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Hey everybody, welcome back to our podcast. This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Peyton Marland. And I'm Garrett Marland. And he's the husband. And I'm the husband. Before we hop into my 10 seconds, I guess the only announcement that we have this week is a reminder that every Monday night we get in our world and watch the latest episode or listen to it. As well, there's a new chat sim boards feature.
um that you can use from your phone you can talk to anyone in there talk to us we're going to start talking about more true crime topics in there um so come follow along or come join if you want there will be kind of links everywhere um and it's free you can just come hang out also just a reminder for anyone who wants ad free or bonus content you can subscribe on apple or patreon
We do bonus episodes and all the regular episodes and bonus episodes are ad free. Unless you want to listen to our beautiful ads, then go ahead and not subscribe. Cool. Okay. Do you have your 10 seconds? Just hanging out with Daisy. I feel like that's what our week's been of hanging out with Daisy and actually our, our, my mother-in-law. So your mom.
is in town. She's currently watching Daisy, so she's not with us recording. Yeah, it's actually the first time we've really been separated from her this long, so it's a little weird. A bunch of separation anxiety going on. I can't remember if I mentioned it. I got my truck back. Oh, yeah. Did I mention that? I don't know. I don't know if I did. Finally got my truck back. All is good. All is well in the world. Things are back in order, and we are ready to go. Oh,
All right. Our episode sources are Death Cruise by Donald A. Davis, Tourist Trap by Fred Schrum, Forensic Files, Wikipedia.com, TampaBay.com, and Newspapers.com. You know, some people just love to travel and others hate it. Some just rarely have the opportunity to travel or they don't have the money to spare. Well,
When you're an infrequent traveler, though, going out of town can feel like a pretty great adventure. It can also be scary. When you're a stranger in a strange land, you're vulnerable. And there are people out there from crooks to predators who can recognize that and exploit it. And that is sort of what our story is about today. So the Rogers family was one family that never got to go on vacation. Like, ever.
ever. They'd never seen the ocean and had never ventured far beyond their little village of Wilshire, Ohio, where they lived. They didn't have a lot of money and operating their 300 acre farm out in rural Ohio was a full-time job. One that left little room for leisure. Hal and Joanne Rogers had been high school sweethearts and they married only four months after Joanne graduated from high school.
Both of them had grown up on farms and farm life was all they knew. Hal worked on their farm all day and Joanne and their two daughters, Michelle and Christy, were usually up at the crack of dawn to lend a hand milking the cows and minding the crops.
And life was pretty simple for the Rogers family. That was up until Michelle turned 14 years old. That was when her uncle John sexually assaulted her. Oh my gosh, okay. John had co-owned the farm with his brother Hal until 1988.
It stopped in 1988 because that was the year that John was arrested for raping an 18-year-old roommate at knife point after she returned home from a date. So he raped his own young roommate. And when the police searched his trailer next door to the family farm, they found a briefcase full of incriminating material, including a videotape of the rape,
Oh my gosh. Audio tapes of sexual abuse and Polaroids of a partially nude young woman with a blindfold on. Now this young woman was different from the 18-year-old roommate he had raped.
And when they investigated further, they discovered that the young woman in the photos was his own niece, Michelle. And he had sexually assaulted her half a dozen times starting in the summer of 1986 when she was 14. And it continued on all the way through November 1987 when he was arrested for sexually assaulting his roommate.
Now, when police interviewed Michelle, she told them that her uncle would rape her when her mom and dad were away from the farm. And he'd always blindfold her and tie her up. And sometimes he would carry out the attack while holding a knife to her throat.
He would make her call him master and afterward he threatened to hurt her if she told anyone. Now, talking about her sexual abuse with police was itself pretty harrowing for Michelle, as you can imagine. And she was actually spared from having to testify against her uncle when he took a plea deal in exchange for a sentence of seven to 25 years. I always find it interesting when it's like you're going to get two to 50 years. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? It's like, are you getting two years? Are you getting 10 years? Are you getting 50 years?
