On the afternoon of June 1, 1989, Joan Rogers and her daughters Michelle and Christe got lost on their way into Tampa. They were dairy farmers from northwestern Ohio on the first real vacation of their lives. A stranger wrote directions to their motel on the back of a Clearwater Beach brochure and offered to take them out on his boat to watch the sunset. Three days later their bodies were found floating in Tampa Bay, bound, their mouths taped, with ropes and concrete blocks around their necks.
The man who wrote the directions was Oba Chandler, a 42-year-old aluminum contractor with a criminal record stretching back to his teens. It took the St. Petersburg police more than three years to find him. The case was solved by the brochure: his handwriting, his palm print on the paper, and a former neighbor who recognized both his face in a police sketch and his printing in the newspaper. In 1994 a jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder, and on November 15, 2011, he was executed by lethal injection. In February 2014 police in Coral Springs, Florida, announced that DNA from the body of a 20-year-old woman abducted in November 1990 matched Chandler. He was never charged in that case, because he was already dead.
The Rogers case was the subject of "Angels & Demons," a series by Thomas French of the St. Petersburg Times that won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Much of what is known about the family and about the investigation comes from that series, which French based on interviews with Hal Rogers, family members, detectives and prosecutors and on more than 4,000 pages of police reports and court records.
Oba Chandler Jr. was born on October 11, 1946, at Cincinnati General Hospital. His mother, Margaret Johnson, was a housewife from Jackson, Kentucky; his father, Oba Chandler Sr., worked as a laborer at National Distillers in Cincinnati. He was the fourth of five children. When he was 10, his father hanged himself in the basement of the family's apartment. A cousin later told investigators that the boy jumped into the open grave at the funeral; other relatives denied it. Chandler himself, interviewed on death row in 1995, remembered his father as a big man with powerful forearms who took him fishing every weekend.
He was stealing cars by 14 and was arrested about 20 times as a juvenile, according to the St. Petersburg Times series. He had an eighth-grade education. He served briefly in the Marine Corps; French reported that he deserted, while the trial court later accepted as a mitigating point that he had been honorably discharged, and the record is not consistent on this.
In 1969 a 22-year-old Oba Chandler in Cincinnati was indicted for receiving 21 wigs stolen from a beauty salon; reporters in 1992 could not confirm that this was the same man. In 1976 he was charged in Volusia County, Florida, with kidnapping, armed robbery and burglary after a home invasion in Holly Hill, near Daytona Beach, in which a couple was held at gunpoint and tied up with stereo and telephone cords. He pleaded guilty to one count of robbery on January 12, 1977, and was sentenced to 10 years. Five months later he escaped from a road prison near Palatka.
For the next five years he lived under false names. As "Jim Wright" he rented a house in Maitland, near Orlando, ran an aluminum siding business from his home and was arrested several times for minor offenses without anyone realizing he was an escaped prisoner. On September 27, 1982, Secret Service agents arrested him with $8,340 in counterfeit $20 bills in his car. He served a federal sentence in Texas, was returned to Florida in June 1984 to finish the robbery term, and was released on December 12, 1986. He had children with several women; French counted eight children by seven mothers.
In May 1988 he married Debra Ann Whiteman of Tarpon Springs, and that December the couple bought a three-bedroom house on Dalton Avenue in the Tampa Shores neighborhood of northwest Tampa. The house backed onto a canal that led to Tampa Bay and had two davits for lifting a boat. In the fall of 1988 Chandler bought a 21-foot 1976 Bayliner, blue and white, from a neighbor on the same street. He also drove a dark blue Jeep Cherokee. Their daughter was born in February 1989. He was working as an aluminum contractor, building screen enclosures and porch additions, and obtained a Hillsborough County occupational license that year.
The Rogers family farmed 300 acres near the village of Willshire in Van Wert County, Ohio, close to the Indiana line. They milked 80 Holsteins twice a day, every day. Hal Rogers and his wife, Jo, had married a few months after high school. To qualify the family for health insurance and to add to the farm income, Jo also worked the midnight shift on the assembly line and forklift at a health and beauty products distribution center across the state line in Indiana. She would come home at dawn, help with the milking, get the girls off to school, and try to sleep in pieces between chores.
Her given name was Joan, but almost no one used it. Friends described her as outgoing and funny; a neighbor said she never knew a stranger. She loved country music and dancing, made a potato soup people remembered, and liked riding behind Hal on their motorcycle. Hal said she was his personality. She was 36 in 1989 and, by the accounts of those who knew her, worn down by years of work and family trouble. In the months before the trip she had talked about having another baby. She could not swim and was afraid of having her face covered by water.
