Uncovering Further Victims and Legacy

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast, the podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. Episode 276. I am your humble host, Thomas Rosland Weiburg Toon. If you, dear listener, are tired of the vast swath of AI slop and AI voiced content out there You've come to the right place. My promise to you. is that the Serial Killer Podcast will never be voiced by AI. Only by me. You can probably hear that tonight, considering my voices. Rusty and harsh due to a cold I am brewing on. With that out of the way, we'll travel to Tampa Bay, Florida. The date was the 4th of June 1989. A sailboat cuts lazily across glittering water beneath a blue morning sky. Then. Someone on deck sees something in the water. Something that should be there. Body. Face down. Make it from the waist down. Bow. Then another call comes in. A second body. Two miles north. Drifting of a pier in St. Petersburg. And before authorities can even process that Our third report. Two hundred yards to the east. Three. Women. Three. Bodies one monster. His name. Ober Chandler The water was supposed to swallow his secrets forever. This episode will shed light on his life. Crimes. Joy. This episode, like all other sagas told by me, would not be possible without my loyal patriones. They are. Lisbeth, Lisa, Kathy, Corbyn, Meow, Val, the Dougletons. Jonathan, Manuel, Derek, Alicia, Robin, Holly, Troyer, Lissa, Cody, Young Mustard WTF Reviews, Lindsay Aulin and You are truly the backbone of the Serial Killer Podcast. And without you. There would be no show. Oba Chandler Jr. was born on the 11th of October 1946 in Cincinnati, Ohio. The city was a river town. carved by the winding Ohio River. A place of industry and smokestacks, where working class families like the Chandlers tried to carve out a life. The fourth of five children Oba was raised under the iron fist of a father described as a full blooded Cherokee and Lakota man. four sons in Kentucky before starting another. In the Chandler Home. Discipline. Hey. Daughters were punished for dressing in a way their father deemed inappropriate. were punished for everything else. The apartment they shared was cramped and suffocating. Thick with unspoken resentment and the ever present threat of violence. Then, on the thirty first of may nineteen fifty seven, when Oba was just ten years old, His father hanged himself in the damp, musty basement of that apartment building. The discovery shattered. Little structure the family had left. At a funeral the next day under a gray Ohio sky, witnesses say young Oba did something nobody could forget. Every time the grave digger shoveled dirt onto the simple wooden coffin The boy jumped down into the open grave and stomped it flat. Over and over. His small fists pounding the earth, muttering that his father didn't have to do that. Make of that what you will. But something cracked open in Ober Chandler that day. and it never healed. Without his father's crushing authority, Chandler went feral. He skipped school, wandering the streets of Cincinnati instead of sitting in classrooms at Cutter Junior High. He stole bicycles. He shot BB guns at passing cars. Finding a strange satisfaction in the startled reactions of drivers. Is Overwhelmed mother, Margaret. Began shuffling him between relatives. First to his sister Helen in Tampa, Florida. Then to his sister Alma in nearby Pinellas Park. The Florida sun did nothing to warm the coldness growing inside him. He refused to work. He refused to study. punched through windows during arguments with his sisters. The glass shattering like the family bonds he was systematically destroying. By age fourteen he was stealing cars for joy riding. Before he was even old enough to vote, He had been arrested twenty times. A wrap sheet that already included property crimes and assault. He was, by every measure, a young man on a collision course with catastrophe. In nineteen sixty five he tried to straighten out Enlisting in the United States Marine Corps. discipline of Paris Island should have tamed him. But Chandler's rebellious spirit could not be broken by military routine. It lasted about a week before he was disciplined. By March nineteen sixty six, he had deserted from Camp Le June. The Marines caught up with him in St. Paul, Minnesota that summer. Six months of hard labour followed at Camp Le June and then a general discharge. on the eleventh of january nineteen sixty seven. Then Freedom to roam. Chandler drifted through Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio. across the south eastern United States, leaving a trail of larseny, fraud and broken lives. He fathered seven children. different women over two decades and raised? None of them. He lived under false names, calling himself James Thomas Wright, among others, was Posing as an X ray technician. A mechanical draughtsman, an apartment manager. He was whoever he needed to be. Whatever he wanted. Crimes were escalating. In November nineteen sixty eight. He was caught peeping through a woman's bedroom window in the dead of night. Not just watching. He was call pleasuring himself, while spying on us. is violation of her privacy turning into something more sinister. In 1969 he broke into a Cincinnati beauty salon