The History of Northeast Florida

Florida likes to execute people.  Since centralizing judicial execution in 1923, the State of Florida has executed more than 300 convicted criminals.  Prior to that, when executions were carried out by individual counties, documentation is scarce.  While Florida ranks sixth overall in state-sanctioned executions historically , it holds a solid fourth place since 1976, behind only Texas , Oklahoma , and Virginia , a period during which some states have slowed or outlawed executions altogether . Capital punishment worldwide has a long history that extends back thousands of years.  In Florida , there is evidence of Native American tribes executing members for various offenses.  As early as the 1500s, French explorers documented the beheading of Timucua sentinels for the crime of falling asleep at their posts.  It could have been worse for them, as boiling was another method of execution used by the natives. When the Spanish arrived in 1565, they brought...

The night was clear and hot at Raiford Prison on August 17, 1979.  Suddenly, the lights on the Northwest side of the perimeter fence flickered and fell dark.  Three figures darted across the prison yard.  One of the men was caught in the focus of a search light.  Guards fired warning shots from the tower and the man dropped to the ground.  The other two continued on unnoticed, scaled three fences topped with barbed wire and disappeared into the Florida night. One of the escapees, Willie Griffith, who was serving a life sentence for the murder of a cab driver, managed to elude capture for eleven years.  When he was finally arrested in Holladay , Utah , his wife and mother of his two young children was shocked as she was completely unaware of his past criminal life. The other escaped prisoner, Frederick Barrett, also serving a life sentence for murder, spent an astounding thirty-two years on the run before he was taken into custody. Frederick Mark Barr...

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 pro...

In 1947, Nassauville Road , across the Amelia River from Fernandina Beach , Florida , was a dirt road surrounded by deep woods.  The stillness of the forest remained undisturbed, decades before housing developments would replace it.  At night, the road leading from the hamlet of O'Neil in the north to the settlement of Seymour 's Point in the south was pitch black, as the tree canopy overhead choked out even the light of the stars.  A few homes and churches dotted the periphery, set too far back to cast any illumination onto the path. At 1:30 in the morning of August 13, 1947, Sidney Pope was driving to his home in Seymour ’s Point following his shift at the Fernandina pulp mill.  He took a shortcut and turned left on a path that intersected with Nassauville Road .  There he came upon a car parked on the side of the road, facing him with it’s headlights on.  As he drove past the parked car, he looked over and saw that it was unoccupied. Pope stopp...