Charles Schmid was 23 when Tucson police arrested him at his home on November 10, 1965. That morning a 19-year-old friend of his, Richard Bruns, had led detectives into the desert outside Tucson to the remains of Gretchen Fritz, 17, and her sister Wendy, 13, who had disappeared on the night of August 16. Within two weeks two other young people had pleaded guilty in a different killing, that of Alleen Rowe, 15, who had vanished in May 1964, and both had agreed to testify that Schmid planned it.
A Pima County jury convicted him of the Fritz murders on March 1, 1966, after an 11-day trial, and fixed his penalty at death. In May 1967, in the middle of his second trial, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for Alleen Rowe's death, and a month later he led sheriff's officers to her grave. The prosecution's theory, which the Arizona Supreme Court accepted, was that he killed the Fritz sisters because Gretchen knew about the earlier killing and was using what she knew against him. The death sentences were reduced to life after the United States Supreme Court's 1972 ruling in Furman v. Georgia. He escaped from the state prison in 1972, was caught within three days, and died in March 1975 after two other prisoners attacked him.
The case drew national magazines to Tucson. Life called him "The Pied Piper of Tucson," and the name stayed with him, because so many of the teenagers around him had heard him talk about killing and said nothing.
Schmid was born in Tucson on July 8, 1942, to an unmarried mother, according to a Tucson Citizen retrospective by Paul L. Allen. Charles and Katharine Schmid, who ran a nursing home in Tucson, adopted him when he was a day old, and he took his adoptive father's name.
He was a poor student at Tucson High School but an outstanding gymnast. In 1960 he led the school to the state gymnastics championship, winning the flying rings and the still rings, the Arizona Daily Star reported in 1965. He quit school during his senior year and drifted through odd jobs, Phoenix Magazine wrote in 2025.
His adoptive mother supported him. She gave him a small house of his own on the family property, next door to hers, paid his bills, and gave him an allowance of $300 a month, which she told the jury in 1966 he had received since he was 16. The prosecutor, William J. Schafer III, later wrote that Schmid had no job, and that his adoptive mother also brought him his meals. He had a car and a motorcycle.
He was about five feet three inches tall. He stuffed his cowboy boots with rags, papers and flattened cans to gain about three inches, a detail confirmed by his adoptive mother on the witness stand, by the detective Clarence Dupnik, and by Schafer. He dyed his hair black, wore pancake makeup, and drew a false beauty mark on his cheek; Schafer wrote that he used axle grease for it. He admired Elvis Presley, and the Tucson Sentinel reported that he trained his lower lip with a clothespin to look more like the singer. At times he wore a metal bridge on his nose as if it had been broken, told people he had incurable cancer, and carried small bottles of salt and pepper.
Schafer, writing in 2008, described him as good-looking, very polite and "impeccably mannered." Time magazine, in a long account summarized by the Arizona Daily Star on November 24, 1965, called him a "swinger" who always had wheels, money, tall tales and a supply of girls' phone numbers. The money came from his mother's allowance, the Star noted, though he told friends he made it smuggling cars into Mexico.
His evenings centered on Speedway Boulevard and on parties at his small house. Among his friends were John Saunders, Mary French, Paul Ginn and Richard Bruns. Several of them would end up in court, either as defendants or as witnesses against him.
Norma Alleen Rowe, known as Alleen, was 15 in the spring of 1964 and a sophomore in high school. She lived on Tucson's east side with her mother, a night nurse. Tucson Weekly's Brian Smith, who grew up a mile from her home, wrote in 2023 that she was a good student who wanted to become an oceanographer. Her mother told reporters at the time that she often walked alone in the desert. Her mother and her friends later named Schmid to investigators as an ex-boyfriend of hers.
Mary French, 17 at the time, was Schmid's girlfriend and Alleen's neighbor. John Saunders was a quiet friend of Schmid's who, according to Time, Alleen had once stood up for a date.
The story of that night was told by Mary French on the witness stand, in testimony the Arizona Supreme Court summarized in 1971, and in the statements she and Saunders gave police in 1965. Schmid told French and Saunders that he wanted to kill someone, a girl, and see whether he could get away with it. He chose Alleen Rowe. French testified that he kept pressing her to persuade Alleen to go out with them, and that Alleen finally agreed to go after her mother had left for work at 11 p.m.
