Joan Mae Etzler, who went by Jo was born on November 12, 1952 to parents Wilhelm & Virginia Etzler in Van Wert, Ohio. She grew up on a farm in Van Wert and was described as being very outgoing, friendly, and gregarious. She loved country music, animals, and was a happy person who could talk to anyone and never knew a stranger.
In high school, she began dating a boy named Hal Rogers, who was a few months older and a year ahead of her. Unlike herself, Hal was reserved and introverted but they got along well despite their different personalities and they both loved wearing shaded glasses. By the end of her senior year in 1971, they discovered that Jo was pregnant. Jo’s parents weren’t happy that she had become pregnant out of wedlock, so Jo & Hal got married a few months after she graduated. The wedding wasn’t ideal, Jo’s parents didn’t allow her to invite friends or wear a white dress and were still disappointed about the pregnancy. They spent their honeymoon at an inn just across the state border in Fort Wayne, Indiana. But Jo & Hal were determined to make it work for their child and bought Hal’s parents’ 200-acre dairy farm in Willshire, Ohio.
Jo & Hal would go on to have two daughters together.
The girls were complete opposites just like their parents. Michelle had her mother’s looks but was shy and aloof like her father, while Christe had her father’s looks but was outgoing and extroverted like her mother. Every day before school, the sisters would milk the cows and do chores around the farm to earn money. The family didn’t have much money, but they worked hard and were well-liked in Willshire.
Jo got a second job working the night shift at a distribution center called Peyton’s Northern to provide some extra money for the family, however she became very exhausted from working there and on the farm, as well as taking the girls to school and their extracurricular activities. All her friends told her she was killing herself slowly and needed a break from work.
As Michelle & Christe grew older, they spent less time on the farm. Michelle was a tomboy who preferred hanging out with boys; especially her boyfriend Jeff Feasby as well as going to parties, and smoking cigarettes and Christe was a cheerleader who also played on a softball team. She often performed her dance routines in front of the cows.
Michelle had always been shy, but as she entered high school her grades started dropping and she became even more withdrawn than usual. Less than a month after Michelle’s 16th birthday in March 1988, her uncle John was arrested for assaulting & raping his girlfriend. When detectives searched the trailer John lived in, they found a briefcase containing tapes of the assault but also discovered videos of John sexually assaulting Michelle. When detectives asked her about it, she told them how he had been raping her for two years and threatened to kill her if she told anyone about it, and Michelle wanted to protect Christe from him. The family was shocked and despite all the evidence, Michelle’s paternal grandmother Irene didn’t believe her and told the whole town her granddaughter was lying. Hal distanced himself and cut off contact with his family. Unfortunately since Michelle didn’t testify, the charges brought against John were dropped and Hal bailed him out of jail but wouldn’t speak to him ever again. John ended up serving time anyways for the rape of his ex girlfriend.
It was a rough year for the Rogers family, and they were trying to live a normal life. By spring 1989, 17 year old Michelle was finishing up her junior year and 14 year old Christe was finishing eighth grade. Jo had planned a vacation to Florida for the whole family, it would be their first vacation ever and the girls’ first time ever leaving Ohio. But the weather had been bad that spring, and someone had to look after the farm. Hal decided to stay in Ohio while Jo and the kids went on vacation. Jo, Michelle, & Christe left the farm on the night of May 26, 1989 and began the trip to Florida over 1,000 miles away in their 1986 Oldsmobile Calais.
They would only be on vacation for a week but were very excited and determined to make the most of it. After arriving in Florida they stayed at an inn in Titusville, and on May 28 they went to the Jacksonville Zoo. The next three days the family spent going to different parts of Disneyworld.
On June 1, 1989, Jo and the girls checked into a Days Inn hotel in the afternoon. Michelle called her boyfriend Jeff who was working in Van Wert to check up on him. After she hung up, the family got changed to go to the beach. They ate dinner at a nearby restaurant and left just after 7 to go see the sunset on a boat. Nobody heard from them after that.
Hal reported his family missing when they didn’t come back by June 4, since Jo had to go back to work and Michelle would be starting summer school. He withdrew $7,000 and was going to drive down to Florida to look for his family and see if they had possibly gotten lost or whether they just decided to stay a few extra days.
