The Man Who Made Ted Bundy Look Like a Boy Scout | Part 1
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Susan Poole was reported missing just two days before Christmas in 1972. The 15-year-old girl was never seen alive again by her friends or family after she disappeared from her Fort Lauderdale home. She was listed as a missing person for nearly 50 years before some clue to her fate finally surfaced, like a horrific secret that refuses to stay buried.

Although no one knew it at the time, Susan Poole's remains were found by authorities just two years later, in 1974. That year, Palm Beach County Sheriff's deputies were called to a scene off Florida State Road A1A along a stretch bordering some mangrove trees. It was amid those trees that Susan Poole's remains were found.

However, given the mutilation inflicted on the body, the effects of the harsh Florida weather, and the decomposition the body had undergone, authorities at the time could not positively identify the body. They knew it belonged to a white female between 14 and 25, but that was the extent of their knowledge. DNA profiling wouldn't be developed until the 80s, and it wouldn't become widely used until the 1990s.

Every other route the authorities tried to take to identify the body led to a dead end. They were also unable to positively identify a cause of death. Despite this, authorities were inclined to believe that foul play was involved. Given that it appeared the girl had been tied to a mangrove tree with wire. The case remained open and unsolved, and Poole's disappearance remained a mystery. The unidentified remains were exhumed in 2014.

By 2015, authorities had managed to create a DNA profile from the remains and yet another attempt to put a name to the decomposed body. They knew that somewhere out there, the girl had family members and friends who were still seeking closure. But again, they hit a brick wall. When the DNA profile was put through the Combined DNA Index System, commonly known as CODIS, it came back with no hits.

However, it was able to eliminate certain other missing persons cases, helping at least to narrow other cases involving unidentified bodies. More years passed with no movement on the cold case. In 2019, authorities tried a new technology. They had a facial reconstruction done based on what little information was on hand. They released the reconstruction to the public, but no one recognized the photo. Another dead end.

Two years later, in 2021, the unidentified remains were sent to a company based in Texas to help with the identification. The company, Othram, commonly works with law enforcement to identify remains through DNA testing and genealogy. In 2022, after the company's in-house genealogy team found some promising leads, they sent their findings to the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Department.

Included in the leads were the possible names of the girls' siblings and mother. Armed with this new information, the sheriff's office contacted potential relatives and eventually confirmed, through DNA testing, that the girls' remains were those of Susan Gail Poole. While this solved the mystery of what had become of Susan Poole, indicating that she had been killed and had not run away as some people thought, there was still the matter of who had killed her.

But once it was clear who the girl was, where she had lived, and the manner in which she'd most likely been killed, it wasn't hard to surmise the name of her alleged killer, a man named Gerard John Schaefer, one of Florida's most disturbed and sadistic killers. The most tragic part about Susan Poole's horrific death is the fact that it likely could have been prevented

In fact, the day she went missing was just one day after Gerard John Schaefer was convicted of one count of aggravated assault on two teenage girls. The judge granted Schaefer leave to spend the impending holidays with his family before reporting to serve his sentence. And it seems that Schaefer wasted no time in selecting a new victim to quench his thirst for murder.

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Part one, early life and first kills. Much of what you're about to hear about Gerard John Schaefer's early life should be taken with a grain of salt. Like many serial killers, Schaefer seemed to like the limelight that came after his eventual conviction.

He spent many years confessing to murders and then retracting those confessions, insisting that he hadn't killed anyone and even threatening to sue anyone who called him a killer. Much of the information available about his childhood comes directly from Schaefer himself, although there are a few factors that third parties have since verified. Those things that are unverifiable may or may not be the truth. We only have Schaefer's word to go on.

and the word of a disturbed killer is not always reliable. So as we go through this section, I'll let you decide what you think is true and what is simply the product of a disturbed mind obsessed with fame and the attention that comes with it. We do know that Gerard John Schaeffer was born in 1946 in Wisconsin to parents Gerard and Doris Schaeffer.

named after his father, Gerard Schaefer Sr. The younger Schaefer would eventually go by his middle name, John, as such. I'll refer to him from now on as John Schaefer or simply Schaefer. From all outward appearances, John's childhood seemed pretty normal. He was the oldest of three children and he did well in school. They did not live in abject poverty. John's father was successful as a traveling salesman,

In fact, Gerard Sr. moved the family down to an upper middle class suburb of Atlanta, Georgia after they spent some time in Nashville, Tennessee. However, things didn't seem so good to John. He later described some of the problems he had growing up. He always felt like his mother and father preferred his sister to him. He said that he could never do anything to please his father and that his mother was always nagging him to do better.