Michelle Lee Rogers was 17 and had just finished her junior year at Crestview High School. She was quiet with strangers and bold with friends, wore four rings on her left hand, liked unicorns, Guns N' Roses and U2, belonged to 4-H and the Future Farmers of America, and slept in the barn with her animals during the Van Wert County Fair. Some days she said she wanted to become a veterinarian; other days she wanted a family and a farm. A month before the trip she had started going steady with a classmate, Jeff Feasby, and kept his class ring in her purse so she would not lose it in the barn. She had been through a great deal. In 1988 she told sheriff's investigators that a relative had sexually abused her over two years; the relative was later imprisoned for an assault on another woman, and the charges involving Michelle were dropped because she did not want to testify. French wrote that during those years Michelle had kept watch over her younger sister to keep her safe.
Christe Rogers was 14 and had just finished eighth grade. She was a cheerleader who practiced her routines beside the barn with the cows as her audience. She played catcher on her softball team, played the saxophone, rode a motor scooter, collected teddy bears and wore three braided friendship bracelets on her left wrist. She was the last one out of bed for the early milking. She had followed her father everywhere as a small child, riding in the combine cab and coloring under a tree while he plowed, and the two stayed close. "That's just my little girl," Hal told French.
The trip was the family's first vacation together; in most years the farm allowed nothing more than a few days at the county fair. Hal stayed behind because spring planting was late and the cows had to be milked. On the afternoon of Friday, May 26, 1989, Jo backed the family's blue 1986 Oldsmobile Calais up to the milk house, kissed Hal goodbye through the window, stopped at the bank in Willshire, and headed for Interstate 75.
The rolls of film later recovered from their motel room traced the week. They visited the Jacksonville Zoo and rode a glass-bottom boat at Silver Springs, which may have been the first time Christe had ever been on a boat. From Titusville, Jo sent Hal a postcard saying the girls were dragging her everywhere, and Michelle mailed a birthday card to Jeff. They went to Sea World, Epcot and Disney-MGM Studios. Hal told the jury in 1994 that the last time he spoke to Jo, she listed the parks they planned to visit and he told her not to bother with Disney World because it was just rides.
On Thursday, June 1, they drove from the Orlando area to Tampa, where they planned to visit Busch Gardens. They checked into Room 251 of the Days Inn at Rocky Point, on the Courtney Campbell Parkway, at about 12:30 p.m. At 12:37 Michelle called Jeff Feasby at the gas station where he worked; it was his birthday and she had sent him flowers. A few minutes later someone in the room called the Busch Gardens information line. How the family spent the afternoon was never established.
At about 7 p.m. a businessman staying at the motel noticed the three of them laughing and joking at dinner in the motel restaurant. Their last photograph, taken from the balcony outside their room, shows palm trees against an evening sky over the bay; an expert at trial placed it between about 6:20 and 8:20 p.m. Sometime after that they drove a couple of miles to a boat ramp on the Courtney Campbell Parkway. Jo had written directions to the ramp on a sheet of Days Inn stationery, and the note suggested they were meeting someone with a blue and white boat.
Chandler admitted at trial that he met the family that afternoon and wrote directions to the Days Inn on their brochure, and that he went out in his boat that night. A man who did aluminum work for him testified that Chandler, in a hurry at midday, said he had a date with three women. Marine telephone records later showed five collect calls placed from Chandler's boat, which was named Gypsy One, to his home between 1:12 a.m. and 9:52 a.m. on June 2. At about 7:30 that morning he stopped at a job site, and the same worker said he looked unwashed and told him he had been out on his boat all night.
On Sunday morning, June 4, people aboard a sailboat returning from Key West spotted a body in the water near the Sunshine Skyway. A Coast Guard crew from the Bayboro Harbor station in St. Petersburg recovered it, and within a short time two more bodies were reported floating about two miles off the St. Petersburg Pier. All three were women. Their hands and feet were bound, their mouths were taped, and ropes around their necks had been tied to concrete blocks. One of them had worked her left hand free before she died. The assistant medical examiner, Dr. Edward Corcoran, found that they had died of asphyxiation, either from the ropes or by drowning; water was found in their lungs. Because the bodies had been in the water for days, it could not be determined whether they had been sexually assaulted. Tidal experts from the University of South Florida concluded that the bodies could not have been put in the water from land or a bridge; they had been taken out by boat.
No identification was found. For four days the three women were unknown. On Thursday, June 8, a housekeeper at the Days Inn reported that the guests in Room 251 had not slept in their beds for a week. Tampa police sealed the room, and prints from the room, including a print on a tube of toothpaste, matched the bodies. Police then found the Calais at the boat ramp, locked, with the passenger seat pushed forward. Inside were Jo's directions on the motel stationery and a Clearwater Beach brochure with a map of Tampa Bay on the back, marked in someone else's handwriting with directions to the Days Inn.
In Ohio, Hal Rogers had been waiting for the car to come up the driveway. The family had been due home that weekend. He had already reported them missing and had withdrawn cash to hire a plane and search the highways himself when the sheriff of Van Wert County, a friend since high school, came to the farm with the news. The three were buried in June at the cemetery across the road from Zion Lutheran Church. Hal asked that a teddy bear be placed in each of the girls' caskets. After the service he changed into his overalls and went out to grind feed for the cows.
