Daughter of murdered 'tough guy' pushes for justice

Donna Chandler is haunted by a vision of her tough but elderly father bleeding to death in an entryway of his Winston-Salem house as his killer steps over him.

"That's what kills me, thinking about how violated he would have felt, how embarrassed that he wouldn't have been able to fight," Chandler told me last week.

Chandler, a 47-year-old who teaches third-graders, inherited the fighting spirit of her father, Ansel Rakestraw. She kept pushing for police to solve her father's August 2004 slaying at his Bethania Station Road home. In 2007, she wrote a letter to the Journal in support of the city police department's plan to form a cold-case unit to investigate unsolved murder cases.

Late last month, detectives from that unit announced that they'd charged 29-year-old Abdula Rashea Hall with the first-degree murder and armed robbery of Chandler's father, who was 77. Hall was already in the Forsyth County Jail on another murder count. He is one of three men charged with the slaying of Howard Antonio Haddo at his Clemmons home a couple of months after Rakestraw was killed.

Chandler and her sister, Susan, praise Detective Mike Rowe of the cold-case unit, as well as the Forsyth County deputies and SBI agents who helped on their father's case. The charge is one step in a long road to closure. Chandler's memories of her father, whom she gently describes as "colorful," give her strength.

He met and married her mother, Doris, soon after he came here from Georgia in the mid-1940s, Chandler said. He'd been drafted into the Army, but World War II ended before he was sent overseas. To support his family, he ran a painting contracting business, then Tom's Drive-in on Cherry Street, and then a bar. He later ran a used-car dealership, and would repossess cars by himself in rough neighborhoods.

As tough as her father was, Chandler said, he was also tender. After the family collie died, she said, "there was no more watching Lassie. It upset him too much."

Years later, friends would tell her about his quiet acts of kindness, such as giving a pregnant school-mate of Chandler's $50 for a baby stroller.

Ansel Rakestraw, called "Straw" by his many buddies, liked a drink and a smoke. But he was strict with his girls. "As far as his family went, we had to toe the line, we had to make the grades," Chandler said. "I was in at 11 o'clock until I got married." She said she only got to go in his bar once -- when there was a birthday party there for him. "There was a whole side of his life that he didn't want us to have anything to do with," she said.

Rakestraw, who never went to college after his high-school graduation, wanted more for his girls. He put the three of them through school. He unsuccessfully ran for Winston-Salem Board of Aldermen in 1985, citing, among other things, a need for more law and order. "I think they could beef up the police department," he told the Journal.

As her mother was dying of cancer, Chandler said, her father cooked and cared for her.

Several years ago, he started the used-car lot. "He really wanted more than anything else a place to hold court, a place where his buddies could stop by and talk," she said.

One of her father's habits bothered her.

"My dad always carried a lot of cash," she said. "We fussed at him about it. You know, as men grow older, they don't want to admit they aren't the tough guy they once were."

On the Saturday he was killed, her father had left a note on his workplace door, saying that he had closed because he was sick. That Saturday night, Chandler said, "An officer came to the door and said, ‘Do you know a Mr. Rakestraw?' I was just floored. He was getting older, and I thought maybe there had been an accident or something. You just don't expect (a murder)."

Chandler teaches at Julian Gibson Elementary School, right around the corner from her father's old house.

"I guess dealing with kids all the time, I see where some of them come from," she said. "I have a real curiosity about what led (her father's killer) to prey on a human like you prey on an animal. I think my curiosity is worse than my anger right now."

She worries about the paths some of her students might take. "If they'd just had a parent to give them a good background … ."

She is her father's daughter, tough but tender.

■ John Railey writes local editorials for the Journal. He can be reached at 727-7357 or at jrailey@wsjournal.com.