Gerard John Schaefer: The Policeman Serial Killer

Gerard John Schaefer grew up in an environment that today is recognized as a recipe for raising a serial killer.  His mother was overly doting towards him, and his father was an abusive alcoholic who was away from home much of the time.  He was born on March 26, 1946 in Neenah, Wisconsin.  His father, Gerard John Schaefer, Sr., was a traveling salesman.  His mother, Doris, was a housewife. He was the oldest of three children, the others being a girl, Sara, and a boy, Gary. When his father was home, he often belittled Doris.  He never missed an opportunity to make it clear that he thought young Johnny, as he was called, was useless and that he preferred his daughter to him.  On top of this, both parents were dogmatic Catholics who enforced strict adherence to their faith.

The family relocated to Nashville, Tennessee, and shortly thereafter, they moved to Atlanta, Georgia.  Around the age of 12, as Schaefer approached puberty, his disturbing proclivities began to emerge.  According to his own later account, he would go into the woods alone, strip naked and don women’s panties he had stolen from either his mother or sister.  Then, he would lash himself to a tree, tie a rope around his neck, and tighten it until he achieved autoerotic orgasm.

The Schaefer family again relocated in 1960, this time to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where they enrolled Johnny in St. Thomas Aquinas High School.  While studying there the teenager continued his autoerotic asphyxiation routine, took up full-blown cross-dressing, and added peeping through neighbor’s windows to his repertoire.  The struggle between his perversion and his Catholic faith resulted in a self-loathing which increased day by day.

Johnny met a young woman named Cindy, with whom he was in a relationship for three years.  During this time he eased off his own perversions as he was busy satisfying hers.  Cindy liked play-acting, specifically acting out rape fantasies.  She was unable to enjoy normal sex and only became aroused when, at her insistence, Johnny would rip off her clothes and pretend to rape her.  Johnny eventually tired of the “pretend” part of the rape fantasy and broke off the relationship, much to Cindy’s disappointment.  The next day Johnny returned to the woods and resumed his sexual self-torture.

Johnny Schaefer managed to keep his bizarre activities to himself throughout high school and was, by all accounts, considered a good student.  He was a member of the varsity football team, but otherwise, he generally avoided interaction with other students.  He graduated high school in 1964 and enrolled at Broward Community College. 

After successfully completing two years at Broward, he pursued studies at Florida Atlantic University with the goal of becoming a high school teacher.  While at the university, Schaefer married Martha Fogg, a fellow student two years his junior. Schaefer obtained and was fired from two student teaching positions during 1969, leading him to abandon his teaching aspirations.  While the exact circumstances of Schaefer’s termination from the two teaching positions is unclear, his supervisor at one of the schools was later quoted as telling him “He had better never let me hear of his trying to get a job with any authority over other people or I would do anything I could to prevent it.”

On September 8, 1969 25-year-old waitress Leigh Bonadies left her apartment at 2121 Davie Blvd., Fort Lauderdale, just down the street from the home of Johnny Schaefer’s mother, and disappeared.  The week before that she told a friend she had been offered a $5,000 per month job as an investigator for the Central Intelligence Agency. On the morning of her disappearance Leigh left a note for her husband saying that she was going to Miami for a tennis match.  Her car was later found abandoned in a municipal parking lot and she was never seen again.

Leigh and Johnny knew each other from their senior year of high school.  Back then, despite himself being a “Peeping Tom”, Johnny Schaefer was offended by Leigh’s habit of changing her clothes without drawing the shades and told his then-girlfriend, Sandy Steward as much.  He told Steward that he thought Leigh was a “slut” and that he intended to “put a stop” to her.  Sandy Steward was disturbed by this remark and dumped Schaefer a short time later.

On December 18, another young waitress, Carmen Marie Hallock, went missing from her Fort Lauderdale apartment.  Carmen had told her ex-husband’s sister a week before she disappeared that she had been offered a top-secret job with a government agency that dealt with narcotics.  When police entered her apartment they found her dog, which she adored, alone and hungry; a clear indication that she had planned to return. Like Leigh Bonadies, Carmen’s car was later discovered abandoned in a municipal parking lot.  Police initially suspected a merchant seaman, whom Carmen had recently dated, in connection with her disappearance, but he was ultimately cleared.

