One of the people they wanted to interview for the documentary was Laurie Swank, Chandler’s roommate. They kept asking around, but nobody could seem to know what had happened to her. It took them a long time, but eventually they did find her in Pennsylvania. When Swank spoke to the film students, she warmly described Janet as “musical and fun-loving.”
When police reopened the case in 2004, they made it a priority to re-interview many of the Wackenhut guards, even though most of them no longer lived in Michigan. One of the people they interviewed was Robert Lynch. By this point, he was 65 years old and he had 2 children of his own, including a 22-year-old daughter.
Outwardly, Robert appeared to be a normal 65 year old man, except for his extreme alcoholism. Robert drank like crazy whenever he could, as if he was desperately trying to forget something. The investigators sensed that Robert knew more than he was saying, so they kept coming back to him. After multiple visits, he finally started to crack and open up about what really happened.
When he first started opening up, he told investigators that right before the murder, Janet had been at a party that "went haywire." This immediately caught the attention of investigators; they’d been interviewing people for over a year since the investigation was reopened and this was the first time they’d ever heard anyone mention a party. But when they tried to get more information, Robert clammed up again; he said that he’d only heard about the party second hand.
Still, they kept coming back to him. The big breakthrough came when the detectives pulled out a copy of the documentary “Who Killed Janet Chandler?” and had him watch it with them. As they watched the movie together, Robert started crying. He said that he regretted his entire life.
He started telling investigators everything that he knew, this time honestly. He admitted that he and a number of other security guards had raped and murdered Janet at a surprise party. He insisted that killing her wasn’t intentional, but he also understood that it doesn’t really matter if it was intentional or not.
Robert gave up the names of the others who’d been involved: Arthur Paiva, Freddie Parker, Anthony Williams, and James Nelson. But investigators were most surprised to hear that Laurie Swank had been there and she’d cheered on the gang-rape as it was happening. When investigators confronted Laurie Swank with this new information, she finally broke and admitted that she’d been involved in the murder. Ultimately, Swank agreed to testify against the others in exchange for being allowed to plead guilty to 2nd-degree murder.
But perhaps most importantly, when police searched Paiva’s home, they were able to find the rape photos that he’d used to blackmail the others into silence for some many years. The trial began in 2007. Paiva, Parker, Williams, and Nelson were all tried together. Robert Lynch and Laurie Swank testified against all four of them.
Another person who testified at the trial was Cheryl Ruiz, the hotel maid who’d been upset with Janet before the murder. Janet had slept with Cheryl’s boyfriend and so she was happy, at first, to see that Janet was finally getting punished for her constant sleeping around. However, she later testified that she’d had no idea that it was going to go so far or that Janet would end up dead.
"I didn't think it was going to be this rough. I didn't think they were going to go to this extreme,” Ruiz testified.
Ruiz was told that if she ever told anybody about what she saw that night, then she’d end up just like Janet Chandler. And so for almost 30 years, she said nothing. She did end up telling her parents about what happened, but they told her to stay out of it, saying that she could be arrested if anybody ever found out what happened. It wasn’t until Arthur Paiva was finally put on trial in 2007 that Ruiz broke her silence.
