Hey everybody welcome back to cold case murder mysteries.

I'm your host Ryan Kraus descending to darkness once again to take you inside the harrowing

psychology inherent within the brutal murders of 32-year-old Roger Atkinson and his 22-year-old

lover Rose Burkeert at the Amana Holiday Inn, located

in Williamsburg, Iowa back on September 12, 1980.

Now, there are multiple suspects in this case and all of them viable, but I'm going to take

you down the road I think leads to the truth.

But again, there are multiple suspects and any one of them could be the killer.

Now, Roger grew up in a devout Christian family and later served in the military, going overseas to join the conflict in Vietnam.

He soon met his wife, Marcella, also a devout Christian, and the two ultimately settled

in St. Joseph Missouri, where they lived with their daughter at the time of the murders in 1980.

Roger was employed at a company called GTE, or General Telephone, as an installer responsible for setting up phone lines and similar sources of communication

While working here, Roger allegedly indulged a decisively male culture that involved intentionally making mistakes on installations where attractive young women would be vulnerable to the charms of a returning repairman looking to fix what's broken.

Not only did these efforts resonate strongly on a symbolic level with potential lovers, but

from a more practical standpoint, Roger also seems to have been a good-looking

guy who would be successful at it.

Accordingly, while Roger seems to have met and perhaps engaged romantically with a number of women through using this deceptive

method, it also stands to reason that this is the type of behavior that could get him in trouble one day, especially with a jealous or enraged

husband. Now, supposedly, this faulty installation technique is exactly the way Roger meets Rose, who was a single mother of a two-year-old at the time, but one with a past that reveals she was likely being stalked in 1980 by a former boyfriend.

Roger, of course, is a family man,

one who sings in the church choir and teaches Sunday school, somebody seemingly harmless in comparison, and Rose, training

to be a nurse at nearby Methodist Hospital, clearly sees him as a good guy. But let's get real for a minute. A man who enters your

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