Gerard John Schaefer was born in Wisconsin on March 25, 1946 and raised in Georgia and Florida. He wanted to be a priest and then a teacher, failed at both, and in 1972 was hired as a deputy by the Martin County Sheriff's Office. He lasted six months.
On July 21, 1972, on patrol, he picked up two teenage hitchhikers, Pamela Sue Wells and Nancy Trotter, told them hitchhiking was illegal, and arranged to drive them to the beach the next day. Instead he took them to Hutchinson Island, handcuffed them, put nooses round their necks and stood them on tree roots, and left.
They got free. He was arrested, dismissed from the force, and convicted of false imprisonment, for which he served under a year.
He was out on bail on that charge in September 1972 when Susan Place, seventeen, and Georgia Jessup, sixteen, left Place's house in Fort Lauderdale with a man who gave his name as Jerry Shepherd. Place's mother had written down his number plate. Their remains were found on Hutchinson Island in April 1973, at the same spot he had taken Wells and Trotter to nine months earlier.
Those named in the record are Leigh Hainline Bonadies, twenty-five; Carmen Marie Hallock, twenty-two; Belinda Hutchens, twenty-two; Collette Goodenough and Barbara Ann Wilcox, both nineteen; Susan Place, seventeen, and Georgia Jessup, sixteen; and Mary Alice Briscolina and Elsie Lina Farmer, both fourteen.
He was convicted in September 1973 of two counts of first degree murder and given two life sentences. A search of his mother's house produced jewellery, teeth and identity documents belonging to other missing women, and investigators have linked him to somewhere between eight and thirty deaths, none of them charged.
From prison he wrote and sold a book of extremely violent short stories, Killer Fiction, which he maintained was fiction, and conducted a long feud by letter with the writer Sondra London, who had once been his fiancee.
He was stabbed to death in his cell at Florida State Prison on December 3, 1995.
Two convictions stand against a range running to thirty. What the record does establish is that he had already been caught doing the same thing at the same place, with two women who survived to describe it, and that he was on bail for it when Place and Jessup were killed.