Complaint over gas smell leads police to woman's body

COBB COUNTY, Ga. — Police say a Kennesaw man was ready to blow up his duplex. They believe he had already killed his wife inside.

Neighbors told Channel 2's Ross Cavitt they learned something bad was happening long before they realized it was murder.

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"It seemed as if he was going to torch it and I live here with my roommate and my animals and I was like, 'are you kidding me?'" neighbor Christina Cash told Cavitt, one day after police reopened her neighborhood.

Cash said she was still shaken knowing her neighbor allegedly murdered his wife, then splashed gallons upon gallons of gasoline inside the duplex with which she shares a wall.

"I'm just hit with the smell of gasoline, and I was like, ‘OK, this wasn't right,’" Cash said.

"As soon as you stepped on the front porch it was like you were standing in a puddle of gasoline," neighbor James Crowe told Cavitt.

Neighbors had smelled the gasoline before police arrived, but the lights were out in Darryl and Brenda Chandler's duplex.

When the gas company arrived, Darryl Chandler wouldn't let them in. Police arrived and, smelling the stench, they detained Darryl and found Brenda's body, which had been shot, in a bedroom.

Neighbors said the couple had lived in the quiet Kennesaw neighborhood not far from the university for a decade.

"You see them come and go. They drove nice cars and you just thought they were a nice couple," Crowe said.

Court documents say when the quick-thinking cops detained Chandler when they found receipts from two gas stations in his pockets, along with two lighters. He was one motion away from setting the entire building ablaze and possibly taking more lives.

“You're just going to torch the place? What happened to your life where you had to do that-you're going to take out two other people as well? It freaked me out. It got to that point were there was nothing that could have been done, someone you could talk to?" Cash asked.

Cox Media Group