It's just, I don't know. It's just interesting how the justice system works that way. And it wasn't just this whole situation that was traumatic for Michelle. It was also just as painful the way her father, Hal, actually bailed his own brother out of jail after the arrest and accused his own daughter of lying to the police. So he...
So his brother goes to jail for sexually assaulting this 18-year-old roommate. And then in the investigation, they discover that he's been sexually assaulting Michelle as well. Well, Michelle's dad, Hal, goes and bails his brother out and then looks at Michelle, his 14-year-old daughter, and says, stop lying. Which doesn't make sense because there's photos. Right.
So these wounds would not go away so easily. But once the ordeal passed and 1989 rolled in, the Rogers family tried to forget about everything. And they tried to give themselves something to look forward to, a palate cleanser, a clean slate. And this was in the form of a trip to Florida.
This trip would be the first time that the Rogers daughters had ever been outside of the state of Ohio. And it was a vacation that they had planned for the whole family for late May. But when unexpected heavy rainfall that spring flooded the fields, Hal fell behind schedule on the farm and realized that he had to stay behind. Tending a farm is the kind of job where one can't really take a day off.
But Hal knew how much his wife and daughters had been looking forward to going to Florida, and maybe he even secretly felt some guilt about what had happened with his brother. So he decided to encourage them to go along to Florida without them. Go take the vacation. He'd stay back. And so that's what the girls did. They began preparing for their trip as the end of the month approached. Joanne, Michelle, and Christy would leave for Florida on the afternoon of Friday, May 26th.
It would be a... Hey, that's my birthday. Yep, it is your birthday. It was going to be a shorter trip, only a week long, because Joanne had to be back at work. She worked a part-time job at a food warehouse, and she needed to be back by Monday, June 5th. And then also Michelle had to start summer school that very same day, so they needed to be back by June 5th.
But a week-long jaunt to Florida seemed like the perfect bit of respite from the trauma they had endured over the last couple of years. And instead of flying, which they'd never done anyway, Joanne and her daughters decided to make it a road trip. A 1,000-mile trip that would require about 16 hours of driving time. Because of this, they weren't just going to drive straight there. They were going to have to stop.
After Hal saw them off and they hit the road, they made it as far as northern Georgia before checking into a Best Western and recharging for the night. Once they got back onto the road the next morning, they drove another seven hours before stopping again, this time in Jacksonville, Florida. The following day, the family began their Florida adventure at the Jacksonville Zoo, where Joanne bought a postcard and actually sent it to her friend Lori.
After leaving the zoo, they traveled to Ocala two hours away and took a ride on a glass-bottom boat at Silver Springs. From there, they moved on to where they visited the Kennedy Space Center, and on the fourth day of their trip, they spent the morning at the beach before making their way to Orlando, spending the rest of the day at SeaWorld.
Now, Joanne and the girls were having the time of their lives. As you can imagine, they are seeing new things. They are having new experiences. It was almost like overstimulation because this was...
so different from the farm life that they knew. That night, Joanne sent Hal a postcard telling him about their trip thus far, the incredible heat and humidity of Florida, and of their plans to go to Disney World the next day. On May 30th and 31st, their final two days in Orlando, the Rogers went to Epcot and MGM Studios before continuing on to Tampa.
Wait, Epcot is like Six Flags? No, it's part of Disney World. It's just a park in Disney World. So is MGM. And throughout the trip, Joanne and the girls phoned Hal to check in with him each time they reached a new destination. So they get into a hotel and they'd call home.
So when they checked into their room at the Days Inn in Tampa on June 1st, Joanne called Hal to let him know that she'd arrived safely. And Michelle also called her boyfriend, Jeff, to wish him a happy birthday and let him know that they were having a blast. Oh, so she had a boyfriend too now. Yeah, Michelle did. She really wanted to go swimming at the beach, she told him, but her mom wouldn't let them go too far into the water because no one in the family knew how to swim.
Michelle told Jeff that she'd talk to him later. And that was the last time that Joanne, Michelle or Christy would check in with anyone back home. Okay. So they're just at their hotel.
And they check in. And they check in. And then no one hears from them again. Okay. By the evening of Sunday, June 4th, Hal Rogers was growing concerned. He had expected the family back that night, yet he hadn't heard a peep from them since Thursday.