and stole 21 wigs worth over $1,300. Strange crime. That seemed to speak to his desire to transform himself. Someone else. In nineteen seventy six. He and an accomplice broke into a couple's home in Daytona Beach, Florida. The couple had been spot earlier on a boat carrying what appeared to be a large amount of cash, but While his partner tied up the husband with electrical cable. Chandler dragged the wife into the bedroom. Made her strip to her underwear. slowly ran the barrel of his revolver across her stomach. Cold calculated act of psychological torture. That is not a regular robbery. That is something darker taking its first real shape. He was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to ten years. During his evaluation in prison, authorities discovered something chilling. Ober Chandler had an IQ above 120. He was not some blundering thug. He was quite intelligent. And he knew it. He escaped five months into his sentence, while working on a construction crew along Interstate ninety five in Duval County. Simply walking away from the work detail and Vanishing. into the Florida landscape. Back on the streets he ran a counterfeit money operation out of a home in Maitland. Well simultaneously working as a police informant for Orlando's Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation. A detail that tells you everything you need to know about how. Ober Chandler saw the world. Rules Tools. People but props. He provided information that led to police raids on adult bookstores. all while printing fake twenty dollar bills in his garage. The irony was completely lost on him. Or he simply didn't care. By december of nineteen eighty six. Both his sentences had been deemed served. He was free. He moved to Tampa. Married a woman named Deborah Ann Whitman. And they bought a house in Tampa Shores for just under $110,000. Paid for by Deborah. They had a daughter named Whitney in february nineteen eighty nine. He restarted his aluminum siding business. and even became a police informant again. This time for the Tampa Police Department. Ober Chandler looked like a man who had finally put his demons to rest. He hadn't. Here just learn to hide them better. Five hundred miles north. in the small farming community of Wiltshire, Ohio. Joan Rogers was planning something special. Joan? Known as Joe to everyone who loved her. was thirty six years old. Dairy farmer's wife with a warm smile and two daughters she adored. Wellshire was still Everyone knew everyone. where the horizon was flat and the rhythms of life were tied to the seasons. Chaos. Michelle. Well seventeen. Bright and full of promise. Christie was fourteen. Still finding her footing in the burld. A little shy, but full of quiet wonder. None of them. I'd ever left Ohio before. On the twenty sixth of may 1989. They climbed into the family's nineteen eighty six Oldsmobile Calais. headed south. Florida. Sun. A holiday. The first real one they had ever taken. It should have been everything they dreamed of. By the first of June. Their Orlando trip was winding down and they were beginning the long drive home. Somewhere along the way, Joe got turned around. Instead of heading north on I seventy five, the She found herself in Tampa. Confused by the maze of highways and interchanges. She decided to make a day of it. One extra night. One sunset over the bay. A little more sunshine before Ohio's flat horizons swallow them back up. They checked into the Days Inn on the Route 60. twelve thirty in the afternoon. The hotel was a typical roadside motel. Two stories of rooms overlooking a parking lot. And a small pool. developed later from a camera found in their room, painted a quiet portrait of that final day. Michelle. Sitting on the floor, relaxed. I shot from the balcony as the sun began to melt. Into Tampa Bay. The water turning orange. They were alive and happy. They had no idea what was coming. At some point that day, investigators believe it was while they were searching for their hotel The Rogers women crossed paths with Ober Chandler. He gave them directions. He was charming. Helpful. and mentioned he was from Ohio too. He offered to take them. on a sunset cruise of the bay. He already knew what he was actually going to do. They were last seen at a day's inn restaurant at around seven thirty that evening. By eight thirty or nine o'clock. Investigators believe all three had boarded Chandler's boat at the dock on the Courtney Campbell Causeway. A ribbon. of concrete stretching across the bay, and connecting Tampa to clear water. Before the sun rose again, Joan Rogers and her daughters were But all dead. The bodies were found on the fourth of June. Floating face down in Tampa Bay. The first was spotted by people on a sailboat passing under The Sunshine Skyway Bridge. The second was seen float off a pier in Saint Petersburg. two miles north of the first. As the coast guard recovered the second body The call came in about a third, floating two hundred yards to the east. All three were naked from the waist down. Bound with rope. And each had a concrete block tethered. Chandler's insurance policy. The weight was supposed to carry them to the bottom the sea and keep them there. Position has its own logic. As the bodies bloated in Florida's summer heat, they