HOLLAND (WHTC-AM/FM) — One more of the group of people convicted in the 1979 rape and murder of 22-year-old Janet Chandler has died.
James Cleophas Nelson, who went by the nickname “Bubba,” died on June 8, 2020, according to Michigan Department of Corrections records. He did not die of COVID-19; prison officials did not release his cause of death.
Nelson was sentenced to life behind bars on Dec. 10, 2007, for Janet Chandler’s Jan. 31, 1979 murder.
One other convicted for Chandler’s murder have died in prison: 61-year-old Arthur Paiva died in 2013.
Laurie Swank, who worked with Chandler at the Blue Mill Inn in Holland, and was her roommate, was sentenced to 10-20 years for second-degree murder as part of a plea deal. She was released from prison in 2016. She was paroled in Pennsylvania, where she was living at the time of her arrest. MDOC records show that, as of 2018, she is no longer under supervision.
Janet Chandler, a Hope College music student with a night clerk job at the inn on U.S. 31, was lured to a nearby home in Holland, raped repeatedly by five men, then strangled.
The men had been working as Wackenhut Seucrity guards and staying at the Blue Mill during a strike at Chemtron (since closed).
A snow plow driver discovered Chandler’s body on a roadside a day later. Holland police detectives got a big break in the cold case after Hope College Professor David Schock and his students produced a documentary.
The other men convicted reamin behind bars: Robert Lynch, now 80, convicted of second-degree murder as part of a plea deal, was sentenced to 25 to 40 years in prison. Freddie Parker, 63, and Anthony Williams and 69 remain in prison, with life sentences.