Joanne was due back at work the next morning, and his daughter was also set to begin summer school, yet there was no sign of them. No updates, no news of delay, no check-ins on their drive home. Meanwhile, Jeff, Michelle's boyfriend, was also getting antsy not having heard from her. So he decided to call Hal, her dad, several times throughout the day to ask if they'd returned yet, which they hadn't.
And as Hal went out to feed the cows that night, he scanned the darkened horizon for any sign of his wife's Oldsmobile. But there was nothing. All day Monday, the next day, Hal tended to his cattle and his crops, distracted by an uneasiness weighing on the pit of his stomach.
By Tuesday, when his family still hadn't shown up or called, Hal assumed the worst. There'd been an accident. Maybe they'd been kidnapped or killed. But he had no idea where to start. A thousand miles separated Ohio and Florida. And Hal didn't know if they'd ever even left Florida. And if so, where they may have run into trouble. He waited another day. Maybe they would come home. So this is three days that he's waited in all.
before finally calling the Florida Highway Patrol and then the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office. But despite reporting his wife and daughters missing, he wasn't getting anywhere with either of these agencies. Which, this is kind of crazy when you know about the discovery that had been made back on June 4th. That was the day that the girls were supposed to arrive home.
But just like us, Hal didn't know about the discovery on June 4th that happened in Tampa Bay. It was after an early morning thunderstorm, the kind that's routine along Florida's coastline. Some people on a sailboat called Amber Waves were passing under a bridge when they saw something floating in the water, something that looked like a human body. And then later, people on another sailboat at another location also saw a body, and
And shortly after noon, passengers on a pleasure boat reported a third body in the same general area. So by early afternoon, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office had recovered three bodies from the same location in the water. In the ocean, correct? Yes. All were female, nude from the waist down, and each had been bound, gagged, and had a yellow rope fastened around their necks and tied to concrete cinder blocks. Oh my gosh.
Now,
This is going to get pretty graphic, so fast forward if you don't want to hear it. But it appeared likely that each of the girls had been sexually assaulted before going into the water. And forensic examination of the bodies showed that each of the women had water in their lungs and had died from drowning probably three or four days earlier. Now this means that they had been thrown into the water while still alive, weighted down by those weights.
And then sunk to the bottom. What? What happened? It's just, it's unimaginable. What happened? They were just at a hotel. Well, we don't know if it's the girls yet. Well, I mean...
It is. Okay. I mean, I assume it is. Draw your conclusions. All right, keep going. Let's hear it. So it was observed that one of the women had been able to free her hands, but not her feet from the concrete block that kept her at the water's bottom. So just the struggle, I mean, I don't want to get into it, but it is really awful. I can't even think about it. It just, ugh.
Police believed the three women were between the ages of 20 and 30, but they were partially decomposed to a degree that they couldn't say for sure. And that's the reason they came to the surface of the water in the first place. The warm temperature of the water accelerated the decomposition, and decomposition gases had caused the body to rise to the surface where they were discovered.
So the investigation that then began was a collaboration between the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office and the St. Petersburg Police Department.
It was obviously a homicide, but they had no suspects, no motive, except for possible sexual assault, and they still had no idea who these three women were. At first glance, the only clue was that one of the women was wearing a wedding band, but no one at this point had reported three women missing in the area. So desperate for leads, police held a press conference to display the jewelry recovered from the three victims, with the hope that someone watching it on TV would recognize it.
And another lead that they were trying to pursue was a report of three women fitting the general description of the Jane Does who had been seen hitchhiking along the Tampa interstate that weekend. But they didn't have much more to go on. The fingerprints of each of the Jane Does were sent by Express Air to the FBI lab in Washington as no record of their fingerprints was found in local databases.
And, you know, one of the things that makes cases like this where the victims are dumped into water so difficult is the way the water washes away any clues. Although the police were pretty certain these women had been raped based on the way they were partially undressed, they weren't able to recover any biological material because they'd been in the water for too long.
In the middle of the week, the manager of the Days Inn in Tampa contacted police to report that the guests in room 251 hadn't been seen since the day that they checked in.
