Extreme Killers by Michael Newton

Author:Michael Newton [Newton, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Testimony from Susan Place’s family, coupled with Georgia Jessup’s purse (found at Doris Schaefer’s home) and combined with Gerard’s graphic blood-and-guts “fiction,” led to Schaefer’s conviction on September 27, one year to the day since Place and Jessup had vanished. On October 4, he received two concurrent life sentences and was dispatched to the state prison at Stark.

On November 17, Schaefer’s wife Teresa filed for divorce, announcing plans to wed attorney Elton Schwartz. For the next twenty-three years, Schaefer would cite that fact as proof that he had been “framed” by his own lawyer, acting in concert with corrupt police to silence Schaefer’s revelations of official involvement in drug trafficking.

He was a martyr, Schaefer claimed, on par with Manhattan’s Frank Serpico.

Schwartz married Teresa on December 29.

On January 5, 1977, picnickers found remains of two dismembered corpses in St. Lucie County, identified later as Collette Goodenough and Barbara Wilcox. Again, decomposition barred discovery of how they died.

In April 1978, construction workers found a human skull near Boca Raton. Punctured by bullets, the skull was identified in May as a relic of Leigh Bonadies.

In prison, Schaefer had embarked on a career as an unlicensed cellblock lawyer for his fellow inmates, while pursuing a series of dead-end appeals in his own case. Some inmates appreciated him; others despised him after revelations came out of his correspondence with convicts in other prisons in which he posed as a lovesick woman, wheedling details of their crimes that prosecutors might find useful.

On the side, he sued any author who mentioned his case in print, pleading poverty while taxpayers assumed his ever-rising legal costs. Aside from yours truly, targets of frivolous harassment claims—all ultimately dismissed—included Robert Ressler, British writer Colin Wilson, and would-be biographer Patrick Kendrick, who was forced to defer marriage in the face of mounting lawyers’ fees.

In 1979, Schaefer announced his third marriage, to Filipina mail-order bride “Elen.” She reached America in July 1980, lived briefly with Schaefer’s father and Gerard Sr.’s second wife, then obtained her coveted green card and dropped her convict husband.

Five years later, posing as underage prostitute “Dee Dee Kelly,” Schaefer collaborated with Miami police and U.S. Postal Inspectors to convict international “child porn king” Mervyn Cross, supporting federal charges and thereby branding Schaefer as a jailhouse “snitch.”

In August 1985, Schaefer faced charges of plotting to escape and then murder Elton and Teresa Schwartz, his prosecutor, and the judge who’d sentenced him to life. Foiled in that scheme, Schaefer befriended fellow convicted serial killers Ted Bundy, Gerald Stano, Bernard Giles, and Ottis Toole (see Chapter 5). He played Cyrano de Bergerac for semi-literate Toole, penning a ghoulish extortion letter to TV personality John Walsh that demanded $50,000 for directions to the headless corpse of his murdered son Adam.

Walsh gave the letter to police, but neither sadistic inmate was penalized. Schaefer did receive thirty days in solitary, allegedly “for submitting a story to a magazine.” As Schaefer explained, “The editor was so upset he wrote to the prison demanding I be punished.”

Florida’s parole board scheduled Schaefer’s first hearing for 2017, when he was seventy-one.

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