The three young people drove Alleen into the desert outside Tucson. French testified that Schmid later came to her at the car and told her, "We killed her." According to the statements reported by the Arizona Daily Star in November 1965, Alleen was beaten to death.
Alleen had gone to bed at about 9:30 on the night of Sunday, May 31, 1964, and was gone in the morning. Her mother assumed at first that she had gone to school; the school reported that she had not attended. The sheriff's office and city police investigated, and Schmid's name came up early, but no one was charged. Her mother believed from the start that her daughter was dead and had not run away.
Schmid did not keep the secret. Bruns later testified that Schmid showed him a grave in June 1964, shortly after Alleen disappeared, and Paul Ginn testified in 1966 that Schmid once told him he had taken a girl out and killed her, which Ginn did not believe. Time reported in November 1965 that at least 30 of Schmid's teenage friends had heard him boast about the killings and stayed silent. "A lot of people knew, but it was already too late," a 16-year-old student told the magazine.
Gretchen Fritz was 17 and Wendy Fritz 13 in the summer of 1965. They were the daughters of a Tucson heart surgeon and his wife. Prosecutor Schafer told the jury in 1966 that Gretchen met Schmid in the fall of 1964, and the two became a couple. Paul Ginn testified that they fought and then became "madly in love" again, over and over.
By 1965 Schmid wanted out of the relationship. According to the Arizona Supreme Court's 1973 summary of the trial evidence, he told friends he could not stop her because she knew he had killed Alleen Rowe, and on a number of occasions he told them he would like to kill her and "twist her pretty little neck." He also told friends that Gretchen had stolen his diary, which he said held an account of how he had killed a young boy. A former housemate testified that Schmid said the diary could send him to the electric chair and that Gretchen had taken it around July 1, 1965.
The court's opinion records a series of episodes from that summer. One night Schmid told a friend that Gretchen was going to take him to a bank and give him the diary; instead she left him ten miles out in the desert, and he had to walk home. Another time a boarder heard him running through the house, very nervous, saying "they" were coming to get him. Asked who, he answered: "The cops, Gretchen turned me in. She has taken the diary and turned me in." A few days before the sisters disappeared, he went to the Fritz home, argued with Gretchen in her room, slapped her, and left saying, "That's it."
Other testimony suggested he tried to manufacture a break. A 17-year-old witness told the jury that a threat Bruns made toward Gretchen was a prank planned with Schmid, who wanted to break up with her. Gretchen's mother testified that Gretchen was not afraid of Schmid but was afraid of Bruns.
On the evening of Monday, August 16, 1965, Gretchen and Wendy left home in the family's red-and-white Pontiac LeMans, saying they were going to a drive-in movie. They did not come back.
That night there was a party at Schmid's house. According to the 1973 opinion, Paul Ginn answered the telephone and told Schmid it was Gretchen, who said that if he did not come she would tell her father. A 17-year-old guest testified that Schmid said he would get "that bitch" if it was the last thing he did. He and Ginn went into a back room, came out with an old scuffed briefcase, and left. The same guest testified that the two men left early in the evening and returned at about 1 a.m.
The Pontiac was later found abandoned in a hotel parking lot in Tucson, its interior dirty and spattered with mud, the court recorded. Reported sightings placed the girls in Mexico, and none proved accurate.
At trial Schmid's adoptive mother testified that he had spent that evening at her house watching television and eating pizza. Bruns testified that Schmid later told him the killings had happened at Schmid's house. "I did it right here," Bruns quoted him as saying.
In the weeks after the disappearance, Schmid told people the girls had run away. Late in August he went to California. San Diego detectives later confirmed that he was held there for about an hour and a half on August 28, 1965, in connection with the Fritz disappearance, and released without being booked, after San Diego police were told he was not a suspect at that time, the Arizona Daily Star reported on November 12, 1965. San Diego authorities said he had been escorted to the city by two men they believed were members of the underworld, and that he was picked up while showing pictures of the Fritz girls and asking people whether they had seen them. Tucson's police chief, Bernard L. Garmire, said his department had not been told of the detention at the time.
According to the Supreme Court's summary, about a week after the disappearance Schmid told Bruns he had killed the girls. A week after that he took Bruns into the desert and showed him their bodies. Bruns told no one in authority. He later testified that he and Schmid spent two to three hours talking with FBI agents during that period without revealing anything about the killings. As late as November 4, 1965, Schafer later noted, the Arizona Daily Star was reporting that police admitted they had no idea where the girls had gone.
