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It was a hot and muggy Florida day in July 1972 when Paula Sue Wells and Nancy Ellen Trotter were hitchhiking back to the halfway house where they were staying. Paula, 17, and Nancy, 18, were new to the area and didn't know their way around all that well. Martin County, on Florida's Atlantic coast, was a laid-back place to enjoy the beach.
Unlike other, more populous parts of Florida, it had low crime rates and was generally considered very safe. As such, Paula Wells and Nancy Trotter relied on the kindness of strangers and the power of their thumbs to get them to their destinations. The two attractive girls were stopped by a sheriff's deputy who offered them a ride to the halfway house. They agreed, getting into the squad car.
On the way, Deputy Schaefer explained to them the dangers of hitchhiking. He even said it was illegal and that he would have to write them up for it. Of course, the girls didn't know that hitchhiking wasn't illegal in that part of Florida. By the end of the ride, the nice deputy said he would give them a break this time, but that they needed to be more careful. He offered to pick them up the next day and take them to Jensen Beach so they wouldn't get in trouble for hitchhiking.
The girls agreed. When Schaefer showed up the next day, he wasn't wearing his uniform and he was driving his personal car, a blue Datsun. They found this strange and asked him why he wasn't in uniform. He dispelled their worries by explaining that he was working as a plain clothes officer to keep an eye on the area surreptitiously. The girls got into the car with Schaefer and they headed off. But instead of heading for their original destination,
a beach where plenty of other people would be around, Schaefer said he wanted to show them an old Spanish fort, which was really just a wooden shack. They stopped at a secluded area on Hutchinson Island, where he showed them the supposed ruins of the old Spanish fort. The two girls got out of the car, looked at the shack for a few minutes, and then got back in the car. They wanted to go to the beach, but Schaefer made no move to start the car again.
He started asking about the halfway house where the girls were staying. He wanted to know if there were any drugs there. They said there weren't. He continued asking them questions, most of which they couldn't answer because it was only their second day in the area. At first, the two girls thought his behavior was slightly odd, but they knew he was a police officer, so they simply decided to wait it out, sure that he would eventually drive them to the beach. Then the nightmare started.
He told the girls that he could dig a hole and bury them both, saying there would be no crime without a victim. He then said he would have to arrest the girls as runaways. He made Nancy Trotter dump the contents of her purse out before making her get out of the car, where he handcuffed her hands behind her back. He did the same with Paula Wells. With both girls handcuffed, he got them back in the car.
Then he started talking about selling them into white slavery and asking if their parents would pay a ransom for them. However, even through all of this, the girls managed to remain calm. Whether it was youthful naivety or unaccustomed confidence, they didn't think the strange 26-year-old deputy was actually going to do anything to them. So they dared him to sell them into slavery. This sent John into a fit of fury. He wanted the girls to quiver in fear.
He wanted them to beg and plead. John got the girls out of the car and retrieved supplies from the trunk, ropes and sheets. He left Nancy at the car while he took Paula to a nearby field and bound her legs together. When he had her bound, he also gagged her. At this point, Nancy was scared. Her hands were handcuffed behind her back, but her legs weren't yet bound. She could have run away.
But that would have meant leaving Paula in the clutches of this clearly deranged man. John made it clear that if one girl tried to run while he was busy with the other, he would simply kill the one left behind before coming after the runner. So Nancy didn't run. She stayed put, leaving Paula where she was. Schaefer turned his attention to Nancy. He took her down near the river and tied a rope to a tree.
He made her stand on an exposed root from the tree and tied a noose around her neck, so if she slipped off the root, the noose would tighten and she would die. He fondled her briefly and laughed at her when she cried and made a disgusted face. He told her he could rape her right there if he wanted to. Then he walked back up toward where his car was parked, leaving Nancy alone, gagged and bound and near to hanging.
As soon as he was gone, Nancy started struggling to free herself from the bonds. Luckily, Schaefer had tied one end of the rope around her neck to a low tree branch. Nancy was able to reach it even with her hands bound behind her back. She untied it, got her legs free, and snuck up toward the shack that John told them was a Spanish fort.
