On the evening of May 31, 1964, Charles Schmid, who was twenty-one, turned to his girlfriend Mary French and an acquaintance named John Saunders and said, "I want to kill a girl tonight!" The three drove to the house of Alleen Rowe, a high school student who lived with her divorced mother, a woman Schmid knew worked nights. It is believed he chose Rowe because she had refused to have casual sex with him and other local boys. French persuaded her to come out to the desert with them. There Schmid tied the girl's arms behind her back, and when she asked why he was doing this he told her it was Mary French's idea, that French hated her. He raped her. Saunders, told to do the same, could not, refused Schmid's order to hit her with a large rock, and went back to the car for French, who had stayed behind listening to the radio. In their absence Schmid beat Alleen Rowe to death with the rock. Back at the car he kissed French and said, "Remember, I love you." Then the three of them buried her.
Schmid had been born in Tucson on July 8, 1942, to a single mother, and adopted by Charles and Katharine Schmid, who owned and ran the Hillcrest Nursing Home. He got on badly with his adoptive father, whom his adoptive mother later divorced. When he went looking for his birth mother she told him, angrily, never to come back. He did poorly in class but was good-looking, intelligent and polite, and he was a fine gymnast who led his high school to a state championship before quitting the team in his senior year. Just before graduation he was suspended for stealing tools from the school's machine shop, and he never went back. His parents gave him his own quarters on their property, an allowance of $300 a month, a new car and a motorcycle, and left him to it.
He stood five foot three. He stuffed his cowboy boots with newspapers, rags and flattened cans to gain three inches, and told impressionable teenagers that the rolling walk this gave him came from a crippling fight with the Mafia. He dyed his hair, wore pancake makeup and lip balm, drew a mole on his cheek, pulled at his lower lip with a clothespin so it would hang like Elvis Presley's, and sometimes wore a metal bridge on his nose as though it had been broken. He told friends he had incurable cancer and carried tiny bottles of salt and pepper that he said were for blinding opponents. The mothers of the teenagers who drove Speedway Boulevard with him at night liked him. His closest friends were John Saunders, Richie Bruns and Paul Graff, who lived with him, and the young people around him kept his secrets for a long time, which is why he came to be called the Pied Piper of Tucson.
A few months after the Rowe killing he noticed sixteen-year-old Gretchen Fritz at a swimming pool. She was the daughter of Dr. James Fritz, a prominent heart surgeon and community figure, and local gossip said she had been expelled from her private school over an attempted armed robbery; her tutors there had called her a pathological liar and recommended psychiatric treatment. By Schmid's own later account he turned up at her house that evening posing as a salesman of pots and pans. They began going out, and she proved intensely possessive. By 1965, he said, she was calling him five or six times a day, and he began trying to get away from her. He had told her about Alleen Rowe and even shown her the grave, to show her, as he put it, what kind of guy he was. She had also stolen a diary of his describing the Rowe killing and the alleged shooting of a sixteen-year-old boy, a killing that has never been established. When he tried to end it she threatened to ruin him. On August 16, 1965, he strangled Gretchen Fritz, then seventeen, and her thirteen-year-old sister Wendy, and left their bodies in the desert. The police told the Fritz family the girls had run away. Schmid, questioned, suggested the same, and he went to California with two men he described as Mafia types, supposedly to look for Gretchen; the San Diego police held him for a couple of nights on suspicion of murder and let him go for lack of evidence.
He could not keep quiet. He told Richie Bruns he had killed the sisters and took him out to see the bodies, which had been dumped carelessly in the desert. Bruns became convinced Schmid would kill a girl Bruns had once dated, and hung around her house until her family complained to the police. That autumn Bruns, nineteen, was convicted of disorderly conduct and placed on six months' probation, the first three of them to be spent with his grandmother in Ohio. In Columbus he told his grandparents everything. Late on a Monday night he telephoned the Tucson police and said he knew where the missing girls were. Detective Sergeant Robert Wilhelm flew to Ohio and brought him back, and Bruns led detectives to a hill north of the city near Alvernon Way and Pontatoc Road, where they found the bones of Gretchen and Wendy Fritz strewn across the desert. Bruns could not find the place where Alleen Rowe was buried.
