The Horrifying Journey of Gerard Schaefer

Imagine hitch hiking with your best friend, not a care in the world, when a police officer pulls you over to tell you it is against the law to hitchhike. The police officer gives you a ride back to the shelter you and your friend are staying in, he tells you when he is off shift he will come give you and your friend a ride to the beach. He comes back the next day to give you the ride he promised, but instead takes you to a swamp where you are forced out of his vehicle at gunpoint.
Gerard Schaefer was born in 1946, he was the eldest of three children and raised in Wisconsin until the early 1960’s by his mother and father. Schaefer did not get along with his father who was a chronic drinker. In the 1960’s, Doris and Gerard Sr. moved the whole family to Fort Lauderdale, Florida where signs of Gerard Jr. disruption began to show themselves. As a young child, he would steal women’s underwear, fantasize about dying and even tie himself to trees because it sexually aroused him. Later he would admit to killing animals in the Everglades that could not be consumed as well as cross dressing. Schaefer met his first girlfriend at the age of 14, they dated

He buried them on Hutchinson Island underneath a tree. He had by this time accepted a plea bargain for the first two girls he abducted. His plea was a year in prison, while he was in prison the bodies of Place and Jessup were found. Due to the similarities between the two cases police obtained a search warrant for Schaefer’s mothers house where he lived with his wife. Inside the house, they found several letters written by Schaefer while he was in prison as well as 11 guns, 13 knives, a mountain of evidence implicating Schaefer in the disappearances of over 30 women. Despite all the evidence against Schaefer he was only convicted of the murders of Jessup and