Because the family disappeared from Tampa and were found in St. Petersburg waters, a task force was formed of more than two dozen investigators from the St. Petersburg and Tampa police, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Florida Marine Patrol. There was no crime scene. The car had been left clean, and no useful prints were found in the motel room. The family's camera, a Nikon One-Touch, was never found.
Detectives reconstructed the family's route from receipts and photographs, interviewed guests and employees at every motel where they had stayed, searched construction sites for matching concrete blocks, and cross-checked guest lists against more than 700,000 registered Florida boat owners. A $5,000 reward produced more than 800 tips. One promising suspect, a man with a blue and white boat and a criminal record, was cleared after his alibi checked out and he passed a polygraph.
Two detectives, Ralph Pflieger of St. Petersburg and Henry Duran of Tampa, went to Ohio twice. They looked at the relative who had been accused of abusing Michelle, who was in prison when the murders took place, and concluded that he had neither the knowledge of the trip nor the contacts to arrange a killing. They looked hard at Hal Rogers too. He had been on the farm milking the evening of June 1 and before dawn on June 2, about an hour's drive from the nearest sizable airport, and when the detectives asked about the cash he had withdrawn, he showed them $6,000 of it still in a bank bag in his truck. They came home convinced that the crime had nothing to do with Ohio. As the tips ran out, the task force was disbanded and the case was left with four St. Petersburg detectives.
Rumors about Hal persisted in Van Wert County, where people noticed that he wore tinted glasses even at the funeral and never cried in public. In April 1991 the Tampa Tribune published a front-page story that portrayed him as cold and suggested the investigation had turned back to Ohio. St. Petersburg police later asked Hal to take a polygraph, which he passed, and the sergeant in charge, Glen Moore, announced publicly that Hal was not a suspect.
The first real lead came from a Florida Department of Law Enforcement bulletin. The lead detective, Jim Kappel, learned of a rape reported in the Gulf of Mexico off Madeira Beach, on the Pinellas County coast, on May 15, 1989, about two weeks before the murders. The victim was a 24-year-old Canadian tourist. She and a friend had met a friendly man in the parking lot of a convenience store; he said his name was Dave, that he owned an aluminum company, and that he lived in Bradenton. He took the woman out on his blue and white boat that day and invited both women back for a sunset cruise. Her friend declined twice. That evening, offshore, he attacked her, threatened to tape her mouth with duct tape, and destroyed the film in her camera before bringing her back near John's Pass. She survived and reported the attack. She is not named here.
Kappel and another detective flew to Canada to interview her and came back convinced that the same man had killed the Rogers family. The similarities were plain: a friendly approach to tourists in a public place, an invitation to a sunset boat ride, a preference for more than one woman, a threat of duct tape. With her help they made a new composite sketch of the man without a hat, and in November 1989 police released it along with a description of his boat and his dark four-wheel-drive vehicle. More than 400 tips came in. None led anywhere.
Chandler's wife later told investigators that his temper had grown short in the months after the murders. In November 1989, when the composite sketch appeared in the newspaper and on television, she thought it looked exactly like him. Within hours he left Tampa without packing, and he was gone for about three weeks. He went to Cincinnati, checked into a motel and called his adult daughter, Kristal Mays. She and her husband found him anxious and chain-smoking. At trial she testified that he told her he could not go back to Florida because police wanted him for the rape of a woman, and later, at dinner, that he could not return because he had killed some women. Her husband, Rick Mays, testified that Chandler spoke of raping someone in Florida and of being involved in murders there. Kristal bought her father a coat because he had brought none.
Chandler returned to Tampa. On August 28, 1989, about 12 weeks after the murders, he had sold the Bayliner to a Tampa man for $1,000. In July 1990, as news reports said the Rogers case would be featured on the television program Unsolved Mysteries, he and his family abruptly left the Dalton Avenue house. They stopped making mortgage payments and left behind furniture, clothes and a fouled swimming pool; the bank foreclosed. The family lived for a short time in Sunrise, in western Broward County, and by October 1991 were renting a house in Port Orange, near Daytona Beach.
Glen Moore, a veteran St. Petersburg officer who had never worked a homicide, took over the homicide squad in November 1989. In June 1990, as the first anniversary approached, he assembled a team of detectives new to the case to review the three binders of reports with the original investigators. The review produced a list of close to 150 questions and a 10-page memo. Among its findings, Moore said, was that the Clearwater Beach brochure had never been processed for fingerprints. When it was, several unidentified prints were found on it.
Moore's superiors gave him more time and two full-time detectives, Cindy Cummings and J.J. Geoghegan. They re-interviewed motel guests, studied the last photograph to fix the time the family left, and checked tips that had never been followed up. That fall Moore went to England to study HOLMES, the computer system British police had used to manage information in the Lockerbie bombing inquiry; its owner, McDonnell Douglas, donated the system to the department. In January 1991 Cummings, Geoghegan and FBI agent Jim Ramey spent 10 days in Ohio and interviewed more than 70 people, including Hal three times, and again found no Ohio connection.
