Why did the Tampa Police think their man Oba Chandler, had to be charming?
Why did Kathy Will Richardson I don't know what her real last name is since she was adopted, say to me she had lived in Madiera? I don't think she ever lived in Madiera. Because she said she had been divorced for 13 years, but still kept in contact with her husband in Madiera, and said his name was Rick Richardson. Then she had me call him one day and he asked why I needed to call him. But then it was said that the telephone number that she had given me was a number that was in Lebanon Ohio near Lebanon Correctional prison and near FedEx, where their Blond Wig in the form of Josie Hatfield also lived and knew Carnie Wilson. I guess Josie wears the wig that Eric and Sandy Parker mentioned something about in Columbus but Neil has my destiny in his back pocket in the form of stick and can tell where I am all the time, I just did not know that then. So the spider or something like that would make calls when I was not there and I never did know why a blond wig was mentioned one day and why Josie wears it. She worked at Sears Industrial for a short period of time. The wig is worn I guess because of a Tatoo Neil put on her in the Boston area
On Arc TV they said they did not think he was so charming. But how could they have thought that to be true in the first place or even after they put him on trial
There is no one in the Gates household that was ever a criminal. Our dad, as an engineer and husband of Betty Louise Gates, was a victim like his sons and like me most if not all my life even after over 20 years of sleep deprivation. Our dad died in 1978 after moving back to Cape Coral Florida near where I had our last vacation together on Sanibel Island just before our mom and his wife died in 1962.
There was a document that was stalking the Gates family from before I was born. It was a document that writes itself and was being against the Gates family even before I was born as far as I know.
My two siblings were born in Dayton and are now about 71 and 75 years old. I am just about 68 years old. Because I was born a Pisces and the 12th house is an issue there was a document that I did not even know existed for over 40 years of my life. Our dad and who then to be our mom of three children, not two, moved to St Peterburgh Flordia the west coast of Florida I think the only state to have both an east coast and a west coast, and on August 22, 1950, I was born. Our dad after taking care of his mom, who was dying of terminal Cancer until about 1954 when she passed away. I was just 4 years old and do not really remember any of that time period but I know our dad had to have a nurse come in and administer Morphine. In the 1950's that was the only form of Hospice Care.
He was offered an engineering position in Ft Lauderdale about the time that Pam Neil Eleanor came to Florida. They somehow knew where we lived and brought a dog and I guess the document with them.
The name of the company our dad started working for was Concrete Pipe Products which started being taken over almost from the start. First, they brought in new management and then they changed the name twice first Concrete Pipe Products to American Marietta then to Martin Marietta and finally after our dad retired the fourth name of Lockheed Martin in Colorado. It changed from being a concrete pipe company to Cape Canivel company that may have caused his leased car to be stolen the first time he and the sibling in Columbus and me in the back seat went over to Pam Neil and Eleanor's place in Davey Florida
Oba Chandler Chooses Cheap Chow
Fans of our book already know that Florida serves one of the finest last meals in the USA. Prison cooks make a special trip to the grocery store, and the condemned can order whatever they want with a generous $40 spending limit. That means steak, lobster, shrimp, gourmet side dishes, fancy desserts...
Then why in the world did Oba Chandler, executed today for the triple rape/murder of a mother and her two daughters, order nothing but two salami sandwiches and one peanut butter and jelly sandwich, all washed down with a simple cup of coffee?
Was he afflicted with bland taste buds? A limited imagination? Or did some part of the phrase "You can order anything you want" cause his decision-making process to trip, stumble, and fall like an overweight clown slipping on a banana peel?
Then why in the world did Oba Chandler, executed today for the triple rape/murder of a mother and her two daughters, order nothing but two salami sandwiches and one peanut butter and jelly sandwich, all washed down with a simple cup of coffee?
Was he afflicted with bland taste buds? A limited imagination? Or did some part of the phrase "You can order anything you want" cause his decision-making process to trip, stumble, and fall like an overweight clown slipping on a banana peel?
Who was Oba Chandler? I was born in St Petersburg Florida and our dad took two of three children and our mom, his only wife, to Tampa Florida in the 1950’s when I was eating Peanut Butter and jelly and he made the picnic table I ate them on. But our dad was not a criminal, but there was Red that started pestering our dad as a truck driver, and in 1964 a person in Columbus that claimed he was a vice cop in about 1969, when he broke into the rooming house I lived in, and broke into my room, groped me saying “I want that big one” our dad had said those words in Tampa but only because I had caught a fish in the canal we lived on that broke the line. It was weird because I had thrown the line out and tied it to a tree all day long. I went over to Steve Bridges house, but when I went home, I saw the bobber going up and down in the canal. So I called Steve with his boat. I watched the fish go out of the canal but could not stop it from happening because the bobber was set too deep even for a fishing net. I am sure it was not a turtle because they have to come up for air and the canal was too long for that to be possible
TALLAHASSEE, Fla/COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) - Florida and Ohio each executed men by lethal injection on Tuesday, one for killing a mother and two daughters on vacation and another for shooting dead his three sons.
The executions brought to 41 the number of people put to death in the United States this year.