The housekeeper had continued cleaning the room every day since, and it had looked to her like nothing in the room had been touched. The beds hadn't been slept in, the towels were never used. So when the Tampa police arrived to investigate, what they learned was that the room had been reserved by a woman named Joanne B. Rogers from Ohio, who had checked in the previous Thursday with her two teenage daughters.
Because of the recent discovery, the room was then cordoned off as detectives from the St. Petersburg police arrived to search the room. Three women from Ohio are missing and three bodies just showed up. So what's the husband doing at this point? What is, like, what is... He still hasn't even reported them missing at this point. We've jumped back. So it wasn't long before fingerprints found on a tube of toothpaste inside of the room were matched to one of the Jane Does pulled from the bay.
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Word at this point reached Hal Rogers up in Ohio that afternoon. He called Florida police again to try and confirm whether or not the bodies found were his wife and kids. In a phone call, he was asked to authorize the release of his wife's and children's dental records. And once they were compared, it was confirmed that the bodies were those of Joanne, Michelle, and Christy Rogers who had been on vacation in Florida.
Hal was in the middle of his work day when the sheriff came to his farm to break the news. Not all of them, Hal said in utter disbelief. Why all of them? His whole family had been wiped out, but in the worst possible way. But Hal had his crops to tend to. With his helping hands gone forever, he didn't even have time to come up for air as he went right back to work that day on the farm.
The funeral took place on June 13th with nearly 300 mourners in attendance. Hal's demeanor at the service seemed stoic. Not many people knew Hal well, but even to those close to him, Hal's behavior seemed out of sync with the enormity of his loss. So...
Like he wasn't sad enough or what are they, what are they getting at? I guess. Yes. Like his Reverend Gary Lutterman who officiated at the funeral. Um, it seemed like Hal's lack of visible grief seemed a little odd at no point during the service did Hal cry or show any kind of emotion except for the one moment when the pastor put his hand on Hal's shoulder offering condolences and Hal suddenly swept the pastor's hand away from him and told him to never touch him ever again.
All right. So before we keep going, life insurance, was there life insurance policies? No, but I also do just want to add here. It's so easy to look at people in grief when you're not the one grieving and go, oh, I would act like X, Y, and Z. When in reality, this guy just lost his entire family. And maybe I'm playing devil's advocate here. Maybe I'm not. No, I mean, there's a good chance that people probably think I'm crazy.
Yeah, like you don't show much grief or emotion. And so it's just really hard to me in these situations to judge. But we all do it. We all do it because we want to find someone to blame.
But the pastor wondered what kind of secrets lurked behind Hal's blank expression, his flat effect. And kind of like we all do, everyone started becoming suspicious of Hal. It was known among her friends that Michelle was very afraid of her father, that he had a violent temper. He once punched a cow to death because it stepped on him. Holy crap.
And animals around the farm would frequently just disappear or turn up dead. Some people in town, after learning of the family's deaths, wondered if Hal somehow didn't have something to do with it. Like...
Like, they were kind of just suspicious. His manner just didn't fit anyone's idea of how a grieving widower should grieve. A man who lost not only his wife, but his daughters. Yeah, but like, why kill them? It seems like there's zero motivation for it. Right. Well, get this. The parents of a girl named Holly, who was Michelle's best friend. So Michelle has a best friend named Holly, 14-year-old Michelle. Her...
had learned about a remark that Hal had made saying how strange it was going to be dating girls his daughter's ages now. So after all this happened, he made a remark kind of around that.
And then he called up Holly, again, this is his murdered daughter's best friend, to ask if she wanted to go grab a beer with him sometime. She's a teenager. - All right. - So after hearing about all of this, Holly's mother forbade her daughter from visiting Hal. And Holly's own theory was that Michelle's uncle John was somehow responsible for their deaths.
having them killed in retribution for having him sent away. That's what my first thought was. In fact, John had actually visited the Tampa area himself just a few months before his sister-in-law and nieces did. This was while he was out on bail. And maybe just by coincidence, he had actually visited some of the same attractions there.
