Serial Killer Investigations (13 page)

Mrs Place thought the man—who said his name was Jerry Shepherd—looked too old for the girls (he was 26). A feeling of vague unease prompted her to note down the license-plate number of his blue Datsun.

When neither girl returned home, Mrs Place notified the police. But when they checked the licence number she had noted down, it proved to belong to another make of car, whose owner was totally unlike the genial, plump-faced ‘Jerry Shepherd’.

A month later, on 23 October 1972, two more teenaged girls vanished—this time, they were only 14. Elsie Farmer and Mary Briscolina had set out to hitchhike when they too disappeared. In January 1973, their skeletons were found in undergrowth near Fort Lauderdale, and identified by dental records.

Meanwhile, in November 1972, Schaefer had been sentenced to six months for the Trotter and Wells kidnapping, and while he was in jail, his luck ran out. As Susan Place’s mother was driving through Martin County, she noticed that all car license plates began with ‘42’. The license number of the blue Datsun had started with a 4, which was the number of Pinellas County, near Saint Petersburg. Had she noted down the number incorrectly? Mrs Place decided to act on the assumption that she had, and when she found that the same number, but starting with 42, belonged to a blue Datsun, she suspected that she was at last on the right track. When further research revealed that its owner, Gerard Schaefer, was in jail for kidnapping two teenage girls, she knew she was. At the county sheriff’s office, she was able to identify Schaefer as Jerry Shepherd.

A search of Schaefer’s home—where he lived with his mother—revealed various items that belonged to the missing young women, and some extremely explicit pornography, written and illustrated by Schaefer himself, describing murder, rape, and acts of necrophilia.

Schaefer was indicted and sentenced to two life terms for the murders of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup. But the items found in Schaefer’s room convinced the police that he had killed at least 20 women, and even two children of eight and nine. Evidence recovered later suggested that even this could be less than half the total. Sondra London was shaken when Schaefer came to trial in 1973, and as she began to realise that Schaefer had already committed murder when he was her lover, her fascination with the problem of serial killers increased.

Finally, in February 1989, Sondra addressed a letter to Schaefer in Florida State Prison. He replied effusively: ‘How could I not remember you, the great love of my life?’ Soon he agreed to allow Sondra to work on a book about him.

As the correspondence continued, she asked him if he still wrote pornographic stories, like those the police had found in his home. By way of reply he forwarded her some of his more recent efforts.

A typical one, ‘Grand Theft’, describes how he picks up a hooker, a ‘girl with an ass like jello on springs’, in a burger bar. In her room she performs oral sex with ‘misty eyed pleasure’. Then, as they are leaving the room, he slips a garrotte around her throat. Schaefer describes her last moments: ‘With her eyes, she asked me, “Why?” “Because,” I hissed, as the life went out of her.’

Most of the stories have the same, predictable plot: he picks up a young woman, they have sex, and he kills her sadistically, strangling, shooting, or disembowelling her. ‘She stared in wide-eyed fascination as the ropy coils of her own intestines slid out of her belly...’

Yet as she interviewed him in prison, Sondra was puzzled by the paradox of a man who was ‘well-spoken and pleasant, funny and smart’. She adds: ‘In the process of studying him like some kind of caged wild animal specimen, I’ve come to appreciate his many fine qualities. What is scary is the idea of the hideously deformed, shadowy monster lurking behind this nice, normal guy.’

Sondra decided to publish Schaefer’s ‘killer fiction’ herself. ‘You do not have to like something to learn from it,’ she pointed out. It appeared in a slim, red-paper covered book, 70 pages long, costing $18. I was offered a copy by a specialist crime bookseller in New Jersey, and recognised that this was the authentic production of a sadistic sex killer.

Soon after, I entered into correspondence with Sondra, after an introduction by British publisher Paul Woods, who published her study of men on death row,
Knockin’ on Joe,
(a term meaning self-injury to get out of forced labour) and in due course, wrote an introduction to a new edition of
Killer Fiction.

I have to admit that I hesitated. It was so sick that it seemed to me to be interesting solely as an insight into the mind of a sadistic killer.

I described Schaefer as suffering from a kind of ‘halitosis of the soul’. Finally, though, I overcame my squeamishness, because I agree with Sondra that it is not necessary to like something to learn from it.

