THE SUSPECT: A snapshot of Oba Chandler, roughly around the time of the murders, at the door of his Jeep Cherokee.

The investigators sent Chandler's handwriting to an analyst with the FDLE, who confirmed that it matched the directions written on the Clearwater Beach brochure.

They got his prints from his prison and probation records, then sent them to another analyst, who concluded that one of the prints found on the brochure -- a palm print -- had come from Chandler's right hand.

They sent law enforcement officers to Volusia County to begin the surveillance of Chandler's home.

They had a device placed on Chandler's phone line, keeping a record of every call into or out of the house.

Early in September, as all these other assignments were being carried out, two investigators -- Katy Connor-Dubina, a St. Petersburg police detective, and John Halliday, an FDLE agent who had worked with the task force for almost a year -- flew to Toronto to interview the Canadian tourist who had been raped in the waters off Madeira Beach back in May 1989, two weeks before the murders.

They interviewed her one Thursday evening in a hotel room. Knowing how difficult it would be to talk about something so painful, they did their best to make her feel comfortable. Before she arrived, they bought some yellow daisies at a market and placed them in a bottle in the room.

The woman was 27 now, recently married, employed as a social worker. More than three years had passed since that day when she had joined the man out on the gulf in his blue and white boat. But she had no trouble recalling details. She explained how she and her girlfriend were on vacation that week in Madeira Beach, how they met the man one night in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, how she wound up talking to him and agreeing to join him the next day on his boat, how he seemed disappointed and even angry when her girlfriend wouldn't join them.

She described the man and said he was wearing faded jeans and a mint green, cotton mesh shirt. She described the boat and its engine, which she remembered was a Volvo engine, painted yellow. She talked about how, just before the man changed, the night grew so still and quiet and how she began to feel so uncomfortable. Through the silence, she said, she heard a bell from a nearby buoy, ringing over and over.

Once again, she recalled the things he had said to her when she tried to get away from him.

"What are you going to do? Jump out of the boat?" he asked her. "Is sex something worth losing your life over?"

The man threatened to cover her mouth with duct tape, she said. He pulled down her shorts and the bottom of her bathing suit. She tried to persuade him to stop, told him she was a virgin, but this only seemed to spur him on.

Connor-Dubina told her they had some photos to show her. The man who had raped her, the detective said, may or may not be in the photos.

The detective asked the woman to look at all the photos before making a decision. Then she opened an envelope and pulled out six photos, each showing a different man.

The Canadian woman held the photos in a stack in her hand, looking at them one by one. When she reached the third photo, she raised it closer to see more clearly. Her face grew flushed.

She looked through the remaining photos, going through them all before she stopped.

"You really want to know?" she said.

She pulled the third photo from the middle of the stack and threw it down in front of the investigators.

"My initial reaction is him."

It was Oba Chandler.

Connor-Dubina asked her to sign the photo and mark it with the time and date. The woman did it, then asked for a favor.

Would it be okay if she turned the photo over, she said, so she didn't have to look at it anymore?

"It's really bothering me."

***

The detectives had company with them in Toronto.

Joining them on the trip was one of the assistants from the state attorney's office. As Halliday and Connor-Dubina questioned the Canadian woman, this prosecutor sat in a nearby hotel room, waiting.

After the woman had given her statement, the prosecutor carefully questioned her again. He needed to hear her account and study her with his own eyes, so he could evaluate how well her testimony would hold up in court. Now that she had picked out Chandler's photo, was that enough to make an arrest? To win a conviction?

The prosecutor thought so. The Canadian woman, he believed, was an exceptionally strong witness -- articulate and credible, and willing to tell her story in front of a jury.

The time had come to move. The assistant state attorney and his colleagues from the state still wanted more evidence before seeking an indictment against Chandler in the Rogers murders, but there was enough to arrest him for the Madeira Beach rape. It was a serious charge, carrying a possible life sentence. They would use it to get him off the street, then keep strengthening the Rogers case until they had enough to prove those charges as well.

They wrote up an arrest warrant and took it to a judge to be signed. By this point the surveillance units in Volusia County were working around the clock. Keeping track of Chandler's movements had expanded into a huge operation. Now the task force comprised 40 to 50 law enforcement officers, fielded from the St. Petersburg police, the FDLE and the FBI. They worked out of a command post a few miles from Chandler's house, taking over an empty business office. Officers had stationed a video camera near Chandler's house, pointed toward the driveway and front door; a couple of blocks away, they had rented a house and converted it into a small watching post. Members of the task force kept track of a monitor showing them the feed from the video camera. If anyone came out of the Chandler house or pulled up the driveway or ran across the front yard, they would see it immediately.

Whenever Chandler left, he was followed. At any one time, there were as many as six or seven units in unmarked cars assigned to track of his movements. To avoid alerting Chandler to their presence -- getting "burned," the surveillance people called it -- they rotated the ground units so that no one vehicle stayed anywhere near him for long.

The FBI had donated the use of two of the bureau's single-engine Cessnas to assist the ground units. From before dawn till late at night, one of the planes stayed high above Chandler's house, circling endlessly; when that plane had to refuel or the pilot needed a rest, the two-man team in the other Cessna would take over. If Chandler pulled out of the driveway, whichever plane was in the sky -- the air unit was called Eagle -- would follow. A spotter seated next to the pilot would watch Chandler's movements, making sure they stayed with him.

"Okay," they would say, speaking over the radio to the units on the ground, "Eagle has the eyeball."

The surveillance was just beginning to settle into a routine when the prosecutors came to Volusia County with the arrest warrant. The plan was to take Chandler into custody on the rape charge. Glen Moore and a couple of other investigators would then try to question him. Moore and the other investigators had a strategy for how to conduct the interview. They had been rehearsing how it would go. They were going to get him in a room at the FBI's Daytona Beach office and show him photos of Jo and Michelle and Christe, both after they were dead and when they were very much alive. Then, they hoped, he would start to talk.

They were set to go on Thursday,

Sept. 17. But that morning, an hour or so before they were to arrest him, something unexpected happened.

Chandler walked out of his house, got into his car, a blue Toyota Corolla, and drove out of town.

Silver Bullet continued