On June 4, some people on a sailboat in Tampa Bay called after discovering what they thought was a dead body floating in the water. About 200 yards east, 2 more dead bodies were found without any identification, investigators only knew they were all white women. Their hands and feet were bound with rope and duct tape, their mouths were also covered with tape. They also had rope around their necks tied to a concrete block which weighed them down underwater. An autopsy was performed, all three victims had water in their lungs and were alive when thrown in the water. They had been in the water for a couple days, most likely since June 1. Dental records & DNA confirmed Hal’s worst fears, the victims were his wife and daughters. Michelle had freed her left hand from the rope but tragically couldn’t escape as none of the Rogers women knew how to swim.
The bodies of 36 year old Jo, 17 year old Michelle & 14 year old Christe were transported back to Ohio to be buried. The funeral was held a week later on June 13, all three were buried in Zion Lutheran Cemetery in Schumm, Ohio.
Hal Rogers was the prime suspect in the murders, investigators thought it was suspicious he didn’t report his family missing earlier and seemed to be acting strange. Hal said he was on the farm in Ohio the whole time Jo, Michelle, & Christe were on vacation and his alibi checked out, there was no way he could’ve driven to Florida and got back and he had no motive to murder his whole family.
The next suspect was Hal’s brother John who had sexually abused Michelle for years, but he was in jail at the time and didn’t know about the family vacation so he was ruled out. Investigators began searching for suspects down in Florida and put the Rogers family on billboards hoping it would lead to tips that would get them somewhere.
A note with distinctive handwriting was found in Jo’s abandoned car which didn’t belong to her or her daughters, the handwriting was also put on billboards in the hopes someone would recognize it. Jo has also written down directions for a boat to go to, investigators believed the killer owned a blue and white boat. A few months after the murder investigators got a tip from a Canadian tourist named Judy Blair. She was in Florida a few weeks before the Rogers family and on the night of May 15, 1989, she went on a boat ride with a man she didn’t know to see the sunset. On the boat, the man touched her inappropriately, pulled off her clothes and raped her. He told her there were sharks in the water if she was thinking of swimming to shore, but eventually the man threw up and stopped assaulting her. He told her to get dressed and swim away, which she did. The man identified himself as Dave Posner and said he owned a nearby aluminum company, but police couldn’t find anyone with this name. A composite sketch of the man was done.
Just over a year after the murders, investigators got the tip they needed. A woman named Jo Ann Steffey called and said she recognized the handwriting as belonging to one of her neighbors, an aluminum contractor named Oba Chandler. She felt certain he was responsible for the murders.
Like the Rogers family, Oba Chandler was also from Ohio. He had an extensive criminal record going back to his teenage years with crimes such as stealing cars, burglary, & kidnapping. Chandler was questioned, he claimed he met the Rogers family the day of the murder and had given them directions in the afternoon but never saw them again. He also owned a blue and white boat and phone records showed he was out late on the day of the murders, which he claimed was due to boat trouble and was sold shortly after the murders. Chandler and his wife also moved to a new house quickly, which made investigators even more suspicious. A palm print found on a brochure in Jo’s car matched Oba Chandler, and he was finally arrested for the murders on September 24, 1992.
Oba Chandler was indicted for the murders on November 10, 1992 and pled not guilty, claiming that he was fishing alone the night of the murders and he was out late because of a gas leak on the boat he was trying to repair. But all the evidence showed he was responsible, he was sentenced to death on November 4, 1994. He appealed many times, but they were all denied.
Governor Rick Scott signed a death warrant for Oba Chandler and he was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison in Raiford, Florida on November 15, 2011 at age 65. He never received any visitors when he was on death row, and his daughter Suzette publicly said that he committed the murders and deserved to die.
Hal Rogers and his new wife Jolene drove down to Florida, they met in 1998 and were both widowed. However, they didn’t witness the execution and Hal said he’d never have any real closure and just had to keep living his life and working.
After being executed in 2011, DNA evidence confirmed in 2014 that Oba Chandler had also murdered Ivelisse Berrios-Beguerisse, a 20 year old woman who was found raped & strangled to death in Coral Springs, Florida on November 27, 1990; a year and a half after the Rogers family murders. Ivelisse was born on December 22, 1969 and would be 55 in today’s time had she lived.
This family portrait was done after the murders. Had the Rogers women lived; Jo would be 72, Michelle would be 53, and Christe would be 50. Continue reading
Comments
Post a Comment