Carmen Marie Hallock

Martha Fogg Schaefer filed for divorce in 1970, citing “extreme cruelty” as the reason.  In truth, she was tired of Johnny’s inability to hold a job, tired of him being out of the house so often (he told her he was hunting), and tired of his constant demands for sex.

Johnny Schaefer spent several months in Europe following his divorce.  By the time he returned he had decided to enter the field of law enforcement.  As a first step towards this goal he got a job as a security guard at the Wackenhut Corporation.  While working there he met 19 year old secretary, Teresa Dean.  The couple married on September 11, 1971, a month after Schaefer secured a job with the Wilton Manors Police Department.  He had previously been rejected by the Broward County Sheriff’s Department after failing the psychological test.

Schaefer attended a multi-week course at the police academy, and after completing it, he was assigned patrol duty in the small town of Wilton Manor.  In this capacity he became known in the tight community for pulling over young women, obtaining their contact information and then calling them to try to get dates.  Word of this filtered back to his supervisors who fired Schaefer in April 1972 for what the police chief called “a lack of common sense.”

In June 1972, Gerard Schaefer found another job, this time with the Martin County Sheriff’s Department.  Martin County was unaware of the circumstances surrounding Schaefer’s separation from Wilton Manor and was impressed by his credentials.  When interviewed later, Sheriff Robert L. Crowder said, “When you first meet Schaefer he leaves a good impression.  He’s smooth mannered, soft spoken, polite.  There’s nothing at all offensive about his demeanor.  He had gone through the academy and he had a college degree.  Usually, when you get a guy with this training you latch on to him.”

Martin County Sheriff Robert Crowder

Nancy Ellen Trotter of Farmington, Michigan, and Pamela Sue Wells of Garland, Texas, were traveling the country and met while hitchhiking.  They arrived at a friend’s apartment in Stuart, Florida, two days earlier and, on July 21, 1972, they decided to hitchhike to the beach.  After spending a day in the sun, the two 17-year-old girls had their thumbs out on the shoulder of State Road A1A when a Martin County Sheriff’s car pulled over. 

Deputy Sheriff Gerard John Schaefer got out of his patrol vehicle and approached the girls.  He warned them that hitchhiking was illegal in Florida (which it was not at the time) but said he would give them a break since they were from out of state.  He offered to drive them back to where they were staying and they accepted. On the way Deputy Sheriff Schaefer even offered to give them a ride to the beach the next morning – for their own safety.  He seemed so kind that they readily agreed.

This Article is from the Book "Florida Felons"

Republished with Permission of the Author

The girls were surprised the next morning when Deputy Sheriff Schaefer showed up in his personal vehicle wearing civilian clothing.  He explained that he was doing plain clothes undercover work that day, and they got into the car.  As they were headed down A1A Schaefer lectured Nancy and Pamela about the dangers of accepting rides from strangers.  As they continued their ride, Schaefer’s warnings escalated into hypothetical scenarios that sounded more like threats: “I could sell you to a white slaver.  You’ve heard of people just disappearing.  There’s no crime if there’s no victim found.”

Schaefer pulled onto a dirt road on Hutchinson Island where he stopped the car deep in the woods and forced the, by-then terrified, girls out of the car at gunpoint.  He tied Nancy and Pamela to separate trees and secured a noose around each one’s neck.  A gag was placed in each girl’s mouth.  He suspended the nooses from tree branches, which left the girls standing on their toes atop exposed tree roots in order to keep from choking.  Any attempt to escape would cause them to slip and be hanged.

While the girls were suspended in that position, Schaefer received a dispatch on his police radio that required him to report back to the station.  He told the girls that he was meeting with a slave trader to negotiate their sale.  He made it clear that upon his return they would either be sold to a prostitution ring or they would simply be raped and killed.  With that, he drove away.

