Oba Chandler
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Oba Chandler (born October 11, 1946) is a convicted murderer currently on Death Row in Florida for the murders of a woman and her two daughters.
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[edit] The crime
Chandler, an aluminum building contractor, was convicted of killing 36-year-old Joan ("Jo") Rogers, and her daughters, Michelle (17) and Christe (14), on June 1, 1989. They were on a Florida vacation; it was the first time they had left the state of Ohio and their family farm. Authorities believe the women became lost and encountered Chandler, who gave them directions and offered to meet them again later to take them on a sunset cruise of Tampa Bay. The women were known to have left Orlando that morning around 9 a.m. and checked in at the Days Inn on State Route 60 at 12:30 p.m. Camera snapshots found in the car showed the last picture of Michelle while she was alive and even the sun setting on the same bay where their lives would later end. They were last seen alive at the hotel restaurant around 7:30 p.m. It is believed they boarded Chandler's boat at the dock on the Courtney Campbell Causeway between 8:30 and 9:00 p.m. and were dead by 3 a.m.
The women's bodies were found floating in Tampa Bay on June 4, 1989, bound hand and foot with cement blocks tied to their necks and duct tape over their mouths (to prevent screaming) but not their eyes (for them to see what was happening). Autopsies indicated the women had been thrown into the water while still alive. This was bolstered by the water found in the lungs and the fact that Michelle had freed one arm from her bonds before succumbing. The partially dressed bodies of all three women indicated that the underlying crime was sexual assault. The blocks were tied on their necks to make sure they died from either suffocation or drowning, and to make sure the bodies were never found. The bodies were found when they bloated due to decomposition and floated to the surface.
The women would not be positively identified until a week later by which time they were reported missing by the husband and father, Hal Rogers, in Ohio. A housekeeper noted on June 8 that nothing in the room had been disturbed, and that beds had not been slept in. She contacted the general manager who then contacted the police. Fingerprint matches were made to the bodies from those found in the room. Final confirmation came from dental records sent from the Rogers' dentist in Ohio. Marine researchers at Florida International University studied the currents and patterns from and confirmed that they were tossed from a boat and not from a bridge or dry land and that it had happened anywhere from two to five days before they were found. This was confirmed when the Rogers' car, a 1984 Oldsmobile Calais with Ohio license plates, was found at the boat dock on the causeway.
[edit] Trial
The case remained unsolved for several years, and Chandler would not be indicted for the murders until 1992. His handwritten directions and palmprint on a brochure found in the Rogers' vehicle, along with a description of his boat written by Jo Rogers, were the primary clues that led to his becoming a suspect. Also, authorities had posted the handwriting from the brochure on billboards, and this led to a tip from a former neighbor who was able to provide a copy of a work order that Chandler had written. A handwriting analysis conclusively matched the two. Another neighbor, as well as one of the secretaries on the investigative task force, also thought that Chandler resembled the composite sketch of the suspect. The palm prints from the brochure were also matched to Chandler. Moreover Chandler had sold his boat and left town with his family soon after the billboards appeared all over the Tampa Bay area.
Another lead was that two weeks prior to the murders, Chandler had lured a Canadian woman on to his boat in nearby Madeira Beach, raped her, then dropped her off back on land where she made her way back to her hotel room where her friend was waiting. He was not charged or tried for this crime. It is thought he did not murder her because the friend refused his offer for her to join them, a decision which more than likely saved both their lives. As a result, the victim testified during his trial for the murders to establish his pattern of attack and the similarities between the two crimes. The victim testified he had given his name as Dave Posner or Posno. Presumably Chandler gave the same alias to the Rogers women when he first met them. He did tell the Canadian victim he was in aluminum contracting which helped lead investigators to him as well as the naming of the investigation to capture him: Operation Tin Man. The description the victim gave was also posted on the billboards along with the handwriting samples.
In addition, a former employee of Chandler's testified that he bragged of dating three women that night on the bay and that the next morning he arrived and delivered materials for a job by boat and immediately set out again (presumably to make sure his victims were dead). In an attempt to establish Chandler's whereabouts on the night of the murders, investigators found phone records of several radio marine telephone calls made from his boat to his home between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. – probably to attempt to explain to his wife his absence as well as to provide himself with an alibi for his whereabouts at the time of the murders.