In the spring of 1991 the FBI's behavioral science unit gave the team a profile. It predicted a white man, probably 30 to 40, of above-average intelligence, socially skilled, affluent enough to own a boat, living around Tampa Bay, who had probably attacked before and would probably kill again. The profilers advised Moore to use the news media. Moore, who had avoided reporters, began holding press conferences. The case appeared on Unsolved Mysteries in the fall of 1991 and again in March 1992, and the reward was raised to $25,000. By 1992 more than 1,500 tips had been logged, and the team was under pressure inside the department to justify the time it was spending.
The tip that solved the case had been sitting in Tampa since late 1989. Jo Ann Steffey lived two houses down from Chandler on Dalton Avenue. When the composite sketch from the Madeira Beach case appeared in the newspaper, she thought it looked like her neighbor, an aluminum contractor with reddish-blond hair, a dark blue Jeep Cherokee and a blue and white boat he liked to take out at night. She cut out the sketch and hung it on her refrigerator. She mentioned her suspicion to a Hillsborough County deputy in a college accounting class she was taking, but the information never reached the task force.
On March 25, 1992, the night the case was shown on Unsolved Mysteries for the second time, Steffey's sister called police to say that a man named Oba Chandler, who had lived near her sister, had owned a vehicle and boat matching the descriptions. A detective left a message that never reached Steffey.
In May 1992 Moore held a press conference to announce that investigators now believed the person who wrote the directions on the brochure was the killer, and he asked the media to publish the handwriting. The writing was distinctive, printed letters with a long hook curving left from the bottom of each Y. On Thursday, May 14, 1992, Steffey read about it in the newspaper and asked her next-door neighbor, Mozelle Smith, whether she remembered where Chandler had worked. Smith had hired him to build an aluminum porch and still had his written contract and a check he had signed. The two women compared the contract with the newspaper sample. Steffey called the task force, and the contract and check were faxed to a civilian investigator, where they went into a stack of tips awaiting follow-up.
Investigators had also turned to billboards. In May 1992 a donated set went up around Tampa Bay asking "Who killed the Rogers family?" above large photographs of Jo, Michelle and Christe. Pinellas County Commissioner Barbara Sheen Todd, who had followed the case, suggested putting the handwriting itself on billboards and arranged for an advertising company to donate the space. On July 30, 1992, the new billboards went up, and Moore and Todd held a press conference beside one at Himes Avenue and Columbus Drive in Tampa, near the section of Dale Mabry Highway where detectives believed the family had stopped for directions. Moore said that police did not normally show evidence in an unsolved homicide, but that this case was an exception.
Smith's daughter, frustrated that no one had called back, faxed the contract again with a sharply worded cover letter mentioning Commissioner Todd's interest. This time the tip reached Moore, who sent Geoghegan to collect the original. Smith made him sign a notarized receipt before she handed it over. The writing on the faint customer copy looked like the writing on the brochure. Moore later acknowledged that the tip should have been followed sooner and said it had been buried in a stack of paperwork.
Records checks showed that Chandler, now 45, had lived on Dalton Avenue a few miles from the boat ramp, had owned a blue and white 21-foot Bayliner in 1989 and a dark blue Jeep Cherokee, and had a long record. An office assistant on the team, Marilyn Johnson, pointed out that his photograph looked like the Madeira Beach composite, and remembered that the Canadian woman's attacker had said he owned an aluminum company. An FDLE handwriting examiner matched his writing to the directions on the brochure, and a fingerprint analyst identified a palm print on the brochure as coming from Chandler's right hand. The detectives nicknamed him "the Tin Man."
The investigation grew to 40 to 50 officers from the St. Petersburg police, FDLE and FBI. Teams watched the Chandler house in Port Orange around the clock with ground units, a video camera and two FBI aircraft. In early September 1992 St. Petersburg detective Katy Connor-Dubina and FDLE agent John Halliday flew to Toronto and showed the Canadian woman six photographs. She picked out Chandler's. Prosecutors judged that there was enough to arrest him for the rape, though not yet to charge the murders, and a warrant was signed.
The arrest was planned for Thursday, September 17, 1992. About an hour before officers moved in, Chandler drove out of Port Orange and headed north. Commanders decided to follow him rather than stop him. In a thunderstorm in Lake City, near the Georgia line, the surveillance teams lost his car. For a week investigators waited, tracing calls to his house from Cincinnati and northern Kentucky. On Thursday, September 24, a call to the house was traced to a pay phone off Interstate 75 in Valdosta, Georgia. Officers watched the highway exits, and that day they surrounded him at an Amoco station at a Port Orange exit. Halliday told him he was under arrest. Chandler did not resist.
