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Donald Chambers Built the Bench Behind the Playhouse. He Died on It.
Published 2 months, 3 weeks ago
Description
Donald Chambers built the green bench himself, in the workshop of the community playhouse where he volunteered as a set builder, and the crew had repainted it the weekend before and carried it outside to dry. On a Tuesday morning in September two thousand fourteen, a woman arriving early for a costume delivery saw a man sitting on it with his head tipped forward, and almost drove past. For fourteen months before that morning, Donald had been taking cash out of his account and telling no one why.
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This episode is a work of fiction; the case below is the case as the episode tells it.
Donald Chambers, 55, a retired drafting teacher from Delphos, Indiana, was found dead on the morning of Tuesday, September 9, 2014, in the gravel lot behind the Millbrook Community Playhouse, where he had stayed on alone after the last actor left the night before. The medical examiner recorded death from blunt-force injuries. Bank statements showed more than eight thousand dollars withdrawn in cash over fourteen months, ending with eight hundred dollars on August 29. A torn bank document recovered from the prop compartment of the bench led investigators to Howard Roberts, 49, a freelance electrician who had upgraded the panel at Donald's house and done backstage work at the theater, and who had been demanding payment in exchange for not sending copies of private letters about the end of Donald's marriage to his family. Roberts was arrested in October 2014, convicted of murder after a nine-day trial in March 2015, and sentenced to sixty years. A second investigation in Tipton County reopened the 2011 death of Carl Whitmore, recorded at the time as a fall on a staircase; Roberts was convicted of that murder in September 2016 and received forty-five years, ordered to run concurrently rather than consecutively. The Indiana Court of Appeals rejected his appeal in the autumn of 2018. He then gave a recorded statement admitting the demands for money and the killing, while maintaining he had not gone to the theater intending to kill Donald.
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Sources: none. This episode is fiction. The people, the theater, the investigation and both trials are invented, and nothing in it is drawn from a real case, a real record or a real person.
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This episode is a work of fiction; the case below is the case as the episode tells it.
Donald Chambers, 55, a retired drafting teacher from Delphos, Indiana, was found dead on the morning of Tuesday, September 9, 2014, in the gravel lot behind the Millbrook Community Playhouse, where he had stayed on alone after the last actor left the night before. The medical examiner recorded death from blunt-force injuries. Bank statements showed more than eight thousand dollars withdrawn in cash over fourteen months, ending with eight hundred dollars on August 29. A torn bank document recovered from the prop compartment of the bench led investigators to Howard Roberts, 49, a freelance electrician who had upgraded the panel at Donald's house and done backstage work at the theater, and who had been demanding payment in exchange for not sending copies of private letters about the end of Donald's marriage to his family. Roberts was arrested in October 2014, convicted of murder after a nine-day trial in March 2015, and sentenced to sixty years. A second investigation in Tipton County reopened the 2011 death of Carl Whitmore, recorded at the time as a fall on a staircase; Roberts was convicted of that murder in September 2016 and received forty-five years, ordered to run concurrently rather than consecutively. The Indiana Court of Appeals rejected his appeal in the autumn of 2018. He then gave a recorded statement admitting the demands for money and the killing, while maintaining he had not gone to the theater intending to kill Donald.
---
Sources: none. This episode is fiction. The people, the theater, the investigation and both trials are invented, and nothing in it is drawn from a real case, a real record or a real person.