Dead in the Water

In the spring of 1989, Joan “Jo” Rogers, 36, took her daughters Michelle, 17, and Christe, 14, on vacation, driving from their dairy farm in Willshire, Ohio, to Florida. Near Tampa they asked a stranger for directions, and he wrote them on a brochure and offered to take them out on his boat. The man was Oba Chandler, an aluminum-siding contractor.

On June 1, 1989, Chandler took the three out on Tampa Bay. He bound them and threw them overboard with concrete blocks tied to ropes around their necks. Their bodies were found floating in the bay on June 4. The case stalled until police put the handwritten directions from the family’s car on billboards. In 1992 a former neighbor recognized the writing from a work contract Chandler had written, and he was arrested that September.

A jury convicted Chandler of all three murders on September 30, 1994, and he was sentenced to death that November. The state executed him by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on November 15, 2011. Hal Rogers, Jo’s husband and the girls’ father, attended. In 2014, police in Coral Springs, Florida, said DNA tied Chandler to the unsolved 1990 murder of Ivelisse Berrios-Beguerisse.