"These Are Short Stories": Gerard Schaefer Defends His Writings

In a prison interview produced by Sondra London, Gerard Schaefer insisted that the violent writings police seized from his mother's home were fiction inspired by the 1963 film "Blood Feast".

Subject

Gerard John Schaefer

Runtime

4:42

Content warning: Concerns a man convicted of murdering two teenage girls discussing his violent writings; references to murder and a "murder plan".

The Interview

In this segment of a long prison interview produced by Sondra London, Gerard John Schaefer talks almost without interruption about the violent writings police found among his belongings. He says they were "actual fantasies" and "rough drafts" for fiction, begun in the 1960s after he saw Herschell Gordon Lewis's horror film "Blood Feast" and thought he could create a more frightening character. He accuses the police of picking out the passages that made him "look like a serial killer" and discarding the rest, and says he learned to write graphic material by studying creative writing at Florida Atlantic University.

Historical Context

Schaefer, a former Florida police officer and Martin County sheriff's deputy, was convicted in 1973 of the murders of Susan Place, 17, and Georgia Jessup, 16, and sentenced to two concurrent life terms. Writings found by police at his mother's home in Fort Lauderdale were treated by investigators as thinly veiled accounts of his crimes. From prison he worked with Sondra London, who had been his girlfriend in high school, on collections of his stories and drawings, published as "Killer Fiction" (1990) and "Beyond Killer Fiction" (1992). London ended the collaboration in 1991. Schaefer later sued her; the suit was dismissed.

Circumstances of the Interview

Sondra London posted the interview on YouTube in 2007 in 14 segments, describing it as an hour-long interview she produced. She does not give the date or the prison. Schaefer's defence of his stories as fiction fits the period of their collaboration, about 1989 to 1991, but this is an inference. The segment begins mid-conversation, with Schaefer talking about murder rates and killings inside the prison where he was held.

What the Interview Covers

Schaefer describes his reaction to "Blood Feast", which he calls "so campy" and "so immature", and his ambition to write a truly frightening killer. He says a pile of papers included "exhaustive studies" such as on Ed Gein, mentions the columnist Joe Bob Briggs, and says a document called a "murder plan" was "nothing more than a little scenario". He answers people who ask how he could write such material without being a killer: "You do it by research. You do it by concentration. You do it by creativity." He ends by complaining of "bad experiences" with the media and the police.

What Makes the Recording Significant

The segment records Schaefer's own defence of the writings that investigators and later writers read as accounts of real crimes, made to the person who published them.

Archival Importance

With 14 segments, London's interview is a substantial recording of Schaefer speaking for himself, made before his death in 1995. This page preserves one segment; the others are not yet in the archive.

Important Caveats

Everything Schaefer says is his own claim. His description of the writings as fiction, and his account of how police used them, are his version; he was convicted of two murders. He says he graduated from Florida Atlantic University; the sources checked confirm only that he studied there. Two short passages may be the interviewer speaking rather than Schaefer. The recording date and prison are not documented.

Gerard Schaefer: It's wrong. There's, what, 25,000 murders in this country last year, something like that. It's epidemic. It's out of control. You know, that's scary. And it's in here, too. You get murdered in here, too. There's been murders this year right in this building. And, uh, just because you're in prison doesn't mean that you're immune from this.

Gerard Schaefer: This is taking things out of context, all right? This story, this is part of actual fantasies, all right? Now, what this was: when I was in high school there was a man by the name of Herschell Gordon Lewis who made films, and he made a film called "Blood Feast". And I was very taken with "Blood Feast", and I thought, it's so campy, it's so, uh, immature. Imagine what we could do here if we had a real, real scary person, not Fuad Ramses, who is, you know, going to run around and pretend. [unclear: "He wasn't believing" / not in Whisper.] This was written during the '60s, when I was putting together this character.

Gerard Schaefer: And when the police went into my home, I had put all this aside when I got married, say, and I just had it in storage. But this was what came out of "Blood Feast", out of my watching it and studying it. And I said, this guy Lewis is making a million dollars with this character. I can write this well. And I said, I started putting it together. This took years. And this just wasn't, I just did it in one day. This was a product of years.

Gerard Schaefer: Now, there were all parts. There was a pile of paper that high that had to do with this, this area right here, that I did exhaustive studies, like on Ed Gein. Actual fantasies. And this is the first part of a murder plan. Okay? And I haven't even seen this, actually. I've never seen this. Joe Bob Briggs also thinks this is really interesting too, you know, the, uh, the nationally syndicated columnist that does horror film, uh, no, drive-in. Joe Bob Briggs at the drive-in.

Gerard Schaefer: You've never seen that, but you're obviously not into horror.

Gerard Schaefer: But what I'm telling you is that when you go and take a man's rough drafts, this is, when you do a work, and this was to be a work, the ghoul, the person, all right, is a commodity. He is a scary character. And when you read this, you get scared. By the time you get to the end you say, "Wow, is this a real guy? What, this guy could be around?" You know, like that. Because this is what's really scary. King Kong isn't scary. Fuad Ramses isn't scary. This is scary, okay?

Gerard Schaefer: Now, they went and they took these rough drafts and they stole it, okay? What they got is, they took, "Oh, this looks good. This looks like it might be inculpatory, to make him look like a serial killer. So we'll keep this one over here and we'll throw this part away." So by the time the police got done with it, you've got a piece over here, "murder plan", which is nothing more than a little scenario. This is just a sketch to build something on [unclear: "sexually" / not in Whisper]. And I'm going to read this, and by the time I get it read and you get it cut, you're going to, it'll be turning into a confession type of thing, is what it gets turned into.

Gerard Schaefer: Reading his work in a setting where people understand that this is a reading, like a poetry reading or something, that's one thing. But so many people have said, "We think you're a killer because of that graphic stuff that you write."

Gerard Schaefer: People have said this to me. They said, "How can you write this kind of stuff and not be a killer?" I said, well, you do it by research. You do it by concentration. You do it by creativity. I said, you do it the same way that everybody else who writes graphic murder stuff does it. You work at it. This isn't just something that happens. This is something that you pay money to go to the university to learn how to do it correctly.

Gerard Schaefer: I mean, I went to, I graduated from, uh, Florida Atlantic University, and I took creative writing, and I specialised in short stories. I did not specialise in doing novels or journalism. I specialised in short stories, and these are short stories. I've had so many bad experiences with, uh, with media and police and everybody, you know, tricking me and saying do this and do that, and you say it and it comes back in a negative way. [segment ends] ---