rose. That's it. says in Stephen King's universe. They always float. Autopsies confirm the unthinkable. All three women had water in their lungs. They had been thrown into the bay. Alive. Michelle identified as the second body found. had managed to free one hand from her bonds before she drowned. She fought. Until the very end. It took a full week to identify them. Joan's husband, Hal had already reported them missing back in Ohio. A days in housekeeper confirmed the room had never been slept in. Fingerprints and dental records sealed. Confirmation. A family that had left Ohio for the first time. Just to see a little sunshine. had been murdered on the water by a man they had trusted with directions. The Tampa Bay area in the summer of 1989 was a place of stark contrasts. On one hand It was a tourist paradise. With its white sand beach, emerald gold courses and attractions like bush gardens drawing millions of visitors. On the other hand It was a region grappling with its own Shadows. Courtney Campbell where Chandler launched his boat that night. was a popular spot for fishermen and boaters during the day. But after dark. It became a lonely stretch of road. started with boat ramps and parking lots that offered little more than a view of the vast dark expanse of the bay. It was the perfect place for a predator to operate. a place where a scream would be swallowed by the wind and the waves. The investigation into the Rogers Murders was Hit wall after wall. The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office. through everything they had at case. They interviewed hundreds of people. down every lead, no matter how small. And developed a partial theory that Two men. Might have been involved. Based on the difficulty. of subduing three victims simultaneously. But they had no name. They had almost nothing. The crime scene itself had been the bay. A vast moving body of water that had washed away most of the evidence. The only physical evidence recovered from the bodies was the rope. The concrete blocks and the tape used to gag them. was a brochure found in the Rogers car. Tourist map of Tampa The kind available at any gas station or hotel lobby. On it. Blue pen. was handwriting. Directi scrawled by whoever had offered to help Joe Rogers. Navigate to City. The writing was neat, precise. Almost architectural in its clarity. in a different hand. Joe herself had written a description of a man who and his boat. Male, white, forties, with a Bay liner power boat about 21 feet long. It was a start. But it wasn't much to go on in a city of over million people. Boats were as common as cars. The year round tan was unremarkable. For three years the case went cool. Detectives worked other cases. But the Roger's murders were always there. A nagging presence. The families waited for answers that never came. The community moved on. but the fair lingered. A dark cloud over the sunny beaches. and sparkling waters of Tampa Bay. In nineteen ninety two, three years after the murders, Hillsborough County Sheriff's Detectives. made an audacious decision. They had the handwriting from that brochure enlarged. Print it on billboards. Which they posted across the Tampa Bay area. Asking whether anyone recognized it. A phone number was plastered. Across the bottom. A lifeline to justice. It was an unprecedented move. Law enforcement simply didn't do things like that. It was expensive. Risky. Very much a long shot. They were desperate. And It worked. In the spring of 1992, a woman named Jo Ann Steffi was going about her day in Port Orange, a small city on Florida's Atlantic coast. She was at work, going through old paperwork. When she came across something familiar. A work contract signed by a former neighbor. She looked at it. She looked at the billboards she had seen on the news. Her stomach dropped. The handwriting was identical. You called police. She sent a copy of the contract. She sent it again. When no one followed up. Finally, in july nineteen ninety two A detective came to interview her. The neighbor she recognized was a charming, smooth talking aluminum siding contractor who went by the name Jim Wright. Yes. A real name? Was Oba. He had lived next door to her in nineteen eighty nine. The same year the Rogers were murdered. and had given her a quote on some work. She had ultimately turned down. What the billboards also shook loose. was a story that has been sitting in a police file since May nineteen eighty nine. Two weeks before the Rogers murders, a Canadian tourist named Judy Blair had met a friendly man at a Tampa convenience store. He called himself Day Possum. And offered her and her friend Barbara Motrum. A boat tour. It sounded like fun. The next morning Barbara backed out. Judy went out alone. They spent most of the day on the water without incident. Chandler was charming. Pointing out landmarks along the shore and telling stories about his life in Florida. When they returned to the doc. The man Judy knew as Dave grew cold when she wouldn't persuade Barbara to join them again. For dinner. Without warning. Turn the boat around. and sailed them out into the Gulf of Mexico. Today known as Gulf of America. There miles from shore. Ober Chandler raped Judy Blair. She reported the crime. A sketch was made. But no one