As an adult looking back, John gave these reasons for an obsession with death that started at a young age. He said that whenever he would play games like cops and robbers with other kids, he would always want to be the one who pretended to die. John also said that his father's preference for his sister Sarah made him want to be a girl, thinking that if he were a girl, his father would love him more.

It was around this time, when John was about 12, that he also developed an obsession with women's panties. According to him, he would steal women's panties and wear them in private, often masturbating while he wore them. He would eventually claim that this tendency to dress in women's clothes was only something he did to avoid the Vietnam War. We'll likely never know the full truth of these conflicting statements, since we only have John's word to go on.

And John is no longer around to set the record straight, even if he wanted to. We'll also never know if his claims about killing animals in the woods as a teenager are true or not. He said it was a common occurrence. And it's common knowledge these days that animal cruelty is one of the telltale signs of psychopathic behavior. John Schaefer also claimed to have performed sadomasochistic acts on himself as a youth.

As he told an interviewer after his eventual arrest, he would tie himself up to a tree and struggle to get free, becoming aroused in the process. He said this often led him to doing something to hurt himself as a way to gain pleasure and excitement. It wasn't long before he started fantasizing about hurting other people instead of himself. He confessed to having elaborate fantasies about hurting young women from an early age. In 1960, when John was 14,

His family moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Shortly thereafter, he met his first girlfriend, a 14-year-old girl named Cindy. The two became sexually active together, and Cindy later claimed that the only way John would have sex with her was by pretending to rape her, tearing off her clothes and taking her by force as she pretended to resist. However, John later claimed that this was Cindy's preference, not his.

The two dated for three years before Cindy broke up with him. Whether the role-playing sexual escapades were John's idea, which seems most likely, or they were something Cindy first suggested, we'll never know for sure. But it seems that John left other kinds of impressions on his schoolmates during these formative years. He attended St. Thomas Aquinas High School, where he was a member of the football team and an above-average student.

but some of his classmates remember him being a strange fellow and a loner. He didn't completely shy away from extracurricular or group activities, but he was also never 100% there, even when he was there. While other kids developed close friendships in high school, John Schaefer seemed to prefer his own company. But this by itself isn't strange. His other behaviors during this time in his life also left lingering impressions.

especially on the girls in his class. It was apparently common for John to sneak peeks at his female classmates' underwear. One classmate even recalled that John would practically stand on his head to see up a girl's skirt. This makes sense with what we know now of his obsession with women's underwear, which eventually morphed into a lethal obsession with young women themselves.

One of John's neighbors at the time, a young man named Gary Heinlein, remembered that John would often go hunting alone in the Everglades, shooting animals for sport. Gary's sister, Lee Heinlein, became somewhat of an obsession of John Schaefer. Lee, two years older than John, was apparently friendly towards him. Some people suggest that they even dated for a short period, but others disagree on this point.

However, they did seem to play tennis together, although how much time they spent in each other's company is not completely clear. After things ended with his first girlfriend Cindy, John met 17-year-old Sandy Stewart while attending a school dance. They quickly started dating. Things seemed to be going well. John and Sandy became physical together, and he was a frequent guest at her house.

Her parents seemed to like him because he was very polite and it was clear their daughter was taken with the young man. Even after John graduated from high school in 1964, his relationship with Sandy continued. The two grew close enough to develop a bond.

It was this bond that apparently allowed John to open up about the dark thoughts that were taking up more and more of his waking life. He told her about his neighbor Lee and how she would purposely undress in a window just to tease him. He said something similar about another neighbor who would sunbathe in her own backyard. According to John, these young women were doing these things just to torment him. He called them sluts and whores.

He told her about his dark fantasies concerning these young women, which included rape and sometimes murder. Surprisingly, these confessions didn't drive Sandy away. Not at first. After all, they were just thoughts. John hadn't acted on any of these fantasies. At least, not that Sandy knew.