Oba Chandler, 65, was executed in Florida for the murders of Joan Rogers, 36, and her daughters Michelle, 17, and Christe, 14, who were traveling back to Ohio after a trip to Disney World in 1989.
They met Chandler in Tampa, where they stopped to ask for directions after becoming lost searching for their motel, authorities said. Chandler gave them directions to a Days Inn and then apparently offered to take them on a sunset cruise on his boat, “Gypsy One,” that evening on Tampa Bay.
The mother and daughters were never seen alive again. Their three bodies — bound, gagged and naked below the waist — were found floating in Tampa Bay three days later.
It took investigators three years to solve the case. Local officials posted billboards in the Tampa Bay area showing the distinctive handwriting found scribbled on a tourist brochure in Rogers’ car, which led to Chandler’s arrest in 1992.
At trial, prosecutors said Chandler had lured the trio to his boat, raped them and dumped them into the bay with cement blocks tied around their necks to make sure they sank. Chandler testified he had given Rogers directions but said he was out fishing alone the night of the murders.
A Canadian tourist testified that she had been raped by Chandler, an aluminum contractor by trade, under similar circumstances a few weeks before the murders.
Chandler was convicted in 1994 and sentenced to death on three counts of first-degree murder. He was pronounced dead on Tuesday at 4:25 p.m. local time at Florida State Prison near Starke, said Amy Graham, spokeswoman for Florida Governor Rick Scott.
Chandler’s last meal consisted of two salami sandwiches on white bread and half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He made no final statement, Graham said.
Oba Chandler
WitnessesAnother lead was that on May 15, 1989—two weeks prior to the Rogers murders—Chandler lured Canadian tourist Judy Blair onto his boat in nearby Madeira Beach, raped her, then dropped her off back on land. Blair made her way back to her hotel room where her friend Barbara Mottram was waiting. He was not charged or tried for this crime. It is thought he did not murder her because Barbara refused his offer to join them on the boat, a decision which more than likely saved both their lives. As a result, Judy Blair testified during his trial for the murders to establish his pattern of attack and the similarities between the two crimes. Blair testified that on May 14, Chandler gave his name as Dave Posner or Posno when the three first met at a convenience store in Tampa. Presumably he gave the same alias to the Rogers’s. He told Blair and Mottram he was in the aluminum contracting business, which helped lead investigators to him, as well as the naming of the investigation to capture him: Operation Tin Man. The description that Judy gave was also posted on the billboards along with the handwriting samples.
In Ohio, inmate Reginald Brooks on Tuesday became the first person put to death in that state since it revised death penalty procedures in September in response to concerns over inconsistent practices.
Brooks was convicted of shooting to death each of his three sons, aged 11, 15 and 17, while they were in their beds in East Cleveland in 1982. His wife had served him with divorce papers two days before the killings.
Brooks, who spent nearly three decades on death row, died at 2:04 p.m. local time, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. A corrections official said the mother of Brooks’ children watched him die.
Defense attorneys had argued that Brooks was a paranoid schizophrenic and suffered from mental illness before he killed his sons. He was denied clemency by both the Ohio Parole Board and Governor John Kasich.
Brooks, 66, was the oldest person put to death since Ohio resumed executions in 1999, according to Carlo LoParo, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
For his last meal on Monday evening, Brooks requested lasagna, garlic bread, ice cream, chocolate cake and root beer, along with almonds, beef jerky and caramel candy, LoParo said.
Brooks was the first person put to death in Ohio since a federal judge delayed the execution of Kenneth Smith in July, ruling that Ohio’s execution rules were enforced inconsistently.
But the state issued revised procedures in September that it said addressed the judge’s concerns, and the judge ruled that the state had corrected its course, paving the way for Brooks’ execution.
Brooks had claimed that Ohio had made only cosmetic changes and that its death penalty practices may have worsened in the last few months.
Ohio has executed five men in 2011, while Florida has executed two, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Angels and Demons - Chapter 1: Sunset | Chapter 2: Haunted | Chapter 3: Neighbors | Chapter 4: The Tin Man | Chapter 5: Silver Bullet | Chapter 6: Night Stories | Chapter 7: The Magic Kingdom
Chapter 4: The Tin ManAfter nearly three years of frustration, a name stands out from the thousands of tips. Sgt. Moore was praying. He did it every morning, in his car on his way to work. He did it in the evenings, in his prayer group at his Baptist church. He prayed for himself and his team of investigators. He prayed for the man they were hunting. Glen Moore did not know why God had allowed this person to walk free through the world, doing such horrific things. But he believed that the Lord had a reason for everything, even this. So now he was asking for illumination. He wanted to understand what purpose the killer served, what goal was being furthered in the eternal plan. Mostly, though, he wanted to know how to track this man down and lock him away forever. "If you want us to find this guy," he would say to God, "show us the way." *** A thousand miles to the north, Hal Rogers was carrying on his own conversation with God. People kept telling Hal that God never gives us more of a burden than we can handle. But Hal, lost for so long in numbing sorrow, was not so sure. There were days, standing in the milking parlor before dawn, when he would have given anything for God to come down from heaven and answer a question or two. For starters, Hal wondered why God had taken his family from him. Hal had heard the minister's explanation for this at the funeral, but he had found that particular explanation to be empty, unmemorable, completely useless. What purpose had been served by allowing his wife and daughters to suffer and die in the prime of their lives? Why, for that matter, had God left Hal alive to continue on alone? Why had he been chosen for such a loss? Had he done something wrong? The months were blurring together. Hal was drinking too much. He was driving his car too fast late at night. For a while he was frightened, because he could not bring himself to summon up a clear image of Jo's and Michelle's and Christe's faces. Try as he might, he could not remember what they looked like. One day, Hal decided to put an end to it all. He climbed on his motorcycle, found a long and empty stretch of State Road 49, accelerated till he was tearing down the pavement at 100 mph, then closed his eyes and took both hands off the handlebars. A mile or two later, when the motorcycle finally stopped, he opened his eyes and realized he was still on the pavement and still very much alive. He figured it was Jo and the girls, watching over him. They weren't ready to let him join them yet. Too easy. EVIDENCE: As time went on, it seemed increasingly clear that whoever had written these directions was almost certainly the killer.