knew who Dave Possner really was. Until Operation Tin Man. Named for the aluminum siding business Blair remembered him mentioning. Brought it all together. Trial, Blair identified Chandler from a photo lineup without hesitation. That's him, she said. Her voice steady, but her eyes filling with the pain of a memory that had haunted her for three years. That's the man who raped me. Ober Chandler did something remarkable at his nineteen ninety four trial in Clearwater, Florida. gains the explicit advice of his own attorneys. The stand. He admitted he had met Joan and her daughters. He admitted he had given them directions. You said. He had never seen them again. He claimed he was on Tampa Bay that night. Which three ship to shore. calls from his boat to his home. had already confirmed. But insisted He was fishing alone. He said his engine had broken down. He had tried to call the coast guard. He had flat down a patrol boat. He had fixed a few line with duct tape. The prosecutions boat mechanic. Dismantled every word. The few lines in Chandler's 1976 Bay liner ran upward. meaning a leak would have spray fuel into the air. rather than pooling below. Gasoline dissolves duct tape. Adhesive. Pair Chandler described was physically impossible. There were no distress calls on record, but No coast guard vessels logged on the bay that morning. Nothing. to corroborate a single word he said. Then There was his own family. His daughter, Crystal Mays, took to stand told the jury what her father had confided in her after fleeing Florida. in nineteen eighty nine. That police were looking for him because he had killed some women. Her husband Rick. added that Chandler had admitted to raping women in the Madero Beach area. and had mentioned that one of them had got away. Another daughter, Valerie. testified he had admitted to raping women in the two weeks before the murders. A former employee told the court that Chandler had bragged about taking three women out on the bay. The very night of the killings. One juror? would later recall that Chandler scared some of them with the way he would sit and stare. Holding a strange grin on his face. Something they said made their skin crawl. On the fourth of November. Nineteen ninety four. Ober Chandler was found guilty of three counts of first degree murder. Sentence. Death The judge who presided over the trial Seuss and Schaefer. said of him years later that it was the worst case she had ever handled. Both in terms of the facts. And in terms of a defendant completely without saving grace. She described him as a man with no soul. Chandler was sent to Union Correctional Institution. So the long, silent cot it off. or Florida's death row. His wife, Deborah, filed for divorce shortly after the conviction. She had stood by him through the trial, and The testimony of his own daughters had broken something in her. She could no longer deny the truth. About the man she had married. He was barred from seeing his daughter Whitney. and was not permitted to see photographs of her as she grew up. in seventeen years on death row. Ober Chadler did not receive a single visitor. Not. He pursued appeals for years. claiming innocence until the very end. All were denied. His final appeal to the United States Supreme Court was rejected. Governor Rick Scott signed his death warrant on the tenth of october twenty eleven. The execution was set for the 15th of November at four in the afternoon. His attorney noted that Chandler, sick by then with high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney problems, and arthritis, Wasn't begging for his life. He wasn't scrambling. He said quietly that if there was a legal way out, But he wasn't going to make a scene. He had once boasted that his last words would be an obscene dismissal of the proceedings. In the end he did not say that. On the fifteenth of November, twenty eleven. at Florida State Prison in Rayford at four o' eight in the afternoon. Ober Chandler junior was executed. by lethal injection. He left no spoken final words. You left only a written statement. handed to prison officials before the end. Insisting. Innocent man was being killed that day. Those words were loud at a post execution press conference. Joan Rogers Michelle Rogers. Christie Rogers were buried together in Wilshire, Ohio. On the thirteenth of June. nineteen eighty nine. With three hundred people in attendance. Police at the doors to keep the cameras out. The service was held at the Zion United Methodist Church. A small white building. With a tall steeple. That had been a landmark in the community for over a century. Pewed with farmers in their Sunday best. With teachers and shopkeepers and neighbours. who had known the Rogers family for generations. Hal Rogers. Joan's husband and the girl's father. Sat in the front row. His face a mask of grief. His shoulders bent under the weight of a loss too immense to comprehend. He had lost his wife. and his two daughters in a single senseless act of violence. He had lost his future. He had lost everything that mattered. But they Or not. The only victims. There was at least one more woman. whose life was taken by the man investigators would come to call the Devil of Tampa Bay. Evilis Barios Bagiris. Newly wet. Murdered in November 1998. Her