They were wrapping up their first vacation ever from the western Ohio dairy farm where they toiled seven days a week.
For Joan Rogers and her two teenage daughters, it was the picture-perfect Florida getaway: sunshine, beaches, Epcot, Sea World, glass-bottom boats.
But when the trio made it to Tampa on the first day of June in 1989, they had trouble finding their hotel on the Courtney Campbell Causeway. A smooth-talking con man named Oba Chandler -- who also had Ohio ties -- helped by giving them directions.
He also invited them out on a boat ride. So the three met Chandler later that day at the boat ramp on the causeway, just 2.6 miles west of the hotel where they were staying.
Joan, Michelle and Christe Rogers had no clue Chandler was a former convict who had been arrested on a laundry list of charges before. They didn't know that in Cincinnati, he used to beat rats to death with a stick that had a nail attached to it. And they had no idea that he would be accused of raping a Canadian tourist aboard the very boat they were about to board.
When that tourist screamed, Chandler threatened her with duct tape and asked a chilling question: "Is sex something worth losing your life over?"
Now, two weeks later, Chandler had new victims.
Somewhere out on the dark waters of Old Tampa Bay, a sunset cruise turned into a sinister nightmare.
Chandler forced the three to strip from the waist down. He covered their mouths with duct tape to silence their screams, then tied their ankles together and secured their hands behind their backs with rope. Then he tied rope around each of their necks, attaching the other end to a concrete block.
Then, one by one, he threw them -- all three were deathly afraid of the water -- overboard.
Alive.
"One victim was first; two watched," Pinellas-Pasco Court Judge Susan Schaeffer said at Chandler's sentencing hearing on Nov. 4, 1989, when he was ordered to die for his crimes after being convicted of three counts of first-degree murder. "Imagine the fear.
"One victim was second; one watched. Imagine the horror," Schaeffer continued. "Finally, the last victim, who had seen the other two disappear over the side, was lifted up and thrown overboard. Imagine the terror."
In two days, Chandler is scheduled to die by lethal injection for his crimes.
The man who has never had a visitor while in prison since the murders will be allowed to order a final meal valued at up to $40. Then he will be executed at 4 p.m.
"I know I've had a lot of problems in my life, you know, I know I've done things that I shouldn't have done, but I have never physically hurt no human being in life. Never," Chandler said in a telephone conversation from jail with a daughter in October 1992 after his arrest in the rape of the Canadian tourist. "Everything I've always done is just been con games and things like that, you know what I mean."
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Bruce Bartlett has seen a lot of murderers in his 33 years as a prosecutor. But he's never seen one as nasty as Chandler.
That's why he will climb in his car Tuesday and make the drive to Florida State Prison in Starke to be there when Chandler is executed for one of the most heinous crimes in Tampa Bay history.
It will be the first time Bartlett, the chief assistant state attorney for Pinellas and Pasco counties, has watched a man die at the hands of the state.
"I really have no compunction or reservations in seeing this guy executed," Bartlett says. "If Florida is going to have a death penalty, this individual is the poster child for having it.
"No matter what we do to him, it can't equal what he put those three victims through."
After all, Chandler's death will be painless. And that is nothing like what the three members of the Rogers family went through.
"The one thing that always bothers me is that somebody watched two of the other family members get killed," the prosecutor says. "Just think if the daughters were killed before the mother, how horrible it would have been for her to watch that. Or if the mother was killed before the daughters, how horrible it was for them to watch that.
"God knows what all went on before that," Bartlett adds, referring to the belief that all three were raped. "For anybody to do such a thing, he has to be one sick, deranged individual. He wiped out a whole family. It's unconscionable."
The prosecutor still believes to this day there would have been two more victims -- Canadian tourists staying in Madeira Beach -- had one not declined offers to go on a boat ride with Chandler.
As it was, only one went on the boat. She ended up being raped after Chandler told her that no one would hear her screams and that sex wasn't worth losing her life over.
"Had the situation been different, they would have been killed," Bartlett says. "The reason she wasn't killed is because there was always a witness out there to identify him."
Police and prosecutors believe that Chandler is a serial killer.