In the wake of identifying the three dead women, Tampa authorities examined what scant evidence they were able to find in the Rogers Motel room. Their car was not in the motel parking lot, so police drove up and down the causeway across Tampa Bay until they spotted it. A 1986 Oldsmobile with Ohio plates. It was in the parking lot of a public boat launch ramp about two miles away from where they were staying.
Inside the car, they found a map on the passenger seat along with a piece of stationery from the day's end with a handwritten note on it. The note read, quote, turn right, west on 60, two and a half miles, on right side, alt before bridge, blue with white.
This reflected the route that they'd taken from the hotel to where their car was found. The only difference was the blue with white added at the end. It also read, "Courtney Campbell Causeway Route 60 Days Inn." Inside their room at the Days Inn, investigators also recovered a camera belonging to the victims with an undeveloped roll of film inside. They took it to the lab to process it, hoping that it might reveal something that would move the investigation forward or maybe even the face of their killer.
Once the photos were developed, detectives looked through them and saw images of the Rogers family in the days leading up to and on the day of their murders that Thursday.
There were pictures from the Jacksonville Zoo, from inside their motel rooms, normal tourist stuff. The two girls appeared sunburnt, probably from their day at the beach. The final photo on the last roll of film was a shot from the balcony of their room at the Days Inn. Now, based on the shadows and the position of the sun, experts were able to narrow the time between 6.30 and 8 p.m., just around sunset.
According to the motel log, the Rogers had checked into their room at 1228 p.m. on Thursday, June 1st, which is around the same time that they called home to Ohio, and they were last seen by a witness around 730 p.m. at the hotel restaurant.
But that's where the trail ended. So 7.30 p.m., that's pretty late, actually. Yeah. You have the two notes found inside the car. One of them, the one written on the Days Inn stationery, had handwriting consistent with Joanne's, so the mother's handwriting. But the other note, written on the travel brochure, was written in handwriting that didn't match anyone in the Rogers family. So police immediately presume this was written by the killer, which might be like,
fast jump but also these directions led them to essentially where we're thinking they disappeared and then the writing isn't in their handwriting. The likely scenario that investigators were able to piece together from the two notes was that they had first encountered their killer before they reached the Days Inn and asked him or her for directions and he or she must have then enticed them into meeting up with them at a later point maybe for a sunset boat ride.
The most significant thing in the note written by Joanne was the phrase blue with white. So she had like noted blue with white. It seemed like they were looking for something that was blue and white once reaching the boat launch. And based on where the car was found,
a boat launch and the fact that her note contained directions from the days into this exact spot, it was reasonable to conclude that the Rogers were probably meeting someone with a blue and white boat. Yeah, for sure. But because this was a public boat launch, anyone could use it. This wasn't like a neighborhood launch event.
So there wasn't any log or registry of who may have been there that day, nor were any boats docked there. So the boat launch was only about a mile from the days in where the Rogers were staying, but the area where their bodies were found was about 25 miles south of there. So it seems likely that they got on a boat.
One thing the police wanted to determine was where the victims may have been dumped. So detectives reached out to the Marine Sciences Department at the University of Florida and had them analyze the ocean currents, and they figured that the bodies had almost certainly been dumped from a boat in the middle of the bay. Over the next few weeks, police ran down leads involving numerous blue and white boats, all of which were dead ends.
And then months went by. The number of detectives working the Rogers case shrank from two dozen to merely two. Just because they couldn't find anything, I assume. No. And by September 1989, the task force working the case was disbanded because they just didn't have any new leads to work.
yeah gosh i don't know you're supposed to do there's no cameras they were dumped in water the husband was a thousand miles away about that so where's the uncle where was the uncle during all this i guess that's my question also a thousand miles away but you never know if it was like a murder for hire yeah so without any new leads detectives simply have nothing to do they have nothing to work on but then the
following month in October, a detective with the St. Petersburg police had been reading a monthly magazine published by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement when a story inside of it caught his eye.
It was an unsolved rape case that occurred two weeks before the Rogers girls were murdered. And it involved a man with a blue and white boat. It was unsolved. It happened in Madera Beach, a beachfront city about 30 miles away on the other side of the bay.