When Schaefer returned two hours later, the girls were missing, having apparently wiggled out of their constraints.  He knew that they could identify him as he had told them his name.  Schaefer went home, called Sheriff Crowder, and gave him an alternative version of the story.  He told the sheriff that he had “overdone” his job, arrested the girls as runaways (which they were not) and was trying to scare them -- of course for their own good - out of hitchhiking in the future.

Sheriff Crowder was naturally alarmed, ordering Schaefer to return to the station and setting out on his own to find the girls.  He found Nancy Trotter, handcuffed behind her back, wading through a small body of water, trying to reach the road.  Nancy told him that her friend was still tied to a tree in the woods. Nancy was not aware that the sheriff had just been informed that Pamela had also managed to escape and was rescued by a passing trucker.

With Nancy Trotter and Pamela Wells now safely accounted for, Sheriff Crowder returned to the station where Gerard Schaefer was waiting.  He immediately fired his deputy and arrested him on charges of false imprisonment and aggravated assault.  Schaefer spent two weeks in the county jail before being freed on July 24 on a $15,000 bond.  His trial was scheduled for December.

Susan Place and Georgia Jessup were two 17-year-old friends. They each had a rebellious streak and both dropped out of high school in their junior year.  Susan had previously run away from home. Like many teenage girls they were extremely gullible.  However, unlike most teenage girls, they had the misfortune to meet Gerard John Schaefer while he was out on bail.

Susan Place and Georgia Jessup

On the afternoon of September 27, 1972, Susan Place’s mother, Lucille, returned to her home in Oakland Park, Florida, at the end of her workday.  There, she found Susan and Georgia in Susan’s bedroom, along with an older man who the girls introduced as “Jerry Shepherd.”  They told Lucille that they were going to the beach to play guitar, and the three soon left in the man’s car.  Lucille was suspicious.  Although the man, who appeared to be in his mid-20s, was clean cut and seemed nice - perhaps too much so - something seemed off, so she jotted down his license plate number.

Four days passed and Susan had still not come home.  Lucille contacted Georgia’s mother, Shirley, who told her that her daughter was also unaccounted for and had left a note indicating that she had run away.  The two girls were reported as missing to the Oakland Park Police.  Lucille Place provided them with a description of the man, his name (Jerry Schaefer), and a description of the car (a blue-green Datsun) along with the tag number she had written down.  The police searched for the license number, which showed the owner as a person from St. Petersburg who did not match Lucille's description, owned a different model car, and had an alibi for the night of the girls' disappearance.  Thereafter, the police treated the missing girls as likely runaways and no further action was taken.

Meanwhile, Gerard John Schaefer accepted a plea bargain and avoided going to trial for the kidnapping, imprisonment, and assault of Nancy Trotter and Pamela Wells.  He pleaded guilty to one count of assault and received a sentence of one year in county jail followed by three years probation.  The other charges were dropped.  At the sentencing hearing on December 22, 1972, Judge D.C. Smith seemed to incredibly not recognize the seriousness of what had happened and how the two victims had come so close to being raped and killed.  He told Schaefer “It is beyond the court’s imagination to conceive how you were such a foolish and astronomic jackass as you were in this case.”  He also allowed him to wait until after the holidays (January 15, 1973) before Schaefer began serving his sentence.

Although the police had decided that Susan Place and Georgia Jessup were simply runaways, Lucille Place didn’t give up the search for her daughter.  In her mind, she reviewed the day Susan disappeared over and over again. It occurred to her that she might have incorrectly jotted down the start of the tag number as “4” (indicating Pinellas County) rather than “42” (indicating Martin County).  She took this theory to the police in March 1973 who were skeptical about the sudden memory almost six months after the fact.  Nonetheless, they agreed to trace the number in order to placate the clearly distraught mother.  It came back as a blue-green Datsun registered to Gerard Schaefer.