Bruns was 19 and unemployed. That autumn he was convicted of disorderly conduct over his behavior toward a 16-year-old former girlfriend and placed on probation, with orders to spend three months with his grandmother in Columbus, Ohio, according to Schafer and the Arizona Daily Star. He could not stay silent there. From Columbus he telephoned the Tucson police and said he knew where the missing girls were. Detective Sgt. Robert Wilhelm flew to Ohio and brought him back.
On November 10, 1965, Bruns led detectives into the desert outside Tucson, where they found the sisters' remains. Pathologist Dr. Louis Hirsch identified them, and the Supreme Court's opinion records that their dentists confirmed the identification. The Star reported the next day that police had not determined how the girls died. Bruns also told investigators what Schmid had said about Alleen Rowe, but he could not find her grave.
Police took Schmid into custody at his home shortly after noon on November 10, the same day the remains were found. He was charged with two counts of homicide, arraigned before Justice of the Peace Toby LaVetter, and held without bond. In October 1965 he had married a 15-year-old girl in Nogales, Mexico, Phoenix Magazine reported, and the arrest came 17 days after the wedding.
Clarence Dupnik, then a Tucson police detective, questioned him. Dupnik told the Tucson Citizen years later that Schmid was uncooperative, refused to take a polygraph test, and made many statements, some true and some not; Dupnik's own view was that Schmid was schizophrenic.
Bruns's statement, published by the Arizona Daily Star on November 12, named two men and a girl as the people who had taken Alleen Rowe into the desert. Within days, Mary French was arrested in Belton, Texas, on November 14, and Saunders was in custody in Tucson.
On November 25, 1965, both of Schmid's companions from the night of May 31, 1964, pleaded guilty in Pima County Superior Court. John Robert Saunders, 19, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in Alleen Rowe's death before Judge John Collins, according to the Arizona Daily Star's report that day. Mary Rae French, also 19, pleaded guilty before Judge Robert O. Roylston to being an accessory to murder and to concealing and compounding the crime. Both agreed to testify for the state against Schmid. "They wish to speak the full truth for the state in the Schmid case," said the county attorney, Norman E. Green. Schmid's lawyer, William Tinney Jr., said: "It's obvious that somebody made a deal."
Judge Roylston sentenced French on December 20, 1965, to four to five years in state prison, on two concurrent terms, and denied the probation her court-appointed lawyer, Jack Redhair, had asked for. Redhair told the court she had been 17 at the time of the killing and "under the influence of an older man," and that her chief offense was failing to report the crime. "She cooperated 100 per cent," he said.
The next day Judge Collins sentenced Saunders to life in prison. He could have imposed death. Collins said he would "fit the punishment to the man, not the crime," and called Saunders easily influenced and "the passive party in this matter." Saunders told the court he would dedicate the rest of his life to becoming a better person.
French and Saunders also took officers to where they believed Alleen had been buried. Schafer wrote that the search turned up only some of her belongings. A man from Mesa who claimed to find things with a divining rod pointed to a spot, and nothing was there.
The formal charges against Schmid followed: an information for the Rowe killing on December 15, 1965, and one for the Fritz murders on December 21, 1965.
By then the case was national news. Time ran a long account in November 1965. Life sent the writer Don Moser, Playboy sent a reporter, and television crews and foreign newspapers followed. Judge Richard N. Roylston issued an order barring law enforcement agencies from speaking to the press, an order the Arizona Daily Star reported in February 1966 had been sought by Schmid's own lawyer, who argued he could not otherwise get a fair trial. News organizations around the country objected that it was unconstitutional and threatened to sue, Schafer recalled, but the order stood.
The prosecution wanted to try the Rowe case first. A conviction there, Schafer wrote, would let prosecutors prove the Rowe killing at the Fritz trial without dispute; without it, Schmid could deny the first killing and undercut the motive for the second. Schmid wanted the Fritz case tried first, and the judge agreed.
