Oba Chandler Case: Billboard ID, Trial, and Execution

The Oba Chandler case is the 1989 Tampa Bay murder of Ohio mother Joan Rogers and her teenage daughters Michelle and Christe, a killing that went unsolved for three years until a billboard campaign displaying the killer’s handwriting led to Chandler’s arrest, conviction, and 2011 execution. Years after his death, DNA testing tied him to a fourth Florida murder.

The Murders on Tampa Bay

Joan “Jo” Rogers, 36, and her daughters Michelle, 17, and Christe, 14, drove from their Van Wert County, Ohio dairy farm to Florida on May 26, 1989, for a rare vacation. They stopped at the Jacksonville Zoo and Silver Springs before checking into a Days Inn in Tampa shortly after noon on June 1. Michelle called her boyfriend at 12:37 p.m. The three were last seen in the motel restaurant around 7:00 that evening.¹

On the morning of June 4, boaters found three decomposed bodies floating in South Tampa Bay.² All three women were nude from the waist down. Their hands and ankles were bound with rope, duct tape covered the daughters’ faces, and yellow nylon ropes ran from their necks to concrete blocks meant to sink them.³

Associate medical examiner Dr. Edward Corcoran found each woman had died from asphyxiation caused by drowning or strangulation from the neck ropes, with time of death between the evening of June 1 and the morning of June 2. He found no genital injuries but noted that evidence of sexual assault could have been washed away. The victims’ locked Oldsmobile Calais was found at a boat ramp on the Courtney Campbell Causeway, sand wedged around the tires. Expert testimony later established that the three bodies had been dumped from a boat at a single location in the bay and could not have come off any nearby bridge.⁴

Who Oba Chandler Was

Chandler had a long criminal record. He began stealing cars at 14 and was arrested twenty times as a juvenile. As an adult, he accumulated charges and convictions in multiple states for burglary, kidnapping, armed robbery, and possession of counterfeit money. In one Florida home invasion he tied a husband with speaker wire and forced the wife to strip. He served a ten-year sentence for a 1976 armed robbery in Volusia County.⁵

He had also worked, off and on, as a paid informant. Between May and September 1991, while police were actively hunting the Rogers killer, Chandler helped U.S. Customs and the Tampa Police Department arrange a controlled marijuana buy that resulted in the arrest of his own nephew-in-law. His informant history stretched back to at least 1981, when he worked for the Orlando Metropolitan Bureau of Investigations under the alias “James Thomas Wright” while a fugitive from prison.⁶

Two weeks before the Rogers murders, Chandler raped a Canadian tourist named Judy Blair. On May 15, 1989, Blair and her friend Barbara Mottram met him at a convenience store, where he called himself “Dave” and said he was from upstate New York. He invited them for a boat ride. When Mottram declined a second outing, Blair went alone. Once on the water, Chandler raped her and told her he would tape her mouth if she did not stop resisting. He destroyed her camera film before returning her to shore. Blair reported the assault the next day, and police produced a composite sketch from her description.³

How He Was Identified

The Rogers case had no conventional crime scene and little physical evidence. The initial investigation stalled, and detectives grew discouraged. In June 1990, Sgt. Glen Moore took over with a new task force that included the State Attorney’s Office and an FBI agent. Reviewing the file, Moore found a Clearwater Beach brochure with handwritten directions to the family’s motel, recovered from the victims’ car, that had never been processed for fingerprints. Other items from the car and hotel room had also gone unexamined.⁷ The FBI behavioral science unit at Quantico profiled the killer as a white male, 30 to 40, with above-average intelligence, social skills, and the means to own a boat.

