The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (80 page)

to assault charges in Ohio on August 4, paying a At his trial, in 1991, Rodriguez seemed to enjoy the $1,000 fine and serving four months in jail before his obvious grief of some observers, even relishing the threats release on December 22.

against his life. Upon conviction he was sentenced to 440

In May 1983, Ross was hired by a Connecticut

years in prison, but the sentence meant little, despite its insurance company, his application falsely denying any apparent severity. In fact, despite his sentence, Spanish criminal convictions, and his work record was satisfac-law decreed that Rodriguez would serve no more than 30

tory until a slump in early November. On November years in custody, and authorities scheduled his tentative 16, 19-year-old Robin Stravinsky was reported missing release for 2008. Before that happened, though, in Norwich, her body found by joggers a week later Rodriguez found himself in danger from fellow inmates, near a local hospital. Ross’s employer was pleased to whose rough code of honor mandated summary punish-note an improvement in Michael’s work through

ment for rapists. After suffering multiple assaults at one December and January, but by March 1984, the young prison, Rodriguez was transferred to the Topas jail, in man seemed to be entering another unexplained slump.

western Salamanca Province, on October 22, 2002. Two On April 22—Easter Sunday—14-year-old neighbors days later, a pair of inmates armed with makeshift knives Leslie Shelley and April Brunais disappeared from Gris-stabbed him to death in the prison exercise yard.

wold, Connecticut, en route to a friend’s house. Two months later, on June 13, Wendy Baribeault vanished in Lisbon on a short walk to the neighborhood store. Her
ROSS, Michael B.

body, raped and strangled, was found on June 15, and Born in Brooklyn, Connecticut, where his parents ran witnesses recalled seeing a blue subcompact car near the an egg farm, Ross concentrated on animal science in scene.

high school, moving on the Cornell University in 1977

Police began working their way through a computer and earning a bachelor’s degree in 1981. After gradua-listing of 2,000 subcompact drivers, and they caught up tion, he worked briefly at an egg farm near Columbus, with Ross on June 28. He swiftly confessed to the Ohio, but Ross had trouble keeping his mind on the Baribeault murder, then directed authorities to a rural chickens. Bicycling through LaSalle City, Illinois, on dump site where the bodies of Leslie Shelley and April September 28, 1981, he kidnapped a 16-year-old girl Brunais were recovered. On June 30, officers followed and dragged her into the woods, gagging her with a Ross’s directions to the shallow grave of Tammy handkerchief and belt before police arrived. Charged Williams, and by July 5, he had been charged with a with unlawful restraint, Ross pled guilty the following total of six homicides. Guilty pleas in the murders of day and paid a $500 fine, drawing two years’ probation Williams and Debra Taylor earned Ross a sentence of before he returned to Connecticut.

120 years imprisonment. Convicted of four more slay-230

ROSS, Michael B.

Michael Ross, in manacles, is led from a police truck. (Wide World API) ings on June 26, 1987, he was sentenced to death 10

year elapsed before that panel recommended execution days later.

on April 6, 2000. Judge Thomas Miano formally rein-In 1994, the state supreme court upheld Ross’s mur-stated Ross’s six death sentences on May 12, 2000.

der conviction but overturned his death sentence on Four months later, New York authorities sought to grounds that the trial judge wrongfully excluded por-extradite Ross for trial in the 1982 rape-slaying of tions of a psychiatric report that might have helped him Paula Perrara, a high school cheerleader from Wallkill.

escape the death penalty. A new penalty hearing was Legal maneuvers stalled the transfer until August 2001, ordered, but Ross promptly fired his public defenders, and while Ross initially entered a not guilty plea in that collaborating with the prosecutor’s office to expedite case, he changed his mind and admitted the slaying on his own death. In March 1998, Ross signed an agree-September 24, 2001. That confession earned Ross a ment with the prosecution acknowledging that his sentence of eight to 25 years in prison, effectively inval-crimes were cruel and heinous, asking the court to idated with his return to death row in Connecticut.

order his immediate execution. Startled by this turn of Reversing his 1998 decision in September 2003, Ross events in a state where no condemned inmate has been hired a new team of lawyers to appeal his death sen-executed since 1960, the court invalidated Ross’s tence, thus ensuring further long-term delays in a state

“death pact” on April 2, declaring such a bargain which has executed no condemned inmate since 1960.

between prosecutors and defendant an illegal usurpa-By 2005, Ross became determined to die, despite his tion of judicial power. Jury selection for the new lawyers’ appeal. On May 13, he got his wish, when he penalty hearing began on April 7, 1999, but another was executed by lethal injection.

231

S

SCHAEFER, Gerard John

Schaefer claimed to have visited a psychiatrist in Gerard Schaefer was born in Wisconsin on March 26, 1966, seeking relief from his sexual deviance and homi-1946, the oldest of three children in a family he later cidal fantasies, but therapy didn’t help. If his later state-described as “turbulent and conflictual.” Years later, ments are credible, he kept on hearing voices “telling interviewed by court-appointed psychiatrists, he would him to kill.” That same year, he toured the South with refer to himself as “an illegitimate child,” the product Moral Rearmament, the cheery “Up With People” folks of a hasty shotgun wedding. He described his father as who sang that freedom isn’t free. Schaefer thought a verbally abusive alcoholic, flagrantly adulterous and about the priesthood as a calling, but he was turned often absent from home on business trips or otherwise.

away from St. John’s Seminary, where, he recalled, By 1960, Schaefer’s family had settled in Fort Laud-

“they said I didn’t have enough faith.” The rejection erdale, Florida. He graduated high school there in angered Schaefer so much that he quit the Catholic 1964, and he was working on the first of several college Church.

degrees when his parents divorced three years later.

