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- Hi everyone, welcome back to the podcast. Before we jump into it, if you are watching on YouTube, please right now give this video a thumbs up and subscribe, it helps out so much. And if you are listening on audio, can you just give me a five star review? If it's anything less, don't worry, we don't need it, but five stars, that's what we want here. I'm Peyton Morland, and today I'm diving back into the cruddy world of serial killers.
Specifically those who've claimed a higher than average number of victims. The kind of serial killers who often get called the most prolific. But I have to say, these sick, pathetic deviants don't deserve words like prolific. Words that pump them up and somehow frame them as celebrity-like. There's nothing to celebrate about murder, especially murderers like Gary Ridgway, who we covered last week.
And the same can be said about today's monster, an especially twisted and cruel individual who would have loved for you to think of him as the most prolific serial killer. So let's not give him that as we now begin this week's story. 18-year-old Nancy Ellen Trotter and 17-year-old Pamela Sue Wells were doing what many young people back in 1972 often did—
to explore their freedom and to get around from place to place on the cheap. They were hitchhiking. Nancy was from Michigan and Pamela was from Texas. And the two young women had only just met. It was hitchhiking, in fact, that brought them together. That was the beauty of hitchhiking. You could meet new people, make new friends, and suddenly you're not traveling solo. You have a companion.
Nancy and Sue had met while hitching in Illinois and figured they might as well consolidate their hitchhiking trips since both were headed in the same direction, Florida. But of course, the dark side to hitching rides was you never knew whose car you were getting into. The number of people who've disappeared and been murdered while hitchhiking is beyond count.
And even in the early 70s, young women who hitchhiked knew it could be dangerous. And these girls felt like, hey, there's safety in numbers. Let's just continue on together. So the two young women made it down to Stewart, Florida on the state's east coast. It was late July. The Florida heat and humidity were sweltering and also kind of dreamy, especially for a Michigander like Nancy.
But neither young woman had much money in their pocket, so they stayed at a place called the Halfway House. That's what it was, and that's also what it was titled. And there, they got their food and shelter for free while continuing to hitchhike to get around town.
It was on the 21st of July. It was a Friday afternoon and they'd been in Stewart for a couple of days and they wanted to go up to Jensen Beach and do some tanning. That's why they came to Florida in the first place, actually, was to tan. So they got onto Highway A1A and began hitchhiking. And within a matter of minutes, a car stopped. But it was not the kind of car they were hoping would stop. This was a Martin County Sheriff's Cruiser.
The young deputy inside rolled down his window and told them hitchhiking is illegal in Martin County. We didn't know, the girls told the deputy, who nodded and then picked up his radio and called into the station. I have two girls out here hitchhiking, he said into the radio. Is it okay if I take them home? The station gave him the okay and the young deputy motioned for the girls to hop in.
They got into the backseat of the squad car, and he turned back around in the direction he was coming from. He asked them where they were going and where they'd come from. As he was driving them back to the halfway house, the deputy told the girls that he himself knew what hitchhiking was like and how dangerous it could be, because he himself had hitched all over Europe. If they wanted to go to Jensen Beach, which wasn't that far away, he'd happily take them himself, he said, since that was his patrol area.
If they were open to meeting him in downtown Stewart the following morning, he could pick them up and take them there. The deputy, whose name was Schaefer, seemed like a nice enough guy, and so the girls accepted. Which, honestly, this is kind of twisted because he just picked them up for hitchhiking, but now he's agreeing to be their hitchhiking driver for the next day, but...
I digress. So bright and early the next day, they walked down to the park next to the courthouse where Deputy Schaefer had agreed to meet them. And there he was, not in his sheriff's cruiser, but in a private vehicle and not wearing his police uniform, but dressed in slacks and a plain shirt. How come you're not in your police car? They asked. Ah, he replied, they got me on as a plainclothes cop today, which seemed plausible enough.
So Nancy jumped in the front and Pamela got into the back and Deputy Schaefer turned onto A1A toward Jensen Beach.
And as they're driving along, he turns to the young women and asks, "Hey, do you girls want to see a Spanish fort?" And this sounded interesting, so they both agreed. I mean, why not? The deputy pulled off the highway and stopped alongside the Indian River, where he led them to the ruins of an old Spanish fort, just like he'd said. From there, he pointed out a place on the river where he claimed the boats used to enter and leave back during the Revolutionary War.
