Oba Chandler Jr. (October 11, 1946 – November 15, 2011) was an American mass murderer, rapist, robber, and fraudster who was convicted and executed for the June 1989 murders of the Rogers family, consisting of Joan Rogers and her two teenage daughters Michelle and Christe, whose bodies were found floating in Tampa Bay, Florida, with their hands and feet bound. Autopsies showed the victims had been thrown into the water while still alive, with ropes tied to a concrete block around their necks. The case became high-profile in 1992 when local police posted billboards bearing enlarged images of the suspect's handwriting recovered from a pamphlet in the victims' car. Chandler was identified as the killer when his neighbor and three people that were suing him recognized the handwriting.
Prior to his arrest, Chandler worked as an unlicensed aluminum-siding contractor. Against the advice of his attorneys, he testified in his own defense, saying he had met the victims and had given them directions. Chandler said he never saw them again, except in newspaper coverage and on the billboards set up by authorities. Police originally theorized that two men were involved in the murders, but this was discounted once Chandler was arrested. Following his conviction, Chandler was incarcerated at Union Correctional Institution. During his seventeen years of incarceration until his execution, he did not have any visitors.
Chandler was executed on November 15, 2011. He wrote a last statement to prison officials: "You are killing innocent man today". The statement was read at a post-execution news conference. In February 2014, DNA evidence identified Chandler as the murderer of Ivelisse Berrios-Beguerisse, who was found dead in Coral Springs, Florida, on November 27, 1990.
Early life
Childhood and teenage years Chandler was born on October 11, 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, as the fourth of five children born to Oba Chandler Sr. and Margaret Johnson. He was known as Junior to his family. Oba Sr. was described as a "full-blood Indian of Cherokee and perhaps Lakota descent", who had abandoned his first wife and four sons in Kentucky. To the children in his second marriage, Oba Sr. was a strict disciplinarian who physically punished his children if they misbehaved or, in the case of his daughters, dressed inappropriately. On May 31, 1957, when Chandler was 10, his father hanged himself in the basement of the family's apartment. According to Chandler's cousin, at the funeral the following day, every time the gravedigger piled dirt on the coffin, Chandler jumped into the open grave and stomped the soil, muttering "He didn't have to do that"; other family members denied the account. After his father's death, Chandler began skipping school and staying out late. He joined a group of neighborhood boys who encouraged him to partake in small criminal acts, such as bicycle theft and shooting BB guns at passing cars.
Throughout his teenage years, Chandler and his siblings were frequently given into the care of other relatives by his mother and in 1960, he was sent to live with his older sister Helen and her husband in Tampa, Florida. Chandler refused to attend school, due to which Helen tried to make her brother take a factory job at her husband's workplace instead. On the day of a planned job interview, Chandler used the money meant for a bus fare to play pinball, returning home to his sister only two hours later to ask for more money. During the ensuing argument, Chandler punched a window, after which Helen gave her brother into the custody of their oldest sister, Alma. He lived with Alma and her husband Robert Docter in nearby Pinellas Park for a few months, briefly attending Pinellas Park Middle School before lapsing attendance. Chandler returned to Cincinnati to live with other relatives, during which time, at age 14, Chandler stole a car for joyriding. While still a juvenile, Chandler was arrested a total of twenty times, mostly for property-related crime and one instance of assault and battery. He attended Cutter Junior High School in Cincinnati until the eighth grade. Chandler returned to Pinellas Park in 1963 with his mother and stepfather, subsequently working with his brother-in-law at a lathing company in Largo. Between 1963 and 1965, Chandler had three children with two girlfriends, but refused to take responsibility in raising them.
Prior criminal career On December 27, 1965, Chandler left home to travel to Jacksonville and enlist in the United States Marine Corps. He was disciplined for the first time within a week of his arrival on Parris Island for training and in March 1966, he deserted while at Camp Lejeune. Chandler was arrested in Saint Paul, Minnesota in summer of the same year, serving six months of hard labor at Camp Lejeune and receiving a general discharge on January 11, 1967. Throughout the rest of the year, he lived in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Ohio, where he was noted for larceny and robbery offenses. He subsequently travelled around the midwestern and southeastern United States as a conman, living under various false identities and fathering four more children with four different women. Between November 1968 and February 1973, Chandler was arrested six times for non-violent offenses, including fraud and theft, but also a peeping tom offense, when it was alleged that he was caught masturbating while spying on a woman through a window in her home. Another notable case occurred on January 28, 1969, when Chandler broke into a beauty salon in Cincinnati and stole 21 wigs, worth over $1,300 (), which resulted in an indictment on a charge of receiving and concealing stolen goods. He was last recorded in Cincinnati in 1975, when he obtained a driver's license in the city.