The Billboard Campaign

In July 1992, investigators tried something unusual. They reproduced the handwritten note and map from the victims’ car on five billboards across Tampa Bay under the headline “WHO KILLED THE ROGERS FAMILY?” The day after the billboards went up, a former neighbor of Chandler’s recognized the writing and gave police a copy of a work order he had written. Handwriting analysis confirmed the match. “The link is the handwriting,” Sgt. Moore said.⁸

Another neighbor, Joann Steffey, had earlier identified Chandler as resembling the composite sketch in the Blair rape case and reported that he owned a blue and white boat and a black four-wheel-drive vehicle. Her tip went to a Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputy and never reached Moore’s team, a delay that cost the investigation months.⁷ A palm print recovered from the tourist brochure was also matched to Chandler.⁵

After the composite sketch and news coverage began pulling him toward the investigation, Chandler sold his boat and moved from Tampa to near Daytona Beach. He was arrested on September 24, 1992, at his home in Port Orange, initially on the Judy Blair rape charges while investigators finalized the murder case.⁸

The Trial and Death Sentence

Chandler’s trial began in September 1994 in the Sixth Judicial Circuit, Pinellas County, before Judge Susan F. Schaeffer.⁹ Prosecutors argued that Chandler had encountered the Rogers women by chance, offered them a sunset ride on his seventeen-foot Boston Whaler, the Gypsy 1, and killed them on the water.¹⁰

The state’s case rested on four pillars. The tourist brochure carried Chandler’s handwriting and palm print, placing the directions in his hand.² Marine phone records showed three collect calls from the Gypsy 1 to Chandler’s home on the night of June 1, 1989, and two more the next morning; in at least one, the caller identified himself as “Oba” to the marine operator. Prosecutors argued the timing put the calls during the abduction.¹⁰ Rollins Cooper, an aluminum contractor who worked for Chandler, testified that on June 1 Chandler told him he had “a date with three women,” and that the following morning Chandler looked disheveled and said he had been “out on the boat all night.” The defense noted Cooper had not shared this until the summer of 1994, explaining he had “woke one night in a sweat and clearly remembered” the conversation. Finally, the court allowed Judy Blair to testify about her rape to establish identity and modus operandi, with prosecutors listing fourteen similarities: female tourists, chance encounters at public places, offers of a sunset cruise, sexual motive, use or threatened use of duct tape.

Some of the most damaging testimony came from Chandler’s own daughter, Kristal Mays. She told the jury that in November 1989, when her father visited her in Cincinnati, he said he could not return to Florida because police were looking for him “for the rape of a woman.” Later that same evening, at dinner, he told her “he had killed some women” and instructed Kristal and her husband, Rick, to tell anyone looking for him that they had not seen him.¹⁰ The defense attacked her credibility, citing a paid 1994 appearance on Hard Copy, a prior conviction involving dishonesty, and a 1990 incident in which Chandler orchestrated a drug robbery using Rick Mays, held a gun to Rick’s head, and told him “Family don’t mean s— to me.” Prosecutors rehabilitated her testimony with a sworn statement she had given to the state attorney’s office on October 6, 1992, before the Hard Copy appearance.²

Chandler testified in his own defense. He admitted giving the Rogers women directions but denied any involvement in the murders, saying his boat had broken down that night. When cross-examined about the Blair rape, he invoked the Fifth Amendment twenty-one times.²

On September 29, 1994, the jury found Chandler guilty on all three counts of first-degree murder. The next day, the same jury voted 12-0 to recommend death on each count. The trial court imposed the three death sentences on November 4, 1994.⁵

Appeals

Chandler challenged his convictions and sentences for the next seventeen years without success. On direct appeal in 1997, the Florida Supreme Court rejected all seven claims of error, including that the Blair rape evidence was unfairly prejudicial and that the trial court improperly forced him to invoke the Fifth in front of the jury.¹¹ The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in 1998.¹² His state postconviction motion was denied in 2001 and affirmed in 2003. Federal habeas review ended in 2006 when the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the denial, rejecting his claim that trial counsel was ineffective for failing to move a second time for a change of venue. The court held that “presumed prejudice” for venue changes is “rarely applicable and reserved for an extreme situation.”¹³ The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in May 2007.⁹

After Governor Rick Scott signed Chandler’s death warrant on October 10, 2011, Chandler filed a final motion arguing Florida’s death penalty was unconstitutional under Ring v. Arizona. The circuit court denied it as procedurally barred and non-retroactive; the Florida Supreme Court affirmed and refused a stay on November 7, 2011.¹²