"The sophistication which he seemed to utilize in committing this offense would suggest to me this isn't the first time he would have done something like this," Bartlett says. "He preyed on unsuspecting, naive people who trusted people for being good. He went out with the sole intention of killing them."
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Jeff Chandler and Valerie Troxell don't agree with Bartlett and others who portray their father as some type of madman killer.
"I really don't think he did it, in my opinion," says Jeff Chandler, who still lives in the Tampa Bay area. "He may have been a con man, but he ain't a murderer."
"I feel for the Rogers' family. I know Hal Rogers lost his world when he lost his wife and his girls," says Troxell, who lives outside of Cincinnati in Bethel. "But I'm not convinced it was at the hands of Obie."
The son blames the media for sending his father to prison and to Death Row.
"I truly believe he was tried and convicted by the media long before he went to trial," Jeff Chandler says. "The media can pretty much convict you. I don't think he got a fair trial.
"Can you imagine if you gave someone directions to their hotel and that's the only evidence you have against somebody?" the son asked. "It was all circumstantial evidence. Show me some DNA, give me an eyewitness, show me something better than what was presented."
Troxell agrees.
"There wasn't any forensic evidence. He gave them directions. They had a palm print," she says. "That's all they had. There was no other physical evidence whatsoever."
The only childhood memory that the daughter has of her father is when he took her to an amusement park when she was about 5 years old. She remembers that he had big arms and that she had a fun day.
She lost track of him for a number of years. When she was able to locate him, he was behind bars in Zephyrhills on a counterfeiting charge.
Recently, she wrote a letter to Gov. Rick Scott asking him to commute Chandler's sentence to life in prison. And she wrote to her father as well.
"I told him in the letter I believed in him. I believed that he was innocent," Troxell says. "And that I do care about him. I hope that his sentence is commuted."
She hasn't heard back from either man.
Jeff Chandler says that he still loves his father and that the two exchange letters.
"He was a good father to me," he says. "He treated everybody well. He was a very kind man."
But he hasn't visited his father since he went to prison. Oba Chandler hasn't had a single visitor since being convicted of three counts of first-degree murder.
"He's been sitting in a 9 by whatever cell for 20 years, with no air conditioning, no heat. We don't even house terrorists in that manner," the son says. "He doesn't want anybody coming up there to that rat hole and I don't blame him."
His father, Jeff Chandler says, has accepted his fate.
"He's ready to get this over with," the son says. "He's not trying to fight for his life."
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Baya Harrison, the attorney whose job it is to try to spare Chandler's life, has seen that firsthand.
"I think he's just resigned to it," Harrison says of Chandler and his date with death. "This is an intelligent man. He knows that this probably is going to be the end."
The two never have talked about whether Chandler killed the three vacationers, something he denied during the trial on the witness stand.
"We don't discuss it. He doesn't bring it up, I never bring it up," says Harrison. "He's never said he did it; he's never said he didn't."
Throughout the last decade of their working together, the attorney says, Chandler has always been cordial to him. Harrison even calls him honorable.
Harrison has represented Chandler for the last decade in his death appeals. He took his first capital case in 1971 and he's represented about 25 Death Row inmates -- including Gainesville serial killer Danny Rolling.
"I'm not one of those flag-waving, anti-death penalty types," he says during a telephone interview outside his farm house near Monticello in rural North Florida. "If it isn't my client, I support the death penalty. I think the death penalty is appropriate in some cases. It's a deterrent.
"It sure as hell would deter me."
But it didn't deter Chandler from killing the three Ohio tourists.
And now, Harrison says, the 65-year-old killer with a bad heart, bad kidneys and bad arthritis is ready to go.
"I don't find him exceedingly bitter. I would just say emotionally exhausted," Harrison says. "I don't see any dread or fear of death. I just see a guy who's tired of living in an 8-by-12 cell. It's pretty grim."
About three years ago, he got mad and took all of his relatives off the visitor list, his attorney says. And since there was no one on that approved visitor list when the governor signed the death warrant, that likely means that no one can see Chandler before he dies.
"I think he would like to see some of them now, but he kind of shot himself in the foot on that when he took them off the list and he didn't realize what he was doing," Harrison says.
Prison officials are trying to see if they can work around the rule to allow Chandler to have visitors before he dies. Harrison says he may have as many as nine children.