I have never read the entire book and do not intend to. There is a dreary sameness about the stories, an obsession with trying to provoke nausea and disgust. ‘I pulled off her shoes thinking it wasn’t right to cornhole a woman with her panties around her knees and a bullet in her head with her shoes on.’ And he describes how he dug up the body several times, in spite of decomposition, and ended by cutting off the head.

Oddly enough, Schaefer would later try to sue me because his name is mentioned in my book
The Serial Killers
(1990), maintaining that he was in prison only for the murder of two teenagers. When I sent the publisher’s defence attorney some photocopied pages of Schaefer’s book, in which Sondra London writes of the ‘serial killer who loved me’, and Schaefer quotes himself as telling fellow inmate Ted Bundy: ‘[I reckon] twenty-eight confirmed kills in South Florida alone, plus my collection of heads’, Schaefer’s case against me was dismissed. I suspect that he only started it to introduce some variety into his uneventful prison life.

Schaefer was murdered in his cell on 3 December 1995, stabbed by fellow inmate Vincent Rivera. But Sondra, who attended the trial, sets it on record that she does not accept this version of his death. ‘His body was covered with marks of state-issued boots.’ She believes prison guards murdered him, and that drug-dealing lay behind it.

Since Schaefer has written hundreds of thousands of words attempting to describe his crimes and his state of mind, it ought to be possible to understand exactly why he committed them. We know that he was brought up a Roman Catholic, and that he adored his mother and hated his alcoholic father, who often beat her. Sondra once had to pull him off his father, whose head he was beating with a golf club, after he had called Schaefer’s mother a whore.

Plainly, Schaefer became obsessed with this idea of ‘whores’; he once said that there are only two types of women, whores and virgins. He obviously hated women who enjoy sex: ‘...with her left hand she tore at her panties in an effort to strip them from her own ass. Her wanton depravity was out of control. She’d become an animal in the mindless throes of sexual lust, a regular bitch in heat.’ This comment is a prelude (of course) to killing her.

But the story enables us to glimpse the puzzling complexity of Schaefer’s psychology. He knows perfectly well that the woman in question is not a whore, just as he knew that Georgia Jessup and Susan Place and his other victims were not whores. When he broke into the bedroom of the woman who lived nearby, and set out to terrorise her, he knew she was not a whore either—she had just said goodbye to her boyfriend at the front door. But he could only achieve the maximum pitch of sexual excitement by telling himself that they
were
whores. In a sense it made no difference what they were, for they were simply tools of his masturbatory fantasy, like illustrations in some pornographic magazine. He had conditioned himself to be excited by the idea of whores, and perpetrating violence on them, just as some men need a prostitute to dress in a schoolgirl’s gym slip, or a nurse’s uniform.

Which leaves the interesting question: what originally caused Schaefer’s obsession with ‘whores’? Was it, perhaps, his adoration of his mother, and his father’s assertion that
she
was a whore? Sondra London believes that he was sexually obsessed with his mother, and that since he was allowed into the marital bed until he was 16, such an obsession had plenty of time to develop. We recall that the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, was also obsessed by prostitutes; a friend describes how he would hang around brothels, fascinated by the sight of the women who went in and out. We have noted how Sutcliffe was deeply shocked when his mother, whom he adored, was caught by her husband having an affair with a policeman. Sutcliffe’s mother was also bullied and humiliated by her husband, another typical Right Man. Could it be that when a child sees the mother he worships ill-treated by her husband, and accused of being a whore, the result is an emotional trauma that causes him to associate love and humiliation, purity and sadism?

There is undoubtedly another element that needs to be added to the equation: what psychologists call ‘hypersexuality’. Most young and healthy adolescent males experience a powerful sex drive that usually results in repeated masturbation, perhaps several times a day; therefore most of them are
potential
rapists. Another serial killer, Danny Rolling, commented in a letter to me that the difference between the rapist and the normal male is smaller than we assume, and he refers to a study in which a hundred college men were asked if they would rape a pretty girl if they were sure they could get away with it, and all replied yes.

