His bond was denied by a magistrate judge.

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