DET. LEEDY: Three female bodies were found
floating in Tampa Bay.
All three of them had yellow polypropylene rope
tied around their necks
and the other end of that rope
was tied to a concrete block.
SGT. MOORE: We believe they had gone there
to meet somebody in a blue and white boat.
CRAIG: People were worried there might be
a serial killer loose.
DET. LEEDY: We publicize a picture of the brochure
with the suspect's handwriting on it on billboards.
The very next day, we got a call from a Tampa woman.
She said she believed she knew who the killer was.
Who would do this to an entire family?
DOUGLAS: There was tremendous worry
that we would never solve the crime.
[theme music playing]
CRAIG: Florida is the number one tourism destination
in the United States.
It attracts millions of people from around the world.
DOUGLAS: You have the major attractions in Orlando.
You've got loads of beaches, loads of shoreline,
a lot of boating.
CRAIG: Tampa is across the bay from Saint Petersburg
which is famous for its beaches
and seeing the sunset over the water.
DET. CULBERSON: June 4, 1989 was a very quiet Sunday
in Tampa Bay,
nice weather, boats everywhere out fishing.
DET. LEEDY: On that Sunday morning,
three female bodies were found floating in Tampa Bay.
SGT. MOORE: They've been discovered by some boaters
that was called in to a coastguard.
The coastguard came out and recovered the bodies.
DET. LEEDY: All three of them had a yellow polypropylene rope
tied around their necks
and the other end of that rope was tied to a concrete wall.
[suspenseful music playing]
SGT. MOORE: The coastguard bought them back to the dock
and that's where we were called
and began our investigation.
DOUGLAS: The victims' mouths were covered
with duct tape.
Their hands were tied with cotton
and polypropylene rope behind their backs.
And then their feet were bound.
They were unclothed from the waist down.
They were relatively young women.
We didn't have any identification,
we knew nothing about them.
All we knew was that this terrible tragedy occurred.
DET. CULBERSON: I was in special operations
and we were called down to the docks.
And when I arrived there, I was able to view the victims
along with the cinder block.
One body that I did observe on the dock
was unlike the other two.
This girl was able to release
one of her hands from the rope
and had pulled part of the duct tape off of her mouth.
It was obvious that she had still been alive
when she was tossed in the water.
This was a malevolent, horrible crime,
extremely cruel with a great deal
of sadistic intent.
DET. LEEDY: We all just couldn't imagine
what kind of a person would kill three women
and then just throw them overboard
like they meant nothing.
DOUGLAS: We didn't know the relationship of the victims
but it was apparent because of the commonality
and the way they were tied that the crimes
were related and were committed at--
at approximately the same time by one or more people
who were still out there.
The autopsies were performed within a couple of days.
We had results indicating that they died of asphyxiation
but it was impossible to tell whether that occurred
from drowning or from the constriction
of the ropes around their neck that were used
to tie to the concrete blocks.
They were able to get fingerprints off the bodies
but they didn't match police records.
DET. LEEDY: The medical examiner said that
they were in the water
from 50 to 60 hours.
And because of that, there was no evidence
that could determine if the victims
were actually raped.
But since they were nude from the waist down,
we just figured they probably were.
DOUGLAS: We didn't know the venue
where the crimes had occurred.
We contacted the expert witnesses
who'd been studying the currents in Tampa Bay for decades
and it was clear that they had not been dumped
from one of the bridges or from land,
so we knew that the bodies had been disposed off
from a boat in the middle of Tampa Bay.
Tampa Bay is probably 10 miles across.
It's a big, expansive water.
There was not crime scene in the traditional sense.
The crimes had occurred in the boat
in the open waters of Tampa Bay,
so the crime scene that police are normally able to go to
and get forensic evidence was just not existing.
DET. LEEDY: There was no evidence
to help find out who our victims were,
so we needed a big break to solve this case.
And trying to find out
who they were, where they were from,
we checked missing person reports in Florida
and the jewelry that the victims were wearing was publicized,
asking anyone to come forward with information
to help us identify the women.
But three days after the bodies were found,
nothing was panning out for us.
CRAIG: Just the thought that three women
would be killed in such a way,
it set off a sort of a wave of terror
around the Tampa Bay area.
