Watch Who Killed Janet Chandler? Online | Vimeo On Demand

Name: Watch Who Killed Janet Chandler? Online | Vimeo On Demand
Uploaded: 2016-10-13T20:27:36+00:00
Duration: 12 min 59 s
Channel: David Schock

Twenty-three your-old Janet Chandler was abducted on January 31, 1979, as she worked the night desk at the Blue Mill Inn in little Holland, MI. The abduction, sometime after 1 a.m., set the Holland Police Department in motion, calling out the entire detective bureau and forensics team.  The motel at the intersection of U.S. 31 and 16th Street, was even then a seedy place, and was playing host to a group of Wackenhut guards. They were in town to police a strike at nearby Chemtron, a paint company.  One of the guards had called police with a story that he had been on the phone with Ms. Chandler when he heard her say “Please don’t take all the money, sir.” The guard said he went down to the desk after a discrete lapse and found her gone. An all-points bulletin went out in western Michigan to alert officers and other government workers as to the abduction.  A snowplow driver found her body almost 24 hours later in a wooded turn-around on Interstate 196 seven miles south of South Haven. That was about 40 miles south of Holland. Local, state and federal law enforcement agencies all became involved in the investigation, but the crime remained unsolved. At that point it was the city of Holland's only unsolved homicide.  And it remained that until a Hope College professor took it in mind to make a documentary about the abduction and murder. During the fall and winter of the 2003-4 school year, Dr. David Schock, then an associate professor of communication, prepared an 80-minute program about the crime, its investigation and its aftermath with members of his documentary class.   “I asked them if they wanted to walk with me as I made a documentary…in addition to the three short films they were making as assignments for the class. After some initial hesitation when I explained that the subject was a Hope College student who had been murdered nearly a quarter century before, they came on board and were active in research and in discussion about who should be interviewed. They came along on most of the interviews, too, taking part in the kinds of things a documentarian is called on to do.”  Two of the most technically inclined also got involved in parts of the editing, but the bulk of that took place in Schock’s basement during the college’s Christmas break.  Who Killed Janet Chandler? debuted in January at the college's Knickerbocker Theatre and showed subsequently on local public television 25-years to the hour after the discovery of her body. Local and regional media also published accounts of the student program and the crime it examined. The film got the attention of the public and people began to talk. At the same time, the Holland Police Department, the Michigan State Police, and the Ottawa County Sheriff—all of whom had jointly investigated the crime in 1979—came to the conclusion that the complaint was solvable.  It took 21 months before the first arrest and several more for the other five. Eventually six people would face justice, although perhaps as many as ten additional men were guilty of felony murder, having raped Janet in the course of the crime that led to her death.  This is the film that revivified the case and allowed the dedicated investigators to pursue it.

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Who Killed Janet Chandler?