It was pretty neat stuff indeed, but the two young women were more interested in getting their tans on at this point. They'd seen enough and they wanted to get to the beach, so they walked back to the car and got into it. The deputy followed them and stood outside the car as he began asking them questions about the halfway house. He asked if they had drugs at the halfway house, and they told him he was wasting his time if he thought there were because there weren't any there. "'Where are the drugs in Stuart?' he asked."
"We have no idea," Nancy said. "This is only like our second day down here." Then he said something a little stranger. "You know, I could dig a hole and bury you out here. You know, no body, no crime." It was creepy, but the girls weren't taking anything he said seriously at this point. He kind of seemed like a goofball and they were annoyed because it was hot and balmy, mosquitoes were nipping at their ankles, and they just wanted to get to the beach.
But suddenly, everything changed. It didn't seem like Deputy Schaefer would be taking them to the beach after all. No, he told the girls he was, in fact, going to have to place them under arrest because they were runaways.
The girls started to laugh, they thought he was joking, but the deputy wasn't smiling. And he proceeded to make Nancy dump the contents of her purse out onto the car seat. He then pulled a pair of handcuffs from between the seats of his car, pulled Nancy outside, and cuffed her hands behind her back. He then did the same thing to Pamela. He then opened the back door of his car and threw the two handcuffed girls inside.
"I could sell you into white slavery," he threatened. "Do you think your parents would pay ransom?" "I know a guy I could sell you to, then you'll really get to see the world." But at this point, Deputy Schaefer didn't think the girls were scared enough and this kind of enraged him. So he opened the door back up and yanked them both outside the car and then went to his trunk, which he opened, and from it he pulled out several ropes and sheets.
At this point, he'd gotten what he wanted. The girls were definitely scared. He snatched a blanket from the car and then led Pamela out into a field and made her sit down on the blanket, tying her feet together. He made another loop around her shoulders, hog tying her and then gagging her.
Nancy at this point wanted to run, but she couldn't just leave her friend Pamela there alone with this monster. And then he warned that if one of them got away, he'd kill the other and then come and catch the escapee and kill her too.
So at this point, he gagged Nancy and took her down to the river where there were trees bunched together. He tied her feet and made her stand on part of a tree root that was above the ground. He fashioned some rope into a noose and tied it around Nancy's neck. The deputy then told her that he was going to rape her and kill her and then her friend too.
And Nancy was terrified. Tears poured down her face as Deputy Schaefer slung the other end of the rope that was around Nancy's neck over a tree branch that was above her and then tied it to another branch. Suddenly, Deputy Schaefer's dispatch radio told him that he was needed back at the station urgently.
Oops, Schaefer said, I gotta go. The deputy warned Nancy that if she tried to get away or even moved wrong, she would lose her footing and if she slipped off the tree root she was balanced on, she would hang herself. And if she somehow worked herself loose and tried to run away, he would be not far down the road. As Nancy cried her eyes out, the deputy left. Almost immediately, Nancy started chewing on the rope that was around her neck.
She tried working her legs free, but she wasn't able to. But she did manage to turn her body around, and as she did, she fell against the branch that the other end of the rope was tied onto. Her chewing had loosened the rope enough that she was able to then untie it with her still handcuffed hands.
After about 15 minutes, she was able to work herself out of all of her bindings, all except the handcuffs. She hid the ropes inside the Spanish fort structure because she had remembered getting a peek into the deputy's trunk and there weren't any more ropes inside. So if he did come back, he wouldn't have anything else handy to tie her back up with. This is super smart. He'd be all out of rope. As Nancy peered out from behind the fort, she saw the deputy's car still parked where it had been.
And this confused her. Did he not leave yet? Did he leave in another car? Had he left and had now come back? She felt like she was in a movie. She ran back down towards the river and walked into it until she was knee-deep in water. It was at this point that she could hear a voice in the distance, and it sounded like it was calling her name. She looked around and spotted Pamela through the bushes, calling out her name.
But at the time, Nancy was afraid to reply. She feared that the deputy had realized that she'd gotten loose and was making Pamela call out her name to lure her back into captivity. So Nancy stayed silent. But then, suddenly, she heard what sounded like someone approaching from behind.
So she began running through the water as fast as she could, trying not to fall because if she fell face first into the water with her hands handcuffed behind her back, she could drown. At the first clearing she came to, Nancy exited the river and began navigating the thick undergrowth on her knees, hiding under the cover of the weeds and brush. She knew there had to be snakes crawling around down there with her, but all she saw were spiders, every imaginable kind of spider.
And each time a bird would fly up or the wind would rustle the trees, her heart would race because she thought it was the deputy closing in on her, ready to fulfill his promise of rape and murder. As Nancy crawled deeper into the underbrush, the onslaught of mosquitoes overwhelmed her, and there was nothing she could do to fend them off as her hands were still cuffed behind her back.