People were worried there might be
a serial killer loose
and the authorities were baffled.
DET. LEEDY: Four days after the bodies were found,
a housekeeper from the Days Inn Hotel in Tampa
notified her manager that room 251
had not been used since the hotel guest
checked in to their hotel room a week earlier.
SGT. MOORE: The housekeeper there had noticed
that nobody had been back to the room.
The bed had not been slept in.
She had heard about the bodies recovered
out of the bay and so she thought
that maybe this was suspicious.
So, we went to the Days Inn.
DET. LEEDY: The registration at the hotel
showed the room had been rented by a Joan Rogers
with two children.
When we examined the hotel room,
the beds had never been messed up,
the suitcases had been opened.
SGT. MOORE: Our technician obtained the fingerprints
off of several items in the hotel.
DET. LEEDY: That technician dusted a toothpaste tube,
uh, dusted some items from their suitcase.
Those fingerprints showed that the same women
who had been in that hotel room
and left those items behind
were the same women who were found in Tampa Bay.
So now we knew for sure that the victims
were the mom, Joan Rogers, and her two children.
But we still needed more information
about the Rogers family.
The registration at the hotel
showed Joan Rogers' name.
SGT. MOORE: We found out what kind of car
they were driving, their tag number
from records at the hotel.
DET. LEEDY: We couldn't find information
about the two children, but we found an Ohio address.
So we contacted Sheriff Stan Owens
with the Van Wert County Sheriff's Department
in Ohio.
He knew Joan Rogers and her family.
We learned that the family owned a dairy farm
in Willshire, Ohio.
There was the dad, Hal Rogers,
and his wife, Joan Rogers,
but she always went by Joe.
The sheriffs also knew
they had two teenage daughters,
Michelle, 17,
and Christe, 14,
the same girls found in the water.
The sheriff contacted Hal for us
and discovered that the family was down here on vacation
while Hal was still on the farm.
Hal was expecting them back Sunday.
DOUGLAS: We found out Hal had been in contact with Joe
off and on during the trip.
Then he lost contact with her.
DET. LEEDY: So Hal had just reported
his family missing days earlier.
We gave Hal the news about his family's death.
DOUGLAS: This was certainly horrific in the fact
that the entire family was wiped up
and the husband and father
being left absolutely devastated.
DET. LEEDY: Later that day, Tampa Police
searched for several hours and found the family's car
in the parking lot of a boat ramp
just off Courtney Campbell Causeway
about two and a half miles from the hotel.
We searched the car.
SGT. MOORE: There was a tourism brochure
that was found in the car.
There was handwriting on that brochure
that gave directions to the victims' hotel.
We also discovered in the car
a note that was written on Days Inn stationary.
The note said, "Turn right Highway 60,
two and a half miles blue/w"
which we took to mean blue and white.
These were directions from the hotel
to the boat ramp where we discovered their car.
Considering the fact that these ladies
were found in the bay,
we surmised that they had gone there to meet somebody
in a blue and white boat.
Whoever was on the water that night
was probably their killer.
[suspenseful music playing]
DET. LEEDY: We think the killer gave them directions
to the boat ramp.
SGT. MOORE: If we could find the person
that wrote this handwriting,
we'd find the killer.
Hal Rogers told us that Michelle
had been sexually assaulted by her uncle.
CRAIG: The detectives speculated that John Rogers
had perhaps hired a hitman
SGT. MOORE: On June 4th, 1989,
there was three bodies popped up in Tampa Bay.
DET. LEEDY: The victims were Joan Rogers
and her two teenage daughters,
Christe and Michelle.
On June 8th, 1989,
a Tampa Police Officer found the victim's car
in the parking lot of a boat ramp
about two and a half miles from their hotel.
SGT. MOORE: In that car were two items
that turned out to be key in the investigation.
One of them was a note with directions from the hotel
to the boat ramp.
And we believed that they had gone there
to meet somebody in a blue and white boat.
The other thing we found in their car
was a brochure that gave directions
to the victims' hotel
on the Courtney Campbell Causeway.
DET. LEEDY: And there was some handwriting on the brochure.
