Life was not easy for the Rogers family of rural Willshire, Ohio, a tiny town of fewer than four-hundred people in the northwest part of the state, thirty miles from the Indiana border. The parents of two daughters, seventeen-year-old Michelle and fourteen-year-old Christe, Hal and Joan “Jo” Rogers struggled to keep their dairy farm afloat. Jo also worked across the state line at the assembly line at Peyton’s Northern, a distribution center for health and beauty products.

In addition to money being tight, Jo’s parents were both ailing, and Hal’s brother John had allegedly sexually assaulted Michelle on multiple occasions: the charges were dropped after he was convicted of another rape and imprisoned.

By the spring of 1989, however, things were looking up for the Rogers family. Business was improving, Michelle had put the ordeal with her uncle behind her, and the family had saved enough money to do something they had never done: take a vacation. The chosen destination was Florida.

The Rogers sojourn to the Sunshine State had been heavenly for six days; the seventh day proved hellish.

Joan, Michelle, And Christe Rogers

On May 26, the Florida-bound Rogers ladies left Willshire beaming with excitement. None had never been out of the states of Ohio or Indiana.  Hal had hoped to accompany his family on the trip, but he felt he needed to stay home and work the farm as the spring rains had been late.

Jo phoned Hal daily telling him what a great time they were having. Among the Florida attractions they had visited were the Jacksonville Zoo, the Kennedy Space Center, and Disney World.  The girls had taken lots of pictures to show Dad when they returned home.

The Rogers Family

(Earlier Family Photo)

On May 29, three days after they departed Ohio, Jo mailed Hal a postcard. Her writing also conveyed what a great time she and her girls were having.

The Mailed Postcard

Jo phoned from Tampa on Thursday, June 1, saying they should be home in a couple of days. Hal was concerned when they had not called or returned by Sunday, but he figured they had found other attractions en route.

When his family had not returned by Tuesday, June 6, however, a by-then panicked Hal called the police.

Last Contact From Joan

That same day, three bodies were found floating in Tampa Bay. Two days later, they were identified as those of Joan, Michelle, and Christe Rogers. Autopsies revealed all three women had water in their lungs, meaning they were alive when they had been thrown into the bay. All were naked from the waist down.

The women’s mouths had been gagged and their hands were bound behind their backs by ropes; Michelle had managed to free her left hand from the rope before she drowned. Ropes had also been tied around their necks and were weighted with concrete cinder blocks. They had likely been raped because they were nude from the waist down, but the desalinization of the bodies prevented a definite determination.

Particularly telling was that the women’s eyes had not been covered. Authorities believe the killer wanted to see the terror in their eyes as he threw them overboard and that he wanted each subsequent victim to endure watching him throw the others overboard.

The Family Is Found Murdered

The bodies were discovered within a two mile radius along the Courtney Campbell Causeway, the northernmost bridge across the Tampa Bay. Because the water was warmer than usual for that time of year, desalinization created gasses that lifted the bodies and the cinder blocks to the surface. Had the water been colder, they may not have risen.

The Courtney Campbell Causeway

Over Where The Bodies Were Found

Jo and her daughters checked into the room Jo had reserved at a Tampa Days Inn. After articles of their murders were printed, the manager contacted police after maids reported it appeared no one had been in the room for several days.

Police combed room #251 but found no clues as to who may have killed the Rogers women.

The Rogers’ Murders Were a Major Area Media Story

The Rogers’ car, a 1986 Oldsmobile Calais, was found at the boat dock by the Courtney Campbell Causeway, one mile from the Days Inn and twenty-five miles from where their bodies were recovered. Investigators found two handwritten notes in the car.

The Family Car Is Found

The first note, written on Days Inn stationery, appeared to be directions to a venue which was determined to be a nearby boat launch. At the end was the phrase “blue w/wht”. Handwriting tests showed the writing was that of Jo Rogers.

Investigators surmised that a man with a blue and white boat had offered to take Jo and her daughters on a boat ride on Tampa Bay. Once on the water, he likely used either a gun or a knife to subdue, bound, and rape them before throwing them overboard.

Investigators located over eight-hundred blue and white boats but found no evidence that the Rogers women had been on any of them.

Joan’s Written Directions

The handwriting on the second note, written on a brochure, appeared to be that of a male. It detailed directions to the Days Inn. Investigators came to believe the writer was most likely the killer.