The detectives were in the dark, searching for the door that would lead them to the light. It was the spring of 1992, and the investigation was well into its third year. Sgt. Moore and the rest of the team did not know how much longer they had left until the powers that be decided the whole thing wasn't worth it anymore. Moore and the others kept going, trying almost anything they could think of to buy more time, more room, a solid lead. They held more press conferences, brought new people onto the team, raised the reward from $5,000 to $25,000. They asked Unsolved Mysteries to feature the case. They remembered the writing from the Calais -- the handwritten directions found on the Clearwater Beach brochure -- and asked whoever wrote them to please call. Moore turned to his wife, Carol, for help. After 20 years of marriage, he knew she was smart and independent and not afraid to speak her mind. She worked as an interior decorator, which meant she saw the world differently, thought in terms of colors and shades and balance, sensed when things were arranged properly and when they were not. So Moore showed Carol photos of the brochure and the handwriting. "What does this mean to you?" he asked. When he was off duty, he would take her to the boat ramp. He took her to the Days Inn. He drove with her on I-4 and I-275, guiding her along the route that the Rogers women had taken into Tampa and to their deaths. "What do you see?" he said. "What were the victims thinking?" Carol did not disappoint him. When they drove the route, she wondered if perhaps Jo and the girls had been in the far right lane of I-275 South and accidentally gotten off at Dale Mabry Highway, where the exit-only lane suddenly curves right. Maybe they got lost, she said. Maybe they stopped someplace on Dale Mabry and asked for directions. Could that be where they met the person who wrote on their brochure? Glen listened carefully, filing everything away. He was ready to consider any plausible theory. After all this time, he and the other investigators were still working out of the gray office on the second floor of the St. Petersburg police station. The team members had their work cut out for them. Finding the killer was already a mammoth challenge. But as they piled up the overtime on the case, they also found themselves being second-guessed inside their own police department. From almost the start of their time on the Rogers investigation, Moore and his detectives felt they were under attack from nearly every direction. Other officers resented how much time they were being given. They especially resented seeing so many resources devoted to a case that, in their opinion, was clearly unsolvable. The only way the case would ever be closed, they said, was if the killer strolled into the station and turned himself in. Moore's team was accused of wasting time, acting selfishly, riding the case for all it was worth. "How much longer are you gonna milk this one?" people would say. The jabs were not occasional. They were a common refrain, heard in the halls, in the offices, in staff meetings. "Why are people still working on this case?" other officers asked. "Why are we doing this?"
The critics were envious of the fact that the team was allowed to use a special computer system, the HOLMES system brought over from England. Due to the high-profile nature of the case -- the Unsolved Mysteries segment had aired in the fall of 1991 -- they also assumed that Moore and his people were signing book and movie contracts left and right, preparing to grow rich and famous. As it happened, producers and agents were calling, expressing interest in the case. Moore and the rest of the team had already agreed, though, that they would have no part in such projects. Their goal was to make an arrest, period. The critics weren't buying it. "When's your book coming out?" they would ask Moore. Moore would look at them. "I'm not a writer," he would say. "I'm not doing a book." Ill feelings toward the sergeant and his detectives skyrocketed early in their investigation, when the decision was made to segregate themselves inside a special office. Moore's team had occupied one end of a large squad room, sharing the space with detectives working robberies and other homicides. Then one day a construction crew showed up and erected a wall across the center of the room, dividing the area where the Rogers investigators were working from the area where the other detectives worked. It didn't help that the half of the squad room claimed by Moore and his people had better windows, affording them more light than the detectives on the other side of the wall. It also didn't help that Moore had a lock installed on the door to his half of the squad room, or that the only people with keys to that lock were the members of his team. Even worse, the thermostat regulating the temperature for the entire room was located on the other side of that locked door. This meant that Moore's team controlled the temperature for everyone in the room; sometimes, when no one was inside the locked office, the other detectives would be burning up or freezing and would have no way to get to the thermostat. By their nature, detectives are nosy people. They don't like to be shut out of anything, especially a piece of their own home turf. From the day the room was split in half, the other investigators complained about the locked door and the thermostat and the unfairness of the window situation. Mostly, though, they griped about being locked out. "What's going on back there?" they would say to the team members emerging from the inner sanctum. "What's so secret?"