The victim was a 24-year-old Canadian tourist named Priscilla. This isn't her real name. It's a pseudonym. Okay. Who had been leaving a 7-Eleven store with her friend, Anne, also a pseudonym, when they were approached by a man who said his name was Dave Posno. He asked them if they were tourists, and they told him that they were, and they were visiting from Canada. Okay.
Well, I used to live in upstate New York, right near the border, he told them. The man said he was 33 years old and worked in the roofing business, had lived in Florida for a number of years and didn't miss the frozen winters of the North. He was a friendly sort of guy, quite talkative, and as much as the two women wanted to stay and chat, they realized that they were running late for a date with their friend at John's Pass. I'm going in that direction if you want a ride, he said to them. But...
But we can walk, Priscilla told him. But the man insisted, listen, you're already running late. You can get in with me. I'll drive right by and drop you off. You'll get there much faster than you would on foot. Gosh, it's so hard to like figure out, especially these days. What's the line?
Like, when do I say yes? When do I say no? When do I feel it's weird? When do I feel it's not weird? Because I guess you just never know these days. It's also different for a tourist because you're visiting and it's like, oh, well, he's offering us a ride. Yeah, he's being nice. It's quicker than walking like we need to. And you figure you're with somebody else. You're with multiple people. Nothing bad can happen to me. Right. It's just hard. So they agreed to ride with the man and they got inside his Isuzu. That's his car.
During the brief drive to their destination, the man calling himself Dave told the women of a 30-foot boat that he had docked a couple of hours away and that they should join him for a boat ride. Anne said they'd keep it in mind as they pulled up to the restaurant where they were meeting their friends. Anne told Priscilla and Dave that she was going to run in and try to find their friends and then she'd be right out.
Now, while she was gone, Priscilla made small talk with Dave, who warned her to be careful in the neighborhood that they were now in because it's a high crime area and they should remain alert.
His concern for their safety made Priscilla lower her guard a little bit, and she ended up deciding to take him up on his offer of a boat ride the next afternoon. But when Priscilla tried to persuade Anne to join, Anne was not on board. No pun intended. She wasn't about to go out on a boat with a total stranger in a totally new country. It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up.
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But Priscilla now felt obligated to go because she had already agreed to meet Dave and she didn't want to stand him up. And she had no way of getting in touch with him to back out. So she went to the dock and met Dave, who asked about her friend and almost looked disappointed that it was only going to be the two of them. She's going to miss a really nice day, he told her. Out on the
the water in his boat that was blue and white dave gave priscilla some fishing tutorials showing her how to use a crab trap how to bait and hook a fish he pointed out nearby landmarks and local points of interest and was generally a good boating companion that afternoon but then at a certain point the engine began to stutter and dave told priscilla that he'd have to turn back to get the engine repaired in the meantime she could enjoy dinner and then they could regroup afterward
And she should bring her camera this time, he told her, so she could get some shots of the sunset. So he takes her back after the morning day ride, says, I'm going to fix my boat, but you come back tonight for sunset ride, bring your camera.
and bring your friend this time too, he added. When she got back to their vacation condo, Priscilla told Anne about her afternoon with Dave, how nice he was, and how he was going to treat her to a sunset cruise. You should come, she said, but Anne just still wasn't down for it. And when Priscilla met back up with Dave, he seemed even more annoyed that she wasn't able to persuade Anne to join them. Priscilla was like, well, she just doesn't want to come. And he said, that's her loss.
They boarded the boat and they started out. While on the water, they did some fishing again and Dave even let her steer the boat from the captain's chair, showing her how to use the throttle. And as the sun began to set, Dave took some pictures of Priscilla with her camera, capturing her against the lush subtropical sunset.
You're really a nice looking lady, he told her. Oh, great. Thanks, she politely replied. But once the sun disappeared below the horizon, a certain sense of safety seemed to disappear along with it. Priscilla thanked Dave for showing her such a good day and indicated that now would probably be a good time to head back.