She finally decided to bolt to her feet and began running toward the road that ran parallel to the river, running through the jungle, awkwardly, with her hands still behind her back in handcuffs. And she kept falling to the ground and working her way back up,
Eventually, she came to a thicket of vines and trees and she couldn't get around it, so she had no choice but to head back into the direction of the river. Nancy was smart. She knew that the land she was on was a peninsula, and that if she followed the river, she would eventually come to a spot where she could see the highway, and she'd be able to flag down a car. And she was right. She reached a point where she did see the road. But the road was on the other side, so she had to enter the river again.
And as she reached a point where the water became too deep to walk, she managed to flip onto her back and float, kicking her way toward the other side. But the river was wide. It was a long, slow journey from one side to the other. And during the swim, Nancy got stung and then stung again by jellyfish hiding in the murky water.
When she finally approached the other side, she turned herself upright and found that the water was shallow enough that she could now walk herself towards shore. And as soon as she saw passing cars on the highway, she began screaming at them as she approached the shore and one of those passing motorists heard her. The motorist happened to be Sheriff Robert L. Crowder, the head of the Martin County Sheriff's Department.
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Because Pamela, her friend, had already been found about 45 minutes earlier. She had gotten loose and flagged down a truck and she was back at the sheriff's station. And he was already well aware of the situation. The sheriff got out of his patrol car and wrapped a blanket around the soaking wet young woman and then he unlocked and removed the handcuffs. What's going on? Nancy asked as he put her in the backseat of his car. I guess we have a bad apple in the bunch, he told the girl.
What had happened earlier was when Deputy Schaefer, a bad apple indeed, returned to the spots where he tied the young women and found that they were both gone, he immediately called the station and got Sheriff Crowder on the phone.
I've done something foolish, he told the sheriff. You're going to be angry with me, he said. He then explained that he had, quote, overdone his job while trying to teach two young runaways a lesson about the dangers of hitchhiking. He explained to his boss, I tied them to a tree to put the fear of God into them, and then they got away. Sheriff Crowder was appalled by what he heard. He demanded to know the exact location and then slammed the phone down, got into his cruiser and sped out there.
On the way, he learned that one of the girls, Pamela Sue, had been found by a truck driver and was back at the sheriff's station. As it turns out, Pamela had escaped from her bindings in much the same way as Nancy. And luckily, Sheriff Crowder found Nancy very quickly upon arriving at the scene. Now, when all was said and done that day and the two girls gave their statements, Gerard Schaefer was promptly fired from the department.
No one bought his flimsy and absurd explanation as to why he abducted the two girls, both of whose stories were consistent with each other's and not consistent at all with Schaefer's. As a result, Schaefer was placed under arrest and charged with aggravated assault and false imprisonment. But let's get to know Schaefer a little bit now that we know how he was captured.
Gerard John Schaefer Jr. was 26 years old on his second marriage and was a native of Wisconsin who was raised in Nashville and Atlanta and moved with his family to Fort Lauderdale as a teenager.
He was accepted for a scholarship at Florida Atlantic University pursuing a degree in education. And in 1969, he was given a student teaching internship at Plantation High School, teaching the subject of geography. In 1970, Schaefer took a break and left the country, spending the summer traveling across Europe and North Africa. And when he got back to South Florida, he took a job as a security man and decided that he liked it. He liked being a man in uniform with a badge and a gun.
So when he saw a vacancy open up with the Wilton Manors Police Department, he filled out an application and sat down for an interview.
And he did what, unfortunately, many people do in the application process for a new job. He lied. He totally neglected to mention that he'd been fired from two student teaching positions, neither of which he held for longer than seven weeks. And he also claimed that he had two years of experience as a research assistant at Florida Atlantic University. And in the same breath, he boasted that he'd recently returned to the U.S. from Morocco, as though somehow his recreational travel had been work-related.
The police department took him at his word, never looked into his background or tried to verify his work history, and by September 1971, he was hired by the Wilton Manors Police Department as a cop. September of 71 was also the month Schaefer married his second wife, Teresa Dean. His first marriage didn't last long. His first wife divorced him after less than a year and a half of marriage, citing his extreme cruelty as the reason she had to get away from him.
Gerard Schaefer, by all accounts, was a cruel, arrogant loser whose jobs and relationships seemed to all end in record time. And his experience with the Wilton Manors police would be no different.