At the FBI office in Daytona Beach, Moore's team tried the interview they had rehearsed. Chandler, experienced with police, asked for a lawyer. Detective Cindy Leedy, chosen to question him in the belief that he might talk to a woman, later said he did not open up. On the drive across the state he chatted with FBI agent Jim Ramey about his daughter and tried to trade information about an odometer-tampering scheme. A judge held him on $1 million bail on the rape charge. In Ohio, reporters found Hal Rogers outside his barn. "It sounds good, but they ain't charged him with nothing," he said.
Investigators bought back the Bayliner and found it had a yellow Volvo engine, as the Canadian woman had described. In the Port Orange house they found a mint green mesh shirt like the one she remembered. She and her friend each picked Chandler out of a lineup at the Pinellas County jail. After Kristal and Rick Mays told investigators what Chandler had said in Cincinnati, a Pinellas County grand jury indicted him on November 10, 1992, on three counts of first-degree murder.
The state's physical evidence proved that Chandler had met the family, but not that he had taken them out on the water. In April 1994 Steve Porter, an investigator for the state attorney's office, persuaded the telephone company GTE to search for backup copies of Chandler's home phone bills for May and June 1989, which it had said were purged. The bills showed a collect call to the house at 5:49 p.m. on May 15, 1989, the day of the Madeira Beach attack, and five collect calls in the early hours and morning of June 2, all billed to a number reserved for marine radio calls. After a supervisor spent hours searching microfilm, GTE found the marine operator's toll tickets. Each call came from a vessel called Gypsy One. On the May 15 ticket the caller gave his name as Oba.
Chandler's defense changed hands several times. The public defender withdrew in March 1993, citing a conflict; his next appointed lawyer, Thomas McCoun, withdrew in October 1993 on being selected as a federal magistrate judge. Fredric Zinober became lead counsel, with Robert Santa Lucia. Chandler first chose to be tried in Hillsborough County; under a later stipulation the trial was held in Pinellas County with jurors drawn from Orange County, around Orlando, and sequestered because of the publicity. The jury was seated in about a day and a half.
The trial opened in late September 1994 before Circuit Judge Susan Schaeffer. Four prosecutors from the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney's Office tried the case: Doug Crow, who led, Bruce Bartlett, Bob Lewis and Jim Hellickson, with Glenn Martin working behind the scenes. Zinober told the jury in his opening that his client had indeed met the family and written the directions, but that the state could not prove he ever saw them again.
The state called as many as 20 witnesses a day. A handwriting expert, a print examiner and the marine operators testified. Hal Rogers testified about the trip and the last time he spoke to his wife; twice he referred to Jo in the present tense. When the defense tried to raise the abuse Michelle had suffered and suggest that the family would only have gone out on a boat with someone they knew, Judge Schaeffer sent the jury out and later barred the line of questioning, calling it a red herring because the relative was in prison and there was no evidence he had arranged anything.
Over defense objections, the judge allowed the Canadian woman to testify, ruling that the Madeira Beach attack was so similar to the murders that it was admissible to show identity, plan and opportunity, a ruling the Florida Supreme Court later upheld. She was 29, married and working as a social worker. She described meeting the man she knew as Dave, the two boat rides, and the attack, and she identified Chandler in court. Several jurors cried during the break that followed. Kristal and Rick Mays testified about Chandler's statements in Cincinnati; the defense pointed out that Kristal had prior convictions for crimes of dishonesty and had been paid $1,000 to appear on the television program Hard Copy. Three inmates who had been jailed with Chandler testified to things they said he had told them; a fourth, called in rebuttal, said he heard Chandler say his biggest mistake was leaving the note in the car. The aluminum worker, Rollins Cooper, testified about the "date with three women"; on cross-examination Zinober brought out that Cooper had first mentioned it in the summer of 1994, after waking one night with the memory.
The defense called witnesses who thought they had seen the family with other men earlier that week, and one who believed she saw Christe in a black car at the boat ramp that afternoon. Prosecutors showed that these sightings were vague or contradicted by other evidence.
Chandler took the stand. He said he had stopped at a gas station off Interstate 4 near 50th Street in east Tampa, that Michelle asked him for directions, that Christe called out "Rocky Point" from the car, and that he wrote the directions and never saw them again. That night, he said, he went fishing near the Gandy Bridge, a fuel hose burst and his 40-gallon tank drained into the bilge and the bay, and he spent the night stranded, calling home for help. In the morning, he said, a Coast Guard crew in an inflatable boat refused to tow him, and two men in a boat towed him to a marina. Asked by his lawyer whether he killed the women, he said: "I have never killed no one in my whole life. It's ludicrous. It's ridiculous."
On cross-examination Crow asked why he had not contradicted his daughter, his son-in-law or the Canadian woman. Chandler refused to answer questions about the rape, and when told he must either answer or invoke the privilege against self-incrimination, he took the Fifth Amendment 21 times while answering some questions about it. Crow then pinned him to the times of the morning phone calls, which Chandler said he made from the boat before being towed in, although two witnesses had placed him at the job site at about 7:30.
