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Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Oba Chandler was the fourth of 5 children to mother and father Margarette Johnson and Oba Chandler Sr. In the summer of 1957, his father hanged himself in the basement of their home when Oba was ten years old. As the grave diggers filled Oba Chandler Sr's grave with dirt at the funeral, Oba Chandler Jr. Jumped into his father's open grave.
At the age of fourteen Oba Chandler Jr. started stealing cars, leading up to twenty arrests during his juvenile years. Into adulthood, Oba would be charged with numerous crimes including: possession of counterfeit money, loitering, burglary, kidnapping, and armed robbery. At one point he was accused of masterbating as he peeped through a women's bedroom window.
On May 26, 1989, Joan Roger's and her two teenage daughters Michelle and Christie, took a vacation from their dairy farm in Willshire, Ohio and went to Florida. It was the first time the family ever left their home state. On June 1st, it's believed Joan and her daughters became lost during their return trip to Willshire from Orlando, Florida, leading to a decision to take a extra vacation day in Tampa. They encountered Oba Chandler Jr. As they looked for a hotel room.
Chandler provided them with directions and offered to meet them another time to take them on a sunset cruise of Tampa Bay. After leaving Orlando at 9am, the Roger's checked into the days in on route 60 at 12:30pm. Photos from a roll of film in the Roger's hotel room showed Michelle Roger's sitting on the floor. The last photograph taken was from the hotel balcony, showing the sun setting over Tampa Bay, confirming the Rogers had not left their hotel room and were still alive during this time. At the hotels restaurant is where they would be last seen alive around 7:30pm.
Authorities believe the Roger's boarded Chandlers boat between 8:30 and 9pm near the dock on the Courtney Campbell Causeway and were dead by 3am the next morning. Knowing the Roger's were not from Florida, indicated by their Ohio license plate, it's believed Chandler lured them into establishing a connection with him by using the fact that he was born and raised in Ohio.
On June 4, 1989, the bodies of the Roger's family were discovered floating in Tampa Bay. The first body was found by sailors who seen an object in the water as they crossed under Sunshine Skyway Bridge. The second body was seen floating off the pier of St. Petersburg, two miles north of the first body. While recovering the second body, the coast guard received a call about a third body seen floating two hundred yards to the east. All three were bound with a rope around the neck and naked below the waist.
The three women were thrown into the water while alive, proven by water found in their lungs during the autopsies. Michelle Roger's managed to free one hand from her bonds before drowning. The ropes around their necks had concrete blocks tied to the other end to ensure their deaths of either drowning or suffocation and that the bodies would never be found. However, the bodies bloated during decomposition and floated to the surface. Sexual assault was indicated as the underlying crime by the partially dressed state of the bodies. They were not positively identified until a week after their discovery. By this time, Roger's husband and father of Michelle and Christy reported the three missing in Ohio.
On June 8, a Days Inn housekeeper confirmed the beds in the Roger's family room hadn't been slept in, leading the manager to contact authorities. Fingerprints found in the room matched to the bodies, with final confirmation of their identities coming from dental records. Marine researchers estimated from currents and patterns that the bodies had been thrown from a boat and not from a bridge or dry land between two to five days before they were discovered. The Roger's car was found at the boat dock near Courtney Campbell Causeway.
The case went unsolved for over three years due to a high volume of tips received by investigators. On September 24, 1992 Chandler was arrested for the Roger's murders. Primary clues leading to Chandler being a suspect were his handwritten directions on a brochure found in the Roger's car and a description of his boat written by Joan Roger's. Unusual at the time, authorities posted images of Chandlers handwriting from the brochure on Tampa Bay billboards, leading to a call from a former neighbor of Chandlers. The former neighbor provided authorities with a copy of a work order written by Chandler.
The two samples were matched through handwriting analysis. Also matched to Chandler was a palm print on the brochure. Soon after the billboards were put to use by authorities, Chandler sold his boat and left town with his family. Him and his wife eventually moved from Tampa Bay to Port orange near Daytona Beach according to law enforcement.
During his trial, Chandler claimed he did meet Joan, Michelle, and Christie Roger's and provided them with directions but didn't see them again until recognizing them on billboards and in newspapers. The police had evidence of three ship to shore telephone calls home from his boat made in the time frame the murders took place but Chandler maintained he was fishing alone in Tampa Bay that night. He says he got home late due to a gas leak causing his engine to not start in which he claimed to have called the coast guard and flagged down a patrol boat but both were to busy to help. He said he fixed the line with duct tape then safely returned to shore.
However, there were no distress calls from Chandler to either the coast guard or the Marine patrol that night on record and no coast guard boats on the bay the following morning. According to a boat mechanic who testified for the prosecution, Chandlers claims of fixing gas leak on his boat wasn't tenable because the fuel lines on his boat were directed upward. This would have caused fuel to spray into the air rather than into the boat and the fuel would have dissolved the duct tape adhesive that Chandler claimed he used to repair the leak. When questioned about this by the county prosecuter Douglas Crowe, Chandler claimed he couldn't recall.
A women by the name of Judy Blair testified that on May 15, 1989, two weeks before the Roger's murders, Chandler invited her for a boat trip on Tampa bay in which he raped her then returned her to shore. She told the court after the rape, she returned to her hotel room where her friend Barbara Mottram, who refused Chandlers boat trip offer, was waiting for her. Though Chandler wasn't charged for this crime in particular, Blairs testimony during the murder trial helped establish his pattern of attack and noted similarities between the two crimes.
A former employee of Chandlers testified he bragged about dating three women on the bay the night of the murders, claiming the next morning he arrived by boat delivering materials for a job then immediately set back out. Investigators found that the ship to shore phone calls were made between 1am and 5am and may have been attempts to explain his absence to his wife and to establish himself an alibi during the time he committed the Roger's murders. Chandlers daughter Krystal May Sue testified that her father talked about killing three women and was afraid to return to Tampa Bay.
On November 4, 1994, Oba Chandler was found guilty of the Roger's family murders and was sentenced to death. He continued to pursue legal appeals while on Florida's death row as he maintained his innocence. He would admit to the Judy Blair incident but claimed the sex was consensual and that Judy changed her mind during the act.
Conclusion: All of Chandlers appeals were denied and he was eventually executed on November 15, 2011. His last statement was "You're killing an innocent man today." On February 25, 2014, DNA evidence identified Chandler as the murderer of twenty year old lvelesse Berrios-Begurisse who was raped and strangled in Coral springs Florida on November 27, 1990.