Someone had written Route 60,
Courtney Causeway, Days Inn,
and off to the side there was written
in a different handwriting,
"Boy Scout Columbus"
which is the name of a street that runs in Tampa
from Dale Mabry Highway toward the victims' hotel
on Courtney Campbell Causeway.
SGT. MOORE: It was our belief that they met somebody
at some point on their way to their hotel
who gave them these instructions
and actually wrote the instructions
on the brochure.
The brochure was important.
We had to have that analyze for handwriting.
And also, the Days Inn stationary,
we need to determine for sure
whose handwriting that was.
We had sent investigators to Ohio
to develop more information about the victims.
We found out the Rogers family had a dairy farm.
The husband and father, Hal Rogers,
Joe, Michelle, and Christe
lived on the farm and worked the farm.
DET. LEEDY: When we talked to Hal,
he had mentioned that Joe worked two jobs.
She worked on the dairy farm
and she also had a midnight shift job
at a factory just to bring in some extra money.
He said the girls were big members
of the community.
They did a lot of activities.
They participated in the county fair.
They would show their cows.
Hal said that at the beginning of May 1989,
they decided to take a vacation for a week
and they had talked about coming to Florida before.
And they decided that this would be the summer
they would do it.
Hal had to stay behind and work with the farm.
SGT. MOORE: They were farmers from Ohio.
They'd never had a vacation in their lives.
DET. LEEDY: On Friday, May 26,
the mom and the two daughters got in their Oldsmobile
and they said goodbye to Hal
and they left for Florida.
They sent postcards home,
they made phone calls home.
SGT. MOORE: Hal told us that they had been
to Disney World and had come to the Tampa area
to go to the beach.
DET. LEEDY: They were gonna go to Busch Gardens on Friday,
June 2nd, in Tampa,
and then head home on Saturday.
And Hal was expecting them back Sunday, June 4th.
SGT. MOORE: Hal told us he'd been in contact with Joe
off and on during the trip.
Then he lost contact with her.
And he became very, very concerned.
They weren't coming back at the timeframe
that he expected them.
He was very, very distraught.
On June 5th, he'd notified the police
but unfortunately, Hal Roger's entire family
had been murdered.
DOUGLAS: The terrible tragedy of this young family
coming to our hometown hoping to escape the hardship
of the farm and being victimized,
it's a terrible tragedy.
SGT. MOORE: While in Ohio, we discovered
a lot of things that had been going on
inside the Rogers family.
Hal told us that Michelle,
the oldest of the two teenage girls,
had been sexually assaulted on several occasions
by her uncle, John Rogers.
DOUGLAS: A year or so prior to the bodies being found,
Hal's brother, John Rogers, was arrested in Ohio
for the rape of another local woman,
sent to prison,
was imprisoned at the time of the murders.
We wondered if both the rape and the Rogers family case
were related.
[tense music playing]
DET. LEEDY: Hal's brother, John Rogers,
had a separate trailer on the farm.
During that investigation a year earlier,
when the sheriffs searched John Rogers' trailer,
they found pictures taken of Michelle.
She was tied up.
It was clear that it was against her will.
When Michelle was asked about that,
she did admit that John had raped her.
John raped Michelle probably a dozen times
over the last two and a half years.
DOUGLAS: And the charges for the rape of Michelle
were dropped because she didn't wish to prosecute.
DET. LEEDY: She was afraid of John
because he always threatened to kill her
if she told anybody.
DET. GEOGHEGAN: Hal's brother was in prison,
so we wanted to see if it was possible
that it was a contract murder
where he had hired somebody to kill the women.
SGT. MOORE: Could there be some connection with John Rogers
and what happened to the Rogers family
DOUGLAS: The murders of Joe, Christe, and Michelle
were horrific in the fact that the entire family
was wiped out.
We found out John Rogers was in prison at the time
that the Rogers women were murdered.
CRAIG: Hal Rogers told the police
that John Rogers, during the rape,
had threatened Michelle,
he said if she told anyone he would kill her.
Now that she was dead, the detective speculated
that John Rogers had perhaps hired a hitman
from prison who had wiped out the whole family.
SGT. MOORE: We investigated John Rogers
because we wanted to be sure there's no connection.