As much as Moore and the rest of the team chafed at the accusations of elitism, discretion told them to keep their mouths shut. Given the appalling nature of the crime they were investigating, they knew that any leaks could have disastrous consequences. Among other things, they could not allow the names of potential suspects -- and there were hundreds of them over the years -- to accidentally be made public without risking the ruin of those people's lives. To be fair, the frustrations with the Rogers investigation were not all based on envy or petty concerns. Some of the other homicide detectives, struggling with unsolved cases of their own, wanted to know why the murders of Jo and her daughters merited so much more attention than other homicides. Yes, this case was terrible. But was it necessarily more terrible than other murders? What if some of the vast amounts of time and money expended on the Rogers case for more than two years now had been directed instead toward other investigations? How many more killers might have already been caught and put behind bars? These were legitimate questions. Furthermore, they were exactly the kind of issues that had to be agonized over and weighed by the officials running the police department. After all, the department ran on a budget like every other government agency. Resources were limited; tough decisions had to be made on how to divide those resources. Up to now, the department's chain of command had decided that the Rogers investigation did merit extraordinary attention. Moore and his team were searching for someone who was almost certainly a serial killer with a taste for murdering more than one victim at a time. If this person were not caught, how many more lives might he claim? Still, the longer the case dragged on, the more difficult it became for the department to reconcile the tension between the desire to make an arrest in the Rogers murders and the need to attend to other cases. Moore felt this tension every day as he walked down the halls of the station. To him, it seemed as though he and his investigators were working under a perpetual cloud. He felt he had the support of his immediate superiors, Lt. Gary Hitchcox and Maj. Lois Worlds; Hitchcox, in fact, was devoting himself full-time to the case and was working out of the team's office. But elsewhere in the department's hierarchy, there were those who clearly thought the time was approaching when Moore and his team would have to be ordered to let it go. "We had a tremendous amount of pressure put on us by the administration," Moore says. "Not to solve the case, but to get off the case." To keep the investigation alive, Moore would have to use every tool at his disposal. It wasn't enough to be a good detective or a strong supervisor. He had to transform himself into a master salesman, too. That's why he kept the chain of command well-supplied with updates and progress reports, keeping them happy and off his back. It's also why he became so adept at manipulating the media. In the past year, since the FBI had recommended using the media to generate leads, Moore had seen for himself just how useful a bit of coverage could be. He had held several press conferences, given interviews, cooperated with TV producers. With each new round of publicity, tips poured in. By now, Moore had learned a great deal about how reporters and editors think, how to get their attention, how to make them do what he needed. He had discovered, for instance, that the media prefer to be fed their news in bite-sized chunks, easy to digest and easy to pass along to the public. Thinking back to his first press conference, he realized he had overloaded the reporters with too much information. He had given them six or seven items -- the FBI profile, the innocence of Hal Rogers, the likelihood that the killer lived in Tampa Bay, to name a few -- when any one of those items, by itself, would have been strong enough to make a compelling news story. It would have been better if he had parceled out the items slowly, one or two at a time, over several months. Each piece of information would have gotten better play, and there would have been that many more rounds of stories, generating that many more new tips. Now he knew better. He understood that reporters were constantly hungry for something fresh. "Every time you talk to them," he would say, "you've got to have a new hook, a new bait." So he gave it to them, calling press conferences and issuing press releases to detail important developments, different strategies, emerging theories. Moore didn't particularly enjoy talking to reporters. In fact, it made him uncomfortable. But the more coverage he drummed up, the better the chance that the right tip would finally come the team's way. The publicity served a second purpose. As long as the Rogers story was in the newspapers and on the evening news, Moore figured, the higher-ups in the police department would be reluctant to pull the plug on the investigation.
The highest of the higher-ups, it turned out, didn't need to be pressured into supporting the investigation. Since the Rogers women were killed, there had been a couple of police chiefs in St. Petersburg. Early in 1992, the chief was Ernest "Curt" Curtsinger, and some of the pointed questions about the investigation were reaching his office. So Moore and Lt. Hitchcox sat down with the chief one day and gave him an extensive review of the case, telling him everything they were doing and everything they were still struggling to get done. Curtsinger listened closely. When they were finished, he turned to Moore. "How many people do you need?" he asked. "Four." "How about six?" Moore was amazed. At that point, there were eight people on his team, including him and Cindy Cummings and J.J. Geoghegan. Now, here was the chief himself approving six more detectives -- he also okayed an extra investigator, an agent from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement -- and promised them at least six more months to work on the case. The euphoria was short-lived. Curtsinger had been under attack for some time, accused of insensitivity to minorities. A month after he approved the new detectives for Moore's team, Curtsinger was fired. Moore was left to wonder where the investigation stood. Who would be the next police chief, and how supportive would he be? How much time did the team truly have left before someone pulled the plug? All Moore and his investigators could do was keep going until someone told them to stop. By now, more than 1,500 tips had been logged in the case, and the number jumped again late that March, when the investigation was featured a second time on Unsolved Mysteries. Hundreds of people called, saying they knew someone with a blue and white boat or someone else suspicious that the police should check out. Many of the calls were frustrating. One St. Petersburg woman, for instance, phoned to say she had a sister in Tampa who had wondered for some time if a man who used to live down the street from her had something to do with the murders. The caller suggested that the police phone her sister. A detective did in fact call the sister's house, but she was not home. The detective left a message, but the sister with the information did not call back. That was how it went, over and over. At any one time, the investigators were checking out an endless parade of names and numbers and facts, hoping they would finally stumble across the one detail that would blow the case wide open. They had no doubt that the detail was out there. "This can be solved like any other crime," Geoghegan would say to Cummings. "All we have to do is work it."