Perhaps seeking a way to deal with the darkness inside him, John applied to seminary school in 1964, thinking that he could become a priest. He was promptly rejected for a lack of faith. John later said that he was hurt by this rejection, but that it ultimately led him to realize that he'd been brainwashed by the Catholic Church. This caused him to reject religion altogether. Instead of seminary school, John attended a local community college.

It was around this time that Sandy broke up with him. She later said that she never feared for her safety around John. Instead, she ended the relationship because she'd come to feel more like John's therapist than his lover or partner. John took the breakup hard, reportedly stalking Sandy for a period before finally giving up and turning his mind to other pursuits.

He took a creative writing class at the community college, where he developed a penchant for writing dark and vividly violent crime stories, most of which involved the graphic rape and murder of young women. John confessed his dark thoughts to his creative writing teacher, who told the campus psychologist about it. When interviewed by the psychologist, John said that he wanted to join the army because he enjoyed killing things.

According to this interview, John no longer just liked to shoot small critters in the Everglades. He had graduated to killing larger animals like cows before decapitating them and even raping their dead bodies in some cases. It's unclear what the psychologist did with this information, if anything. If the information was passed on to the authorities, nothing ever came of it. Not until it was far too late and many families were shattered because of John Schaefer.

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Part 2. Married to a Murderer As 1966 dawned, the Vietnam War was in its 11th year.

John, now an adult with thin brown hair, a thick round face, and a near permanent smirk, had received college deferments, which kept him out of the war. But he'd left college at the end of 1965 to travel with a singing troupe as part of the Moral Rearmament Movement. During this adventure, John met Martha Fogg. The two dated, and John decided he would go to Europe with a musical troupe.

but he came down with a case of measles, which derailed his plans. Martha went to Europe and the two lost touch. Despite his admission that he wanted to join the army, it seemed that the reality of such a change wasn't lost on John. Knowing that he had to go back to school or risk going to Vietnam, he decided on the former and was back in school by September of 1966.

This is important to remember because the first pair of John's alleged victims went missing just a month later, in October of 1966. Nancy Elaine Leichner was 21 and Pamela Ann Nader was 20 when the two of them took a trip to the Alexander Springs Wilderness Area with their boyfriends. The boys decided to take a hike on their own, leaving the girls at a picnic area.

When the two young men returned from their short hiking trip, they couldn't find Nancy or Pam. Seeing that the two young women had left behind their shoes, keys, and purses, they figured they'd just gone for a short walk. But as time ticked by and the girls didn't return, they decided to be proactive. They searched around, even renting a canoe to search the nature trails from the water. They found nothing. At first, they were sure that the girls had just wandered off.

But after more than an hour of searching, they feared something was very wrong, so they called the police. The sheriff of Lake County at the time, a man named Willis McCall, seemed to only do a token search for the young women before turning his attention to the boyfriends. Despite the families pleading with him to bring in outside help to search the area and perform a thorough investigation, McCall only did things his way.

While the boys were never charged with anything, McCall never managed any solid leads. To this day, the bodies of Nancy Leichner and Pamela Nader have never been found. And it was only a prison confession decades later that tied the disappearances to John Schaefer. Despite the warning signs that John left in his wake as he went through his life, no one would come to suspect him of anything serious for many years.

And when it did happen, it was due to a mistake made by John himself. Like so many serial killers, Gerard John Schaeffer was able to fly under the radar, destroying lives for his sick pleasure as he went about his dark business. John left Broward Community College in 1967 with an associate degree in business administration. He soon applied to Florida Atlantic University with the ultimate goal of becoming a teacher,

John started attending the university in January 1968. However, he failed to keep his grades above the minimum required to receive continued college deferment. He was told to report for his army physical in April of that year. John soon hatched a plan to get out of fighting in the Vietnam War. He left a suicide note in his dorm room and disappeared. But it seems he didn't go far.