[ominous music playing]
DOUGLAS: The more the police looked at John Rogers
as a suspect, they found out
that he was an isolated inmate,
no contacts, no real ability to pull this off.
DET. LEEDY: There were no phone records from the prison
to indicate anything had been set up
or paid for no murder to hire type thing.
So we eliminated John Rogers as a suspect.
[ominous music playing]
DOUGLAS: In any criminal investigation,
you have to go back and eliminate family
because that's frequently the person that commits crimes.
DET. LEEDY: The most suspicious thing about Hal Rogers
at the time was that he didn't go
on vacation with his family.
That was important to us in case Hal
had orchestrated someone to find his family
and kill them while they were down here on vacation,
and while Hal was still on the farm.
But he was so cooperative.
He had no problems with the police
subpoenaing all his phone records,
his bank records, his credit card records.
And once we learned why he didn't go on vacation,
it was a rainy season, he had crops to plant,
he had to milk the cows.
John had been arrested and was in prison.
He had nobody to help him on the farm.
So we eliminated Hal pretty quickly.
Van Wert is a very small farming community,
very close knit.
There were over 300 people at the funeral
when the Rogers women were buried.
There were friends and relatives,
community members.
To lose three people, most of the family
from one small community,
it was very shocking and devastating
to that entire community.
DOUGLAS: No one really recovers
from having your entire family murdered.
Losing your wife and daughters is completely devastating.
And, uh, there is no closure that goes along with that.
[dramatic music playing]
SGT. MOORE: After we did all of our investigation
in Ohio, we came back to Florida
and began the investigation
into where the Rogers family were
and anybody they could have met,
at the time we were getting a lot of leads
called in to us also because they released information
to the media that maybe they had met somebody
on a blue and white boat.
So we were getting all kinds of calls
about people with blue and white boats,
people that were suspicious and all.
But none of those panned out.
[suspenseful music playing]
SGT. MOORE: Our main evidence that we had
was the handwriting on the Days Inn stationary
and the tourist brochure were found in the car.
So we had that analyzed.
DET. LEEDY: It turns out that on the stationary
from Days Inn where the directions
from the hotel to the boat ramp,
that was Joe Rogers' handwriting.
The little Boy Scout in Columbus on the brochure
was Joe's handwriting.
But the other handwriting,
Route 60 Courtney Causeway Days Inn,
we couldn't match to anybody.
This was written by someone she met
probably on Dale Mabry Highway in Tampa.
He gave them directions to their hotel.
We think he called them later at the hotel
and gave them directions to the boat ramp.
SGT. MOORE: At that point, we believe if we could find
the person that wrote this handwriting,
we'd find the killer.
DET. LEEDY: We did a lot of investigation
on Dale Mabry Highway.
We interviewed and compared handwriting samples
with all the employees who were working
in the immediate area at the time of the murders,
but nothing was panning out for us
and we still didn't have a suspect.
In October of 1989,
four months after the murders,
one of the detectives was reading
a Florida Department law enforcement bulletin,
and it described a rape that happened two weeks
before our Rogers family was murdered.
It happened in Madeira Beach, which is very close to Tampa.
SGT. MOORE: It was a tourist from Canada,
and it was a blue and white boat
that she had gotten on with this gentleman.
And he had taken her out on the water for a sunset ride.
And he made threats to her and he raped her.
And there was a composite sketch
that was done by the sketch expert.
DET. LEEDY: There were similarities
between that rape and our homicide.
The description of the blue and white boat,
and the fact that he threatened to tape her mouth off
with duct tape if she didn't stop screaming.
The suspect threatened to throw her off the boat
or to kill her if she didn't cooperate.
There were so many similarities.
We thought this could be our guy.
[dramatic music playing]
DET. LEEDY: In May of 1989,
two weeks before our Rogers family was murdered,
there was a rape case that happened in Madeira Beach,
very close to our area.
It happened on the water in a boat
and the victim of that was a Canadian tourist.
DOUGLAS: The details of the rape were a lot of similarities
to the crimes against the Rogers family.
DET. LEEDY: So we flew up to Canada
and interviewed the rape victim.
SGT. CONNOR-DUBINA: The Canadian tourist
was in her mid-20s
when she was here on vacation with her friend.