When she peeked around the shack and saw that John's car was still there, she ran back toward the river, knowing she had to get away and find help. As she got into the river, she heard someone calling her name. It was Paula, who was tied up to a tree along the river, much like Nancy had been minutes earlier. Thinking that John was forcing Paula to call her, she kept going. She ran through the water, avoiding the thick growth along the river, until she came to a clearing.
Sure that John was coming after her, Nancy got back up on land and crawled into some thick foliage to hide. She stayed there with her hands still handcuffed behind her, until the mosquitoes got so bad she couldn't bear to stay there any longer. Knowing approximately where the road was, she started that way, fighting her way through the bushes because she was afraid John would be able to spot her on a path through the woods.
Finally, she spotted the road on the other side of the Indian River. She decided to swim across, even with her hands behind her back. When she was finally able to stand up in the water on the side nearest the road, she started shouting at the passing cars. The first car to stop was a Martin County Sheriff's Cruiser. Inside was the sheriff himself, Robert L. Crowder, and he said he'd been looking for Nancy.
As it turned out, Paula had managed to free herself not long after Nancy had seen her tied to the tree. She'd gotten to the road and flagged down a truck, then immediately told how her friend Nancy was still out there somewhere. Nancy's whole ordeal had lasted not more than three hours. When asked about the situation, Crowder said, "Guess we had one bad apple in the bunch."
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It's not clear why John Schaefer left the two girls alone near the Indian River and the old shack that day. Some sources say he was called in by the sheriff's station on the radio. Others suggest it was a matter of John leaving to get all the supplies he needed to murder the girls. Whatever the reason, Nancy and Paula were both lucky and resourceful enough to get free and find help.
When he returned to the area and found the girls missing, John tried to cover his tracks. He called Sheriff Crowder and told him that he'd done something foolish. His story was that he'd seen two girls hitchhiking and wanted to teach them how dangerous it was. So he took them out to a secluded place in the woods and tied them up just to scare them. Crowder didn't buy it.
He fired Schaefer and then had him arrested and charged with two counts of false imprisonment and two counts of aggravated assault. Unfortunately, Schaefer made his $15,000 bond and was released on July 24th, 1972. And he was far from done killing. Two months after posting bond and being released from jail, John Schaefer found himself in a teenage girl's house, assuring the girl's mother that his intentions were noble.
The girl in question was 17-year-old Susan Carol Place. 16-year-old Georgia Marie Jessup was also present in the house as they prepared to spend the evening at the beach, listening to people play guitar. When Schaefer had met the two girls while attending a nearby adult education center, he hadn't used his real name. After all, he'd just been arrested for assaulting two young girls, much like the ones he was hoping to drive to the beach that September night.
To the girls, his name was Jerry Shepherd and he was from Colorado. Despite his assurances, Susan Place's mother felt uneasy about the situation. The older man hanging around her daughter was cause for concern. So before the trio left, she wrote down the license plate number on his car, a blue Datsun. As they drove away, Lucille Place had no way of knowing that it was the last time she would ever see her daughter alive again.
When Susan didn't come home after several days, her mother called Georgia Jessup's mother, only to learn that Georgia had apparently run away on the very same night the two girls left with Jerry Shepard.
Lucille gave the license plate and make and model of the car to authorities. But through some fluke, the car was traced to a different man who had an alibi for the night of the disappearances. Police also interviewed the sole Jerry Shepherd living in the Fort Lauderdale area, only to quickly eliminate him as a suspect. It seemed that the case would go unsolved.
Then, on October 26th, 1972, 14-year-old Mary Alice Briscoe Lena and 13-year-old Elise Lena Farmer disappeared while hitchhiking to a restaurant. Their bodies were eventually recovered from underbrush near the city of Plantation. Both girls had been bludgeoned to death, and both were found with their legs spread apart, as though they had been sexually assaulted.