While Chandler testified, Scott Hopkins, an investigator for the state who had examined the Bayliner, realized the fuel story could not be true. The prosecution sent a mechanic, Hensley, who had designed boat fuel systems for two decades, to inspect the boat at the FDLE garage that day. In rebuttal he testified that the boat's fuel line ran above the tank and that its working anti-siphon valve would have stopped any such leak; gasoline could not have drained as Chandler described. A former Coast Guard petty officer testified that the station's inflatable boat had not been out looking for a body that day.
The jury began deliberating late on the afternoon of September 29, 1994. Its first vote, taken within minutes, was unanimous for guilt. The jurors spent more time looking over the evidence and praying together, and returned at 6:18 p.m., about an hour and a half after they retired, with verdicts of guilty of first-degree murder on all three counts. Jurors later said Chandler's own testimony was the most damaging evidence against him.
At the penalty phase the next day, Chandler waived the presentation of witnesses in mitigation and offered only documents showing he had earned a high school equivalency diploma and college credits in prison. The state presented his earlier armed robbery convictions. The jury recommended death on each count by votes of 12 to 0. On November 4, 1994, Judge Schaeffer imposed three death sentences. She found four aggravating factors: prior violent felony convictions, murder during a kidnapping, murder to avoid arrest, and murders that met Florida's statutory test for especially cruel killings (known as the HAC aggravator). She gave little weight to his Marine Corps discharge and the long prison terms he faced, and rejected childhood trauma as unproven because he had chosen not to present witnesses on it.
On October 16, 1997, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and sentences in Chandler v. State, 702 So. 2d 186. It held that the Madeira Beach evidence was properly admitted, that cross-examination about matters Chandler raised himself was proper and any error harmless, that his daughter's earlier consistent statement was properly admitted, that he validly waived mitigation, and that death was proportionate. Rehearing was denied on December 11, 1997, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined review on April 20, 1998.
Chandler then claimed in the Pinellas circuit court that his trial lawyer had been ineffective, chiefly for not seeking a second change of venue, for conceding that the state could prove the Madeira Beach attack, for his handling of Chandler's cross-examination, and for not objecting to parts of the prosecution's closing. After an evidentiary hearing in November 2000, at which Chandler testified that he had not agreed to the strategy, the court found Zinober more credible and denied relief on June 27, 2001. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed on April 17, 2003 (848 So. 2d 1031), noting that only four of the 12 jurors had known about the case and that Chandler had used only four of his 10 peremptory challenges.
A federal habeas petition was denied by the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida on February 8, 2006 (454 F. Supp. 2d 1137). The Eleventh Circuit affirmed on December 18, 2006 (471 F.3d 1360), holding that Chandler had not shown a reasonable probability that a second venue motion would have been granted, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied review on May 14, 2007.
Chandler spent 17 years on death row, much of it at Union Correctional Institution in Raiford. In February 1995 he gave his first newspaper interview, to Craig Pittman of the St. Petersburg Times. He spent two hours insisting he was innocent, called himself a victim of coincidence, dishonest prosecutors and vengeful relatives, and said the jury had convicted him of murder because it believed he had committed the rape. He offered to plead guilty if any witness against him passed a polygraph. He said Jo Ann Steffey had done her duty as a citizen and deserved the reward. Asked who the killer was if not him, he shrugged: "We'll never know."
That same month he appeared on videotape on the Maury Povich Show, calling his accusers "liars" and "frauds." Hal Rogers was on the program. Kristal Mays told him she was sorry for what her father had done, and Hal answered that she had nothing to be sorry for and that what she had done took courage. Kristal and one of Chandler's sisters had signed a movie deal and said they were giving their shares to charity; Kristal offered hers to Hal, who declined it.
In a death-row interview with FOX 13 reporter Kelly Ring before his execution, Chandler said there was no evidence that he committed the crime and that he had met the family only briefly. He said his whole life had been spent running from the police since an arrest in 1969. By 2011, according to the Tampa Tribune, he had had no prison visitors since the murders and had removed his relatives from his visiting list about three years earlier.
On October 10, 2011, Gov. Rick Scott signed Chandler's death warrant, the second of his term, setting the execution for 4 p.m. on November 15. The next day Chandler turned 65. His lawyer, Baya Harrison, filed a successive motion arguing that Florida's death-sentencing scheme was unconstitutional under Ring v. Arizona and asking for a new penalty phase. Circuit Judge Philip J. Federico denied it on October 24, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed and denied a stay on November 7, 2011 (75 So. 3d 267), holding that Ring did not apply retroactively and in any case did not affect a sentence supported by prior violent felony convictions. A daughter, Valerie Troxell, wrote to the governor asking that the sentence be commuted to life; the Tribune reported she had received no reply. On the day of the execution the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay and review.
Chandler was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke and pronounced dead at 4:25 p.m. on Tuesday, November 15, 2011, according to the governor's office. He was the 71st person executed in Florida since executions resumed. His last meal, according to the Associated Press, was two salami sandwiches on white bread, half a peanut butter sandwich and coffee. He made no spoken last statement, the St. Petersburg Times reported, and he had barred his family from attending. The Tampa Tribune reported that he handed officers a handwritten note that read, "You are killing a innocent man today." Coral Springs detectives later said a note to that effect was found in his cell.