After many long months spent trying to understand exactly how Jo and the girls had died, the detectives were now leaning heavily toward the theory that the attack had been carried out by only one person. Cummings, an experienced rock climber who knew something about ropes and knots, had studied the ropes used on the three women. In each case, she observed, the hands had been tied in the same manner. Furthermore, it appeared to her that whoever tied the hands had done the job in a hurry; that was why, she believed, Michelle had managed to work one of her hands loose before she died. To Cummings and the other investigators, this evidence pointed toward a single assailant, moving quickly to place Jo and the girls in his control. He had probably held a gun on them, threatened to kill one of them if they moved, promised that everything would be okay if they just did as he told them. Under this theory, the killer had then taped their mouths, removed the clothes from the lower part of their bodies, then tied their feet. After examining the ropes, Cummings had noted that the women's feet had been bound much more carefully; if their hands were already tied and their mouths taped, he would have had the luxury of taking his time to tie their feet. None of this, however, brought them any closer to identifying the killer. To do that, the investigators were focusing increasingly on the handwritten directions found on the Clearwater Beach brochure in the Rogers car. The directions, which told Jo and the girls how to find their motel, were written on the back of the brochure, on the same page as a map of Tampa Bay. Below the map, the writing said: Courtney Cambell Causeway RT 60 Days Inn
Originally the detectives had thought that the person who shared the directions had merely been someone helpful who gave the Rogers women assistance and then went on his way. Now the investigators saw it differently. After analyzing the timetable of the women's last day alive, as well as the psychological profile provided by the FBI, they thought it appeared extremely likely that whoever had given the Rogers women the directions was the same person who had arranged to meet them later at the boat ramp. The man who wrote the directions, then, was almost certainly the killer. The writing was distinctive, even to a layperson. The man they were looking for printed his letters, with understated R's and an exaggerated curving hook extending to the left from the bottom of his Y's. That May, Moore held another press conference, where he announced the new theory about the killer. He encouraged the media to publish samples of the handwriting, and asked anyone who recognized the writing to please call. Moore repeated the investigators' belief that the killer probably would turn out to be someone charming and likable, someone with a job and a home, someone who appeared respectable and harmless. "Don't rule out anyone," he said. "Think about your husband, your boyfriend, your fellow employee." The Tin It was 2 1/2 years since Jo Ann Steffey had clipped the composite drawing from the newspaper, but she had not forgotten about the man who used to live two houses away on Dalton Avenue in her Tampa neighborhood. She had already tried once to report her suspicions. But it bothered her that she'd never seen any proof that her tip was even investigated. As it happened, someone else had tried to pass along her suspicions. After hearing Jo Ann talk about the neighbor with the blue and white boat, one of Steffey's sisters had called the police. This was the tip that had been phoned in on that night in March, when the Rogers case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries. Steffey's sister was the one who had talked to the detective, encouraging her to speak to Steffey. The detective had called Steffey's house and left a message, but for some reason the message never reached Steffey. Nor had her sister, Steffey says, told her about calling the police. Steffey felt a connection to Jo Rogers. They shared a similar first name, and just like Jo, Steffey had two daughters. Sometimes she had nightmares about the family. She would see them on the boat and would wake up, her heart pounding. "It could have been me and my girls," she would say. So when she picked up the newspaper the morning after Sgt. Moore's press conference -- it was Thursday, May 14, 1992 -- and read the quotes about the handwriting and how it was the key to finding the killer, Steffey found herself wondering if she should report her suspicions again. The police were saying the killer probably had a job not far from wherever he had met Jo and her daughters. Steffey remembered that her former neighbor was an aluminum contractor who built porches and additions for homes. But she couldn't remember where his office had been. So she went next door and asked her neighbor, Mozelle Smith, if she did. Smith had once hired the man to add an aluminum porch to another house she owned in Tampa. She said she thought he worked out of his home. Then something else occurred to her: The contract. When she hired the man to build her porch, he had filled out a contract for her. A handwriting sample.
