Growing Up in Tucson

To most of his acquaintances around Tucson, Charles Schmid Jr., 23, seemed more sick than sinister. A compulsive blabbermouth who prated indefatigably of his sexual and fistic derring-do, the squat (5 ft. 3 in.), sullen-faced high school dropout dyed his hair black, caked his face with makeup, and stuffed so much wadding in his boots to make him look taller that he could hardly walk. Yet among the odd collection of restless, thrill-hungry teen-agers who hang out in the garish juke joints and drive-ins along Tucson's East Speedway Boulevard (TIME, Nov. 26), swart, blue-eyed "Smitty" commanded adoration and terror.

The Itch. Many of his car-crazed coterie may have shrugged off Smitty's repeated threats to kill his best girl, Gretchen Fritz, 17. Some, after Gretchen and her sister Wendy, 13, disappeared, seriously suspected that he had carried out his threat. Several of his intimates thought they knew that a year earlier he had dispatched another girl, Alleen Rowe, 15, as wantonly as he had once smashed a pet cat against a wall. Even so, if one of Smitty's pals, fearing that his own girl friend was next in line for liquidation, had not finally told the police all about his homicidal hero, Tucson might never have caught up with its budding Bluebeard.

Indeed, the city's police were not overly concerned when Mrs. Norma Rowe told them that Alleen had disappeared in May 1964, or even when Dr. James Fritz, a prominent heart surgeon, came in to report his two daughters missing in August 1965. In Tucson, a boom town with an unusually high proportion of transient residents, more than 50 runaway minors are reported each month. Propelled by the same aimless itch, unrestrained by permissive parents, hundreds of teenagers haunt the Speedway. They were easy bait for Smitty, who was older, more sophisticated and, as they said admiringly, "different." His foster parents, owners of a nursing home, had given him $300 a month since he was 16, and furnished him with his own cottage, which his mother dutifully cleaned after all-night orgies. "With Smitty," confided one girl, "there was always something going on."

The Problem. What went on in the swinging fringe of teen-age Tucson was all too clearly documented in the course of Schmid's two-week trial for the murders of Gretchen and Wendy Fritz. Juvenile authorities pointed out that many parents either did not care what their children were up to or else hesitated to check on their activities for fear of inhibiting them. The advent of birth control pills has tranquilized the fear of pregnancy among young girls who have no moral reservations about sexual activity. "What are parents and what is the community doing to fill the gap?" asks Mrs. Eileen Strutz, director of the city's Planned Parenthood center. "Nothing!"

But the community finally did something about Smitty. Last week a jury convicted him of murdering the Fritz girls and sent him to die in the Arizona gas chamber.

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