Dave didn't seem to hear her though. No. Instead, he told Priscilla she looked really good in her swimming suit and she should come closer to him and give him a hug. Priscilla told him that she appreciated the compliment, but she wasn't interested in giving him a hug. Come on, he said. Just come sit on my lap.
No, she said. You're a real nice looking lady, he told her as he suddenly grabbed her and pulled her toward him. This is when his voice and his demeanor changed. Suddenly his tone was gruff and his once friendly expression gave way to a hard stare. He looked right at her and said, you're going to have sex with me. Priscilla told him that she absolutely was not going to have sex with him. And if he forced her, he was going to end up in jail for rape.
But that didn't faze him. Instead, he looked at her and laughed. She began to scream. Do you think anyone's going to hear you all the way out here, he asked. He told her again she was going to have sex with him and there was no way around it. And if she thought about jumping out of the boat, well, the water was filled with sharks and so she'd probably be eaten alive. It's just a little sex, he told her, nothing worth dying over. But Priscilla continued to resist. And the more she resisted, the more Dave seemed to enjoy it.
and the more abusive his language became. It was at this point that he went ahead and began to sexually assault Priscilla. And once he was done, he staggered to the opposite end of the boat and vomited overboard. He then ripped open her camera and threw the film in the water before using a piece of cloth to wipe the camera clean of his fingerprints. When he was finished, he finally began steering the boat back towards the dock.
He said, I know you're going to report me, but if you do, please just give me a chance to go home and tell my little old mother. She'll be really upset if a policeman arrives at the door. It's going to kill her. Priscilla agreed, and as the boat moved alongside the shore, he directed her to step out into the surf, and from there she waded into shore. When Priscilla returned to the vacation condo, she went straight into the bath to clean herself up. She then waited a full day before finally breaking down and telling Anne, her friend, what had happened.
Ann flagged down a cop and Priscilla was brought into the Madera Beach police station where she assisted a sketch artist in creating a composite of the husky 40-something man calling himself Dave Posno. But police tell her this was almost certainly an alias because they could find no record of such a person in the state of Florida. And that was that. She and Ann ended up returning home to Canada and the case went cold. They had no suspects. They had no leads.
But now, fast forward to when the St. Petersburg police detective read about this cold case in October, he immediately saw the parallels between it and the cold Rogers family murders. Taurus from out of town offered a sunset boat ride by a friendly stranger with a blue and white boat and obviously ulterior motives, taken out to sea and sexually assaulted after dark.
The composite was released to the media along with a description of the man, his boat, and his Isuzu. One person who saw the sketch was a woman named Joanne. This is a different Joanne than our victim. Joanne Steffi, who lived in the Tampa Shores neighborhood on Dalton Avenue. The sketch immediately struck her as bearing a resemblance to her neighbor, who also drove an Isuzu and had a blue and white boat that was similar to the one described. And the neighbor, a man...
a man named Oba Chandler was a guy that she didn't really like. There was just something about him, something cagey, untrustworthy. He was also an aluminum contractor who had done some work for her and she just got all around bad vibes from him. But still, it seemed like it might be just a coincidence. After all, the Tampa Bay metropolitan area was home to a million, maybe two million people. So what are the odds that her neighbor is this sketch?
So Joanne clipped the sketch from the newspaper, stuck it on her fridge with a magnet, but didn't call police. Oh, dang it. Months went by. That's so hard, though. I mean, I'm not saying, I mean, now because of how educated and aware I am of this, I probably would. Yeah. But I mean, I don't know if I was in high school or even before we started the podcast.
I'd be like, guys, there's no way it's this guy. Yeah. Like, what are the chances of this? And that's kind of how she felt. So months go by and then years. It was now July 1992 as the three-year anniversary of the Rogers murders came and went. And police still had no strong suspects. And so someone had the idea of launching a billboard campaign in an attempt to help solve the cold case.
The handwriting on the brochure found in the Rogers car, which was believed to be from the killer, was distinctive in a few ways.
The writer, for example, had an unusual habit of using capital T's instead of lowercase t's and his lowercase y's had unique and varied formations. Investigators felt the handwriting was distinctive enough that someone might just recognize it. So five billboards went up around West Tampa featuring a blow up of the handwritten note and a tip line. One of the many people who saw these billboards and also saw the handwriting reprinted in the newspaper was...