He eventually reported for his physical, but was given a deferment under the broad category of mental, moral, or physical reasons. Whether the army found him unfit for service because of his mental state or because he convinced them he was a cross-dresser isn't clear. Either way, he found a way out of going to fight in the Vietnam War, despite his confession that he liked to kill things.

perhaps because the things he liked to kill were the ones who couldn't fight back effectively. This was a turbulent time in John Schaefer's life, and not just because he was failing academically and romantically. His mother filed for divorce from his father in July 1968. Soon after, Schaefer quit his job in Florida and left for a hunting trip in Michigan. On this trip, he reconnected with Martha Fogg from the Singing Troupe,

The couple returned to Florida engaged to be married. Mere months later, in December, they took their vows. By January 1969, the two were living with John's mother, both attending Florida Atlantic University. Now John had his sights set on becoming a teacher, and he soon landed a gig as a student teacher at Plantation High School. But this didn't last long at all. His behavior frightened staff members at the high school,

Apparently, he was belligerent with the students, trying to force his own political and moral views on them. Just weeks after he arrived at the school for the student teaching position, the principal fired him, citing totally inappropriate behavior.

In September of 1969, the same month John Parent's divorce was finalized, John's childhood neighbor, Lee Hainline, went missing. You may remember that this was the very same neighbor whom John felt was teasing him by regularly undressing near a window. The very same neighbor whom John had rape and murder fantasies about as a teenager.

At the time of her disappearance, she'd been married to a man named Charles Bonadiz. Their marriage was rocky, to say the least, with frequent quarrels. But when Charles came home on September 8th, he found a note from his wife that said she was heading to Miami to meet an old friend about a job. She never returned. Her car was eventually found in a Fort Lauderdale parking lot.

Lee's family hired a private investigator to look into the disappearance, not believing that Lee had simply run away. Apparently, Lee had said a lot about this "old friend" that the investigator was led to John Schaefer. When questioned by Lee's brother about the trip to Miami for a job, John told a different story altogether. He said that Lee had called him and asked for a ride to the airport, saying she was going to run away from her husband.

According to John, he'd agreed to give her a ride, but Lee had never called back. Since he never heard from her again, he never met her for the ride to the airport. Although fishy, there wasn't enough for the police or the investigator to go on, so John was eventually dropped as a suspect. It would be another four years before police found jewelry belonging to Lee among John Schaefer's things in a spare room in his mother's house.

Lee's remains were found in 1978 at a Palm Beach construction site, but they weren't positively identified until 2004. She had three bullet holes in her skull. It was around this time, late 1969, that John got his second shot at student teaching. He was placed at Stranahan High School. This job went about as well as his first try.

After similar issues in the classroom, the supervisor fired him on November 11th, 1969. The supervisor, a man named Richard Goodhart, even went so far as to tell John that he would do whatever was in his power to keep Schaefer from getting a job with anyone. Unfortunately, John Schaefer wasn't done seeking out jobs where he could exploit the trust and authority of his position.

He tried to become a priest and a teacher, only to fail at both. Next, he would be drawn to a different kind of job, one with much more power. He would become a police officer. Part 3: Killer Cop John was fired from his second student teaching job in early November 1969.

A little over a month later, a 22-year-old woman named Carmen Marie Hollock went missing. She was last seen on December 18th, 1969, when she had lunch with her sister-in-law. During the lunch, Carmen Hollock said that she had an appointment to meet with a male teacher from Broward Community College, the same community college John had attended, although never taught at.

According to her sister-in-law, Carmen said that this male teacher was offering to help her get a government job that involved travel and great pay. Carmen was wearing a black chiffon dress during this lunch, the last time anyone saw her. When Christmas came and went with no sign of Carmen, the family grew alarmed and checked her apartment with a spare key. There was no sign of Carmen.

Her car was located in a parking lot close to her apartment, not long after she went missing. When John Schaefer's mother's house was eventually searched, investigators found two of Carmen Hallock's gold-filled teeth among John's things, along with the shamrock pin her family identified as hers. Before his arrest, John also wrote a supposedly fictional story about hanging and mutilating a young woman wearing a black chiffon dress.

Carmen Hallock's body was never found. Just 11 days after Carmen Hallock went missing, two little girls disappeared from Pompano Beach, just north of Fort Lauderdale. Peggy Rahn, who was nine years old, and Wendy Stevenson, who was just eight years old, were last seen as they walked down the beach to get ice cream. Eventually, John would confess to murdering the two little girls in a letter to his girlfriend.