At his trial Chandler testified in his own defense against the advice of his attorneys. He admitted meeting the Rogers women and giving them directions, but claimed he never saw them again except in the newspaper and on billboards. Yet he never came forward to tell authorities that he had seen the women. He acknowledged he was on the bay that night but that he was fishing alone. He explained that the reason that he was so late in coming home was because his engine would not start, which he attributed to a leak he claimed to have found near dawn in the gas line. He called the United States Coast Guard and Florida Marine Patrol, but they were busy elsewhere. Finally, he claimed he flagged down a Coast Guard patrol boat but they were busy and promised to send him help. Then he claimed to have fixed the line with duct tape which allowed him to make it back safely to shore.
His testimony was quickly refuted by the Hillsborough County Prosecutor Douglas Crow. Crow verbally sparred with Chandler to demonstrate that he had in fact lied about everything. All Chandler could muster in response to the prosecutor's repeated questions was "I don't remember". This defense won him few sympathizers on a jury that quickly saw through his façade, not to mention the inconsistencies in his statements. Moreover, there were no records of any distress calls from Chandler that night to either the Coast Guard or the Marine Patrol, nor were there any Coast Guard boats on the bay the following morning to help him. A boat mechanic testified for the prosecution to refute Chandler's claim of mechanical trouble. He described that Chandler's explanation for repairing the boat's gas leak could not have happened as he had portrayed it. Chandler's boat, a Bayliner, had a distinctive engine in which the fuel lines were directed upward. Such a leak would have sprayed fuel into the air instead of leaking into the boat, not to mention that the corrosive effects of the gasoline would have eaten away the adhesive properties of the duct tape, that had, supposedly, been used to repair the aforementioned leak.
Chandler was tried and found guilty in 1994, and sentenced to death. He remains on Florida's Death Row. He maintains his innocence and continues to pursue legal appeals. He has admitted the Madeira Beach attack, but claims it was consensual, and that the victim had changed her mind during the act which in his words, was not possible for him to do so. He still claims he never met the Rogers women after that morning when he gave them directions.
[edit] Media concerning the case of Oba Chandler
The Discovery Channel devoted a one-hour episode concerning the murders of the Rogers family and Oba Chandler on their series Scene of the Crime: The Tin Man. The case was also one of three in an episode of the Discovery channel series Forensic Detectives. The former focused on the underlying events of the crimes while the latter focused on forensic evidence.
In 1997, a series of articles entitled "Angels & Demons" written by Thomas French was published in the St. Petersburg Times. The series told the story of the murders, the capture and conviction of Oba Chandler, and the impact of the crimes on the Rogers' family and community in Ohio, most notably their husband and father, Hal Rogers. The articles won a 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.
[edit] Features and background of the Case
- Chandler had long "rap sheet" including kidnapping, armed robbery, forgery, and domestic abuse. He was known to have eight children by several different women and was known to be a deadbeat father. He even held a gun to his son-in-law's head once over a dispute.
- They focused on not just the crime but the events leading up to the crime such as Michelle's previously being raped by her uncle John Rogers who was jailed for that and other similar crimes at the time of the murders. This caused a huge rift in the family with some taking one side or the other. It may have contributed to the vulnerability the Rogers women felt when they encountered Chandler, and like any con man, he sensed it and cleverly exploited it.
- Hal Rogers was considered a suspect because he had posted bail for his brother after he knew of his abuse of Michelle. He said later that he had promised the family to make bail and would not go back on his promise. Investigators from Florida and Ohio also found out he had withdrawn $10,000 from his bank at the time of the disappearance. When he was questioned about it he showed them the satchel with most of the money. He planned on using it to go and search for the girls himself before he was notified of their deaths. He could never bring himself to bring it back to the bank. Besides subsequent investigation conclusively proved he had never left Ohio during that time period.
- The uncle was also seriously considered a suspect even though he was in jail at the time. The idea that he may have planned the crime was bolstered by the fact that his parents, the girls' grandparents, had property near Tampa and that he had visited the area a month before the murders. However he was a general loner with little close ties to even his family let alone friends so such a plan if there was one would have beyond character for him. For this and the simple reason that he did not know when his sister-in-law and nieces would be there he was dismissed as a suspect.
- John Rogers was released on parole in 2004 but is estranged from his family.
- Death Cruise, by Don Davis, also covered the case.
- The case was also featured in an episode of A&E's Cold Case Files entitled Bodies in the Bay which also focused on the evidence but did not delve too deeply in the background of the murders.