By the six-month mark, Schaefer had developed a reputation for poor performance, questionable arrests, and unorthodox conduct. His supervisors at the department were especially concerned over Officer Schaefer's penchant for stopping female motorists for minor traffic violations, and then later running their driver's license numbers through the DMV database, obtaining their contact information, and calling them to ask them out on dates.
This is while he's newly married, mind you. So the Wilton Manors PD canned him, and he wasted no time in securing a new job with the Martin County Sheriff's Department. But all the Martin County Sheriff's Department did at the time was your standard background check, and it was clean, so that was that. They never actually reached out to the Wilton Manors police to talk to anyone, to corroborate anything,
They just took Schaefer at face value. And this was June 23rd, 1972. It wasn't even a month into his new job as sheriff's deputy that Schaefer abducted Nancy and Pamela, got fired, and then was in jail on charges of false imprisonment and aggravated sexual assault. Not long after his arrest, Schaefer managed to raise $15,000 in post bail. His trial date was initially set for August and then was pushed back to December. And wow.
While free on bond, Schaefer was not about to stop what he had been doing for a long time. So let's learn about his next victim. Young Susan Place had a hard time fitting in at Stranahan High School. She was new to Fort Lauderdale. She'd recently moved there from Michigan and left all her good friends behind.
Now she was starting over socially and it wasn't easy. She was shy and self-conscious because of her epilepsy and a slight paralysis on the left side of her body due to complications during her birth. Susan found refuge in music. That was her passion and she was multi-talented. She sang, she played the piano and she played guitar. But she had a lot of setbacks in her 17 years of life and she found herself living in a city that wasn't very kind or hospitable.
Beyond just being made to feel like an outcast in high school for her differences, she was fired from her cashier job at a local grocery store because the owner's insurance company didn't like the fact that she was an epileptic. It was too much of a liability. Needless to say, at the time, Fort Lauderdale wasn't very good to Susan Place, and she reached a breaking point where she just decided enough was enough.
She dropped out of high school and opted to instead finish her education at an adult education center where she wouldn't have to worry about high school cliques and mean girl culture. It was at the adult education center that Susan made some new friends. One was a girl named Georgia Jessup who was a year younger than her but looked a lot more mature and was worldlier than Susan.
Georgia had a restlessness, a wanderlust, and a curiosity about the world, about things, and about people. She too had dropped out of high school because she didn't feel like she belonged, and she hoped to get her life together sooner rather than later so she could break away from her parents whom she felt were overbearing. She wanted to be the free spirit she knew she was.
The other new friend Susan had made at the Adult Education Center was a 26-year-old man named Jerry Shepard. He befriended both Susan and Georgia, in fact, and charmed them with his adventurous spirit.
He was an avid outdoorsman who liked to hike and get lost in the wilderness. He was from Colorado, he told them, and was going to return there after a stint in Mexico. They were invited to come along if they wanted. And the girls thought it over. Jerry was charming and polite, soft-spoken and not pushy, and he seemed like an experienced man who could show them places and teach them things, so...
Why not? They were tentatively going to go away with Jerry and set the date for September 27th, 1972. But they still had some reservations about running away with this man, particularly Susan, who was less at odds with her family than Georgia, who couldn't wait to get away and be away on her own. In fact, less than a week before their going away date, Georgia's parents grounded her. So she had to write a letter to Jerry Shepard explaining she couldn't make their departure date.
And also, she didn't have a passport. But by the evening of September 27th, both girls decided to heck with their parents and their restrictions. Around 7 in the evening, Jerry and Georgia stopped by the place residence as Susan was getting dressed, putting on her makeup, and preparing for her trip. She invited them inside, and that's when Susan's mother first met Jerry, standing in the doorway of Susan's bedroom like he owned the place, while Susan tidied up and Georgia sat in a chair.
"'What's going on here?' Susan's mother asked. "'I'm just cleaning up my room,' Susan replied. "'By the way, this is Jerry.' Susan's mother found Jerry to be soft-spoken, maybe kind of smug, not typical of the young men his age she was used to meeting. Safe to say, she didn't really like him. She knew Susan would be going away with him, and she had a bad feeling about it, just a bad feeling about him in general."
Guided by her intuition, Susan's mother took a pen and a piece of paper outside to Jerry's car and wrote down the license number and make, just in case something happened. And before long, Jerry, Susan, and Georgia were getting ready to take off. And off they went. And that was the last time that Susan would ever see her daughter.
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Four days later, Susan phoned Georgia Jessup's mother and learned that Georgia had run away. She hadn't heard from Georgia since, just like Susan's mom. So both women decided to go to the police and file missing persons reports for their daughters. Susan's mom provided police with the make, model, and license number of the car and a general description of the man named Jerry Shepard who the girls had run away with.