Police questioned Schaefer who was by then locked up in jail.  Schaefer denied everything.  Although Lucille Place identified a picture of Gerard John Schaefer as the “Jerry Shepherd” who was at her house the afternoon of September 27, he denied ever having met the girls or being at the home.  With no proof that a crime had been committed there was nothing that the police could do.

Just two weeks later, on April 1, 1973, hikers discovered the remains of two female bodies in the woods on Hutchinson Island, just a few miles from where the other girls had been held captive six months earlier.  Pieces of the bodies were bound to trees by the legs, and both were decapitated. There was a hatchet-scarred bloody tree stump nearby.  According to an account in the Fort Lauderdale News “The corpses were scattered in bits and pieces across 75 yards of dense underbrush just off the ocean.  Police agree this could be the work of animals.  But what about the skulls, they ask.”

A few days later the bodies were identified through dental records as belonging to Susan Place and Georgia Jessup.  Based upon this evidence, the car registration, and Lucille Place's positive identification, search warrants were obtained for the homes of Gerard John Schaefer and his mother. 

In a locked room at the mother’s house, police found a treasure trove of items.  These items included a piece of jewelry belonging to Leigh Bonadies, Schaefer’s neighbor who disappeared in 1969 and a gold tooth, later identified by her dentist as belonging to Carmen Hallock, the other waitress who vanished that year.

This Article is from the Book "Florida Felons"

Republished with Permission of the Author

In addition to the items belonging to those two women, investigators discovered evidence tying Schaefer to many other women who had gone missing over the past several years.  They also came across hundreds of pages of stories written by Schaefer describing the torture, dismemberment, and murder of women.  Disturbingly, they also found three dozen photographs of mutilated women that were too blurry to identify.

When they searched Schaefer’s house the police found two human teeth in a plastic container.  They also noticed a purse later identified as belonging to Georgia Jessup.  Schaefer’s wife, Teresa, told police that her husband had given her the purse as a gift.  Several firearms and knives were also discovered in the home.

By the following month, investigators believed they had a strong enough case against Gerard John Schaefer to indict him for the murders of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup.  The indictment for first-degree murder was handed down on May 18, 1973.  Although police and prosecutors believed that Schaefer was linked to at least 28 other murdered or missing women, the Place/Jessup case was the strongest.

The trial began on September 17, 1973 in St. Lucie County.  The jury heard testimony from witnesses that included police officers, family members of the two murdered girls, the medical examiner, and several forensics experts, among others.  Nancy Trotter and Pamela Wells also testified, bravely re-enacting how Schaefer bound and suspended them by their necks.  Multiple pieces of physical evidence were presented, among them the license plate that initially led them to suspect Schaefer, the actual tree limbs from which the victims had been suspended, and fragments of the girls’ clothing found at the scene.  Prosecutors were also allowed to introduce as evidence the masochistic writings recovered from the home of Schaefer’s mother. Schaefer’s lawyer did not put forward much of a defense, except by trying to discredit the testimony of prosecution witnesses.  Schaefer himself did not testify.

Nancy Trotter re-enacts her captivity.

In his closing summation the prosecutor told the jury, “I submit for the State of Florida the only verdict is murder in the first degree on two counts.  If those girls were here today they would say ‘You hung me by the tree and let me die and then mutilated my body.’  That’s what those two girls would say.”  The defense attorney focused on the fact that most of the evidence was circumstantial and particularly objected to them considering Schaefer’s gruesome writings: “If you were going to convict him for having the manuscripts then why are Alfred Hitchcock and Earl Stanley Gardner walking around?”  Schaefer was overheard saying to his mother who was sitting behind him in the spectator gallery, “They’re vultures.  Sharks.  All here for the kill.”

The six-member jury returned their verdict at 11:05 pm on September 27, 1973, exactly one year following the disappearance of the two girls.  Gerard John Schaefer was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder.  On October 3, 1973, which would have been Susan Place’s 19th birthday, Schaefer, former policeman and newly convicted murderer, was given the maximum legal sentence of two consecutive life terms in state prison.  He only avoided the electric chair because the United States Supreme Court had imposed a nationwide ban the year before.

