Oba Chandler
Oba Chandler was an American mass murderer who was convicted and executed for the June 1989 murders of Joan Rogers and her two daughters, whose bodies were found floating in Tampa Bay, Florida, with their hands and feet bound. Autopsies showed the victims had been thrown into the water while still alive, with ropes tied to a concrete block around their necks. The case became high-profile in 1992 when local police posted billboards bearing enlarged images of the suspect's handwriting recovered from a pamphlet in the victims' car. Chandler was identified as the killer when his neighbor recognized the handwriting.
Prior to his arrest, Chandler worked as an unlicensed aluminum-siding contractor. Against the advice of his attorneys, he testified in his own defense, saying he had met the Ohio women and had given them directions. Chandler said he never saw them again, except in newspaper coverage and on the billboards set up by authorities. Police originally theorized that two men were involved in the murders, but this was discounted once Chandler was arrested. Following his conviction, Chandler was incarcerated at Union Correctional Institution. During his seventeen years of incarceration until his execution, he did not have a visitor.
Chandler was executed on November 15, 2011. He wrote a last statement to prison officials: "You are killing innocent man today". The statement was read at a post-execution news conference. In February 2014, DNA evidence identified Chandler as the murderer of Ivelisse Berrios-Beguerisse, who was found dead in Coral Springs, Florida, on November 27, 1990.
Early life
Background
Chandler was the fourth of five children born to Oba Chandler Sr. and Margaret Johnson, and was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. When he was tenyears old in June 1957, his father hanged himself in the basement of the family's apartment. According to one relative, at the funeral, Chandler jumped into his father's grave as the gravediggers were covering the coffin with dirt. Between May and September 1991concurrent with the police investigation of the Rogers family triple murderChandler was an informant for the U.S. Customs Bureau's Tampa office.Crimes and incidents
When Chandler was fourteen, he began stealing cars and was arrested twenty times as a juvenile. As an adult, he was charged with a variety of crimes, including possession of counterfeit money, loitering, burglary, kidnapping, and armed robbery. He was also accused of masturbating while peeping through a woman's window. In one incident, Chandler and an accomplice broke into a Florida couple's home, held them at gunpoint, and robbed them. Chandler told his accomplice to tie up the man with speaker wire and took the woman into the bedroom, where he made her strip to her underwear, tied her up, and rubbed the barrel of his revolver across her stomach.Murder victims
On May 26, 1989, Joan "Jo" Rogers, 36, and her daughtersMichelle, 17, and Christe, 14left their family dairy farm in Willshire, Ohio, for a vacation in Florida. It was the first time they had left their home state. Authorities believe Joan became lost on June 1 during the return drive from Orlando to Willshire, and had decided to take an extra vacation day in Tampa. While looking for their hotel they encountered Chandler, who gave them directions and offered to meet them again later to take them on a sunset cruise of Tampa Bay.Joan and her teenage daughters had left Orlando around 9:00a.m. and checked into the Days Inn on Route 60 at 12:30p.m.
Photographs retrieved from a roll of film found in a camera in the Rogers' hotel room showed Michelle sitting on the floor. The last photograph was taken from the hotel balcony and showed the sun beginning to set over Tampa Bay, confirming that all three family members were alive and had not left their hotel room as the sunset began. They were last seen alive at the hotel's restaurant at around 7:30p.m. It is believed they boarded Chandler's boat by the dock on the Courtney Campbell Causeway—part of Route 60—between 8:30p.m. and 9:00p.m., and that they were dead by 3a.m. the next day. Chandler may have used the fact that he was born in Ohio to lure them into feeling a connection to him. Chandler knew Joan and her daughters were not from Florida because he saw the Ohio license plates on their car.
The victims' bodies were found floating in Tampa Bay on June 4, 1989. The first body was found when several people on board a sailboat crossing under the Sunshine Skyway saw an object in the water. The second body was seen floating off the pier in St. Petersburg, north of the first. While the Coast Guard were recovering the second body, a call about a third, which was seen floating to the east, was received. All three female bodies were found floating face down, bound with a rope around the neck, and naked below the waist.
Autopsies showed all three victims had water in their lungs, proving they had been thrown into the water while still alive. Michelle, who was identified as the second body found, had freed one hand from her bonds before she drowned. The partially dressed state of the three bodies indicated the underlying crime was sexual assault. Ropes with a concrete block at the other end had been tied around the victims' necks to ensure they died from either suffocation or drowning, and that their bodies would never be found. The bodies, however, bloated as a result of decomposition, and floated to the surface.
