Oba Chandler’s Biography, Net Worth, Fact, Career, Awards and Life Story
The women were not positively identified until a week after their bodies’ discovery, by which time their husband and father Hal Rogers had reported them missing in Ohio. On June 8, a housekeeper at the Days Inn said the women’s room had not been disturbed and the beds had not been slept in. The hotel manager contacted the police. Fingerprints found in the room were matched to the bodies; final confirmation of their identities came from dental records. Marine researchers at the University of South Florida estimated from currents and patterns that the women were thrown from a boat—and not from a bridge or dry land—between two and five days before they were found. The Rogers’ car, a 1984 Oldsmobile Calais with Ohio license plates, was found at the boat dock by the Courtney Campbell Causeway.
Facts and arrest
The case remained unsolved for over three years, partly due to the volume of tips received by police investigators. The biggest tip came from a Madeira Beach police bulletin that described a similar rape of a 24-year-old Canadian tourist that occurred two weeks before the Rogers’ murders. Chandler was arrested for the murders on September 24, 1992. His handwritten directions on a brochure found in the Rogers’ vehicle and a description of his boat written by Jo Rogers on the brochure were the primary clues that led to him being named a suspect. Local police posted images of Chandler’s handwriting on the brochure on billboards in the Tampa Bay area, leading to a call from a former neighbor who provided a copy of a work order Chandler had written. This was the first-such use of billboards by law enforcement in the US; billboards became useful tools in later searches for missing people.
Through handwriting analysis, the two samples were matched conclusively. Another of Chandler’s neighbors, and one of the secretaries on the investigative task force, thought Chandler resembled the composite sketch of the suspect in the seemingly related rape case. A palm print found on the brochure was also matched to Chandler, who had sold his boat and left town with his family soon after the billboards appeared. In 1990, when the television show Unsolved Mysteries was about to report on the deaths of the Rogers family, Chandler and his then-wife moved from their home on Dalton Avenue in Tampa to Port Orange near Daytona Beach.
Second suspect theory
Investigators originally thought two men were involved in the murders of the Rogers women; this theory was used for an enaction shown in a 1991 episode of Unsolved Mysteries. This theory was dismissed when Chandler was arrested; no evidence of a second man—other than a former prison cellmate’s claim that Chandler said another man, whose identity the cellmate claimed to know but would not reveal—has ever surfaced. The second-suspect theory was belied by Chandler’s approach of two Canadian female tourists—that he was willing to approach multiple potential targets by himself.
Hal Rogers’s brother John was also considered a suspect, even though he was serving a prison sentence for the rape of a woman at the time of the murders. Police investigating the woman’s rape allegation found evidence indicating John had also sexually assaulted Hal’s daughter Michelle, although charges involving this assault were later dropped because of her reluctance to testify. The St. Petersburg Times said John may have planned the murder during a visit to his parents’ property near Tampa a month before the murders. Once the police established John could not have hired a contract killer, did not have accomplices, and could not have known the timing of his sister-in-law’s and nieces’ trip, he was dismissed as a suspect.
Hal was also considered a suspect because he had posted bail for his brother knowing he had abused Michelle. Hal later said he had promised the family he would post bail and would not renege on his promise. Investigators from Florida and Ohio also discovered Hal had withdrawn US$7,000 from his bank account at the time of the disappearance, which he was able to account for. He had planned to use it to look for his wife and daughters before he was notified of their deaths. Investigations proved conclusively Hal had not left Ohio during that period. The rape of Michelle Rogers and gossip by local people was one of the reasons for the Florida trip; the Rogers’ women wanted to distance themselves from the incident.