family would not learn the truth. Until twenty fourteen. DNA testing finally gave them the answer they had waited nearly a quarter of a century for. It had been Ober Chandler. Iverliss had been born in New York City. But her family moved to Florida when she was a child. She was studying to be a medical assistant. Broward Community College. and had married her high school sweetheart. On hell. Beggaries. Just months before her death. They were building a life together. Full of promise and hope. on the twenty seventh of november nineteen ninety. The day before Thanksgiving. Ivalis. to work at the Sawgrass Mills Mall in Sunrise, Florida. When her shift ended. She called her husband. He would hear her voice. When she did not return. He went to the mall to look for her. He found her car in the parking lot. Tires slashed. at the driver's side window slightly open. Signs of struggle. He called the police. Three hours after she was reported missing. Two fishermen discovered her body beneath a residential mailbox in a quiet neighborhood in Coral Springs. A few miles from the mall. She was naked. with ligature marks on her wrists and legs and tape mattered. in our hair. She had been strangled to death. The investigation went on for years with little to go on. No witnesses. No murder weapon. Only DNA from the crime scene. Time matched nothing. Yeah, the national database. The case. Weren't cold. Then in twenty fourteen. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement ran the DNA through the database again. As part of a routine review of cold cases. This time. That it was a match. Óba, Sándla. Man who had been executed three years earlier. for the murders of Joan Michelle and Christy Rogers. The timeline. was damning. Chandler had been living less than a mile and a half from Iverliss's workplace at the time of her murder. and had moved away from his sunrise apartment just two or three days after the killing. The case was officially closed. But it raised a serious question regarding how many other victims. Chandler had claimed. During his decades of crime. Law enforcement agencies across Florida began reopening cold cases in areas where Chandler had lived. Pattern was unmistakable. Predator who evolved from petty theft to sexual violence to murder. Always staying one step ahead of investigators. Through false identities and constant movement. His work as a Police informant had given him inside knowledge of investigative techniques. While his legitimate business as an aluminum siding contractor provided access to homes and families across the state. Chandler's ability to manipulate extended even to his own children. Crystal Maze had initially struggled to accept the truth. About her father. despite his own confession to her. Another daughter, Valerie Troxell, insisted until the end. that he could not have acted alone. Despite the overwhelming evidence. Only one daughter, Suzette. call him plainly what he was. Monster who got what he deserved. The psychological portraits that emerged. Was off a man with no empathy. No conscience. No genuine capacity for human connection. Judge Schaefer's description of him as a man with no soul. was echoed by everyone who encountered him over the course of his life. From his childhood reaction to his father's death. Stomping the grave rather than grieving. to his final written claim of innocence. Chandler demonstrated a complete inability to accept responsibility or recognize the humanity of those around him. His execution marked the end of a legal saga. but it left behind a legacy of unanswered questions. Investigators across Florida began reopening cold cases in areas where Chandler had lived. Knowing that a man who operated across decades and under multiple false identities. who had intimate knowledge of police methods from his ears as an informant. And who moved constantly to avoid detection. had almost certainly left more victims behind. than the ones they knew about. His own daughters. had taken the stand against him. His wife had divorced him. In seventeen years on death row, not a single person came to see him. That isolation was not imposed on him. built it himself. One act of cruelty at a time. The billboards that finally broke the Rogers case open stands as a reminder that sometimes the most powerful tool available to investigators Is the collective memory. of ordinary people who refuse to let the dead be forgotten. A woman. Going through old paperwork recognized a signature. A rape survivor identified a face in a photograph. Without them. Chandler might never have faced the courtroom at all. Joan Rogers. was thirty six years old. Michelle. Well seventeen. Christy. was fourteen. They left Ohio for the first time in their lives. Just to see a little sunshine. And they never came home. Ivalis Berrios Begaris. twenty years old. Newly married. with a carrier ahead of her and a husband waiting at home. Her family waited twenty four years for an answer. They got one. But it came far too late. And it came. Only because investigators refused. To stop. I recommend trying to remember the victims more than we remember their killer. And with that, we come to the end of this standalone episode of the Tampa Bay serial killer known as the Devil of Tampa Bay. Oh, but Chandler.