His next goal was a teaching job, through which he By that time, if we accept Schaefer’s statements to hoped to instill “American values” like “honesty, psychiatrists, he was well on the way to troubles of his purity, unselfishness and love,” but Schaefer was twice own. “From an early age,” Dr. R. C. Eaton recorded in dropped from student-teaching programs for “trying to 1973, “[Schaefer] has had numerous sexual hang-ups.”

impose his own moral and political values on his stu-Experiments with bondage and sadomasochism began dents.” The second time, supervisor Richard Goodhart around age 12. “I’d tie myself up to a tree,” he told Dr.

recalls, “I told him when he left that he’d better never Mordecai Haber, “and I’d get excited sexually and do let me hear of his trying to get a job with any authority something to hurt myself.” Around the same time he over other people, or I’d do anything I could to prevent began to “masturbate and fantasize about hurting other it.”

people, women in particular.” As if this weren’t enough, In 1968, Schaefer married Martha Fogg, but it didn’t Schaefer recalled, “I discovered women’s underwear—

work out. Martha filed for divorce in May 1970, claim-panties. Sometimes I wore them. I wanted to hurt ing “extreme cruelty.” Schaefer took a few weeks to myself.”

recuperate in Europe and North Africa that summer, The violent self-loathing went back to his earliest coming home with a new goal in life. If he couldn’t be a childhood games. In those games, he told Dr. Haber, “I priest or a teacher, he would be a policeman. He applied always got killed. I wanted to die. My father favored to several departments and was rejected by the Broward my sister, so I wanted to be a girl. I wanted to die. I was County sheriff’s office after failing a psychological test, such a disappointment to my family as a kid, to my but the small Wilton Manors Police Department hired father—he loved my sister. I couldn’t please my father, him anyway. In March 1972, Schaefer earned a com-so in playing games I wanted to be killed.”

mendation for his role in a drug bust; one month later,
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SCHAEFER, Gerard John

on April 20, he was fired. Explanations vary: Chief erdale. Susan’s parents said the girls were last seen at Bernard Scott later said that Schaefer didn’t have “an her house, leaving with an older man named “Gerry ounce of common sense,” while ex-FBI Agent ROBERT

Shepherd” on their way to “play guitar” at a nearby RESSLER reports that Schaefer was disciplined for run-beach. They never came back, but Lucille Place had ning female traffic violators through the department’s noted Schaefer’s license number, along with a descrip-computer, obtaining personal information, and later tion of his blue-green Datsun. It was March 25, 1973, calling them for dates.

before sluggish investigators traced the plate number Whatever the cause of his firing, Schaefer needed a back to Schaefer, by which time he was already in jail job. Near the end of June, he signed on with the Martin for assaulting teenage girls.

County Sheriff’s Department, pulling up stakes and Schaefer denied any contact with Place and Jessup, moving to Stuart, Florida. He had been on the job less but the case began unraveling on April 1, 1973, when than a month when he made a “dumb mistake” that skeletal remains were found on Hutchinson Island by would cost him his career and his freedom.

three men collecting aluminum cans. Four days later, On July 21, 1972, Schaefer picked up two hitchhik-the victims were identified from dental records. Susan ers, 17-year-old Pamela Wells and 18-year-old Nancy Place had been shot in the jaw, detectives remarking Trotter, on the highway near a local beach. He told that evidence from the crime scene indicated the two them (falsely) that hitchhiking was illegal in Martin girls were “tied to a tree and butchered.” On April 7, County, then drove them back to a halfway house police searched the home of Schaefer’s mother, where where they were staying. Schaefer offered to meet them Gerard had personal items stored in a spare bedroom.

next morning, off duty, and drive them to the beach Evidence recovered in the search included a stash of himself. The girls agreed, but instead of taking them to women’s jewelry, 100-plus pages of writing and the beach on July 22, Schaefer drove them to swampy sketches depicting mutilation-murders of young Hutchinson Island off State Road A1A. There, he women, newspaper clippings about two women missing started making sexual remarks, then drew a gun and told the girls he planned to sell them as “white slaves”

to a foreign prostitution syndicate. Forcing them out of the car, he bound both girls and left them balanced on tree roots with nooses around their necks, at risk of hanging if they slipped and fell. Schaefer left them then, promising to return shortly, but the girls escaped in his absence and reached the highway, where they flagged down a passing police car. They had no problem identifying their assailant, since Schaefer had told them his name.

By that time, Schaefer had discovered their escape and telephoned Sheriff Richard Crowder. “I’ve done something foolish,” Schaefer told his boss. “You’re going to be mad at me.” He had “overdone” his job, Schaefer said, trying to “scare” the girls out of hitchhiking in the future for their own good. Fired on the spot, charged with false imprisonment and two counts of aggravated assault, Schaefer was released on $15,000

bond. At trial in November 1972, he pled guilty on one assault charge and the other counts were dropped.

Judge D. C. Smith called Schaefer a “thoughtless fool”

and sentenced him to a year in county jail to be followed by three years’ probation. The ex-deputy began serving his sentence on January 15, 1973.

The most shocking revelations were yet to come, however. Two other girls were missing from the neighborhood, and they would not be as lucky as Trotter and Wells. On September 27, 1972, while Schaefer was free on bond pending trial, 17-year-old Susan Place and 16-Gerard Schaefer, the “Butcher of Blind Creek,” poses for year-old Georgia Jessup had vanished from Fort Laud-his police I.D. photo. (Author’s collection)