On February 2, 1976, Chandler and an accomplice broke into the home of a couple in Daytona Beach, after spotting them on a boat with a large amount of money the prior day. While the accomplice tied up the husband with electrical cable, Chandler took the woman into the bedroom, where he made her strip to her underwear, tied her up, and rubbed the barrel of his revolver across her stomach. The burglars stole some cash, a rifle, a shotgun and a Doberman Pinscher. Chandler was arrested two weeks later at his uncle's apartment in the city. He was charged with robbery, burglary, kidnapping, and drug possession, the latter after an arresting officer found marijuana on his person. During his 1977 trial, he pled guilty to a single count of armed robbery as part of a plea deal, receiving a ten-year prison sentence, which he served at Doctor's Inlet Road Prison near Palatka. During his stay, it was determined that Chandler had an IQ of above 120, albeit with a poor reading level, with Chandler voicing an interest in obtaining parole. Officials also noted that Chandler professed strong Christian beliefs, though he showed only "mediocre" interest in prison chapel service. He escaped five months into his sentence while working as part of a construction crew on Interstate 95 in Duval County.
Chandler remained in Florida, generally staying in and around Orlando, presenting aliases, most commonly "James Thomas Wright", fake occupations, such as X-ray technician, mechanical draftsman, apartment manager, and aluminum contractor, and false home states. Between April 1978 and July 1981, he was arrested three times, twice for loitering and prowling and once for a vending machine theft. In the first offense, which took place in Altamonte Springs, a woman had accused Chandler of spying on her through a window in her bedroom. Chandler was convicted each time and sentenced to monetary fines and according to police, he provided false documentations, including identity cards and Social Security numbers, and even gave a fingerprint sample, which was never matched despite Chandler already having a criminal record. Some of his family members were aware of his fugitive status and false identities, but sheltered him throughout the years. By 1982, Chandler, as "Jim Wright", had settled in Maitland with a girlfriend, running a legitimate aluminum-siding business out of his home. Simultaneously, he ran a counterfeit money operation, producing fake $20 bills. Since 1981, he had also been a police informant to Orlando's Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation under the Wright alias. Although the record was destroyed as a routine measure by the time of the Rogers family murders, police archives and a 1983 parole request letter by Chandler indicated that he was given monetary compensation in return for tip-offs that led to police raids on "X-rated bookstores".
In May 1982, two teenagers were arrested for attempting to buy tickets using false $20 bills to the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee. The teenagers told police that a man named "Jim" had given them the money after picking them up as hitchhikers. Following a three-month investigation, the home address of "Jim" was determined and on September 27, 1982, Chandler was arrested by US Secret Service agents as he was driving back home, also discovering $8,340 () in fake currency in the trunk of his car. His true identity was discovered during his stay in jail, although Chandler maintained he was a "cypress clockmaker" to a magistrate. He was ultimately found guilty of possessing counterfeit money and sentenced to seven years, which he served at Federal Correctional Institution, Bastrop, a low-security federal prison in Bastrop, Texas, where he obtained a GED and accrued 33 hours in college credit. In June 1984, he was transferred to a federal prison in Florida to serve part of his pre-existing robbery conviction as a consecutive sentence. In Florida, Chandler requested that sentence be reduced to two years' imprisonment and five years' parole and on December 12, 1986, he was released after both of his sentences were deemed as served. There are no police records about Chandler's whereabouts for the next one-and-a-half years, except for a speeding ticket dated January 1, 1988, which placed him in Kentucky. On May 14, 1988, Chandler married Debra Ann Whiteman and in December 1988, the couple moved to Tampa Shores, where they bought a house for a mortgage of $109,800 (), paid by Whiteman. The couple had a daughter in February 1989, by which point Chandler had successfully restarted his aluminum-siding venture in Hillsborough County. He also resumed his work as an informant, this time for the Tampa Police Department.
Rogers family murders
On May 26, 1989, Joan "Jo" Rogers, 36, and her daughtersMichelle, 17, and Christe, 14left their family dairy farm in Willshire, Ohio, for a vacation in Florida. It was the first time they had left their home state. Authorities believe Joan became lost on June 1 during the return drive from Orlando to Willshire, and had decided to take an extra vacation day in Tampa. While looking for their hotel they encountered Chandler, who gave them directions and offered to meet them again later to take them on a sunset cruise of Tampa Bay.
Joan and her teenage daughters had left Orlando around 9:00a.m. and checked into the Days Inn on Route 60 at 12:30p.m.
Photographs retrieved from a roll of film found in a camera in the Rogers' hotel room showed Michelle sitting on the floor. The last photograph was taken from the hotel balcony and showed the sun beginning to set over Tampa Bay, confirming that all three family members were alive and had not left their hotel room as the sunset began. They were last seen alive at the hotel's restaurant at around 7:30p.m. It is believed they boarded Chandler's boat by the dock on the Courtney Campbell Causeway—part of Route 60—between 8:30p.m. and 9:00p.m., and that they were dead by 3a.m. the next day. Chandler may have used the fact that he was born in Ohio to lure them into feeling a connection to him. Chandler knew Joan and her daughters were not from Florida because he saw the Ohio license plates on their car.