And she said they ended up befriending the suspect
at a 7-Eleven in Madeira Beach.
DET. LEEDY: There was a man in the parking lot
in a dark colored SUV.
He struck up a conversation with these two tourists.
SGT. CONNOR-DUBINA: He had a boat
and he offered to give them a boat ride
for a sunset cruise.
So on the evening of May 15th, 1989,
the Canadian tour showed up by herself
for the evening cruise.
Her friend did not want to go.
They went ahead on the boat,
everything seemed fine.
DET. LEEDY: She wasn't threatened by him in any way.
She thought he was nice.
It was getting dark and she asked
that he take her back to the dock.
He tried to talk her into having sex with him.
She made it clear she wanted nothing to do with that.
She wasn't interested in him in that way.
He told her that he was gonna have sex with her.
He demanded that she cooperate with him.
He then became very aggressive with her.
When she's screaming,
he threatened to duct tape her mouth
if she didn't stop screaming.
DET. LEEDY: He asked her if losing her life
was worth it over just sex.
And he ended up sexually assaulting her.
DET. LEEDY: They took her back to the dock
and he turned around and left.
SGT. CONNOR-DUBINA: There were major similarities
between the rape case and the Rogers homicide.
Most notably is the date range within two weeks.
Secondly, both the Rogers family
and the Canadian tourist
were visiting here in Florida.
You also have the boat ride.
He had a blue and white boat
and he said if she didn't stop screaming,
he would duct tape her mouth.
The Rogers women had duct tape over their mouths
when they were found.
DOUGLAS: We believe, based on the similarities
between the two crimes,
that the rape and the family murders
may have been committed by the same sail.
SGT. CONNOR-DUBINA: In a way, it's almost eerie
because the Canadian tourist's statements
was what probably happened
to the victims on the Rogers case,
and it was almost like they were speaking from the grave.
[dramatic music playing]
DOUGLAS: The rape victim had been told by her assailant
that he owned an aluminum business.
He'd also told her that he lived
about two hours away by boat from Madeira Beach.
We knew he owned a boat, that we had all these details
that if we could find a suspect we could compare.
SGT. MOORE: The composite was released to the public
and it generated a lot of leads.
However, none of those leads panned out.
So, over the next couple of months,
nothing much was happening on the investigation.
DOUGLAS: After a year or so, the tip started drawing up.
When that happened, there was an intense amount
of frustration and an intense amount of concern
that we might never bring justice to the Rogers family.
DET. LEEDY: In January of 1991,
uh, we were doing a lot of investigative work
for the Rogers family trying to find someone
who would have written the direction for them.
We compared handwriting samples
of all the police officers
and deputies who worked in Tampa.
Firefighters, we checked their handwriting
because they're people normally people trust.
We didn't find anyone
whose handwriting was even close.
We checked all of the aluminum businesses
in Tampa because the man who raped
our Canadian tourist
said he had an aluminum business.
We came up with nothing.
Things were going just too slow.
The case wasn't being worked as much.
The detectives who were originally assigned
the case had other homicide cases
that they had to work.
And then a lot of time passed.
In February of 1992,
about two and a half years since the murders,
we had a new chief by that time.
He said he was going to shut us down.
He felt like if we didn't solve it by this time,
the chances of us solving it were very slim,
so he was gonna shut us down in six months.
DOUGLAS: There was tremendous worry
that we would never solve the crime.
DET. LEEDY: We put the family's pictures
on billboards.
There were so many leads that came in.
We got a call that someone thought
one of our police officers
on the Saint Petersburg Police Department
did the murders.
DET.GEOGHEGAN: Police officer was also a marine
patrol officer that knew the Tampa Bay waters,
and lived in Tampa.
ramDET. LEEDY: The new chief decided that he was gonna have
to call it quits on the investigation
of the murders of the Rogers family.
He didn't have enough confidence in our ability
to solve this case.
DET. JAMES: Every morning, we would have briefings
and talk about the case, talk about things we could do.
So I thought that maybe putting billboards up
near where the crime had actually occurred
might generate more leads.
I ended up calling the actual billboard companies
and I was able to get the spaces
for the billboards given to us for free.
