Jessica Bergsten
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Jessica Bergsten (1969-March 20, 1991) was an up-and-coming model and skateboarding fan who was murdered by famous skateboarder Mark Rogowski.
Bergsten was friends with Rogowski's long-time girlfriend Brandi McClain. Bergsten and McClain used to attend California skating events together, and met Mark Rogowski in 1987. There would be no more meetings between Bergsten and Rogowski until the day he murdered her. In town four years later and needing a tour guide, Bergsten remembered Rogowski and contacted him.
Jessica Bergsten was a tall, blonde and beautiful aspiring model with roots in both Alabama and Arizona. Like Brandi McClain, she was also from a wealthy family.
Rogowski went through a period of serious depression; his personal troubles alienated many of his friends after he became famous. His problems had already deepened by the time he began to date McClain. McClain eventually grew tired of Rogowski's confrontational personality and his headlong submersion into an extreme form of Evangelical Christianity, and the couple broke up shortly before Bergsten's death.
According to his own police confession, Rogowski met Bergsten for lunch on the fateful day of March 20, 1991. They went back to his apartment, and going downstairs to the parking lot, he returned with a car-theft deterrent device known as The Club. With this, Rogowski bludgeoned Jessica Bergsten, rendering her semi-conscious, then raped her repeatedly for several hours before smothering her inside of a surfboard bag. Bergsten's body was found naked, buried in a shallow grave in the California desert.
Several weeks after the murder, Rogowski walked into the Carlsbad, California police station, turned himself in, and confessed the murder. Police were astonished, as he was not even considered a suspect and her body had not been indentified.
In a case of post-mortem notoriety that could be compared to that of Nicole Simpson, Bergsten attained international fame after death: since her confessed murderer had gained fame in Europe as well, the news of her death reached countries as far away as Germany and Italy.
In 2003, Jessica Bergsten's name came under the public light again, after a documentary, Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator, was released on DVD and on television.
Mark Rogowski is currently serving a 31-year sentence for Bergsten's rape and murder. He is up for parole in 2010.