Once again, Tampa Shores resident Joanne Steffi. And just as she recognized the composite sketch a few years earlier, she also now recognized the handwriting. It was Oba Chandler's, her neighbor. There was no doubt in her mind.
And he had done some work for her recently and had written her a receipt for it, so she dug it up just to compare. And it sent chills down her spine. It was a perfect match. The next day, Joanne took the receipt to the police, and it was glaringly obvious to them that the handwriting was identical.
They ran Chandler's background and learned that he was 43 years old, married, ran an aluminum building business, had eight children with seven different women, and had a criminal record dating back to when he was a juvenile. With seven different women.
That's crazy. He had crimes ranging from burglary to kidnapping to armed robbery to sexual assault to escaping from prison. And he's somehow not in prison. And like many serial sexual offenders, he had also been a peeping Tom. He had a home in Tampa that backed onto a canal just half a mile from where the Rogers disappeared.
And investigators learned that ship-to-shore phone records had placed him in his boat out on the water on both the date of the triple murder as well as the day Priscilla, the Canadian tourist, was sexually assaulted. So I'm confused. He left Priscilla alive if it's him, which it's coming to a point where it looks like it's him. But he killed the three girls? Why? Yeah.
Why? And I wonder if Priscilla's friend would have went, if he actually would have ended up killing them. Like, I don't know. It's crazy. Well, detectives decide to travel to Canada at this point to re-interview Priscilla now that they have a suspect. And they
and they showed her a photo lineup and she chose oba chandler's picture without hesitation but when they interviewed oba chandler he of course denied any involvement but that brochure that he'd put his handwriting on it turns out he'd also left something else on it his palm print and so with that oba chandler was placed under arrest and charged with the murders of joanne michelle and christy rogers three
That's insane.
and die he did. On November 15, 2011, after nearly 17 years on death row, Chandler was put to death by lethal injection. His final statement was a handwritten note which read, you are killing a innocent man today. Oh my gosh, I will never, ever, ever understand the ego of, you know what, I guess it just makes sense, but the ego of killers.
Like they continue to deny when it's obvious it was them. Right. And his children were kind of like, well, the only thing they had was this brochure. That's not proof. But if you or anyone is having any doubt that it was Chandler, let me just add in this last little bit.
Three years after Chandler's death, in February 2014, cold case detectives in Broward County, Florida, were reexamining an unsolved 1990 murder. It was the murder of a 20-year-old woman named Ivalice Berrios Bergueriz, who
who had disappeared after leaving her job at the Sawgrass Mills Mall in Sunrise, Florida on the evening of November 26, 1990. When Ivelisse failed to return home that night, her husband drove to the shopping mall and found her car in the parking lot with two of its tires flat.
He went to the police to report her missing, and then hours later, at around 3 in the morning, her nude body was found dumped on someone's front lawn in a residential neighborhood in Coral Springs. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. The investigation went cold almost as soon as it began, without a clue and without a suspect. But when DNA from the victim's rape kit was uploaded into the state database in early 2014...
it produced a hit. The DNA belonged to Oba Chandler.
Wow. So I wonder how many other people he was a serial killer. Yep. So not even two years after he killed the Rogers family, he had moved to sunrise, Florida where he abducted raped and killed another woman. Oh my God. So yeah, that should resolve any doubt anyone might have about Ova Chandler. I don't want to hear it. It was him. And who knows, like Garrett just said, how many more he might've been responsible for. He was 42 at the time that he killed the three members of the Rogers family. Um,
And it was such an organized, premeditated, carefully planned crime that it seems highly unlikely it was the first murders he ever committed. Also, I feel horrible for the husband. I know. He's just by himself at the farm and his entire family died. Yeah. It's awful. And then also, screw the uncle that sexually assaulted the daughter. Right. It's so messed up. It's so sad. It's so sad.
All right, you guys, that was our case for this week. And we will see you next time with another regular episode of Murder With My Husband. I love it. And I hate it. Goodbye.