Now, as his time dwindles, the convicted killer would like to see some of those children again.
"The poor man went the wrong way early in life and it's been downhill from there," Harrison says.
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Evelyn Calloway remembers the penetrating, frightening stares from Chandler toward her and others in the jury box. The blank looks. The total lack of emotion and remorse.
"It's like there was an emptiness about him. It's like he doesn't have a soul," says Calloway, one of the jurors who was brought in from Orange County to hear the case in an effort to combat pretrial publicity. "He doesn't have any feelings. He's just empty."
For two weeks, Calloway sat in the courtroom with other jurors and heard the state's case against Chandler.
"I used to tell my husband that I hope he never gets out because I was the No. 1 juror," she says. "He stared at me all the time. He would look at each one of us, staring from one end to the other end.
"It was like he visualized each one of us and he has our faces in his mind."
And for Calloway, who was a school bus driver at the time and now works in the transportation department for Orange County schools, she can't get the memories of seeing photos of the three victims after they were pulled from the water.
"I still can't get those pictures out of my mind. I can see them right now as if I am looking at them today," she says. "They still had that look of horror on their faces."
She remembers the duct tape on their mouths. Their arms and legs being tied. How they were out on a boat in the middle of the night with a strange man who at first seemed so helpful and nice and now was about to kill them in a sadistic way.
"I can't even really imagine what went through their minds," Calloway says quietly.
"When he dies, justice will be done," she adds. "He killed three people. He doesn't deserve to get life. He deserves to get the death penalty."
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For Barbara Sheen Todd, a Pinellas County commissioner at the time, the horrific slayings were personal.
After all, she had two teenage daughters who were about the same age as the girls from the small town in rural western Ohio. Michelle was 17; Christe was 14.
And the Tampa Bay area was supposed to be a sparkling vacation destination -- not a place where you wound up the victim of a grisly triple slaying.
"It was appalling to me that someone would do such a thing and get away with it," says Todd, who retired from the board in 2004 after 22 years as a commissioner. "The very thought that anybody would do such a wretched thing and get away with it was not acceptable to me."
A year passed after the discovery of the bodies; there still was no clue as to who killed them. Then another year went by.
Todd knew that St. Petersburg police had a Clearwater Beach tourism brochure that had handwritten directions on it that might belong to the killer.
She called authorities and told them they needed to get that handwriting sample out there before the public, maybe even by slapping it on huge billboards across the Bay area.
"They said, 'It's our evidence,' " Todd says. "I said, 'It's not doing any good sitting in your hands.' If we can get this man's handwriting up on a billboard, maybe someone will recognize it and will let police know."
The day after the billboards went up in July 1992, Jo Ann Steffey called police from her northwestern Hillsborough County home.
She had thought the composite of the Madeira Beach rapist looked a lot like Chandler, her neighbor who owned a boat and lived just a few miles across the bay from the Courtney Campbell boat ramp. When police talked of possibly having the killer's handwriting, she obtained a sample of Chandler's from another neighbor who wanted the aluminum contractor to build a screened enclosure.
Steffey thought the two matched. Police and prosecutors agreed. At his trial, Chandler admitted giving the three directions but said he didn't kill them.
Todd's suggestion at that time more than two decades ago that was not a routine crime-fighting tool like it is today -- a mass appeal to the public for help in solving a crime.
"Nobody had ever done it before," Todd says. "It just made sense. If you have a clue that is important and could result in capturing that horrible man, you need to get it out there."
As an elected official in a county where tourism is a huge revenue generator, Todd didn't like the idea of some madman running around on the lam who had killed vacationers.
"You like your tourists to feel safe and secure when they are here," she says. "It's not a place you should feel afraid that anyone you talk to can turn around and hurt you and kill you."
The former commissioner says it seems that more than two decades is a long time for justice finally to be exacted in the Chandler case.
"If somebody murdered my daughter like he murdered those women, I'd want to throw the switch or inject the needle," she says.
"I'm not a violent person, but a man like that is a beast," Todd adds. "I know if it were my family, I would not want him to go free or even enjoy prison life."
Copyright 2011 - Tampa Tribune, Fla.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