Later, looking back on their detective work, Mozelle Smith and Jo Ann Steffey would differ in their recollections of the exact sequence of these events. In fact, in the years that followed there would be a great deal of disagreement about how the two neighbors and those close to them pursued their suspicions concerning the man down the street. Smith, for instance, would insist that on that day, when the handwriting appeared in the newspaper, she immediately found the aluminum contract filled out by the man. Steffey, meanwhile, would say that the two of them searched through Smith's house for hours, sifting through the drawers where Mozelle kept her paperwork, but could not find the contract. Either way, Steffey says she was not deterred. As far as she could tell, she had enough to justify calling the task force. She was still nervous, wondering if she were right, wondering if her former neighbor would learn that she had reported him and if perhaps he had an accomplice who lived nearby. But she picked up the phone anyway. "I don't care," she said. "I'm gonna call'em." Steffey talked to Eileen Przybysz, a civilian investigator. Steffey says she told Przybysz about her neighbor and his blue and white boat and the dark-colored sports utility vehicle he had driven. She told how the man had lived in a house on Dalton Avenue along a canal that fed into Tampa Bay, and how her neighbor had hired him for her porch and was searching for the contract. She told how he had moved away suddenly with his wife and little girl two summers ago, and how he had always seemed off to her, made her feel as though he had something to hide. And she shared the name of the man: Oba Chandler.
What happened next? Jo Ann Steffey remembers it like this: Later that afternoon, she says, Mozelle Smith called to tell her she had found the contract, along with a check signed by Oba Chandler. Steffey hurried next door with a clipping from the newspaper, showing the handwriting that Sgt. Moore had displayed at the press conference. Smith was outside, waiting for her. The two of them, Steffey says, made the comparison right there in the driveway. They took the newspaper clipping and the contract and the check and placed them on the tailgate of Smith's husband's truck, and then looked back and forth among the three samples, examining the handwriting. Steffey felt her knees turning to water. She was suddenly so weak, she almost could not stand. It was the same. She was sure of it.
Steffey called the task force again and spoke to Przybysz, the civilian investigator. She told her about the contract. "I've got it," she said. Przybysz listened. It would be helpful to see that contract, she said. "Can you fax it over?" The contract was faxed, along with the check signed by Chandler. The fax was then attached to the investigator's notes on Steffey -- and put in a stack of other potentially promising tips. Once again, the task force was overwhelmed with information. Sgt. Moore's attempts to generate tips were working almost too well. All the investigators could do was check out the tips, one at a time. They would get to Steffey and her suspicions as soon as they could. Moore, meanwhile, was preparing for a possible struggle with the new person running the police department. His name was Mack Vines. He had been the chief of the St. Petersburg Police Department in the 1970s, and had gone on to serve as chief of police in Dallas and Charlotte, N.C., before returning to Pinellas County as director of the police academy at St. Petersburg Junior College. Now Vines was back in charge of the St. Petersburg police, trying to mend a department torn apart by Curtsinger's controversial tenure and firing. Vines wasn't the new chief; he had been hired as an assistant city manager to oversee the police department until another chief was found. It was unclear whether Vines would stay in his new job after a chief was hired, but for now he was sitting in the chief's office on the third floor of the station. Vines was brought in on May 15, one day after Jo Ann Steffey phoned in her tip. From that day onward, he had his hands full, trying to boost morale and hold the department together in the wake of Curtsinger's firing. He had a host of things to worry about other than the Rogers case. Still, Moore says, Vines soon made it clear that he was debating whether it made sense to continue devoting so many officers to one investigation. "We're not going to continue this case forever," Moore remembers Vines telling him. Moore was realistic enough to know that time was limited. But he pointed out to Vines that back in February the task force had been promised at least six more months to work. Those months would be up in mid-August. All right, said Vines. He agreed to honor the six-month commitment. But in August, he said, the case would be reviewed to see if the task force should be disbanded. To Moore, the message was obvious enough. Come August, the investigation would be over. "The guillotine," as Moore later put it, "was coming down."
Years later, Vines would say he doesn't remember specifically telling Moore that the case would not be continued forever. But he might well have said it, he adds, because it was true. No investigation, Vines says, can be allowed to drag on indefinitely. Either way, he says he knew how hard Moore and the task force were working and was hoping they would develop some strong leads by the August deadline. That summer, the Rogers investigators made the most of the time that remained before the deadline. Amid the hundreds of phone calls and tips, they were still trying to understand exactly how Jo and the girls had spent their last hours. Their latest theory, as it happened, relied heavily on the idea suggested by Moore's wife, who had wondered if the family might have been driving in the far right lane of I-275 South in Tampa, and accidentally gotten off at the Dale Mabry exit and then stopped somewhere for directions. Cummings and Geoghegan thought this idea had merit. For one thing, when the two detectives looked at the directions on the brochure and the map beside it, it appeared that the point of origin for the directions was in fact on Dale Mabry or nearby. Second, the detectives had driven that stretch of I-275 and seen how suddenly the far right lane turned into an exit and how easy it would be for a driver unfamiliar with the road to suddenly veer off the interstate. As for where the three women might have gone for directions, the investigators thought the most likely answer was a McDonald's just north of the exit. The fast food restaurant would have been directly in front of them, on the right side of Dale Mabry, making it easy to turn in; it was also a place that would have looked familiar and safe to someone who was lost. Maybe Moore's wife was right. Maybe they saw the golden arches and stopped there, hoping to find a map or a soft drink or just a place to use the bathroom. And while they were there, they met the person who wrote the directions on their brochure. Once he wrote the directions, he knew they were staying at the Days Inn, which would have made it easy to arrange a boat ride later in the day. Maybe he knew they were tourists and therefore easy prey. He could have seen their Ohio tag and struck up a conversation with them, just as the man in Madeira Beach had done with the Canadian tourist when he saw her and her friend in the parking lot of the convenience store. If this theory were true, Jo and Michelle and Christe had died simply because they had wound up in the wrong lane of the interstate.