In some males the sex drive is so abnormally powerful that it is almost insatiable. We have seen that Albert De Salvo, the ‘Boston Strangler’, needed sex up to a dozen times a day, and on more than one occasion, raped two women the same day. When the sex drive is this strong, particularly in an adolescent lacking in self-confidence, the result is inevitably masturbation accompanied by fantasies. Like Heirens, Schaefer became an underwear fetishist when he was 12; like Harvey Glatman, he also discovered the pleasures of bondage: ‘I would tie myself up to a tree, struggle to get free, and I’d get sexually excited and do something to hurt myself.’ And he began to fantasise about hurting women.

In persons with an abnormally strong sex-drive, fantasy can easily build up into what I have sometimes called ‘superheated sex’, in an analogy with superheated steam. In Schaefer’s case this led him to killing livestock, beheading them with a machete before having sex with the carcases. The desire to kill things became so strong that he even experienced the urge to shoot at cows, and thought about joining the army because he liked the idea of killing human beings. But by the time he was old enough for the draft, in 1968, he had changed his mind. He later claimed that he had obtained deferment by wearing women’s underwear.

There followed unsuccessful attempts to become a priest, then a schoolteacher. He lost the latter job at Plantation High School after a few weeks because of ‘persistent efforts to impose his moral and political views on the students’. The same thing happened when he became a student teacher at Stranahan High School, revealing the same obsessive need to exercise authority.

His first murder seems to have occurred in September 1969. The victim was Leigh Hainline Bonadies, a schoolmate of Sondra, whom Schaefer had lusted after when he was her neighbour and tennis partner. In August 1969 she married, but it was not a success, and after two weeks she walked out, leaving a note saying that she was going to Miami. According to Schaefer, she asked him for a lift to the airport, but never arrived at his house. But she vanished, and when Schaefer was arrested in 1973, some of her jewellery was found in his bedroom. He never admitted to killing her.

Two months later, on 18 December 1969, Carmen Hallock, a 22-year-old cocktail waitress, told her sister-in-law that she intended to meet a schoolteacher who had offered her undercover work for the government, with ‘lots of money’. This was the last time she was ever seen alive.

On 29 December 1970, nine-year-old Peggy Rahn and eight-year-old Wendy Stevenson vanished from Pompano Beach. A clerk identified photographs of the two girls and said he had seen them with a six-foot-tall man in his twenties who was buying them ice cream. Neither girl was ever found, and Schaefer later claimed—perhaps jokingly—that he had killed them and eaten their flesh cooked with onions and peppers, having been reading about the 1930s child killer Albert Fish, who claimed to have eaten an eight-year-old girl.

Another 22-year-old cocktail waitress, Belinda Hutchens, was last seen on 5 January 1972, driving off in a blue sedan before she vanished. Her drug-addict husband later identified the car as the one belonging to Schaefer.

There is no exact record of Schaefer’s murders, but when his mother’s house was searched in April 1973, items found included a purse owned by Susan Place; three pieces of jewellery belonging to Leigh Bonadies; two teeth and a shamrock pin belonging to Carmen Hallock; news clippings on the Bonadies and Hallock cases; an address book belonging to 22-year-old Belinda Hutchens; a passport, diary, and book of poetry owned by 19-year-old Collette Goodenough, last seen in January 1973; the driver’s licence of 19-year-old Barbara Wilcox, who vanished with Goodenough; a piece of jewellery owned by Mary Briscolina, missing with a female friend since October 1972; an envelope addressed to ‘Jerry Shepherd’; 11 guns and 13 knives; photos of unknown women and of Schaefer dressed in women’s underwear; and more than a hundred pages of writings and sketches, detailing the torture and murder of ‘whores’.

Schaefer’s writings in
Killer Fiction
detail many other murders that sound oddly authentic—in that they do not seem to have been written merely to gloat—including one of a woman whose body was dumped in a water-filled quarry in an automobile.

It is apropos to Schaefer that Ressler has a passage describing the organised serial killer:

... let me point out the attributes of the organized offender that are present so far in the narrative. The abductor personalized the victims by talking with them, used his own vehicle, and conned the women into his car by means of his verbal skills. He brought his own threatening weapon to the scene and took it away with him, had a rape kit, and was plainly planning to complete sexual acts with the women prior to torture and murder. After the murder, he was going to hide and dispose of the bodies. He displayed mobility and adaptive behavior during the crime when he left the women tied up and went to pay attention to some other aspect of his life, telling them that he would return and finish them off later.