One month after beginning his term at Florida State Prison, Schaefer’s wife, Teresa, divorced him.  His trial attorney, Elton Schwarz, handled Teresa’s end of the divorce.  After the divorce was finalized Teresa and Elton married each other.  This relationship became the basis for one of Schaefer’s 19 unsuccessful appeals of his sentence over the course of the next 20 years.

In prison, Schaefer worked as a jailhouse lawyer, but he had an ulterior motive. After receiving confidential information from his “clients” he would sell them out to officials in exchange for extra privileges.  He was so good at this that in 1983 he received a transfer to Avon Park Correctional Institution, a less secure facility, where authorities were hoping to obtain evidence on an inmate who was suspected of running a child pornography operation from behind bars.  Schaefer successfully obtained the information needed to convict the other prisoner and break up an interstate child pornography ring.  Schaefer’s goodwill with prison officials, however, evaporated when he was suspected of planning an escape.  He was shipped back to Florida State Prison in August 1985.

Back at Florida State Prison, Gerard Schaefer began writing short stories about rape and murder that he submitted to crime magazines.  Many of the stories, written from the perspective of the killer and eerily similar to the ones that police found in the search of his mother’s home years ago, were published.  Although he claimed that the stories were fictional, they bore disturbing similarities to the crimes for which Schaefer was convicted and others that he was suspected of committing.

Schaefer’s former high school girlfriend, Sandy Steward (now Sondra London), contacted him in 1990 with a proposal to publish his stories in a book.  Schaefer agreed and they co-authored two books:  Killer Fiction and Beyond Killer Fiction.  Eventually their relationship soured.  When Schaefer threatened to have her daughter sexually assaulted and killed, London ended their partnership for good.  She went on to publish a book of her own containing Schaefer’s letters to her in which he confessed to murdering dozens of young women.

The small measure of fame that Gerard John Schaefer received following the publication of his books went straight to his head. His smug attitude and condescension further alienated his fellow prisoners who already considered him a snitch. The inmates would regularly harass him verbally and by throwing feces at him.  There were several physical altercations and his cell was set on fire three times.

The Naples Daily News reported the following on December 6, 1995: “A former police officer who tortured and decapitated at least two women and was a suspect in more than 30 other murders was found brutally stabbed to death in his prison cell.  Gerard John Schaefer, 49, a former Martin County sheriff’s deputy, was stabbed several times in his face and once across his throat with a homemade knife or ‘shank’ Department of Corrections officials said.  Another Florida State Prison inmate reported the murder to corrections officials Sunday morning after discovering Schaefer’s bloody body on his cell floor.”  Officials later said that in addition to Schaefer’s throat being sliced, he was stabbed over forty times and both of his eyes were pierced.

Authorities charged a fellow inmate named Vincent Rivera with Schaefer’s murder.  Rivera was a convicted murderer who was seen arguing with Schaefer a few days before the incident.  No motive was ever given for the assault, although plenty of his fellow inmates had good reason to kill him.  Rivera denied the charge and suggested that the murder was carried out by either Ted Bundy or Ottis Toole, both of whom were notorious serial murderers also housed on the prison wing.  Vincent Rivera was eventually convicted and received a sentence of 53 years on top of the life sentence he was already serving.

The death of Gerard John Schaefer closed the books on scores of unsolved murders and disappearances.  Shirley Jessup, the mother of young Georgia Jessup who was killed by Schaefer 20 years earlier, had this to say:  “I’d like to send a present to the guy who killed him.  I just wish it would have been sooner than later.”  The judge who sentenced him to life in prison because the death penalty was illegal at the time said, “He’s finally gotten the death sentence he ultimately deserved but couldn’t be given.”  His literary partner, Sondra London, who perhaps knew him best, summed up his life by writing, “To enter chez Schaefer was to wander through the Byzantine lair of a terminal malignancy in human form.”  The monster that was Gerard John Schaefer could never hurt anyone again.

This Article is from the Book "Florida Felons"

Republished with Permission of the Author