The Handwriting Of the Rogers Family Killer

In 1992, after three years of uncovering few substantive clues to the killer’s identity, police posted the handwriting on the brochure on billboards in Tampa and surrounding communities. It was the first use of billboards by a state law enforcement department in an effort to identify a killer.

To authorities’ amazement, someone recognized the writing on the billboard wall.

A Pioneering Tactic

Tampa resident Jo Ann Steffey believed the handwriting to be that of her former neighbor, forty-five-year-old Oba Chandler. He had an extensive rap sheet, having served several stints in prison on multiple charges, including possession of counterfeit money, loitering and prowling, burglary, kidnapping, and armed robbery.

After the billboards began appearing across Tampa in 1990, Chandler had hastily moved to Port Orange, near Daytona Beach, one-hundred fifty miles to the northeast.

Oba Chandler

Another of Chandler’s former neighbors, Mike Murray, noticed the similarities in the handwriting.

Chandler worked as an aluminum-siding contractor and had done some work for several former neighbors. Murray gave police a copy of a work order with Chandler’s signature. Analysis concluded with certainty the signature matched the writing on the Rogers’ brochure. A palm print found on the work order was also matched to Chandler’s right hand.

Chandler’s Signature Is A Match

Oba Chandler had been married multiple times (sources contradict on the number) and had fathered eight children with seven different women (some sources say thirteen children with twelve different women.) He wed his latest wife, Debra, in May 1988, only ten days after her divorce was finalized. She had given birth to their daughter Whitney in February 1989, four months before the Rogers murders.

At the time of the murders, Chandler was also an informant for the United States Customs Bureau’s Tampa office.

Chandler And Debra

Chandler had owned a twenty-one-foot blue and white Bayliner powerboat matching the description written by Jo Rogers on the hotel stationery. He sold the boat shortly after the murders, but investigators located it. Even though the ownership had changed and multiple people had been on the boat in the ensuing three years, hair from the Rogers women was found aboard.

Chandler‘s Former Boat

In addition, investigators found records of several ship-to-shore telephone calls made from Chandler’s boat to his home between 1:00 and 5:00 a.m. on June 2. Police believe the calls were attempts to explain his absence to Debra and to provide himself with an alibi for the time of the murders. The calls, however, were tracked to the part of the bay where the Rogers bodies would be found. In one instance, the caller identified himself as “Obie” a nickname of Chandler’s.

A Phone Toll Ticket Of One Of Chandler’s Calls

Chandler’s Tampa home was located on a canal with access to Tampa Bay. Behind the house were two davits (small cranes) Chandler used to lower his boat into the water.

Chandler’s Tampa Home

Oba Chandler was arrested and charged with the murders of Joan, Michelle, and Christe Rogers on September 24, 1992.

Shortly afterwards, a woman named Judy Blair picked Chandler out of a photo lineup as the man who had raped her near Madeira Beach, twenty-five miles southwest of Tampa Bay, on May 15, 1989, just over two weeks before the Rogers murders. The assault occurred on a boat after Judy, a Canadian tourist, had accepted a man’s offer of a ride. Afterwards, the man became sick and vomited into the water. Once darkness descended, he allowed Judy to swim to shore.

Chandler Is Charged

Judy had also said her attacker had driven a dark blue vehicle which she believed was a Jeep Cherokee.  Chandler had owned such an automobile at the time. It had since been repossessed.

Chandler Entering His Jeep Cherokee

Following her rape, Judy and Barbara Mottram, a friend who was traveling with her, had helped police create a composite sketch of her attacker.

Jo Ann Steffey and several of her neighbors had seen the suspect composite and believed it resembled Oba Chandler. They contacted the St. Petersburg police who were inundated with tips at the time and had not yet investigated it.

A Composite Of Judy Blair’s Attacker

At Chandler’s trial, several people testified he had bragged about “dating” three women on the bay during the evening of June 1, 1989. His daughter, Kristal Mays, testified her father had mentioned murdering three women and being eager to get out of Tampa. She had not believed he was serious.

A maid who worked at the Days Inn where the Rogers women stayed testified she saw Chandler in the hotel parking lot on the day of the murders. Authorities believe he saw the Rogers women at the hotel and put in motion a plan to rape and kill them.