So, I had asked my father if he could maybe pay
for the printing of the actual billboards,
and he agreed, and we got them printed.
DET. LEEDY: Around the middle of May of 1992,
we put the Rogers family's pictures on billboards.
Five of them throughout Tampa.
At the same time we did that,
Sergeant Moore made a bold decision
to publicize the one piece of evidence
we did have on the case.
A picture of the brochure with the handwriting on it.
SGT. MOORE: And then I stuck my neck out a lot
when I said if you find the person
who wrote this handwriting,
you'll find the killer.
DET. LEEDY: There were so many leads that came in
after the newspaper article about the handwriting.
In the beginning of June of 1992,
we got a call that someone thought
one of our police officers
on the Saint Petersburg Police Department did the murders.
It was a male caller. He refused to identify himself.
He described this police officer as friendly.
He had a blue and white boat.
Spent a lot of time a lot of time on his boat.
DET. GEOGHEGAN: Police officer was also a marine patrol officer
that knew the Tampa Bay waters and lived in Tampa.
DET. LEEDY: The police officer matched the description
of the suspect who killed the Rogers family.
So we pulled credit card records, phone records.
DET. GEOGHEGAN: We set up surveillance
on his house and him.
DET. LEEDY: We surveilled him for probably a month.
We ended up interviewing him.
The officer was very shocked that he was named as a suspect.
He was very cooperative.
He was giving us any information that we wanted.
We had already compared his handwriting
from police reports and other documents we had.
So we knew the handwriting didn't match
and the composite also didn't match.
So we managed to find out who the caller was
and we interviewed the caller who called in on him.
Turns out the caller
didn't like this particular police officer.
Turns out that it was personal. He had a grudge against him.
We had already spent about six weeks on this lead.
But we felt very comfortable when we finished with everything
that we had eliminated the police officer.
So at this point, we still didn't have a suspect.
And we wanted to do whatever else we could do
before we were shut down in a couple months.
Sgt. Moore thought if we put the handwriting
from the brochure in the newspaper
why not put the handwriting on billboards
over in Tampa at a couple of key locations?
So those billboards went up on July 30th, 1992
and on July 31, the very next day,
we got a call from Tampa woman named Joanne Steffi
and she was very angry.
She said she already told us
who the Rogers family killer was.
She already sent us a copy of the killer's handwriting
six weeks earlier
right after the handwriting appeared in the newspaper.
At that time, she faxed over to us
a copy of a contract,
which she believed matched what we had published
in th about that obviouslyesting
was that the Canadian woman who had been raped
said that that was the type of work her rapist did.
DET. LEEDY: She identified this guy as Oba Chandler.
So Joanne Steffi went to her neighbor
and got a copy of Oba Chandler's contract.
DET. GEOGHEGAN: Joanne Steffi said the time of the murders,
she had lived next door to Oba Chandler.
He had lived on the water. He had a blue and white boat.
DET. LEEDY: Joanne Steffi said he sold the boat
shortly after the murders,
and he moved away within a year after the murders.
SGT. MOORE: We looked at it and we said
this really looks like the handwriting.
We sent this contract from Oba Chandler
to a certified handwriting expert.
We got a report back from them
that said this was the same handwriting.
So at that point, we were able to identify who the suspect was,
Oba Chandler.
[dramatic music playing]
DET. LEEDY: So we started doing criminal record checks on him,
driver's license checks,
he had 18 arrests as a juvenile,
he had felony arrests as an adult for rape,
robbery, kidnapping, armed robbery, escape.
SGT. MOORE: Pictures of Chandler matched very well
the composite that we got from the Canadian victim.
DOUGLAS: Detectives flew to Toronto,
I was with them.
They interviewed the rape victim.
SGT. MOORE: We showed her a photo lineup
and she picked Oba Chandler out
as the man who assaulted her.
DOUGLAS: Once he was identified by the rape victim,
we prepared an arrest warrant on the rape charges.
I think he intended to murder the rape victim from Canada
and would have murdered a friend had she come along,
but he didn't because there was a witness
left on land who could identify.
DET. LEEDY: Through record checks on him,
we found out he had had several children.
But at this time,
he was married to a woman named Debra
and he had a little three-year old daughter.