Time was running out. The August deadline was fast approaching. The detectives drove up and down Dale Mabry, talking to business owners, talking to waitresses, interviewing anyone who might have seen the Rogers women or might know someone with handwriting like the directions on the brochure. They questioned dancers at the strip joints near Tampa Stadium, showing them the composite from the Madeira Beach case, asking if they knew a man who looked like this. The first week of June, as the third anniversary of the murders came and went, Cummings and Geoghegan sat in a car near the boat ramp on the causeway, watching for hours in case the killer returned out of some perverse desire to relive the moment when Jo and the girls stepped onto his boat. But they never saw him. Early that summer, the investigators also were talking about billboards. It was an unusual idea, suggested by a couple of the detectives, Jim Culberson and Mark Deasaro. What would happen, they said, if the task force placed the faces of the Rogers women on billboards, along with an appeal to the public for help? Moore, open to anything that might work, thought it sounded good. Even better, it was free. Patrick Media Group Inc. Culberson's father donated the $1,000 required to produce the signs. In May, the billboards went up around Tampa Bay. In huge red letters, they shouted the question WHO KILLED THE ROGERS FAMILY? Below the words were giant photos of Jo, Michelle and Christe, a reminder that the reward for an arrest and conviction was $25,000, and the phone number for the task force. The detectives were not the only ones thinking about new directions for the investigation. Barbara Sheen Todd, a longtime Pinellas County commissioner, had been following the case closely; like so many, she had not been able to forget Jo and her daughters. When Todd heard that the investigators now believed the killer had left his handwriting on the brochure, she called Moore with an idea of her own. Why not put the handwriting onto billboards? Initially Moore was not sure where they would get the money for a second round of billboards. But after Todd told him she would make some calls and take care of it, the two of them worked together to get the new billboards up. Moore doubted the billboards would generate that many leads. However, if more billboards went up with the help of a county commissioner and Moore asked her to join him at another press conference, the media would have a good hook to bite on.
The truth was, the press was growing bored with the Rogers case. When the first billboards had appeared, there had been relatively little coverage. But now, with Todd's help, Moore was confident that the second billboards would lead to renewed interest in the case. The billboards would be shown on TV and in the newspapers -- they were a perfect visual, just the sort of thing editors loved -- and the handwriting would be noticed not by a few motorists, but by hundreds of thousands of readers and viewers from all over Tampa Bay. The strategy went off exactly as planned. With Todd's encouragement, Patrick Media Group agreed to donate the space a second time, and the new billboards, emblazoned with the handwriting samples, went up on Thursday, July 30. That same day, Moore and Todd stood together at a press conference held in Tampa -- this was another strong visual touch -- near one of the billboards, erected on Himes Avenue and Columbus Drive, close to the section of Dale Mabry where the investigators believed the Rogers women had met their killer. "Normally our policy is not to discuss evidence, or have the public view evidence, in unsolved homicide cases," Moore said about the handwriting. "However, the Rogers case is so unique, and the necessity to capture the killer so compelling, the need to display this evidence overrides normal procedures." When it was her turn to speak, Todd was sincere and impassioned. She said exactly what was needed. "The thing to emphasize," she said, "is there is no doubt this person will kill again." Jo Ann Steffey couldn't believe it. She and Mozelle Smith and others had been calling the task force, asking if anyone had checked out Oba Chandler and his handwriting sample. Each time, they were told to please be patient, that the investigators were still catching up on the backlog of tips and would get back to them as soon as possible. Now the task force members were putting up billboards, practically begging for someone to tell them what they already knew. Hadn't they looked at the handwriting on the contract? Steffey called and talked to Przybysz, the investigator who had taken her original tip. "What are you people doing over there?" Steffey asked her. Przybysz said she had the information that Steffey had called in earlier. They were getting to it, she said. Be patient.
