by Colin Wilson
The police checked on Chase and discovered that he had a record of mental illness. When they called at his apartment to interview him, Chase tried to run away; he was finally handcuffed before he could draw a gun.
The body of David Ferreira was found—decapitated—in a box near a church.
On 2 January 1979, Richard Chase was tried on six counts of murder. It became clear from the evidence that one of his peculiarities was to dabble his fingers in the intestines of his victims—hence the nickname the ‘Dracula Killer’. Chase was sentenced to death, but on 26 December 1980, he committed suicide with an overdose of his antidepressants, which he had been saving up for weeks.
Ressler makes the vitally important observation that Chase’s mental problems can be traced back to his mother, who was ‘schizophrenic, emotionally unable to concentrate on the task of socializing her son or to care for him in a loving way’. And he goes on to note that no less than 19 of his serial killers had inadequate mothers. The psychologist Abraham Maslow used the term ‘schizophrenogenic’ about his own mother, explaining that it meant the kind of mother who made her kids crazy, and told me (when I was working on a book about him) that if it had not been for a maternal uncle who loved children, and who took care of Abe and his younger brother, he would not be sane, that his uncle ‘may have saved my life psychically’. If a person like Maslow, brought up in a protective family background, can come close to being ‘psychically wrecked’, it underlines how easy it is for the kind of offenders Ressler was dealing with.
Another serial killer to whom Ressler devotes several pages in Whoever Fights Monsters was Gerard Schaefer, perhaps one of sickest sex killers of the twentieth century. In his early lectures to police academies, Ressler would use Schaefer as a typical example of the organised serial killer. In fact, Schaefer fit the pattern so well that members of the audience often accused Ressler of taking the details of the organised serial killer directly from Schaefer.
Ressler was not involved in catching Schaefer; he was arrested before Ressler had developed the idea of criminal profiling. But the pages about him in Whoever Fights Monsters show the importance Ressler attaches to the case.
In 1973, there had been so many disappearances of young women in Brevard County, Florida, that the police were in the process of putting together a task force, when the man responsible fell into their hands. He was Gerard John Schaefer, a 29-year-old police officer.
On 22 July 1972, Schaefer stopped his police cruiser to confront two hitchhikers, Nancy Trotter, 17, and Pamela Sue Wells, 18, in the town of Stuart in Martin County. He issued them a warning about hitching rides, but also offered to give them a ride to the beach the next day. He drove them out to the then swampy and isolated Hutchinson Island on the pretext of showing them a Spanish fort. The young women must have felt that they could hardly be in safer hands.
Once out on the island, he suddenly started to verbally abuse them, accusing them of being runaways (which they were not). He then forced them from the car at gunpoint, and handcuffed them both. All this was plainly designed to reassure them that this was a legitimate arrest, to make them feel that this was a mistake that would soon be cleared up when they reached the police station. But when he went on to gag them with old rags from the trunk of his car, they must have realised that this was no arrest.
Schaefer then forced Pamela Sue to balance on the giant roots of a cypress tree, where he tied her. Next he made Nancy stand on the roots of another cypress, some distance away, with a noose around her neck. Trapped there, the young women were forced to listen to his taunts of selling them into white slavery. His aim was obviously to terrify them—if possible, until they lost control of their bowels, which seems to have been one of the things that sexually excited him. But then he was interrupted by a call on the police radio. He left the pair only to return to find them gone. Realising that Pamela Sue and Nancy could identify him, he went home and rang the sheriff—his boss—and told him that he had done ‘something foolish’. His intention, he explained, was to frighten the girls and make them realise that hitchhiking was dangerous. He described where he had left them, and in about a quarter of an hour, the sheriff found the petrified young women wandering in the woods—still handcuffed and gagged.
Schaefer was dismissed from the police force immediately, and charged with assault and imprisonment. He was released on $15,000 bail, and ordered to appear for trial in November 1972.
My own interest in Schaefer arose from the fact that he had been the first love of a friend of mine, a woman named Sandy Steward, who later became the crime writer Sondra London. After his arrest she kept in touch with him, published some of his writings under the title Killer Fiction, and persuaded me to write an introduction to them.
When Sondra met Gerard Schaefer in Florida at a high school dance in 1964, she was 17 and he was 18—handsome, gentle, and well-mannered. Her parents liked him so much that they invited him to go with them on their vacation, and her grandmother told her she was lucky to meet such a nice boy. Sandy and Gerry decided that they were in love, walked hand in hand, and made love among the tombstones in the old graveyard. They had been together for a year when he confessed to her that he experienced terrifying sadistic urges towards women, and daydreamed of hanging them dressed only in their underwear. Sometimes he sobbed as he told her about these compulsions. He even talked to the school counsellor about them, but she was unable to help him. Eventually, Sandy broke off their engagement because, she said, she had no desire to be his mother-confessor.
Schaefer also spied on a woman who sunbathed in her garden in a bikini. One night, when she came home late and slightly drunk, he broke into her house, and woke her up by pressing a knife to her throat and threatening her with instant death if she moved, and then made her lie on her face. He removed his trousers and masturbated on her, then urinated on her pillow. Before he left, he threatened to kill her if she told anyone.
The experience proved to be addictive. But it was not rape to which he became addicted, but the terror he could inspire in his victims. For this reason, Schaefer liked abducting two victims together, so one could watch as he killed the other. This is undoubtedly what he had in mind when he drove Nancy and Pamela Sue into the woods that day in 1972, a decision that cost him his job, but unfortunately not his liberty. For soon after being released on bond, he went back to killing.
On 27 September 1972, Schaefer introduced himself to Susan Place, 18, and her friend Georgia Jessup, 17. He went with them to Susan’s home and told her parents that they were going to the beach to ‘play some guitar’.
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.