Several of Briskelina's fingernails had been ripped out from an apparent struggle with her attacker. During the course of the investigation into Briskelina and Farmer's deaths, authorities found that the girls knew a man called Gary Shepard through Briskelina's older sister's boyfriend. Shepard, whose physical description matched that of Schaefer, apparently claimed to be an ex-Wilton Manors police officer. Several acquaintances eventually identified John Schaefer as Gary Shepard.
But as 1972 came to a close, the only evidence authorities had against John Schaefer had to do with the ordeal near the old Spanish fort with Paula Sue Wells and Nancy Ellen Trotter. In December of 1972, John Schaefer was convicted on one count of aggravated assault after accepting a plea deal in the Wells-Trotter case. He was sentenced to one year in jail and three years of probation.
He would be eligible for early release in six months, pending good behavior. Since the holidays were fast approaching, the judge decided to let Schaefer spend the time with his family instead of reporting for his sentence immediately. He was told to report to jail on January 15th, 1973. That seemingly innocent decision cost at least one girl her life.
but perhaps as many as three more were killed in the time between his sentencing and when he finally reported to jail. Susan Poole, the 15-year-old girl whose remains wouldn't be identified until 2022, was reported missing two days before Christmas in 1972. This was just one day after Schaefer's sentencing, but before he was due to report to serve his time.
on January 11th, 1973. Just four days before Schaefer was due to serve his time, Colette Marie Goodenough and Barbara Ann Wilcox both disappeared while hitchhiking together from Iowa to Florida. Shortly before they went missing, Schaefer made a phone call from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Authorities suspect that he picked up the two hitchhikers on his way back to Florida.
Their skeletal remains wouldn't be found until 1977. Bound together with wire near a tree that contained marks to suggest one or both of them had been bound to it at some point during their abduction. John Schaefer was likely confident he had gotten away with murder again and again. He was planning on serving his six months with good behavior and then going back out into the world to satisfy his dark desires.
But thanks to Lucille Place, the concerned mother who had written down Schaefer's license plate, Schaefer never got the chance to kill again. Lucille Place and her husband went on a drive in the spring of 1973. It was on this outing that Lucille noticed many of the license plates in the area started with the numbers 4 and 2 instead of just 4, as was common where the Places lived.
This information, over six months after she wrote down Jerry Shepard's license plate, came with the realization that she'd written down the plate wrong. Instead of four, the plate started with 42. Armed with this information, she went to the police, who quickly searched and found that the license plate was registered to Gerard John Schaefer. This was enough to look harder at Schaefer for the disappearance of the place and Jessup Girls.
But without a body, there was a limit to what they could charge the man with. Then, just two weeks after Lucille Place realized her mistake with the license number, a couple of hikers found the remains of two bodies on Hutchinson Island, mere miles from where Paula Sue Wells and Nancy Ellen Trotter had come close to meeting a grisly end at John Schaefer's hands. Both bodies had been decapitated, and one of them had been shot in the jaw.
They were quickly identified by dental records as Susan Carol Place and Georgia Marie Jessup. Near the place where the bodies were discovered, there was evidence that the girls had been bound to a tree with rope. The initials G.J. were also carved into the tree. It didn't take long for investigators to spot similarities between the abduction case and the murder case, both of which happened on Hutchinson Island.
The police quickly obtained search warrants, one of which included John's mother's house. And what they found among John's possessions in the spare room shocked them all. The walls closed in on John Schaefer quickly after that. When he heard the news that two bodies had been discovered on Hutchinson Island, he requested a public defender. He also called his wife and told her to get rid of the purse he'd given her as a gift. His wife did no such thing.
She was eager to cooperate with investigators, appalled at what her seemingly normal husband had been accused of.
As detectives soon discovered, the purse had belonged to Susan Place. She'd been carrying it at the time of her murder. Investigators also found much more to tie him to other missing person cases and unsolved murders. They found 37 Polaroids of women being mutilated or hung, although they were too blurry for positive identification. They found one of Lee Heinlein Bonnedy's bracelets,
Lee had been his neighbor as a teenager and had gone missing in 1969. They found Barbara Wilcox's license and Colette Goodenough's passport, tying him to the two hitchhikers who had gone missing on their way from Iowa. They also found sections of bone and teeth belonging to eight other young women or girls who were missing or murdered.