The police came for Schmid at his house on November 10, 1965. The month before, he had married a fifteen-year-old girl, and he sent her to fetch his mother. At the station they made him take off his boots and pulled out the cans, rags and cardboard. On November 11 he was charged with two counts of homicide and arraigned before Justice of the Peace Toby LaVetter. Within days John Saunders and Mary French were arrested over Alleen Rowe, and murder charges were filed against all three even though her body had not been found. Saunders pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life; French pleaded guilty as an accessory and was sentenced to four to five years.
By then the case belonged to the country. Life and Playboy sent reporters. Time ran "Secrets in the Sand" on November 26, 1965, and features on teenage life in Tucson. The defense brought in F. Lee Bailey to consult. A Superior Court order barring officials from discussing the case with the press drew a resolution of condemnation from the Continuing Study Committee of the Associated Press on November 28. At the preliminary hearing on November 24 Bruns testified for more than four hours. Another witness was Charles E. Fields, a Phoenix man who said he had once been Schmid's business partner and whose business card had been found in Gretchen Fritz's purse when the family's abandoned car turned up.
The State wanted the Rowe case tried first, because without a conviction for her death Schmid could deny it and take away the motive for the Fritz killings; Schmid wanted the Fritz case first, and the judge agreed. That trial ran from February 15 to March 1, 1966, before Judge Lee Garrett in Pima County Superior Court, with William Schafer III prosecuting. Mary French and Richie Bruns testified. The State's theory, as the Arizona Supreme Court later summarized it, was that he had killed Gretchen and Wendy Fritz to stop them telling the authorities what he had boasted to them about killing Alleen Rowe. The jury of eight women and four men deliberated two hours and ten minutes, found him guilty on two counts of first-degree murder, and fixed the penalty at death in the gas chamber. After a number of delays he went to trial for Alleen Rowe's murder, with F. Lee Bailey now representing him, and after five days offered to plead guilty to second-degree murder; the State agreed. Accounts of the record differ on the date, one giving March 1966 and another May 1967. He received fifty years to life for her death. The Arizona Supreme Court upheld the Rowe plea in 1971, and in 1973 it affirmed the Fritz convictions and death sentences, rejecting his argument that Bruns was the real killer: there was, it said, no evidence that Bruns had killed the girls. The fees left his adoptive mother and her second husband owing his lawyers more than they had, and they ended up living in near poverty in Coolidge, Arizona. When the Supreme Court's decision in Furman v. Georgia in 1972 set aside death sentences across the country, his was commuted; one account gives the new sentence as fifty years, another as life.
He tried repeatedly to escape and finally managed it on November 11, 1972, escaping from the Arizona State Prison with Raymond Hudgens, a man serving time for three murders. They held four hostages on a ranch near Tempe, ate at a Sonic, split up, and were both caught and returned. In the early 1970s he took up poetry and sent his work to Richard Shelton, a professor at the University of Arizona, who said later, "For all the wrong reasons, I critiqued his work and discovered that he was quite talented."
On March 20, 1975, two other prisoners, Jimmy Ferra and Dennis Eversole, stabbed him forty-seven times. He lost an eye and a kidney and died of his injuries on March 30, at thirty-two. Ferra, already in prison for an unrelated murder, and Eversole, serving time for armed robberies, both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received additional time. Schmid's body was stolen from the morgue and recovered by police. His mother chose the prison cemetery for him, believing a headstone in a public cemetery would be defaced, and he was given a Catholic funeral at the prison with the casket empty.
Don Moser's article on the case ran in the March 4, 1966, issue of Life, and in 2008 the Library of America chose it for its two-century collection of American true crime writing. The same year the article appeared, Joyce Carol Oates published "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", about a teenage girl charmed and menaced by a predatory older man, inspired in part by the Schmid case and dedicated to Bob Dylan; accounts differ over whether the Time piece or the Life piece first drew her to it. The story became the 1985 film Smooth Talk, with Treat Williams in the part drawn from Schmid. John Gilmore, sent by Playboy to cover the trial, got to know Schmid and his wife and wrote The Tucson Murders in 1970, and the case also lay behind the 1971 film The Todd Killings. Richie Bruns told his side in I, a Squealer.