On July 21, 1972, Martin County sheriff's deputy Gerard John Schaefer stopped two teenage hitchhikers, Nancy Trotter and Pamela Wells, and told them, falsely, that hitchhiking was illegal in the county. He offered to drive them to the beach the next day. When he picked them up he drove them instead to a remote stretch of woods, tied them to a tree, and put nooses around their necks, leaving them balanced on roots so that slipping would hang them. Then a call came over his police radio and he left, saying he would be back. The girls worked themselves free and reached the police. Schaefer was fired and charged.
He was free on bond awaiting trial on that case when Susan Place, seventeen, and Georgia Jessup, sixteen, disappeared from Fort Lauderdale on September 27, 1972. The two friends had met him at an adult education center, where he introduced himself as Jerry Shepherd from Colorado. That afternoon Place's mother, Lucille, came home to find the girls with a man in his twenties whom they called Jerry; Susan said they were going to the beach to play guitar. Lucille Place was uneasy enough to write down the license plate of his blue-green Datsun. Months passed before the number was traced to him.
Schaefer was born on March 26, 1946, in Neenah, Wisconsin; some accounts give the 25th. He was the oldest of three children and grew up in Atlanta, where he attended Marist Academy, and then in Fort Lauderdale, where the family moved in 1960. He later described a childhood of conflict with a father he believed favored his sisters. He considered the priesthood and then teaching and failed at both, married twice (Martha Fogg in 1968, divorced 1970, and Teresa Dean in 1971, divorced 1973), and turned to police work: he applied to the Wilton Manors police in 1970, and the Martin County Sheriff's Office hired him in 1972.
In November or December 1972 he pleaded guilty to a single count of aggravated assault in the Trotter and Wells case, and the other charges were dropped. Judge D. C. Smith sentenced him to a year in the county jail followed by three years of probation. He did not report to jail until January 15, 1973. A week earlier, on January 8, two nineteen-year-old friends from Iowa, Collette Goodenough and Barbara Ann Wilcox, had left Biloxi, Mississippi, hitchhiking to Florida, and were never seen again.
In March 1973, while he was in jail, the plate Lucille Place had written down came back registered to Schaefer. On April 1, three men collecting aluminum cans in the woods found skeletal remains, which dental records identified as Susan Place and Georgia Jessup. The girls had been tied to a tree, and their bodies had been decapitated and butchered; Susan had been shot in the jaw. Accounts place the site on Hutchinson Island and near Port St. Lucie. Lucille Place identified Schaefer as the man she had last seen with her daughter.
Police searched the Fort Lauderdale house Schaefer shared with his mother and found what investigators came to call his trophies: women's jewelry, clothing, human teeth, identity documents, and more than a hundred pages of his own writings and sketches of women being tortured and killed. Items were traced to women who had vanished in South Florida over the previous four years. There were identity papers, a diary and a book of poetry belonging to Goodenough and Wilcox, whose skeletal remains were found in January 1977 in Oak Hammock Park in Port St. Lucie. There was jewelry and a gold-filled tooth, identified by her dentist, from Carmen Hallock, twenty-two, a waitress who disappeared in 1969 and had dated him. There was a gold locket belonging to Leigh Hainline Bonadies, twenty-five, a childhood neighbor and sometime tennis partner whom he had watched through her window as a teenager. She had married Charles Bonadies on August 21, 1969, told him that her old neighbor had offered her a $20,000 job with the CIA, and on September 8 left a note saying she had gone to Miami; her car turned up in a Fort Lauderdale parking lot. Schaefer told her brother that she had phoned him for a ride to the airport to catch a flight to Cincinnati. Her remains were found in January 1978 in Boca Del Mar, a subdivision then under construction in Boca Raton, and identified in 2004; hers are the only remains of the Fort Lauderdale women ever found. There was an address book belonging to Belinda Hutchens, twenty-two, another woman who had dated him. And there was jewelry belonging to Mary Alice Briscolina, fourteen, and Elsie Lina Farmer, fourteen or, in some accounts, thirteen, who vanished from Broward County while hitchhiking in October 1972, a few weeks after Place and Jessup, and whose skeletons were found early in 1973. In none of those cases could a cause of death be established, and none was charged.
He was indicted on May 18, 1973, for the murders of Place and Jessup and held without bond. His trial opened in St. Lucie County on September 17 before Judge Trowbridge, and in early October the jury found him guilty of both first degree murders. He received two life sentences. The prosecutor, Robert Stone, called him the most sexually deviant person he had ever encountered. Schaefer insisted he was innocent. He said he had never met either girl, and over the following years he smeared them and their families, claimed he had been framed by police and prosecutors, and turned on his own defense lawyer, Elton Schwartz, who married Schaefer's second wife in December 1973. "At first I thought I'd like to see him dead, but I think people suffer more with confinement," Lucille Place said. "Just as long as he's never on the streets again."
His appeals failed. In Florida State Prison he worked as a jailhouse lawyer, filed lawsuits against writers who described him, and wrote violent short stories, later published as Killer Fiction, that he insisted were only fiction. Sondra London, a writer who had known him since they were young, edited them and carried on a long public feud with him. He was attacked more than once and his cell was set on fire twice.
In the fall of 1995 a Fort Lauderdale homicide detective, Tim Bronson, reopened the Hallock, Hutchens and Bonadies files, hoping that one indictment might push Schaefer into a plea that would close all three. On Friday, December 1, he arranged to interview him the following Monday. On the morning of Sunday, December 3, another inmate walked into Schaefer's cell, cut his throat and stabbed him some forty-two times, mostly about the head and neck and many of the wounds to his eyes. Guards found him about an hour later, with a bloody handprint on the wall. He was forty-nine. On February 1, 1996, prison officials charged Vincent Rivera, thirty-three, already serving life plus twenty years for two murders in Hillsborough County, and in 1999 he was convicted and given another fifty-three years. He never gave a motive; Sondra London said the two men had argued over a cup of coffee, and other explanations ranged from a debt to a reputation as an informer. The charges were never filed, and his only convictions for murder remain the two for Susan Place and Georgia Jessup.