Jury selection began on February 15, 1966, before Judge Lee Garrett in Pima County Superior Court, with Schafer prosecuting and Tinney defending. Ninety-five people were summoned. Lawyers on both sides asked prospective jurors whether publicity had shaped their views, and Garrett granted a request to lock up the jury at night, believed to be the first sequestration in recent Tucson legal history. The 12 jurors and two alternates were housed in a hotel at county expense, could speak only with two bailiffs and each other, and had newspaper references to the trial cut out. Tinney twice moved for a mistrial during jury selection; Garrett denied both motions, and denied a request to bar photographers from the courtroom.
In his opening statement Tinney told the jury that Bruns, not Schmid, had killed the Fritz sisters. Schafer told the jurors that Schmid had killed them to cover up another murder; Gretchen annoyed him, he said, and he "could not stop it because there was something over him."
On the trial's sixth day Mary French testified about the killing of Alleen Rowe. The court allowed it as evidence of motive. Saunders, who had agreed to testify, refused once he had been sentenced, invoking his Fifth Amendment right. A former housemate and business partner of Schmid's testified that Schmid had spoken of a killing and a stolen diary, and had said he would like to kill Gretchen; he had not gone to police, he said, because he did not believe Schmid capable of murder.
Bruns was the chief witness. He testified for nearly three hours on February 23, describing what Schmid had told and shown him. Paul Ginn, flown back from New Orleans, testified that Bruns had threatened Gretchen and resented her, testimony Judge Garrett admitted on the question of motive. During a recess Schmid told a reporter, "This isn't over by a long shot." The prosecution rested on February 25, and Garrett denied four defense motions to dismiss or reduce the charges.
The defense offered an alibi. Tinney filed a late notice that Schmid had been at home that night with a companion or with his parents. His adoptive mother testified for about two hours on February 28. "He is my son by choice," she said. She told the jury that she disliked Gretchen, never saw her at her son's house, and never saw anything like a diary in the house, which she cleaned weekly. Schmid did not testify.
The case went to the jury on March 1, 1966. The jurors, eight women and four men, deliberated for 2 hours and 10 minutes, the Arizona Daily Star reported, and unanimously found Schmid guilty of two counts of first-degree murder, fixing the penalty at death. Schmid showed no reaction as the verdict was read; his young wife sobbed, and he waved at her to be quiet. Outside the courtroom his only comment was, "That's the way it goes."
On March 25, 1966, Judge Garrett formally sentenced him to death and set an execution date of June 17, knowing appeals could take years. Before sentence Schmid asked for a truth serum "to prove I am innocent of these crimes," called his trial "a mockery of justice," and said pretrial publicity had done "nothing but condemn me, condemn me, condemn me." Garrett said the court had no power to grant the request and called the moment one "I would rather not face." Execution was stayed pending appeal.
In June 1966 the Star reported that his wife had filed for divorce. She told AZFamily in 2025 that he had asked her to divorce him to protect her name.
Life published Don Moser's article, "The Pied Piper of Tucson," in its issue of March 4, 1966, days after the verdict. It ran about 16 pages, and it gave Schmid the name he has carried since. The article described a teenage crowd that followed him and an account that several high school students knew enough to report the crimes and did not, and it portrayed Tucson and its main commercial street unflatteringly. Many Tucsonans were angry. On March 8, 1966, an Arizona Daily Star editorial titled "An Erroneous View Of Tucson" argued that the case did not represent the city's young people, while asking whether more police work on Alleen Rowe's disappearance might have prevented the Fritz killings. The Star later pointed out that Life had erred in reporting that Schmid was arrested a week after the remains were found; he was arrested the same day.
Schmid's parents had paid Tinney, and in July 1966 the Star reported that Schmid had hired F. Lee Bailey, the lawyer who had won a reversal for Dr. Sam Sheppard, to help with his appeal; Bailey's fees were to come from a defense fund. The archives of the Arizona Historical Society hold a collection donated by George Scott, who conducted one of only two interviews Schmid gave; the finding aid says Tinney recruited Bailey after the Fritz conviction and that the interview tapes figured in the second trial.
The Rowe trial was postponed repeatedly, from October 1966 to April 1967 and then to May 9, 1967. Judge Roylston imposed the strictest press rules ever used in Pima County, the Star reported on April 21, 1967: only what was said in open court could be published, and no one connected to the case could discuss it outside. Jury selection took seven days. Bailey, Schafer later wrote, stressed to the jurors that no body had been found and asked whether they would vote for death while the victim might still turn up.