Investigation
The Rogers' bodies underwent decomposition while underwater due to hot weather. Because of this, they were not identified for a week after their remains were located.Joan Rogers and her daughters were not positively identified until a week after their bodies' discovery, by which time Joan's husband, the girls' father, Hal Rogers, had reported them missing in Ohio. On June 8, a housekeeper at the Days Inn said the Rogers family's room had not been disturbed and the beds had not been slept in. The hotel manager contacted the police. Fingerprints found in the room were matched to the bodies, and final confirmation of their identities came from dental records. Marine researchers at the University of South Florida estimated from currents and patterns that the victims were thrown from a boatand not from a bridge or dry landbetween two and five days before they were found. The Rogers' car, a 1984 Oldsmobile Calais with Ohio license plates, was found at the boat dock by the Courtney Campbell Causeway.
Facts and arrest
The case remained unsolved for over three years, partly due to the volume of tips received by police investigators. The biggest tip came from a Madeira Beach police bulletin that described a similar rape of a 24-year-old Canadian tourist that occurred two weeks before the Rogers' murders. Chandler was arrested for the murders on September 24, 1992. His handwritten directions on a brochure found in the Rogers' vehicle and a description of his boat written by Jo Rogers on the brochure were the primary clues that led to his being named a suspect. Local police posted images of Chandler's handwriting on the brochure on billboards in the Tampa Bay area, leading to a call from a former neighbor who provided a copy of a work order Chandler had written. This use of billboards by law enforcement in the US was unusual at the time.Through handwriting analysis, the two samples were matched. A palm print on the brochure was also matched to Chandler, who had sold his boat and left town with his family soon after the billboards appeared. Police reported that Chandler and his then-wife moved from their home on Dalton Avenue in Tampa to Port Orange near Daytona Beach.
Second-suspect theory
Investigators originally thought two men were involved in the murders of the Rogers family. This theory was used for a reenactment shown in a 1991episode of Unsolved Mysteries. This theory was dismissed when Chandler was arrested. No evidence of a second manother than a former prison cellmate's claim that Chandler said another man, whose identity the cellmate claimed to know but would not revealhas ever surfaced. The second-suspect theory was belied by Chandler's approach of two Canadian female touriststhat he was willing to approach multiple potential targets by himself.Hal Rogers' brother John was also considered a suspect, even though he was serving a prison sentence for the rape of a woman at the time of the murders. Police investigating the woman's rape allegation found evidence indicating John had also sexually assaulted Hal's daughter Michelle, although charges involving this assault were later dropped because of her reluctance to testify. The St. Petersburg Times said John may have planned the murder during a visit to his parents' property near Tampa a month before the murders. Once the police established John could not have hired a contract killer, did not have accomplices, and could not have known the timing of his sister-in-law's and nieces' trip, he was dismissed as a suspect.
Hal was also considered a suspect because he had posted bail for his brother, but he stated in an episode of On the Case with Paula Zahn that he posted bail prior to knowing his brother had abused Michelle. Hal later said he had promised the family he would post bail and would not renege on his promise. Investigators from Florida and Ohio also discovered Hal had withdrawn US$7,000 from his bank account at the time of the disappearance, which he was able to account for. He had planned to use it to look for his wife and daughters before he was notified of their deaths. Investigations proved conclusively Hal had not left Ohio during that period. The assaults of Michelle Rogers by her uncle and gossip by local people was one of the reasons for the Florida trip; Joan and her daughters wanted to distance themselves from the incident.
Trial
Chandler's testimony
At his trial in Clearwater, Florida, Chandler said he met Joan, Michelle, and Christe Rogers and gave them directions but he never saw them again except in newspaper coverage and on billboards. He acknowledged he was in Tampa Bay that nightthe police had evidence of three ship-to-shore telephone calls made from his boat to his home during the time frame of the murdersbut Chandler maintained he was fishing alone. He said he had returned home late because his engine would not start, which he attributed to a gas line leak. He also said he had called the Coast Guard and the Florida Marine Patrol, and had flagged down a patrol boat, but both were too busy to help. He said he subsequently fixed the line with duct tape and returned safely to shore.There were, however, no records of distress calls from Chandler to either the Coast Guard or the Marine Patrol that night, nor were there any Coast Guard boats on the bay the following morning that could have helped him. According to a boat mechanic who testified for the prosecution, Chandler's explanation of repairing the boat's alleged gas leak was not tenable because the fuel lines in his boata Baylinerwere directed upward. A leak would have sprayed fuel into the air rather than into the boat and the gasoline would have dissolved the adhesive of the duct tape Chandler maintained he had used to repair a leak. Under questioning from Pinellas County prosecutor Douglas Crow, Chandler then said he could not remember.