Hal Rogers, the only surviving member of the family, watched from the witness room in a suit and tie. Thomas French, who had left the newspaper and was teaching at Indiana University, flew to Ohio and accompanied Hal to the prison, and both sat in the witness gallery. Three veteran prosecutors from the case and Chandler's lawyer, Baya Harrison, had said they planned to attend. Bruce Bartlett had told reporters before the execution that Chandler had wiped out a whole family and left a grieving father to live with it. Outside, a small group of death-penalty protesters gathered as they usually did.
Ivelisse Berrios-Beguerisse was 20 and had been married for nine months to Bernardo Beguerisse. They lived in Davie, in Broward County; one 2014 report described her as a Sunrise woman. Her parents and sister lived in Puerto Rico. She had been working for less than a month at a Swim and Sport store in the Sawgrass Mills mall in Sunrise. On the night of November 26, 1990, she left the mall with co-workers just after 10 p.m. Her husband, worried when she did not come home, found her 1985 Ford Tempo in the mall parking lot with two passenger-side tires slashed and called police. At about 1 a.m. on November 27 two men coming home from a fishing trip found her body beside a street in an undeveloped part of the West Glen neighborhood of Coral Springs. She had ligature marks on her wrists and ankles and packing tape in her hair; the medical examiner found that she died of asphyxia, and she had been sexually assaulted. Detectives believed she may have been lured into a vehicle by someone posing as a good Samaritan after her tires were cut.
Swabs were taken in 1990, but the Broward Sheriff's Office lab could not develop a profile and the case went cold. Coral Springs police said Chandler's name first came to their attention in 1992, after his arrest in the Rogers case, when they learned he had been living in Sunrise about a mile and a half from the mall and had left his rental home two or three days after the killing, leaving furniture behind. There was then no DNA evidence to compare. In August 2013 cold-case detectives Brian Koenig and Dan Cucchi asked the Broward Sheriff's Office crime lab to retest the saved swabs. On February 5, 2014, the lab reported a full DNA profile that matched Chandler's profile in the state offender database, entered after his 1994 conviction.
Coral Springs police announced the result on Monday, February 24, 2014. In a written statement they said that if Chandler had not been executed, he would be charged with the murder. He never was charged, tried or convicted in the case. Detective Koenig said the victim had done nothing to deserve what happened and had been picked at random. Cucchi said the family was surprised by the news, asked about Chandler and the Rogers case, which they had not known about, and had mixed feelings: grateful for some answers, but pained to revisit it after 23 years. The family declined to speak to reporters. Police asked other agencies to review unsolved killings in places Chandler had lived.
French's "Angels & Demons" ran in the St. Petersburg Times in October 1997 and won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, cited for its compassionate portrait of the mother and daughters and of the three-year investigation. A paperback account by true-crime writer Don Davis, Death Cruise, appeared in 1996. The case's later public life included disputes over credit: in 2025 the Tampa Bay Times reported that retired St. Petersburg investigators, Commissioner Todd and the lead prosecutor objected to a 2023 memoir by former FBI agent Jana Monroe that described her as central to the investigation and credited her with the billboard idea. The St. Petersburg Police Department wrote to her publisher that she had overstated her role; Monroe's lawyer replied that the letter mischaracterized her work. Investigators said she joined the case about 22 months after the murders, mainly to help prepare the 1991 profile, and police records listed no FBI personnel at the dock the morning the bodies were recovered.
Hal Rogers kept the farm. French described years of grief afterward: nights sleeping on friends' couches or in the Calais rather than in the house, a long period when he could not bring himself to buy headstones, and a night when he drove to the cemetery with a shovel, unable to believe the sealed caskets held his family, before turning back. Detectives who interviewed him in 1991 found the girls' rooms exactly as they had left them. In 1997 he told the Times he wanted to watch Chandler die. In 2014, told of the Coral Springs DNA match, he said, "I just knew he was one bad egg," and that such things usually come to light eventually.
Others carried the case too. The investigators kept a 1980 Christmas photograph of Michelle and Christe on the wall of their office while they closed in on Chandler. One juror, Don Fontaine, told the St. Petersburg Times in 2011, as reported by the ABA Journal, that he had put off marriage and children after the trial and that everyone who had been in the jury room would go on with a piece of them missing. Michelle's boyfriend, Jeff Feasby, did not attend the funeral and for years would not go near the church.
The Coral Springs killing rests on a police attribution through DNA, announced after Chandler's death. It was never tested in court, and Chandler, who was dead, could not answer it.
Coral Springs detectives also said in 2014 that they were reviewing other cold cases, including the 1990 killing of a 35-year-old Pompano Beach woman, which they called similar; no link was announced in any source found. Pinellas investigators believed Chandler was connected to other abductions and rapes as far back as 1963, the Tampa Bay Times reported in 2014, and police in the early 1990s publicly named him as a suspect in other unsolved killings. He was never charged with any other killing, and he dismissed those suggestions in 1995 as publicity.