French testified, and Bailey's cross-examination of her was brief. According to the Arizona Supreme Court, after the jury was seated and two prosecution witnesses had testified, Schmid changed his plea. On May 21, 1967, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. When the judge asked why, he answered, "Because I am guilty," and he acknowledged that the range of punishment ran from ten years to life. Bailey told reporters he had expected a guilty verdict, had wanted Schmid to see the evidence, and had known for some time that his client was guilty. In June 1967 Schmid was sentenced to 50 years to life.
Within days he tried to take it back. He filed a handwritten 38-page document seeking a new trial, attacking his lawyers, the press and his former friends and claiming his lawyers had forced the plea. His attorneys asked to withdraw, and the court let them. The judge refused to let him withdraw the plea.
In June 1967 Schmid led Sheriff Waldon V. Burr, an attorney and a family friend to Alleen Rowe's grave in the desert outside Tucson, the Arizona Daily Star reported on June 24. He said the decision was his own. County Attorney Schafer said dental X-rays would be used to confirm her identity, and her family was notified.
The Arizona Supreme Court decided the Rowe appeal on April 28, 1971, in an opinion by Justice Udall. Schmid argued that the trial court should have moved the trial or delayed it because of publicity, that jurors who knew of the case should have been excused, that evidence of the Fritz killings should not have come in, that jurors opposed to the death penalty were wrongly excluded, and that his lawyers had coerced his plea. The court rejected every point. It called the coercion claim "frivolous and wholly devoid of any merit whatsoever," citing a conversation taped between Schmid and his lawyers before trial in which he said he was satisfied with his defense, and found that the plea had been voluntarily and intelligently made. It noted that the trial judge had imposed rigorous restrictions on prosecutors and sheriff's staff, and concluded that Schmid had received a fair and impartial trial.
The Fritz appeal was decided on April 25, 1973. William J. Schafer III, by then an assistant attorney general, argued for the state; Norval W. Jasper of Tucson represented Schmid. The court held that heavy press coverage alone did not prove an unfair trial: seven prospective jurors who had formed opinions were excused, Schmid challenged no juror for cause, and the jury was sequestered early. It said it was "somewhat alarmed" that a flashbulb photograph was taken as the verdict was read but found no denial of a fair trial, and it went on to list kinds of coverage, from a defendant's record to the contents of a confession, that the press should avoid. Evidence of the Rowe killing and of the boy Schmid had boasted of killing was admissible to show motive, the court said, because Gretchen knew of both and had used that knowledge against him. Testimony about the telephone call was admissible to show its effect on him. The trial court had properly excluded evidence that Bruns threatened an unrelated person, and had properly instructed only on first-degree murder because nothing suggested the killings were other than premeditated.
Schafer wrote in 2008 that after the Fritz convictions were affirmed, Schmid wrote to him praising his work and asking him to handle his further appeals.
The United States Supreme Court's decision in Furman v. Georgia in 1972 ended death sentences under the laws then in force. The Associated Press reported in February 1973 that the Arizona Supreme Court had reduced Schmid's two death sentences to life imprisonment. The court's April 25, 1973, opinion affirmed the Fritz convictions, declared the death-penalty provision of Arizona's murder statute unconstitutional, and reduced the sentence to life imprisonment. He also remained under the 50-years-to-life sentence for Alleen Rowe's death.
Schmid was held at the Arizona State Prison at Florence. On October 12, 1972, he disappeared from his maximum-security cell. Roadblocks went up, and about three hours later he was found hiding in a clothing locker in the prison welding shop. Warden Bud Gomes said a hollowed-out gymnastics side horse had been found nearby and that Schmid had been carried in it; four men had carried the horse into the shop, and the warden did not know whether they knew he was inside.
About a month later he got out. In November 1972 he escaped with Ray Hudgens, another prisoner convicted of three murders. Rain hampered the search. A sheriff's lieutenant in Pima County predicted Tucson was the only place he would go, because he had friends and family there, and Tucson police promised to protect the witnesses from his trials. Schmid dyed his hair and wore a wig. At 7:30 a.m. on November 15, 1972, after about two and a half days of freedom, he was arrested in a freight yard on Tucson's south side, where a railroad worker who had been his high school classmate recognized him and called police. The arresting officer said Schmid asked, "please don't shoot me." He had blisters from walking more than 60 miles of desert. Allen Cook, director of the state Department of Corrections, said: "I think I can guarantee the public that he will never escape again." Hudgens was still at large when the Star reported the capture.
