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#Post#: 353--------------------------------------------------
~ Oba Chandler, 15Nov11, (FL) ~
DIR By: BuzzC
Date: May 17, 2019, 7:09 pm
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Oba Chandler, Face of Evil, Executed Tuesday--
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
[IMG]
HTML http://killertruecrimes.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/a4s_chandler111511_199443a.jpg[/img]
Hal Rogers felt no need to watch the last breaths of the man who
took his family.
In October, when news of the death warrant reached Hal on his
farm in Ohio, he doubted he would attend the execution. It
wouldn’t bring back his wife and daughters. Twenty-two years
after their murders, Jo and Michelle and Christe still lived
inside Hal so vividly he sometimes had trouble accepting that
they were buried in the cemetery down the road.
And although he once harbored fantasies of vengeance against
their killer, Hal had long since let go of such bloody thoughts.
He rarely thought about the killer at all anymore. He almost
never uttered his name, not because he was afraid of naming him,
but because he believed the man did not deserve even that small
measure of respect. As far as Hal was concerned, the condemned
wasn’t worth the trip to Florida State Prison.
“He’s just going to die,” said the 59-year-old farmer, blunt and
unbowed as ever. “Big deal.”
But then a few days ago, Hal learned that his niece, Mandi
Scarlett — Michelle’s and Christe’s cousin — was determined to
witness the execution. She didn’t expect anything from the
killer. For herself, and for her cousins, she needed to see the
man die, even if that meant traveling from Ohio to Florida on
her own.
Once Hal realized Mandi wasn’t changing her mind, he knew he had
to join her.
“I don’t want her going down there alone,” he said.
The two of them set off before dawn Tuesday. Hal packed a gray
pinstripe suit — he had been told there was a dress code — and
then he and Mandi drove through the darkened corn and wheat
fields to the airport in Fort Wayne, and then they flew to
Jacksonville.
The whole morning, the finality of what awaited them hung in the
car between them. Mandi couldn’t talk about it. Fighting off
tears, she went silent. Hal worried that the condemned might use
his last words to say something wicked.
“It’s a lose-lose-lose situation,” he said.
In Jacksonville they rented a car and headed southward until
they reached the stone gates of Florida State Prison. Inside,
they were ushered into the small viewing room that looks into
the death chamber.
Hal took a seat next to Mandi in the center of the front row.
Another victim of Chandler’s, a woman he had raped in the ’70's,
sat on the other side of Hal. Before them stretched a large
window, shrouded by a brown curtain.
Minutes ticked by. Hal breathed and waited. On the other side of
the glass, a team was readying the inmate on his gurney. Some of
the witnesses had wondered whether the man would confess,
express regret, show even a hint of recognition of what he had
done.
To Hal, it made no difference. He just wanted it to be over. In
his mind, he conjured Jo and the girls, bringing them into this
silence with him.
The curtain went up.
The first snow of the season fell over Van Wert County late last
Thursday afternoon, not long before dark.
Hal was busy inside a drying bin, shoveling corn toward an auger
that ferried the grain into wagons waiting outside. When the
snow came blowing in, it swirled with red chaff from the corn
and engulfed the wagons in a cloud of white and maroon.
A strange and beautiful sight, but Hal had no time to notice.
Already a month behind schedule, he was lost in concentration.
“I haven’t shoveled corn this wet in thirty years,” he said.
His beard has gone gray. The lines in his face have deepened.
But he still speaks in the same growl, and he moves with the
nimbleness of a teenager.
The 370 acres of his farm remain the center of his world. The
Holsteins he and the girls once milked twice a day are gone,
replaced with pigs. Five thousand of them, snorting and
squealing in a pair of giant barns tricked out with an automated
system that keeps them fed and watered.
Thirteen years ago, he married a farmer’s daughter named Jolene
Keefer. She had four kids of her own, and for years she and Hal
had tried to have more children. But after several miscarriages,
they had had enough. The disappointment still cuts deep,
compounded by the void left behind by the murders.
Jolene has done her best to help him through the darkness. She
knew that when she married Hal, she was also marrying Jo and
Michelle and Christe. Still, she didn’t pretend it was easy
sharing him.
“Sometimes I do have to fight ghosts,” she said the other night.
“That’s when the jealousy creeps in.”
Hal was still outside, tinkering with the auger. Jolene was in
the kitchen, frosting a chocolate cake and fretting over what
would happen at the execution.
“I’m so worried about whether that — whatever you want to call
him — will do something awful,” she said. “That’s what scares me
about Hal going down there. I just don’t want him to be hurt
anymore.”
The next morning, when Jolene wasn’t home, Hal showed the
artifacts he has saved from his previous life — a 4H trophy
Christe won for raising a pig, a crayon drawing Michelle colored
of the farm when she was in first grade, stuffed animals that
both girls had played with throughout their childhood. He feels
their presence on the farm sometimes, especially when he’s
stressed.
Hal’s not sure how he survived the terrible years after the
murders.
To this day, he confessed, he still feels like he’s out on a
tightrope. He can’t make it to the other side, and he can’t find
his way back.
“You get so far out on that tightrope,” he said. “You ain’t got
nothing to do but fall in.”
• • •
The execution unfolded in slow motion. The condemned was
stretched out on the gurney, a white sheet covering his body,
his eyes closed. He looked as though he were already dead. Then
the warden asked if he had anything to say, and the man said
“no” so loudly it was clear he was awake.
Hal realized that the man was going to give them nothing. It was
his way of exerting control, denying the satisfaction of a
confession.
Hal was able to observe closely the faces of the execution team
carrying out the protocol. Though they were doing their utmost
to project composure, Hal could see how hard this was for them.
He watched the team give the signal for the executioner — hidden
by a wall — to begin the flow of the fatal cocktail.
Hal saw the mouth of the condemned fall open slightly and then
began keeping track of his chest rising and falling under the
sheet. More minutes went by, and Hal was surprised that it was
taking so long for the man to die. He thought of Henry VIII,
ordering Anne Boleyn’s death. Much quicker, beheading.
“Chop, chop,” he told himself.
Through it all, he held to his vow to stay motionless. He didn’t
want to give anyone — not the condemned, not the other witnesses
— the opportunity to see him losing control.
Finally it was over. He stood up, his face revealing nothing,
and walked out toward the sunlight.
• • •
Afterward, Hal thanked the prosecutors who had fought so long on
the case and who had joined him there in the viewing room. Mandi
made a brief statement to the reporters, her voice trembling,
and then the two of them climbed back in their rental car and
drove away.
Mandi was clearly relieved. Seeing the man go under, she said,
had given her peace. Hal said he couldn’t find the right words
to explain what he was feeling, but was clearly feeling
something. He was happy for Mandi, and happy to be done, once
and for all, with the dead man under the sheet. Soon he was
talking about God and the devil, heaven and hell. He knew both
were real.
“I seen hell,” he said. “The devil ain’t as smart as he thinks
he is. I like to say that I spit in his eye. I ain’t afraid of
him.”
Hal was still out on the tightrope. He knows, he said, that he
will never make it completely to the other side.
“There’s never going to be justice, okay?” Hal said. “He’d be
dead and they’d come back. That would be justice.”
But as he sped away from the prison at dusk, his suit jacket was
off and his tie was off and his arm hung out the window. The
breeze felt good against his skin.
HTML http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7opaR3nacs
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