It was 2 1/2 years since Jo Ann Steffey had clipped the composite drawing from the newspaper, but she had not forgotten about the man who used to live two houses away on Dalton Avenue in her Tampa neighborhood. She had already tried once to report her suspicions. But it bothered her that she'd never seen any proof that her tip was even investigated.

As it happened, someone else had tried to pass along her suspicions. After hearing Jo Ann talk about the neighbor with the blue and white boat, one of Steffey's sisters had called the police. This was the tip that had been phoned in on that night in March, when the Rogers case was featured on Unsolved Mysteries. Steffey's sister was the one who had talked to the detective, encouraging her to speak to Steffey. The detective had called Steffey's house and left a message, but for some reason the message never reached Steffey. Nor had her sister, Steffey says, told her about calling the police.

Steffey felt a connection to Jo Rogers. They shared a similar first name, and just like Jo, Steffey had two daughters. Sometimes she had nightmares about the family. She would see them on the boat and would wake up, her heart pounding.

"It could have been me and my girls," she would say.

So when she picked up the newspaper the morning after Sgt. Moore's press conference -- it was Thursday, May 14, 1992 -- and read the quotes about the handwriting and how it was the key to finding the killer, Steffey found herself wondering if she should report her suspicions again.

The police were saying the killer probably had a job not far from wherever he had met Jo and her daughters. Steffey remembered that her former neighbor was an aluminum contractor who built porches and additions for homes. But she couldn't remember where his office had been. So she went next door and asked her neighbor, Mozelle Smith, if she did.

Smith had once hired the man to add an aluminum porch to another house she owned in Tampa. She said she thought he worked out of his home. Then something else occurred to her:

The contract. When she hired the man to build her porch, he had filled out a contract for her.

A handwriting sample.

***

Later, looking back on their detective work, Mozelle Smith and Jo Ann Steffey would differ in their recollections of the exact sequence of these events. In fact, in the years that followed there would be a great deal of disagreement about how the two neighbors and those close to them pursued their suspicions concerning the man down the street.

Smith, for instance, would insist that on that day, when the handwriting appeared in the newspaper, she immediately found the aluminum contract filled out by the man. Steffey, meanwhile, would say that the two of them searched through Smith's house for hours, sifting through the drawers where Mozelle kept her paperwork, but could not find the contract.

Either way, Steffey says she was not deterred. As far as she could tell, she had enough to justify calling the task force. She was still nervous, wondering if she were right, wondering if her former neighbor would learn that she had reported him and if perhaps he had an accomplice who lived nearby. But she picked up the phone anyway.

"I don't care," she said. "I'm gonna call'em."

Steffey talked to Eileen Przybysz, a civilian investigator. Steffey says she told Przybysz about her neighbor and his blue and white boat and the dark-colored sports utility vehicle he had driven. She told how the man had lived in a house on Dalton Avenue along a canal that fed into Tampa Bay, and how her neighbor had hired him for her porch and was searching for the contract. She told how he had moved away suddenly with his wife and little girl two summers ago, and how he had always seemed off to her, made her feel as though he had something to hide.

And she shared the name of the man:

Oba Chandler.

***

What happened next?

Jo Ann Steffey remembers it like this:

Later that afternoon, she says, Mozelle Smith called to tell her she had found the contract, along with a check signed by Oba Chandler.

Steffey hurried next door with a clipping from the newspaper, showing the handwriting that Sgt. Moore had displayed at the press conference. Smith was outside, waiting for her.

The two of them, Steffey says, made the comparison right there in the driveway. They took the newspaper clipping and the contract and the check and placed them on the tailgate of Smith's husband's truck, and then looked back and forth among the three samples, examining the handwriting.

Steffey felt her knees turning to water. She was suddenly so weak, she almost could not stand.

It was the same. She was sure of it.

***

Steffey called the task force again and spoke to Przybysz, the civilian investigator. She told her about the contract.

"I've got it," she said.

Przybysz listened. It would be helpful to see that contract, she said.

"Can you fax it over?"

The Tin Man continued

HAUNTED: Jo Ann Steffey, seen here looking out her kitchen window, suffered nightmares about the murders.