On April 9, 1983, Catherine Richards, eleven, known as Katy, was walking along Pedden Hill Road in Springfield, Vermont, with her friend Rachel Zeitz when the two girls noticed the same car passing them for the third time. The driver stopped and asked them the way to the house of a Joe Cerniglia, then got out and threatened to kill them if they did not get in. Katy got into the car. Rachel ran to a neighbors' house, and they called the police. She described a slim man in his twenties, about six feet tall, with short brown hair and sunglasses, wearing a red hooded sweatshirt with "1983" on one sleeve, and possibly driving a light blue Pontiac Sunbird with a dark roof. The next day Katy's body was found in woods near Springfield. She had been sexually assaulted and beaten with a blunt instrument.
A member of the local Christadelphian church, James Millay Sr., told investigators he had seen two girls matching the description on Pedden Hill Road the same day he had seen a fellow churchgoer, Gary Schaefer, who had left services early saying he was ill. Schaefer's photograph looked very like the composite sketch. He told officers who came to his mother's house that he had been in Rutland with a co-worker picking up cars; his mother and the co-worker did not bear him out, and he was arrested on April 11, 1983. In the house police found the red sweatshirt.
He was born in 1951 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, one of several children of Edwin and June Schaefer, and grew up in Springfield, where the family belonged to a close-knit Christadelphian congregation. He was remembered as a quiet, obliging boy who ran cross country and track at Springfield High School. After graduating in 1970 he joined the Navy, although his church discouraged military service, and he was court-martialed for setting fire to his apartment and served thirteen months in a military facility at Norfolk; an older account says he was charged with arson and drug possession and tried an insanity plea that Navy psychiatrists rejected. He married a woman named Arlene while working at a hospital in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and they had a daughter and a son who died of sudden infant death syndrome. Back in Springfield he worked as a mechanic at Soucy Motors, served as a church custodian, sometimes preached to the younger members, and looked after his mother after his father died in April 1982. His favorite pastime, friends said, was cruising around town in his car playing Styx.
Katy Richards was the third Springfield girl to be killed in four years. On August 28, 1979, Sherri Nastasia, thirteen, was reported missing after she was seen climbing into a dark green Pontiac Firebird. Her skeletal remains were found that December off Route 103 near a rest area in Rockingham, and the state medical examiner, Dr. Eleanor McQuillen, identified her through dental records; she had probably been stabbed. In late August 1981 Theresa Marie Fenton, twelve, went out on a bike ride near her home and was taken to the woods off Mile Hill Road, beaten with a blunt instrument and partly buried at the foot of a steep slope. A man fishing with his children saw her arm sticking out of a pile of leaves. She died the next day at the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire. Both investigations had stalled.
Schaefer was also tied to an attack that had not ended in death. On November 12, 1982, Deana Buxton, seventeen, of Brattleboro, was hitchhiking in Chester when a man who said he was from Bellows Falls picked her up, pulled a shotgun and made sexual advances. She escaped when he stopped at a rest area near White River Junction. She later picked Schaefer out of a lineup, and he was arraigned on a kidnapping charge in her case on April 21, 1983. In June, after laboratory results on blood and hair came back, he was charged with Katy Richards's murder. He pleaded not guilty, and Justice George F. Ellison put a gag order on the case that two newspapers challenged in court.
In October 1983 Katy's mother told reporters that Schaefer had written a letter confessing to the murders of her daughter and Theresa Fenton, though the gag order kept her from producing it; an older account says instead that she wrote him an open letter challenging him to confess as his church required. In November psychiatrists found him competent to stand trial. On December 5, 1983, he changed his plea to no contest, saying through his lawyer that he wanted to clear himself in the eyes of God, and in January 1984 he was sentenced to thirty years to life for the Richards killing, with fifteen to twenty years more in the Buxton case. The plea agreement required him to confess to Theresa Fenton's murder and gave him immunity from prosecution for it. In March 1984 he met Fenton's parents and repeated the confession. He was charged with Sherri Nastasia's murder in May 1984, and a Vermont State Police detective said he had confessed to it too, but the charge was dropped after a judge ruled that the confession had been obtained through hypnosis. Her killing officially remains unsolved.
In May 1985 Vermont sent him to the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville under the Interstate Corrections Compact, which allows the state to house prisoners who need higher security elsewhere. He was found during a routine cell check on November 26, 2023, after what officials called an acute medical event, and died in a local hospital at seventy-two. His death was not considered suspicious. The retired Vermont police captain who helped build the case said afterward that he had no doubt Schaefer was a serial killer.