He has been called “one of the sickest” serial killers who “made Ted Bundy look like a boy scout.”
But Gerard Schaefer, a former Florida police officer, eluded arrest for years, with investigators believing he was responsible for the deaths of dozens of other young women, along with the murders of two teens, Susan Place and Georgia Jessup.
It was the murders of Place, 17, and Jessup, 16, that ultimately led to Schaefer receiving two life sentences.
This month marks the anniversary of their deaths, 51 years ago, after they disappeared September 27, 1972, from Fort Lauderdale.
Gerard Schaefer has been called “one of the sickest” serial killers who “made Ted Bundy look like a boy scout.” He is pictured speaking to reporters in 1973
Schaefer murdered Georgia Jessup, left, and Susan Place, right, in 1972. Their remains were found six months later.
Place’s mother Lucille told police her daughter and Jessup had gone to the beach with a man she knew as “Gerry Shepherd,” according to KIRO 7.
She sensed something wasn’t right, so she wrote down the license plate number of the Datsun he was driving. This action helped police link Schaefer to the vehicle.
Lucille also recognized him as the man who was with the teens before their disappearance.
The remains of Place and Jessup were found about six months later, on April 1, 1973, in Martin County. They were reportedly tied to a tree and killed before being beheaded and dismembered.
Although the deaths of the pair were the only murders for which Schaefer was convicted, he is suspected of murdering 30 young women – the first of which took place in 1969.
Retired FBI agent Bill Hagerty described Schaefer as “one of the sickest.”
“If I had a list of the top five, which includes all the serial killers I’ve interviewed across the country, he would definitely be in the top five,” he told the newspaper. South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1995.
It was the same year that Schaefer died after being stabbed in his prison cell by another inmate.
Although the deaths of the pair are the only murders Schaefer has been convicted of, he is suspected of murdering 30 young women – the first of which took place in 1969.
Schaefer told court-appointed psychiatrists that at age 12 he began self-harming after sex and became obsessed with women’s underwear. The photo shows a newspaper clipping
The man who prosecuted Schaefer, Robert Stone, described him as “the most sexually deviant person I had ever seen,” adding, “He made Ted Bundy look like a boy scout.”
After his death, the convicted killer took the secrets of where he buried his victims, as investigators believed they were placed in shallow graves scattered throughout South Florida and across the country.
It is thought that he hanged his victims before having sex with their dead bodies before burying them.
He then dug them up and repeated the gruesome process over and over again.
Most recently, the skeletal remains of a teenage girl tied with wire to a Florida in 1974 were identified 48 years later as another Schaefer victim.
In 2022, police announced they had identified the girl’s remains as the property of Susan Poole, a 15-year-old high school dropout whose family had reported her missing just before Christmas in 1972.
Remains found in Florida’s mangroves in 1974 were eventually identified in 2022 as Susan Poole (left is a police composite and right), who was reported missing in 1972.
Thanks to genetic genealogy testing, they believed she was one of Schaefer’s victims.
Fort Lauderdale women Carmen Marie Hallock and Belinda Hutchins, 22, and Leigh Bonadies Hainline, 25, have also been named as some of his suspected victims. They died in the early 1970s.
During a search of his mother’s home in 1973, the year he was convicted of the Place and Jessup murders, officers discovered Hallock’s teeth and personal documents belonging to Iowa teens Collette Marie Goodenough and Barbara Ann Wilcox. 1977.
Schaefer had been a police officer in Wilton Manors, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, and was a deputy with the Martin County Sheriff’s Office at the time of Poole’s disappearance.
He didn’t use his badge to lure victims; instead, he told most of them that he was from a different state and that he used a different name.
After his arrest, he told court-appointed psychiatrists that he grew up in an abusive household with an alcoholic father.
He said he enjoyed tying himself to trees, masturbating and then self-harming.
Around the age of 12 he became obsessed with women and sex, he told them.