His former wife told AZFamily in 2025 that she had been ready to help him flee to Mexico, but that the plan never went ahead.
In prison Schmid wrote poetry. He sent his poems to Richard Shelton, a poet who taught at the University of Arizona, asking for his opinion. According to the Arizona Daily Star's 2022 obituary of Shelton, which drew on Shelton's book Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer, that letter led Shelton to the idea of writing workshops for prisoners. Shelton founded a creative writing workshop at the Florence prison in 1974, the University of Arizona said in its 2023 tribute, and spent almost every Saturday for three decades running workshops for inmates. Phoenix Magazine reported that Schmid took writing classes from Shelton and had poems published, and that he was trusted to run errands outside the prison grounds without an escort.
In 1974 he legally changed his name to Paul David Ashley. His lawyer in Coolidge said he believed his old name was standing in the way of his rehabilitation. Newspapers kept calling him Charles Schmid.
On March 20, 1975, Schmid was stabbed by other prisoners in a trusty dormitory outside the prison wall, prison superintendent Harold Cardwell told the Arizona Daily Star. He was taken to Maricopa County Hospital in Phoenix in critical condition.
He died there at 12:30 a.m. on March 30, 1975, at 32, of complications from his wounds. His adoptive mother said he told her on his deathbed that friends had stabbed him and kept asking why they had done it; she remained convinced of his innocence. The prison's chief of security, Capt. Dale Davis, said he believed Schmid was attacked because he had backed out of an escape plot. He was buried in the prison cemetery. The Tucson Citizen reported that his adoptive parents did not claim his body, and that a prison chaplain who had looked after cemetery visitors for nine years had never seen anyone at his grave.
Two prisoners were charged. Jimmy L. Ferra, 26, was serving 10 years to life for second-degree murder; Dennis R. Eversole, 22, was serving 5 to 10 years for armed robbery. On April 4, 1975, the Star reported, both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Ferra was sentenced to 10 to 20 years and Eversole to 10 years, each to run concurrently with the term he was already serving.
Mary French was due to be released from the state prison on December 26, 1968, about three years and one month into her four-to-five-year sentence, the Associated Press reported from Florence. She had been denied parole that June. A member of the parole board stressed that she had served her maximum sentence through work and good-time credits and was being released, not paroled. She planned to return to Texas and study commercial art.
John Saunders was to be taken to the Florence prison to begin his life sentence on December 26, 1965. The Arizona Daily Star's 2010 series could not confirm what became of him.
Richard Bruns never had contact with Schmid again, KVOA reported in 2018. He became a teacher and retired in Tucson. During the 1966 trial he kept notes and wrote a manuscript about his part in the case, then put it in a box and forgot about it for about 40 years, KVOA reported in 2018. His daughter found it and persuaded him to publish it; the book, I, a Squealer, appeared in March 2018. She told the station that the inaccurate and exaggerated accounts of her father's role had long frustrated him.
Bill Schafer was appointed Pima County Attorney in June 1966 when Norman Green resigned to run for governor, won election in 1968, resigned in 1969, joined the Arizona attorney general's office in 1970, and later became a Superior Court judge in Maricopa County, according to the Tucson Sentinel. In 2008 he wrote his own account of the case for Arizona Attorney, the State Bar magazine.
Moser's Life article has lasted. The Library of America included "The Pied Piper of Tucson" in its 2008 collection, True Crime: An American Anthology. Joyce Carol Oates based her 1966 short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" on the Life article, according to the Pima County Public Library, and The Believer has described her as turning Moser's account into something "at once less sensational and more harrowing." Her villain, Arnold Friend, shares traits with Schmid. The story became the 1985 film Smooth Talk, directed by Joyce Chopra and starring Laura Dern, which won the Grand Jury award at the Sundance festival in 1986.
The Arizona Daily Star retold the case in an 18-part series, "Tales from the Morgue: The Pied Piper of Tucson," first published in 2010 and drawn from the paper's own reporting of 1964 to 1975. Richard Bruns's I, a Squealer followed in 2018. In 2025 his former wife published a memoir, written with the author Marshall Terrill, and gave her first interview about the marriage. Terrill told Phoenix Magazine that Schmid's crimes "totally robbed Tucson of its innocence."