When all was said and done, authorities had found enough evidence to link him, albeit tenuously, to 28 missing or murdered women. Some estimates put his alleged victim count as high as 36. In one letter Schaefer wrote years after his murder conviction, he suggested that he killed somewhere between 80 and 110 women and girls. Whether this estimate is anywhere near the truth is anyone's guess.
Unfortunately, he was never charged with anything beyond the murders of Susan Carol Place and Georgia Marie Jessup. Still, many families received some sort of closure thanks to the investigation. Before the murder trial started, John Schaefer underwent a full psychological examination to see if he was fit to stand trial. While he was found to be highly disturbed, he was sane enough to know the difference between right and wrong.
The trial went ahead as planned. The only two girls who had managed to get free of Schaefer, Trotter and Wells, testified against him during the trial. Throughout, Gerard John Schaefer maintained his innocence. The attorney who prosecuted him said that Schaefer was the most sexually disturbed person he'd ever seen and that he made Ted Bundy look like a boy scout. Schaefer was found guilty of first degree murder in the place and Jessup killings.
On October 4th, 1973, he was sentenced to two concurrent life sentences. In the years that followed, he would confess to many murders and then go on to retract those confessions. His wife only made one visit to her husband in prison, and that was to serve him with divorce papers. She soon started a relationship with Schaefer's public defender.
An old girlfriend came out of the woodwork to release a book of Schaefer's murderous stories, allegedly true accounts of his actual murders but masquerading as entertainment. The book was a failure, as was the sequel. Eventually, Schaefer blamed this ex-girlfriend for the killings, saying that he had tried to work through his proclivities with her, but she abandoned him instead.
While in prison, he became friends with Ted Bundy, even claiming that Bundy was inspired by Schaefer's kills when he murdered two girls at the same time. Their supposed friendship continued until Bundy was executed for his heinous crimes. Schaefer discussed killing as if it were an art. At one point, he wrote about the challenge of killing two girls at once. He called this doing doubles. Here's what he said about it. "Doing doubles is far more difficult than doing singles.
but on the other hand, it also puts one in a position to have twice as much fun. There can be some lively discussions about which of the victims will get to be killed first. When you have a pair of teenaged bimbalinas bound hand and foot and ready for a session with the shinning knife, neither one of the little devils wants to be the one to go first. And they don't mind telling you quickly why their best friend should be the one to die.
Schaefer seemed to like the attention, and he loved to write about murders, insisting sometimes that his accounts were fictional, and at other times that they were true. He claimed that he was framed by drug-dealing police officers and corrupt prosecutors. His lawyer filed appeal after appeal over the years, a total of 19. All of them were dismissed.
From his cell, Schaefer launched lawsuit after lawsuit, suing anyone who had ever called him a serial killer or wrote about him in the true crime genre. All the lawsuits were eventually dismissed. According to reports, he wasn't well-liked by his fellow inmates. He styled himself a jailhouse lawyer, writing legal briefs for his fellow inmates.
but he used the information he heard during these sessions to sell out other prisoners, trading the info to authorities, perhaps in an effort to curry favor and reduce his sentence. One inmate ended up on death row after he told Schaefer where his victim's body was buried, and Schaefer gave the authorities the crucial information. He was understandably labeled a snitch and was beaten more than once during his time in prison. At least once, his cell was set on fire.
Then, in 1995, Gerard John Schaefer was found brutally murdered in his cell. He'd been stabbed 42 times in the face, neck, and body, and his throat had been cut. The man who was eventually accused of his murder was doing life plus 20 years. He got an additional 53 years for murdering Schaefer, supposedly because the two had quarreled after Schaefer had taken more than his share of hot water from the dispenser on their cell block.
But for a man who was already doing a life sentence plus 20 years, this additional time probably didn't weigh too heavily on him. After being in prison for over 20 years, John Schaefer's life ended much like the lives of his victims had, violently and at the hands of a cold-blooded killer.
