Charles Howard Schmid junior was born in Tucson on July 8, 1942, adopted by the owners of a nursing home, and given money and no supervision. He was a gymnast and a small man, five foot three, who stuffed his cowboy boots with rags and flattened tin cans to gain three inches, dyed his hair black, wore pancake makeup and a fake mole, and told an ever-changing set of stories about himself. He was twenty-two and had a large following of local teenagers who drove around with him at night.
On May 31, 1964, he killed fifteen-year-old Alleen Rowe in the desert outside Tucson, with two friends present, having announced beforehand that he wanted to know what it was like. In August 1965 he killed Gretchen Fritz, seventeen, with whom he had been involved, and her thirteen-year-old sister Wendy, and left them in the desert.
He then told people. He took a friend, Richard Bruns, out to see the bodies. He told others he had killed the Fritz sisters. For over a year a group of Tucson teenagers knew or half-knew and said nothing, out of a mixture of disbelief, loyalty and fear, and that silence is what made the case a national story rather than a local one.
Bruns went to the police in November 1965. Schmid was convicted of all three murders in 1966 and sentenced to death, commuted in 1971 when the Supreme Court struck down existing capital statutes. He escaped from the Arizona State Prison in 1972 and was recaptured. He was stabbed by two other inmates on March 20, 1975, and died of his injuries on March 30.
Don Moser's Life magazine article about the case, The Pied Piper of Tucson, was read by Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote from it the short story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, which is one of the most anthologised in American literature.