Execution

Chandler was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke on November 15, 2011. He was 65. The procedure began at 4:08 p.m. and was delayed roughly seven minutes while officials located suitable veins. He was pronounced dead at 4:25 p.m.⁵

Asked for a final statement, Chandler said only “No.” About an hour later, prison officials released a handwritten note he had written that morning on lined notebook paper: “You are killing a innocent man today.” Pinellas-Pasco Chief Assistant State Attorney Bruce Bartlett, who had helped prosecute the case, responded, “A jury of 12 didn’t seem to think so.”¹⁴

Twenty-one witnesses and eleven members of the media watched. Hal Rogers, the husband and father of the three victims, sat in the front row directly across from Chandler and did not speak to reporters afterward. Joan Rogers’ niece, Amanda “Mandi” Scarlett, told reporters: “The family of Jo, Michelle and Chris are very appreciative of everyone that has brought us to this day. Now is the time for peace.”¹⁵ Years later, Hal Rogers said: “There’s never going to be justice.”¹⁶

Chandler’s defense attorney, Baya Harrison III, his sole witness, said Chandler had advanced coronary artery disease, high blood pressure, and failing kidneys, and had been “simply tired of living in that small cell under those conditions.” He had received no visitors other than his attorney during his seventeen years on death row, having removed his family from his visitation list; under state rules, he could not add them back once the death warrant was signed.⁵

The Fourth Victim

More than two years after the execution, DNA linked Chandler to another murder. On November 26, 1990, twenty-year-old Ivelisse Berrios-Beguerisse of Davie, Florida, disappeared after leaving her job at the Sawgrass Mills Mall in Broward County; two of her car tires had been slashed in the parking lot. Her body was found the next day on a street in Coral Springs. She had been bound, sexually assaulted, and strangled.¹⁷

Rape-kit swabs collected in 1990 had initially been deemed unsuitable for testing by the Broward Sheriff’s Office crime lab.¹⁸ In the summer of 2013, Coral Springs detectives Dan Cucchi and Brian Koenig reopened the file and resubmitted the evidence. On February 5, 2014, the lab returned a positive match to Chandler’s DNA profile, entered into the state database after his 1994 conviction.¹⁹ Chandler had lived in Sunrise, Florida, about a mile and a half from the mall where Berrios-Beguerisse worked. Coral Springs police said that had he still been alive, he would have been charged.

After the 2011 execution, police had alerted agencies across Florida to review unsolved cases in areas where Chandler had lived. Investigators believed he was tied to other abductions and sexual assaults dating back to 1963, but Bartlett cautioned that “time decreases the chances of solving other cases.”¹⁹

1
Pulitzer.org. Thomas French
2
Justia. Chandler v. State
3
Florida State University College of Law. Chandler v. State – Appellate Brief
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Florida State University College of Law. Chandler v. State – Appellate BriefChandler v. State
5
Clark County Prosecutor. Oba Chandler
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Tampa Bay Times. Chandler Was Informant as Far Back as ’81
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Tampa Bay Times. Angels and Demons – Chapter 3: Neighbors
8
Los Angeles Times. Suspect Arrested in 1989 Triple Murder
9
Florida Legislature. Capital Cases – Oba Chandler
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Tampa Bay Times. Angels and Demons – Chapter 6: Night Stories
11
FindLaw. Chandler v. State
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FindLaw. Chandler v. State (Successive Motion)
13
U.S. Court of Appeals, 11th Circuit. Chandler v. McDonough
14
Tampa Bay Times. Oba Chandler Leaves Behind One Last Denial Before He Is Executed
15
St. Augustine Record. Oba Chandler Executed Tuesday in Starke
16
Tampa Bay Times. Hal Rogers Watches His Family’s Killer Meet His Fate
17
CBS News. Florida Police ID Woman’s Killer in 23-Year-Old Cold Case
18
NBC Miami. 1990 Cold Case Murder Solved, Coral Springs Police Say
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Sarasota Herald-Tribune. 1990 Murder Tied to Man Executed 3 Years Ago