Someone upthread mentioned the murder of Joan Rogers and her daughters while on vacation (by Oba Chandler). I first saw that case on Unsolved Mysteries when I was in college. I'd not heard of it before because in the pre-internet days, the murder of a family in Florida (who was from Ohio) just didn't make national news - especially if they thought the killer was local). I was in college in Ohio, and my roommate was from Ohio, so she wanted to watch it because she remembered it. It grabbed me because I'm from a rural area like the Rogers women, and they looked like a family I knew that lived nearby an went to our church. It was spooky, except for the family I knew had a boy and girl, not two girls, but the father owned his own business and I could see him think he was too busy to leave it like Hal Rogers did, and I could see them being too trusting - thinking a friendly stranger wouldn't harm them. Christe was a year or two younger than me, and Michele was a year or two older than me. Joan was close to my mom's age. It stuck with me and I often wondered what happened to them.
Then I saw the Forensics Files ep, and I was glad to see it had been solved. Then it popped up on several other shows over the years. I found a really good article online that had been written for the newspaper down there that won a Pulitzer. It shed a lot more light on the story:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100301...s/default.html
It touched on why they were on vacation in the first place (truly sad), how screwed up small-town family dynamics are (I know families just like Hal's parents and his brother), on Oba's dark history, on how they believe the Rogers women encountered him in the first place - it's very well written.
But it wasn't until I read the book about the case called "Death Cruise" that one thing that never sat quite right with me finally made sense. The women encountered Chandler fairly early in the day. They checked in to their hotel and then went back out. They were seen later in the day/early evening having dinner at the hotel, then they left again - for good. There was no record of them going anywhere in the afternoon where they could be traced (credit card charges, eyewitnesses, etc). Those who worked the case are 99.9% sure that Chandler took them out on the boat during the day to gain their trust - after all, they went out with him once before, and everything was fine, so why couldn't they trust him again? I know a few people who would be trusting enough to go with a friendly stranger (and this was the late 80's as well), but her being a mother with two teens, one of whom had recently gone through something horrible, I would have thought Joan would have been even a bit leery, but then it makes more sense. Chandler did that with the Canadian Tourist that he assaulted about a year before killing the Rogers women. He invited her out during the day, then took her back out at night. But for reasons only he knows, he let her go.
Lastly, while working back through the CODIS system and cold cases, they found out (after he was executed) that Oba Chandler was linked to at least one other murder - a woman murdered after leaving a Florida shopping center. It was less than 5 miles from where he lived at the time. Sadly, they're confident they'll find him linked to more as they go.
A few years ago, I saw an article about Hal Rogers and how he is now. The first few years, he refused to sleep in the bedroom he shared with Joan. At first, he wouldn't sleep in the house at all (crashing with friends), but eventually, he'd just sleep on the floor on newspaper. Ultimately, he had the house torn down because he just couldn't take it anymore, and had a new one put up. After a good long while, he began dating, and eventually remarried. He seems happy, and I am happy for him. I always felt so badly for him - he felt responsible for what happened because he didn't trust leaving the family business to someone else, that he lost his wife and daughters in one fell swoop, and I always felt horrible that people thought he could actually do it.