Central Park was her home and her studio. She was killed there.

NEW YORK — Francis Lee Rogers was a fixture in Central Park’s Ramble, a wooded area that is popular with birders.

She spent her days painting the Ramble’s birds and kept her homemade network of feeders filled with seed, as legions of bird lovers walked by hoping to catch a glimpse of warblers and sparrows.

For years, Rogers, who was homeless, brushed off concerns about the perils of a woman in her 60s — or anyone, for that matter — spending nights in and around the Ramble as she largely had for decades.

Last Sunday morning, Rogers, 63, was found dead, beaten and stabbed in the rustic wooden gazebo where she spent her nights, a short walk from the Central Park Boathouse, an upscale restaurant known for leisurely lunches and weddings.

She was found barefoot and covered in dirt, her body stabbed repeatedly and her head severely beaten, according to two law enforcement officials with knowledge of the matter.

Chillingly, her long graying hair, which she wore in signature tight braids, had been shaved off.

Shortly after the attack, Jonathan Robles, 36, walked into the Central Park police precinct and told officers that a woman in the park had threatened him, one of the officials said. Robles later told investigators that he killed Rogers.

The police charged him with murder and possession of a weapon. Robles, who was living in transitional housing in a midtown hotel, had been arrested twice in New York City, both times for nonviolent crimes, including leaving an IHOP without paying the bill, the official said.

Murders are rare in Central Park, a haven for tourists and New Yorkers alike. There were none this year through Sept. 20, and none last year during the same period, according to police data.

In a city where people largely go about their lives in anonymity, especially the homeless population, Rogers stood out as a familiar figure in the park.

Known as Lee, she chatted with rich and poor, native New Yorkers and foreigners and tourists. She had hardy mountain-woman looks, with her long braids spilling out from her wide-brimmed birder’s hat, running down over layers of wool sweaters.

She carried a large rucksack filled with her watercolors, oils and paintings and sketches in progress. And she was never without her crooked walking stick or her sketchbook of pencil drawings of birds and notes about their colors.

She was devoted to the network of bird feeders she had rigged in the Ramble by hanging them with lines looped over high branches.

“For years, she was the only person maintaining those bird feeders in the Ramble,” said Lincoln Karim, a wildlife photographer who knew Rogers for about 25 years. “She would spend hundreds of dollars on birdseed and suet.”

In the perhaps three decades that Rogers had been living largely in and around the park, she sold hundreds of paintings, her friends said.

Most of the sales came by word of mouth among local birders. But she also gained a following among those who saw her working on her small, nearly pointillist renderings at her regular table in the Boathouse restaurant at the Ramble’s eastern edge.

In this affordable cafe section, Rogers could nurse a cup of coffee for hours, often using the cup’s plastic lid as a palette. It was her atelier, surrounded by large windows overlooking the Ramble and the lake.

“She was a fixture — she came by the same time every day, carrying a big backpack, and she was always welcome,” said Dean Poll, who operated the restaurant from 2000 until 2022. “I gave her her space and she never bothered anybody.”

“She was like family,” he said. “She made us Christmas cards that were beautiful. We still have them.”

Rogers, who also went by the name Elise Bainbridge Hill, told the New York Times in 2012 that her sleeping spots varied from the steps of local churches to a women’s shelter near Park Avenue in cold weather. She told a documentarian in a film released in 2016 that she ran away from her abusive childhood home in New Jersey and initially became a prostitute in New York.

Painting was her escape from life on the streets, she said, with Central Park as her oasis from Manhattan’s bustle.

In conversation, Rogers would often slip seamlessly from detailed discussions about bird species to digressions about conspiracy theories.

“She knew a lot about a lot of things but then she would just slip into outrageous stuff, like her flying in spaceships,” Karim said. “But she was a damn good painter, I have to say.”

Karim said he helped Rogers sell several works, with smaller ones fetching $300 and a large oil painting going for $1,200. “She had enough money to get off the street,” he said.

Joe Lopez, 64, of Manhattan, a caterer who knew Rogers for 15 years, said he bought several of her illustrations for as much as $400, including one of Pale Male, the celebrity red-tailed hawk that captivated the city’s bird-watching community from his nest on a Fifth Avenue luxury building.

Rogers, who used a public bathroom in the park to wash up, took pride in keeping a neat appearance. But more recently she would go barefoot, Karim said, or sometimes wrap her feet in cardboard.

The gazebo had become her regular sleeping spot. Just before her death, she weathered the nor’easter that buffeted the region by sleeping on a bench beneath a green tarp, with her belongings and painting supplies around her.

On Monday, some of her friends trudged through the rain to pay their respects. One of them, Moises Diaz, 71, of the Upper East Side, lit a candle for Rogers, whom he had seen for years on his daily walks.

Diaz, who is also an artist, played a recording of a conversation he had with Rogers about six months ago. She had asked him about his recent work, a wall hanging he had made out of foam.

“She had a beautiful voice,” he said as he listened to the recording. “There’s a lot of mean people that come to this place — a lot, but not her.”

Lopez came by, too. He brought along a satchel of drawings by Rogers, including the one of Pale Male. He called it “a masterpiece.”

“To me, I was buying something beautiful, but it was also money I knew she needed,” Lopez said. “She wasn’t a homeless person to me, she was a genuine special character. The birders really respected her.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.