Bluebeard on the Beach

"We're going to the beach to play guitar," said Susan Place, 17, as she left her home in Oakland Park, Fla., last Sept. 27 with a clean-cut young man she called "Jerry Shephard." Her mother, Mrs. Lucille Place, was suspicious of the stranger so she noted down his license number just before he drove away in his blue-green Datsun. That same evening Susan's 16-year-old friend, Georgia Jessup, also left home. "I'm sorry, Mother and Dad," Georgia said in a note to her parents. "I love you both very much. I have to find my head."

When neither girl returned, their parents went to the police, but the police treated both disappearances as routine runaway cases. Although Mrs. Place told them the license number she had copied, there was a mix-up about where the car was registered. Months of inquiries passed before Mrs. Place finally managed to trace the Datsun to a small apartment house in Stuart, about 80 miles north of her home.

Incredible Acts. The owner was a husky, twice-married man of 27 named Gerard John Schaefer Jr., a former Martin County deputy sheriff. He was serving a one-year term in the county jail for picking up two hitchhiking girls, binding them and threatening them with hanging. Schaefer said he had never seen the Place girl; Mrs. Place swore he was the "Jerry Shephard" who had driven off with her.

Four days later two beachcombers scavenging around some Indian burial grounds on nearby Hutchinsons Island, discovered several bone fragments. The police retrieved enough such relics, all in small pieces, to determine that they had found the remains of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup.

At that, the police went to Schaefer's mother's home in Fort Lauderdale looking for clues. What they found was a trunk filled with an incredible assortment of items that had once belonged to at least six other women and girls who have mysteriously disappeared or died over the past four years. Police say the trunk contained jewelry, some teeth, women's clothing, a passport and other unspecified "souvenirs."

No less incredible was the collection of about 50 pages of rambling, diary-like notes describing a long series of real or imagined acts of murder, necrophilia, dismemberment and burial. One section told how the writer handcuffed and blindfolded an unidentified woman and then "executed" her by hanging. "I tied the rope to the bumper of the car so that if I pulled away it would pull out the ladder and she would be hanged immediately. I went back to the car and finished a bottle of wine. About 9 p.m., I started the car and put it in reverse. After 15 minutes, I went slowly forward into the grove of trees where the execution site was arranged. I had a light, but I almost didn't want to see what I was responsible for."

Schaefer's lawyer. Public Defender Elton Schwarz, says that his client "has a serious mental disorder," but he adds:

"I don't think he committed these crimes." Schaefer's psychological history is indeed long, going back to 1968, when he was a student at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and was found to have "impairment in reality testing." He got a degree in geography in 1968, but because he loved firearms, he wanted to go into police work.

He applied to the Broward County sheriff's department, but was turned down after failing a psychological test.

He was fired from the Wilton Manor police department after six months be cause of what Police Chief Bernard Scott called a "lack of common sense."

He got the job in Martin County only 22 days before he was arrested on the assault charge. After becoming a suspect in the Place-Jessup murders, he told Schwarz, "I'm sick, and I hope to God you can get me help."

Police are still investigating many aspects of the case, and they have received 100 calls about missing girls in other areas. (The writings found in Schaefer's trunk also speak of the "executions" by hanging of girls named Carmen, Nina and Marguerita in an un specified Latin American country.) Prosecutors talk of making connections to more than 20 murders, but last week they filed their first formal charges: first degree murder in the deaths of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup. Schaefer, who will not complete his present jail term until mid-June, petitioned success fully for a series of tests at the state men tal hospital at Chattahoochee. If he is finally judged insane, that is probably where he will remain.

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