The police ran the license plate and it came back to a guy who lived 250 miles away in St. Petersburg on the opposite coast of Florida. Needless to say, the car was stolen and they had no leads. And that was that. Fort Lauderdale police also had no shortage of other cases to investigate. So as far as investigators were concerned, the girls had left the area voluntarily with a strange man in a stolen car.
But Susan's mom knew that wasn't the case, and she wasn't about to let this drop. Months went by without a word from detectives. Susan's mom went into her missing daughter's bedroom and began rifling through her stuff, combing meticulously through everything. But then, after an hour of frustrated searching, she found something. It was a handwritten letter from Jerry Shepard, sent to Susan back in August.
And with it was an envelope with a return address. So in March of 1973, Susan's mom got into her car and made the 80-mile drive up to Stewart. She wanted to confront Jerry Shepard and hopefully find out her daughter was alive and okay and with him. Susan's father joined her for the drive, and when they arrived at the apartment building at the address, they talked to the building manager and learned that no one by the name of Jerry Shepard lived there.
or had ever lived there at any time. The man they were looking for, who called him Jerry Shepard, was in fact, I'm sure you know, Gerard Schaefer. And he had gone away to prison in December on a one-year sentence for the aggravated assault and kidnapping of two girls. Sounding familiar?
The places walked away from this encounter with their blood curdled. What are you to do when the man who you think kidnapped your daughter is already in prison on other charges? On April 1st, a man and his son scavenging for scrap metal in Port St. Lucie stumbled upon the decomposing bodies of two young women. It appeared as though they had been bound to a tree, raped and shot to death, and then decapitated. Carved into the tree trunk was a set of initials, G and J.
And this location was only six miles from where Gerard John Schaefer had taken Pamela Sue Wells and Nancy Trotter, the two who had gotten away. Five days later, the two bodies were identified. They were Georgia Jessup and Susan Place.
When Schaefer was approached and told that the bodies of Jessup in place had been found, he immediately requested a public defender. Meanwhile, investigators served a search warrant at the home of Gerard Schaefer's mother in Fort Lauderdale, and inside a locked spare bedroom where Gerard's belongings were being stored, they found a trove of disturbing items. Items that told a story of serial murder.
For inside the bedroom was a stash of women's jewelry, books about serial murder, newspaper clippings concerning the 1969 disappearances of two women who knew Schaefer, Lee Hainline and Carmen Marie Halleck.
Identification cards belonging to two young women named Colette Goodenough and Barbara Wilcox, who vanished while hitchhiking in January of 1973. This is while Schaefer was out on bail and waiting to start his prison sentence.
Detectives searching Schaefer's mother's house also found nearly a dozen guns, bags of both live and spent ammunition, hunting knives, rope, porno magazines in which the photos of women were crudely modified by Schaefer to make them appear as though they were bound with ropes hanging from trees.
sporting bullet wounds. They also found hundreds of pages of Schaefer's own pornographic drawings and lurid writing telling stories of murder, kidnapping, rape, hanging, and humiliation. Many of these writings appeared to be confessions. Within a month, investigators were able to link Schaefer conclusively to nine murders and disappearances between 1969 and 1973.
Independent journalists would soon connect him to as many as 28, dating all the way back to 1966, when two women named Pamela Ann Nader and Nancy Lickner disappeared while on a picnic with their boyfriends. Schaefer was charged in the deaths of Georgia Jessup and Susan Place on May 18, 1973. This time, he was held without bond.
Schaefer insisted he was innocent and told reporters he was confident that he would be acquitted. After five hours of deliberation, Schaefer was found guilty on two counts of murder in the first degree. At the time, the state of Florida had declared the death penalty unconstitutional, so he was sentenced to spend the remainder of his life at Florida State Prison.
The true number of people Schaefer killed will never be known. Evidence links him to at least 11. He's claimed anywhere between 34 and 100. But he was boastful and arrogant. He liked to brag about being a prolific serial killer, while on the record denying he ever killed anyone and suing anyone who referred to him as a killer.
But Schaefer is hardly an anomaly in the way he liked to brag and maybe boost the number of people he murdered. This is something many serial killers have actually done, inflate their quote, kill counts. And so often when serial killers are written or talked about, their victim tallies are discussed in a way that makes it almost sound impressive. Words like prolific, phrases like kill count,
It's the most extreme. And that is our episode for this week. Thank you for listening and I'll see you again soon. Goodbye.