The diary and the boy. Schmid told friends that Gretchen had stolen a diary describing how he killed a young boy. The trial court admitted his boasts about the boy as evidence of motive, and the Arizona Supreme Court upheld that ruling because Gretchen knew of the claim. No such killing was ever charged or established, no victim was identified, and Dupnik doubted the diary ever existed. In one version reported by the Tucson Citizen, the diary described a killing in California.
How the Fritz sisters died. Police said in November 1965 that they had not determined how the girls died. The 1973 opinion holds only that the evidence showed premeditated killings. Later press accounts in Phoenix Magazine and Tucson Weekly say Schmid strangled them; those accounts do not cite an autopsy finding.
Who else was present. Bruns testified that Schmid told him the killings happened at Schmid's house. The defense argued that Bruns himself was the killer; the jury convicted Schmid, and the Arizona Supreme Court noted the trial court's exclusion of unrelated evidence about Bruns. Paul Ginn left the party with Schmid that night, according to the testimony the court summarized, and later testified at the trial.
Why he was killed. The prison's security chief said Schmid had backed out of an escape plot. Another theory, reported by AZFamily, is that other prisoners saw him as an informer. Phoenix Magazine reported rumors of a paid prison gang killing, and Terrill told AZFamily that he believed it was an organized crime contract; the Fritz family told AZFamily they reject any mob connection and believe he was killed after other prisoners learned what he had done. None of these claims has been proven.
The deliberation and some dates. The Arizona Daily Star reported on March 2, 1966, that the jury deliberated 2 hours and 10 minutes; the Tucson Citizen's retrospective says 30 minutes. Contemporary reporting puts the Rowe plea in May 1967, while the 1973 opinion says March 1966 and a Tucson Sentinel retrospective says May 1966. Saunders's plea is reported by the Star in 1965 as guilty to first-degree murder; Schafer's 2008 article says second-degree murder. He received a life sentence either way.
July 8, 1942: Born in Tucson; adopted as an infant.
1960: Leads his high school to the Arizona state gymnastics championship.
May 31, 1964: Alleen Rowe, 15, is taken from her home at night and killed in the desert outside Tucson.
Fall 1964: Schmid and Gretchen Fritz begin dating, according to the prosecutor.
August 16, 1965: Gretchen Fritz, 17, and Wendy Fritz, 13, leave home for a drive-in movie and do not return.
August 28, 1965: Schmid is briefly held by San Diego police and released.
October 1965: Marries a 15-year-old girl in Nogales, Mexico.
November 10, 1965: Richard Bruns leads detectives to the sisters' remains outside Tucson; Schmid is arrested and charged.
November 14, 1965: Mary French is arrested in Belton, Texas.
November 25, 1965: French and John Saunders plead guilty in the Rowe case.
December 20 and 21, 1965: French is sentenced to four to five years; Saunders to life.
February 15, 1966: The Fritz trial opens with jury selection.
March 1, 1966: Jury convicts Schmid of two counts of first-degree murder and fixes the penalty at death.
March 4, 1966: Life publishes "The Pied Piper of Tucson."
March 25, 1966: Formally sentenced to death.
May 9, 1967: The Rowe trial begins.
May 21, 1967: Pleads guilty to second-degree murder of Alleen Rowe.
June 1967: Sentenced to 50 years to life; leads the sheriff to Alleen Rowe's grave.
December 1968: Mary French is released from prison.
April 28, 1971: Arizona Supreme Court affirms the Rowe judgment.
October 12, 1972: Failed escape attempt in a gymnastics horse.
November 1972: Escapes with Ray Hudgens; recaptured in Tucson on November 15.
February 1973: Death sentences reported reduced to life.
April 25, 1973: Arizona Supreme Court affirms the Fritz convictions and reduces the sentence to life imprisonment.
1974: Changes his name to Paul David Ashley.
March 20, 1975: Attacked by two prisoners at Florence.
March 30, 1975: Dies at Maricopa County Hospital, aged 32.
April 1975: Jimmy L. Ferra and Dennis R. Eversole plead guilty to second-degree murder.
2018: Richard Bruns publishes I, a Squealer.
2025: Schmid's former wife publishes a memoir of the marriage.