Bergsten had years earlier met Rogowski through his ex-girlfriend in Arizona, and called him after she moved to Pacific Beach. He was one of the few people she knew. In March 1991, they arranged to meet.
At his Carlsbad condo, they watched a rented movie. They drank. They talked.
At one point, he went into his garage. He came back with a steering wheel lock and suddenly clubbed her with it. As she lay on the floor dazed, he called her names and spewed Bible verses at her.
He handcuffed her then and raped her for hours, Rogowski has said. Around dawn, he put her into a surfboard bag. She kicked and screamed and struggled. He said he put his hand over her mouth so a neighbor wouldn’t hear. She stopped moving.
Rogowski said he drove Bergsten’s body out to Imperial County, tossing evidence — like the steering wheel lock — out the window as he drove.
In April 1991, about 10 days after Bergsten was reported missing, vacationers found
her body in a shallow grave off Interstate 8 in the desert near Ocotillo. But nobody knew who she was.
A month later, Rogowski — who’d become a born-again Christian in the months before the slaying — confessed to his minister. They went to police, and the man who had once been a skating star
confessed that he had been with the missing model when she died. He took authorities to the gravesite, where Bergsten’s body had been found.
The prosecutor at the time said Rogowski let out his rage at his ex-girlfriend on Bergsten, his ex’s close friend.
Rogowski pleaded guilty to rape and murder the following year and was
sentenced to 31 years to life, taking a plea deal that took the possibility of life in prison without parole off the table. At the time, the prosecutor handling the case said he agreed to the deal because “I really don’t think he will ever get out of prison.”
In 2003, Rogowski was the subject of a documentary titled “Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator.”
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