Opportunistic Oba

Chandler was born in Cincinnati and had lived in Ohio as an adult for several years. He may have noticed the Ohio license plates on the Rogers’ vehicle and used his familiarity with the Buckeye state as a conversation starter to gain their trust. They may have told him they were having trouble finding the Days Inn, prompting him to write the directions on the brochure. After doing so, police believe Chandler offered to give the women a sunset cruise of Tampa Bay on his boat. They likely eagerly accepted.

Chandler admitted meeting Jo Rogers and her daughters and giving them directions but claimed he never saw them afterwards. He had no explanation as to how traces of the women’s hair was on his boat.

Chandler Likely Lured the Ladies With An Offer Of A Boat Ride

Chandler also admitted being aboard his boat on Tampa Bay that evening. He testified he returned home late because his engine would not start due to a gas line leak.

Florida Marine Boat Patrol mechanic James Hensley, however, disproved the claim testifying Chandler’s explanation of repairing his Bayliner’s alleged gas leak was not mechanically legitimate. A leak, the mechanic explained, would have sprayed fuel into the air rather than into the boat, and the corrosive gasoline would have eaten away the adhesive properties of the duct tape Chandler claimed he had used to repair the supposed leak.

Chandler Aboard His Former Boat

Oba Chandler was convicted of the murders of Joan, Michelle, and Christie Rogers and sentenced to death in 1994. He was not tried for the rape of Judy Blair because she saw no need to endure the trauma of a trial with him on death row.

Chandler Is Convicted . . .

After all of his appeals were denied, Chandler was executed by lethal injection at Florida’s Raiford State Prison on November 15, 2011. Despite his plethora of wives and children, he did not have a single visitor at the prison during his seventeen years of incarceration.

. . . And Executed

The note written by Oba Chandler had led to his undoing. Moments before he was executed, he jotted one final note found by prison officials. It read “You are killing a [sic] innocent man today.” No one believed him.

Chandler’s Parting Note

Hal Rogers watched the execution of the man who had executed his family.

Hal Is On Hand For Chandler’s Execution

On February 25, 2014, two-and-a-half years after Oba Chandler’s execution, DNA evidence identified him as the murderer of Ivelisse Berrios-Beguerisse. The twenty-year-old newlywed had been found raped and strangled to death in Coral Springs, two-hundred-sixty miles southeast of Tampa, on November 27, 1990, a-year-a-half after the Rogers’ murders. She was found nude with ligature marks on both wrists and legs and brown tape stuck to her hair.

At the time, Chandler lived only two miles from the Sawgrass Mills shopping mall where Ivelisse worked. Police believe that after watching her for a few days and learning her routine, he slashed her car tires at the mall and then posed as a Good Samaritan offering to help. Instead, he proceeded to kidnap, rape, and murder her.

Ivelisse Berrios-Beguerisse

Before Oba Chandler was identified as the Rogers family killer, profilers believed at least two men were likely involved in the murders. After a thorough investigation, authorities now believe Chandler acted alone.

Profiling experts believe Chandler likely committed murder before killing Joan, Michelle, and Christe Rogers because a first-time killer would probably not be bold enough to abduct, rape, and kill three women at once.  Chandler may also have committed additional murders after killing Ivelisse Berrios-Beguerisse.

Law enforcement agencies across Florida are looking into unsolved homicides and other crimes committed in the 1980s and early ’90s in areas where Chandler resided. They believe he may have been a serial killer.

Are There More Victims?

Oba Chandler had, ironically, returned to his native Ohio for a time to visit acquaintances in 1990, just over a year after the Rogers’ murders. At one point, he was approximately one-hundred-fifty miles from the Rogers family farm in Willshire.

Chandler Was Back In Ohio

Michelle Rogers had accused her Uncle John, Hal Rogers’ brother, of molesting her on multiple occasions dating back three years beginning when she was fourteen-years-old. He was charged with the crime but never prosecuted because Michelle did not wish to testify in court.

At the time of the murders, John Rogers was imprisoned, sentenced from seven to twenty-five years after pleading no contest to raping a woman he had lived with.  I could not find how much time he served.

John Rogers

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/14143195/joan_mae-rogers

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/14143204/michelle_lee_rogers

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/14143213/christe_eugenia_rogers

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/127504556/ivelisse-beguerisse

 

SOURCES:

• Associated Press
• Baltimore Sun
• Forensic Files
• New York Times
• Orlando Sentinel
• Tampa Tribune
• Unsolved Mysteries
• UPI