Mozelle Smith's daughter was calling as well, pressing to know what had happened to the fax of the contract and check signed by Oba Chandler. She also talked to Przybysz. Overwhelmed with phone calls, the investigator told her that she couldn't put her hands on the fax right away and would have to get back to her. So Smith's daughter faxed the papers again. This time, though, she threw in a cover letter, bristling with frustration. Here is another copy of Oba Chandler's handwriting and on the back of his check is his driver's license number. Although I'm sure you received numerous samples of handwriting, many of us are convinced that this handwriting is the same as the one published in the papers. We feel so strongly that they are one and the same that due to your lack of response we were tempted to pursue this with a handwriting expert of our own. However, due to Commissioner Todd's new personal interest we have recontacted you. We expect a response to this information as soon as possible. Thank you for your assistance. The letter was difficult to ignore. Przybysz looked at the writing on the contract and on the check. She didn't know what to think. There wasn't enough writing on the check to make any comparison, just a signature. As for the writing on the contract, it was blurry. Przybysz went to Moore and told him that some people in Tampa kept calling, insisting they had the guy. Looking over the notes and the fax, Moore saw that this particular lead was one of many assigned to Geoghegan. It was in his stack of tips still to be checked out. Moore called Geoghegan, who was out on the road that day, and asked him to find this woman and get the original. No problem, said Geoghegan. It was Friday, July 31. Two weeks before the deadline. Geoghegan went to the address in Tampa where Mozelle Smith was waiting. Smith was not in the friendliest of moods. She didn't want to be interviewed by Geoghegan or anybody else. If anything, she wanted him to answer a few questions. After weeks of trying to get the task force's attention, she wasn't sure she should give him the original of the contract. What if they lost it? Hadn't they already misplaced the first fax that had been sent over? Geoghegan did his best to reassure her. But Smith wanted something more. Before she gave him the contract, she demanded that he sign a piece of paper acknowledging that he was taking custody of the document. She had a notary public -- a friend of her daughter's -- standing by, ready to notarize the piece of paper. Being on the receiving end of all this was not exactly standard procedure. But what was Geoghegan supposed to do? He signed the paper, watched the notary stamp it and got out of there. Contract in hand, he drove back to St. Petersburg, across the sparkling waters where Jo and the girls had died.
Years later, Moore would think about Jo Ann Steffey and Mozelle Smith and shake his head. He acknowledges that the tip from the women and their families should have been pursued more quickly. But at the time, he says, the task force was swamped with tips, many of them from people who were sure they had found the killer. Among all the other handwriting samples flowing into the office, the contract with Oba Chandler's writing was overlooked. "The handwriting thing did get misplaced. It was in a stack about this high," says Moore, holding his hand about 6 inches above the table in front of him. "Nobody seems to understand how difficult it was to manage this massive amount of paperwork." But on that summer day in 1992, when Geoghegan returned to the office with the contract, things moved quickly. Moore and Geoghegan looked back and forth between the contract and the directions on the brochure. They appeared to be written by the same person, but it was hard to be sure. The contract, it turned out, was not the original. It was the customer's copy, the copy from underneath the original, and the writing was faint. Still, the resemblance appeared strong -- strong enough that the task force had a new suspect and a new focus. Moore and the others scrambled to learn more about this Oba Chandler. They ran his name in every computer they could think of and quickly discovered that he was 45 years old and living with his wife and daughter across the state in Port Orange, near Daytona Beach. They learned that Chandler's old house was on Dalton Avenue, not far from the McDonald's on N Dale Mabry, and only 2 miles from the boat ramp where Jo and the girls had disappeared. At the time, state records showed, he had owned a 21-foot Bayliner boat, with a blue exterior and white interior. At the time, he was also the registered owner of a dark blue Jeep Cherokee. Furthermore, he had a long criminal record and had been charged with everything from kidnapping to burglary to armed robbery to counterfeiting.
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All of these facts were encouraging. But the investigators did not dare get their hopes up too high; they had been dashed so often before. Then Marilyn Johnson spoke up. Johnson was a soft-spoken, older woman, a grandmother who sometimes doted on the other members of the task force. She worked as an office assistant, typing information into the HOLMES computer. She was not a detective, but Moore had encouraged everyone to toss out ideas. So one day, at the end of a meeting on the new suspect, Johnson raised her hand. "Yes, Marilyn," said Moore. "I don't know if you noticed it or not," she said. "But this guy looks just like the composite." Moore's mouth dropped open. In all the rush, and in all the checking, no one else had thought to make this simplest comparison. They had a photo of Chandler, given to them by probation officials. And when Moore looked at it and then at the composite drawing, he saw it, plain as day. "You're right, Marilyn," he said. "You're right." They had found him. After three years of back-breaking investigation, Moore was convinced they had the man they were looking for. Now all they had to do was prove it.
One more thing. As the investigation raced forward, energized by these discoveries, Marilyn Johnson pointed out something else. Typing files into the computer, she remembered a fact -- one fact out of the tens of thousands of stray facts that had been logged over the years -- that had escaped everyone else's memory. The man who had raped the Canadian woman, Johnson pointed out, had told the victim he owned an aluminum company. Just like Chandler. That was how they came up with the code name. As they turned their attention to their prey, the members of the task force tried to keep his real name out of their conversations and even their reports. They didn't want to be paranoid, but they had no desire for the word to get out and for Chandler to learn they were on his trail. So they called him by a different name. A name that played off his line of work. A name that was perfect for someone who they suspected had no heart. They called him the Tin Man. THE MATCH: The composite drawing from the Madeira Beach rape and Oba Chandler's photo.