Former professor receives award for documentary that solved cold case

It was Feb. 1, 1979, when Janet Chandler’s body was found buried in a snow bank seven miles south of South Haven by a snowplow driver.

Chandler was 22 years old, said former Central Michigan University Broadcast and Cinematic Arts professor David Schock.

Her death was an unsolved mystery before Schock came along.

Schock received the Liberty Bell Award Thursday night from the Isabella County Bar Association after a documentary he made helped solve the case in Nov. 2007.

“I think it’s very well deserved, and he has done an excellent service,” Marks said.

Schock graduated from CMU in the fall of 1973 with a master’s degree in journalism. He taught at CMU between 1985 and 1991, and began teaching at Hope College in 1994.

Bob DeVries, a retired policeman of Holland Police Department, spoke to Schock’s documentary filmmaking class at Hope in the spring of 2003. Schock asked DeVries what was one murder case that got away and, without a heartbeat, DeVries said Chandler.

“At that moment, he carved that on my heart,” Schock said.

Schock asked a group of eight students to join him in making a film about Chandler, who was abducted and murdered in 1979. He thought watching “Unsolved Mysteries” would be a good format for his students to learn how to make a documentary that would have some substance in real-life applications, Marks said.

Unsolved Mystery

The group chronicled Chandler’s life in college, from her attendance at Muskegon Community College to her transfer to Hope College in Holland.

She dealt with being an outsider at Hope because of her religious background as a Baptist.

“Imagine going to school where you’re not one of us,” Schock said.

She dropped out of school before her senior year and worked through the summer and fall of 1978 in Holland at the Blue Mill Inn.

The people who she worked with did not like her either, Schock said.

“She didn’t realize she was dealing with monsters,” he said.

Carl Paiva, a man who Chandler was seeing, led a plan to abduct, rape and murder her. Paiva had been informed by Laurie Ann Swank, Chandler’s best friend, that Chandler had been fooling around with other men.

Paiva told Swank that he would take care of it, Schock said.

A group of security guards staying at the inn also were involved in the Chandler’s murder. Paiva had spoken to several guards and Holland residents and persuaded them to get involved, Schock said.

“It was basically a gang activity to kill this young college student, and it has been unsolved for about 25 years,” said Andrew Marks, a Mount Pleasant attorney.

Holland Police played Schock’s documentary to their prime suspects, and the suspects decided either their conscious or the law was so close to getting them that they cut a deal with the police, Marks said.

“I think they had intended to teach her a lesson all right, but I think this lesson was more about class, envy and just unbridled hate,” Schock said.