However, authorities are not convinced John was telling the truth. First, these girls were much younger than his typical victims. Second, a witness reported seeing the two girls with a man whose description did not match that of John Schaefer. We'll likely never know whether John killed those two little girls or not, but they never surfaced again, and their bodies were never found.

It's important to note here that John Schaefer was never charged with the murders of the people mentioned so far in this story. These are all alleged murders that he may or may not have committed. The charges that landed him in prison wouldn't come for several years. But if we assume, with the benefit of hindsight, that John is responsible for the deaths of these women, we can surmise that he had already killed at least four women by the time the new decade dawned.

However, this estimate is probably low. It's likely that he killed more than four women during the 1960s, and it seems that he wasn't about to stop in the 70s. In May of 1970, John's wife Martha filed for divorce, citing "extreme cruelty."

Later that year, in October, John was still attending Florida Atlantic University and working as a security guard at Florida Light and Power for tuition money. He met his secretary, Teresa Dean, while on the job. The two quickly got engaged. They were married in 1971, soon after John graduated from Florida Atlantic with a bachelor's degree in geography.

Since he hadn't earned his teaching credential, there was little he could do with his degree. But John soon had his sights set on becoming a police officer. In September of 1971, he was hired by the Wilton Manors Police Department and sent to undergo training at Broward Community College. He graduated in December of that year, hitting the streets soon thereafter.

As was the case with all new officers, John would have a six-month probationary period so his higher-ups could make sure he was a good fit for the job. As you might have already guessed, he was anything but a good fit. While on the job, Schaefer made poor decisions and generally conducted himself strangely. His fellow officers said he was obsessed with writing traffic tickets and that he seemed drunk on his newfound power.

Wilton Manor's chief, Bernard Scott, later told reporters that Schaefer did dumb things and that Scott didn't want him around. As it came out later, John commonly asked women for dates after pulling them over. Perhaps this was how he met his first alleged victim in 1972. Belinda Hutchins was a 22-year-old cocktail waitress and occasional call girl. She had a husband and a baby daughter at home.

although her home life wasn't what you would call normal. Her husband was used to her doing her own thing, which was maybe why he didn't find it immediately strange to see her getting into a blue Datsun with a man he'd never seen before one night in early January. It was only when his wife never returned that he grew worried something had happened. He later identified Schaefer's blue Datsun as the same model and color as the one he saw his wife getting into.

No trace was ever found of Belinda Hutchins' body. But when police eventually searched John's mother's house, they found an address book that was thought to belong to Belinda. Nearly two months after Belinda Hutchins was last seen getting into a blue Datsun, a 13-year-old girl named Deborah Sue Lowe went missing. The last time anyone saw her, she was on her way to school. Her books were later discovered in a trash can a block from her house.

John Schaefer was never directly linked to the disappearance, and no trace of Deborah Lowe ever surfaced. However, Schaefer had worked with Deborah's father and had been to the Lowe household before. After Schaefer was eventually arrested, the Lowe family put the pieces together and believed, despite the lack of any evidence, that John killed their daughter.

Just weeks after Deborah Lowe's disappearance, John was on thin ice with Chief Scott at the Wilton Manors Police Department. Just as Scott was about to fire him, John saved his job with a large drug arrest, but it wouldn't last. His behavior and decision-making eventually drove Chief Scott to call him into his office and fire him. John begged for another chance to prove himself. Despite his better judgment, Scott relented.

But the next day, Chief Scott learned that John had already applied to work for the Broward County Sheriff's Department. He fired Schaefer on April 20, 1972. John failed the mandatory psychological exam and was disqualified for the job with the Broward County Sheriff's Department. He applied at other local law enforcement offices, and most of them called Chief Scott for references. Scott told anyone who called his opinion of John Schaefer.

no one offered Schaefer a job. It seemed that he was out of the law enforcement industry after less than six months on the job. But when Sheriff Robert Crowder of Martin County got an application and an impressive letter of recommendation signed by Chief Bernard Scott, he decided to hire the applicant, Gerard John Schaefer. Apparently, the letter was enough for Sheriff Crowder. He never called to verify or check any other references.

If he had, he would have learned that the letter of recommendation was a forgery. Instead, he unknowingly brought what was at best an incompetent officer onto his staff. But the problems to come would be much bigger than sheer incompetence. In fact, John's job with the Martin County Sheriff's Department would soon spell his downfall.