They were living in Port Orange
on the East Coast of Florida.
When we were gonna arrest him,
Chandler left town.
Our surveillance team followed Chandler.
He was gone for a week
and we were still tracking him when he was on his way home.
He stopped at a service station for gas.
Our units moved in on him and arrested him
for the rape of a Canadian victim.
CRAIG: When the police finally slapped
the cuffs on Oba Chandler,
I think the general feeling was one of tremendous relief
that they had finally made an arrest.
People were kind of baffled
about what his motivations were,
why he would do such a thing
because he just didn't look like the image
you would have of this evil triple killer.
SGT. MOORE: It's been three years
and we finally have the guy
in custody that murdered the three Rogers women
and raped the Canadian tourist also.
So we had to begin to try and develop
what would give us enough to charge
Once we find out Oba Chandler's name,
instead of gearing down,
which is what the chief of police at the time
wanted us to do, we had the gear up.
DET. LEEDY: Once we obtained his phone records,
we noticed that there was phone calls
from Chandler's boat through the marine operator
to his home phone during the early morning hours
the night of the murders.
SGT. MOORE: There we had the silver bullet
that tied him directly to the water on that night.
We had his handwriting on their brochure
proving that he met them.
We have a blue and white boat.
And of course, we have him making phone calls
on the night that the Roger's women disappeared.
That was enough for the State Attorney's Office
to allow us to charge him with the murders.
DOUGLAS: We intended to seek the death penalty
against Chandler.
We knew it was the right guy without question.
But we didn't take it for granted
that anything was gonna be easy.
ATTORNEY: Folks, consider the terror,
the feelings those victims felt
when they knew that they would be next.
And then the death.
Strangulation at the hands
of that man right there,
Oba Chandler.
CRAIG: During the trial, there was some speculation
that the prosecutors might not be able
to get a conviction just because
they really didn't have much in the way of physical evidence
to link Oba Chandler to the murders.
They had the tourism brochure with his handwriting.
They had phone records,
but that didn't prove that he had absolutely
been the one who had taken these women out on a boat
and thrown them overboard
with ropes attached to concrete blocks.
DOUGLAS: When the rape victim took the stand,
we had a witness that could provide an explanation
of what had happened to the Rogers women
that they couldn't provide.
She explained that this man was so convincing to her
that she got on a boat with him even though he was a stranger,
and went out at night in the middle of Tampa Bay.
It's made it completely understandable
to the jurors that Chandler could,
in fact, accomplish that.
CRAIG: The Canadian tourist was very effective.
However, that's not direct evidence
that he had actually killed these women.
The defense attorney was doing a very good job
of raising those reasonable doubts.
And it felt like the case could go either way.
DOUGLAS: The defense announced that Oba Chandler
was gonna take the stand and deny doing it.
I was shocked.
No one saw that coming.
That was a complete and utter surprise.
SGT. MOORE: He did admit to meeting the Rogers women
at a gas station and he did write on the brochure
and gave them the instructions.
But he said that that's all he did.
DET. LEEDY: Because we had the phone records
putting him on the water the night of the murders,
he had to admit that he was out there.
DET. LEEDY: Chandler said there was a gas leak
and all the gas had leaked into the water.
SGT. MOORE: And he said he was calling his wife
from the boat, telling her that he was broke down,
so that was his explanation for the calls that night.
DOUGLAS: In rebuttal, we had a mechanic
absolutely destroyed Chandler's version of events.
CRAIG: The boat mechanic testified
that the fuel line leak was actually above
where the fuel would be coming from
so that the only way that could possibly work
is if gravity had somehow reversed itself
on board over his boat.
SGT. MOORE: When the trial concluded,
and it was given to the jury to make their decision,
they came back with a verdict.
Guilty on all three counts of murder.
And then they came back later with the sentencing.
SGT. MOORE: It was a moment of thank God.
Now, we've got this monster in human form off the street.
I believe that he's finally getting
the justice he deserves.
[dramatic music playing]
SGT. MOORE: I can't even imagine what Mr. Rogers
was going through to know what happened to his wife
and his two daughters
to be taken away from him like this
when they were so young
and they had so much more life to live.
And he has to live with this
the rest of his life forever.
[dramatic music playing]