The Madeira Beach attack was proved to the jury only as collateral-crime evidence in the murder trial, and Chandler's lawyer conceded the state could prove it. No source opened records a separate trial or verdict on the rape charge.
Where Chandler met the family is not settled. He testified it was at a gas station near Interstate 4 and 50th Street; detectives theorized the family left Interstate 275 by mistake at Dale Mabry Highway and stopped at a McDonald's; a jailhouse witness said Chandler spoke of meeting them near Tampa Stadium.
Whether the women were sexually assaulted could not be determined from the bodies. Most accounts say the case shows they were, and the 2011 Tampa Bay Times retrospective states it; the autopsy evidence did not establish it. Prosecutors believed the bodies were put into the bay at different places and that the three women were alive when they went into the water.
Accounts of how Chandler was identified are often simplified. Several reports say a neighbor recognized the handwriting on a billboard. The contemporary record and the Tampa Bay Times' 2025 review show that the first tip came from a neighbor who recognized the composite sketch, that the neighbors supplied his handwriting after it was published in the newspaper in May 1992, and that the handwriting billboards went up on July 30, 1992, weeks later.
The account of the jailhouse informants and of Rollins Cooper was challenged at trial; Cooper first mentioned the "date with three women" five years after the murders. Chandler's daughter and son-in-law had been treated badly by him and Kristal Mays had been paid for a television appearance, points the defense raised. The jury heard all of it.
October 11, 1946: Oba Chandler Jr. born in Cincinnati, Ohio.
About 1956 to 1957: His father dies by suicide when Chandler is 10.
January 12, 1977: Pleads guilty to robbery in Volusia County, Florida; 10-year sentence. Escapes about five months later.
September 27, 1982: Arrested by the Secret Service in Maitland with counterfeit currency.
December 12, 1986: Released from Florida prison.
May 1988: Marries Debra Ann Whiteman; buys a house on Dalton Avenue, Tampa, that December; buys a Bayliner boat.
May 15, 1989: A Canadian tourist is raped on a boat off Madeira Beach; Chandler was later charged and the jury in the murder trial heard the evidence.
May 26, 1989: Jo, Michelle and Christe Rogers leave their Ohio farm for Florida.
June 1, 1989: The family checks into the Days Inn at Rocky Point, Tampa; Chandler writes directions on their brochure; they go to a boat ramp that evening.
June 2, 1989: Five collect calls from Chandler's boat to his home between 1:12 a.m. and 9:52 a.m.
June 4, 1989: The three bodies are found in Tampa Bay off St. Petersburg.
June 8, 1989: The victims are identified through their motel room; the car is found at the boat ramp.
August 28, 1989: Chandler sells the Bayliner.
November 1989: Composite sketch from the Madeira Beach case released; Chandler leaves for Cincinnati for about three weeks.
June 1990: Sgt. Glen Moore's team reviews the case.
July 1990: The Chandlers leave the Dalton Avenue house; they live briefly in Sunrise.
November 26 to 27, 1990: Ivelisse Berrios-Beguerisse, 20, is abducted at Sawgrass Mills mall and found dead in Coral Springs (attributed to Chandler by police in 2014).
Spring 1991: FBI profile delivered; Moore clears Hal Rogers publicly.
March 25, 1992: First tip naming Oba Chandler.
May 14, 1992: Jo Ann Steffey reports her suspicions after the handwriting is published.
July 30, 1992: Handwriting billboards go up in Tampa.
September 17, 1992: Surveillance loses Chandler in Lake City.
September 24, 1992: Chandler arrested in Port Orange on the rape warrant.
November 10, 1992: Indicted on three counts of first-degree murder.
April 1994: Marine phone toll tickets from the boat Gypsy One are found.
September 29, 1994: Convicted on all three counts in Pinellas County.
September 30, 1994: Jury recommends death, 12 to 0.
November 4, 1994: Sentenced to death by Judge Susan Schaeffer.
October 1997: "Angels & Demons" published; the Florida Supreme Court affirms on October 16.
1998: "Angels & Demons" wins the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. April 20, 1998: U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
April 17, 2003: Florida Supreme Court affirms denial of post-conviction relief.
December 18, 2006: Eleventh Circuit affirms denial of federal habeas relief.
October 10, 2011: Gov. Rick Scott signs the death warrant.
November 7, 2011: Florida Supreme Court denies a stay.
November 15, 2011: Chandler executed at Florida State Prison; pronounced dead at 4:25 p.m.
August 2013: Coral Springs cold-case detectives ask for DNA retesting.
February 5, 2014: Lab reports a DNA match to Chandler.
February 24, 2014: Coral Springs police announce the attribution.
May 2025: Tampa Bay Times reports investigators' objections to a former FBI agent's account of the case.